Introduction
Can ‘Asian’ values meaningfully shape an Asian model of education? How would such an Asian model of education differ from a Western one? Could the pursuit of these aims herald a new era of intra-Asian cooperation? A significant contemporary development that speaks to these questions is the initiative to revive ancient Nalanda as Nalanda University in Bihar, India, which first came to diplomatic light as a proposal from the India delegation at the 2006 meeting of the East Asia Summit.Footnote 1 Put simply, the idea was to build a modern university in Bihar near the site of the ancient Nālandā Mahāvihāra, a renowned centre of Buddhist learning that ceased operations some 800 years ago.Footnote 2 The project's earliest advocate was George Yeo Yong-Boon, Singapore's former minister for foreign affairs, who characterized it as an ‘icon of Asian renaissance’; it would be hosted by the government of India and backed by countries across Asia as a means of increasing collaboration across national boundaries through the development and realization of a new model of Asian education.Footnote 3
The first intimation of the Nalanda initiative to appear in the Western press was a New York Times article by Jeffrey E. Garten, a Yale professor of international trade and finance, in late 2006. Entitled ‘Really Old School’, it aimed to call attention to what Garten described as a big event that was unlikely to make Western waves: the intention of Singapore, Japan, India, and possibly others, to ‘discuss the revival of an ancient university in India called Nalanda’ to be announced at an upcoming ASEAN meeting.Footnote 4 Garten used this as an opening to raise two key questions about the future of Asia that, he claimed, ‘we do not generally ask’. First, he wondered whether Asian countries would ever expand their mutual interests from that of trade agreements into something grander that would better the region and the world. Second, despite anticipating the rise of Asia in the new millennium, Garten wondered whether Asian countries would continue to be hobbled by a lack of top-flight, internationally esteemed institutes of higher learning. He argued that the revival of Nalanda University offered an opportunity for ‘Asia’ to achieve both aims.
First of all, the obvious must be stated: is it not somehow astonishing to imagine that any single institution could somehow represent the achievement of two such sweeping goals? And much less a university in Bihar—the state with the lowest literacy level in all of India?Footnote 5 Yet this is exactly what has been proposed, for Garten's basic vision—that Nalanda ‘represents much of what Asia could use today’—is substantively shared by many Asian nation-states. Since its introduction, the project has captured attention at the highest government and philanthropic levels—from India and China to Singapore and Japan. It has found champions in India's Nobel laureate economist (1998), Amartya Sen; British peer and London School of Economics professor, Baron Meghnad Desai; and Singapore's former minister for foreign affairs, George Yeo. Despite early scepticism surrounding the project, obstacles regarding faculty, facilities, and funding continue to be surmounted so that the first batch of students are expected to start their studies in 2014 on schedule. In addition to being regularly reviewed at ASEAN forums, the initiative has received extraordinary support in the Indian domestic political sphere at the levels of both state and centre. In August 2010 the Nalanda Bill was passed by both houses of the Indian parliament and as of February 2014, an amended Nalanda 2013 bill was approved by the Union Cabinet, noting the Indian government's release of 2127.1 crore INR (approximately 448US$ million) to cover the university's expenses from 2010–2011 to 2020–2021.Footnote 6 What is it about Nalanda that makes it so captivating as an exemplar of ‘Asia’ and a means of collaboration for such diverse stakeholders?
Analysis of the discourse surrounding the Nalanda University revival provides a singular opportunity to understand contemporary interests in ‘pan-Indo-Asianism’ and ‘Asian education’, as viewed by key political and cultural interlocutors for Nalanda, the transnational bodies charged with negotiating the project, and the participating nation-states. As a scholar of religion and South Asian studies, I explore three key themes in this article. First, I discuss how the contemporary framing of the project pragmatically both adopts and neglects key elements of the Nālandā Mahāvihāra's known Buddhist heritage. What slippages occur—and what tensions do they reveal—between ancient Nalanda, the contemporary reimagining of historical Nalanda, and the new Nalanda University project? Second, I identify a major stream of discourse surrounding the Nalanda revival that is ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ and transnational in tone and celebrates Nalanda as Asian, while simultaneously acknowledging its Indic provenance. As I discuss, key features of this discourse are centred on an ‘a-cultural’ Buddhism and the invocation of ‘Asian’ values as contributing to a new model of a modern ‘spiritual’ university that would be uniquely Asian. Third, I turn to examine the ‘Indic’ framing of Nalanda in India and the perceived ability of the Nalanda revival to advance four characteristically Indian concerns: Indian foreign policy goals; Indic educational ideals; alternative Indian models of education; and the unique relationship of Buddhism in India to secularism and low-caste politics. In closing, I reflect on these fissures in the conceptions of Nalanda and its future prospects as a representative of ‘New Asia’ and as an alternative model of education that is both modern and ‘Asian’.Footnote 7
Historical Nalanda and its contemporary reimagination
More than 50 years ago, Margaret Wiley Marshall, a scholar of English literature, visited Bihar and, reflecting on her visit to Nalanda, commented that: ‘. . . one can easily imagine the intellectual and spiritual vitality that abounded there as recently as eight or nine hundred years ago’ (my emphasis).Footnote 8 Nalanda's extremely remote past commands a similar enthusiasm today, yet the relationship of the contemporary project to the Nalanda of antiquity is often marked by degrees of inattention to the original institution's fundamental nature. The necessity of both reconciling and harnessing this legacy is at the crux of this project and was recently recognized by India's Ministry of External Affairs in its report on the Nalanda University (Amendment) Bill (December 2013): ‘. . .all efforts should be made to invoke and include the icons, nomenclature and cultural as well as scholarly traditions of the old Nalanda University in the new initiative and . . . that by reconciling the ancient glory with the contemporary and future academic pursuits, the authorities would be able to develop it as an international centre of excellence’.Footnote 9 In this section, I review some of Nalanda's earliest known history in order to frame some of the tensions and elisions that mark the discourse around the contemporary project—where politicians, policy makers, and commentators attempt to build momentum for a modern university project while invoking a decidedly pre-modern institution.
The original Nālandā Mahāvihāra or ‘Great Nalanda Monastery’ was a centre of higher learning that was founded in the fifth century and operated for nearly 800 years, from approximately 427 to 1197.Footnote 10 As discussed by Frederick Asher, Nalanda's demise coincided with major social and economic upheavals in the twelfth century.Footnote 11 The proximate cause of the institution's collapse has been attributed to ‘Turkic Muslim adventurers’Footnote 12 (Turuṣka) led by Muḥammad-i-Bakht-yār Khaljī, who is reported to have sacked the present-day city of Bihar Sharif, about ten kilometres from Nalanda, in 1198.Footnote 13 A later Tibetan account claims that a handful of monks occupied Nalanda until 1235, when the activities of a group of Tīrthika mendicants led to the final cessation of Nalanda's operations. Whatever the exact date, from the thirteenth century onwards, Nalanda vanished from historical records for centuries.Footnote 14 Since the contemporary framing of Nalanda is deeply invested in reviving the original spirit of Nalanda, it is vital to examine what the sources on ancient Nalanda actually disclose about the institution of antiquity.
Most of what is known about monastic life at Nalanda is preserved in the travelogues of Chinese monks who undertook pilgrimages to India: the two most famous Chinese visitors to the Nalanda Mahāvihāra produced detailed accounts of life at the monastery.Footnote 15 First, the itinerant monk-scholar Xuanzang (玄奘, circa 602–664) recorded his impressions of a 17-year return pilgrimage from China to India, from 629–645. His account is one of the most detailed sources of information on ancient Nalanda.Footnote 16 Next, Yijing (義淨, circa 635–713) travelled to India via Sriwijaya (now in Sumatra, Indonesia) and stayed at Nalanda for approximately a decade, from 675–685. His account of the practices at Nalanda corroborates and deepens that of Xuanzang.Footnote 17 Finally, Huili (慧立, circa seventh century), a disciple of Xuanzang, composed a biography of his master—‘The Life of Xuanzang’—which gives the most complete portrait of monastic education at Nalanda.Footnote 18
Monks of all ages formed the main community living at the institution; Xuanzang conjectured that there were a minimum of 10,000 residents. Yijing estimated that approximately 3,000–3,500 preceptor-monks were in residence, occupying eight halls and 300 apartments.Footnote 19 Students lived and studied together with their teachers; some 100 lecterns were set up for instructional sessions. Of the residents, just 1,000 monks were advanced enough to possess mastery of the ‘30 collections’, or scriptural compendiums, and perhaps just ten men, including the ‘Master of Law’ (dharma), could teach 50 collections. One master, Śīlabhadra, revered for his unimpeachable conduct, was said to possess knowledge of them all.Footnote 20
According to both Xuanzang and Yijing, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Nalanda Mahāvihāra was its use of a sort of entrance examination.Footnote 21 A gatekeeper was said to bar strangers from entering the compound's single gate unless they could answer questions attesting to an elementary level of education in Buddhist monastic terms. Knowledge of the Buddhist canon (the Tipiṭaka) was expected as a basic requirement; the failure rate was popularly reported at seven or eight out of ten candidates.Footnote 22 Xuanzang noted that the primary objects of study were Mahayana Buddhist texts, as well as works from 18 other rival Buddhist sects. Additionally, ‘miscellaneous’ texts were also studied, including canonical Sanskrit texts such as the Atharvaveda. Xuanzang dwelt on the grave and pious character of the residential inmates at Nalanda, whose duties included attending to their teachers and studying scripture. The senior monks were described as assiduously following the ‘severe’ rules of the institution; their conduct was ‘pure and unblamable’. Discussion on the topics of study was so enthusiastic that Xuanzang noted: ‘the day is not sufficient for asking and answering profound questions’.Footnote 23
Yijing contributed more details about Nalanda's curriculum and the modes of study. One of the foundational non-Buddhist texts to be mastered was Pāṇini's Sanskrit grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī, knowledge of which ensured facility in study and debate. There were also five major vidyās or ‘disciplines’ (which were of course further subdivided): śabdavidyā (discourse analysis); śilpasthānavidyā (arts); cikitsāvidyā (diagnostic medicine); hetuvidyā (logic, epistemology); adhyātmavidyā (metaphysics).Footnote 24 Students considered to be accomplished would engage in public debates so that, ‘when they are refuting heretical doctrines all their opponents become tongue-tied and acknowledge themselves undone’.Footnote 25
The lifestyle observed by and enforced upon Nalanda residents facilitated strict adherence to the Buddhist Vinaya (monastic code of conduct). The monks had individual cells furnished with a hard, raised platform to be used as a bed. Yijing noted that a clepsydra (water clock) was used to ensure the punctual observance of the monastic rule of not eating after noon, which was mandatory for all monks in residence. Expulsion from the institution was the penalty for violation of this fundamental monastic practice.Footnote 26 Patronage was liberal: on a daily basis, Nalanda was said to receive more than 1,000 pounds of rice and several thousands of pounds of butter and milk.Footnote 27 Xuanzang stated that Nalanda received generous patronage from the region's king, in the form of remittance from 100 villages; in Yijing's account, the number of remitting villages is doubled to 200.Footnote 28
The institution designated itself as a mahāvihāra or ‘great monastery’. This unambiguously Buddhist and monastic term was found on hundreds of terracotta seals excavated from the Nalanda archaeological site, taken by Cunningham as definitive proof that the site was the legendary Nalanda of old. The entire phrase found on the seal confirms Nalanda as an institution for Buddhist monks: (bhikṣu): Śrī-Nalanda-Mahāvihārīy-ārya-bhikṣu-saṅghasya or ‘The Great Monastery of Nalanda of the noble community of monks’. Finally, the major decorative element of the seal is the dharmacakra, or ‘wheel of law’, flanked by two deer, a reference to the deer park at Sārnāth where the Buddha is said to have taught his first disciples. In short, the ancient institution's seal—in scriptorial and pictorial modes—identifies Nalanda as definitively Buddhist; in 2008 it was adopted by the Nalanda Mentor Group as the modern institution's official seal.Footnote 29
Yet in contemporary discourse, old Nalanda has been variously framed as a ‘monastic centre’, a ‘university’, and a ‘monastic university’. For example, Garten has claimed that Nalanda was a ‘global university’ of its time; Sen has stated that it attracted ‘foreign students’.Footnote 30 Yet both characterizations dubiously imply a similarity with the contemporary globalization of higher education, where students can easily enrol for an international term of study abroad. According to all the major Chinese pilgrims’ records, numerous visitors from far-flung places in the Buddhist world indeed went on extended pilgrimages to the Indian sites associated with the exemplary life of the Buddha—but often for ten years or more owing to the difficulty of voyaging over great distances in the first millennium.Footnote 31
Another depiction of Nalanda that troublingly elides the gulf between ancient and modern is the suggestion that students studied there ‘for free’.Footnote 32 It is true that the monks at Nalanda did not pay fees, but the implication that monks benefited from a ‘tuition waiver’ obfuscates the reason why Nalanda was supported. It was underwritten by imperial and lay patronage from primarily Buddhist sources (and also some Hindu ones, such as the Gupta emperors) in order to underwrite a monastic ‘field of merit’ generated by thousands of monks engaged in sedulously observing Buddhist dharma. Xuanzang noted the harmonious arrangement between the regional polity and the mahāvihāra, saying, ‘. . . the students here, being so abundantly supplied, do not require to ask for the four requisites. This is the source of the perfection of their studies to which they have arrived.’Footnote 33 The prestige of the institution and its material support were thus incontrovertibly linked to the religious practices of its pious residents.Footnote 34 According to Yijing, ‘. . . the prosperity of the religion continues ever, owing to nothing but (the fact that) the Vinaya (is being strictly carried out)’.Footnote 35 Texts studied at Nalanda did go beyond Buddhist scripture in that monks studied the foundational Sanskrit texts of the day, and monks hailing from diverse parts of the Buddhist world did study them together. However, the monks at Nalanda were admitted based on their knowledge of Buddhist scripture and compliance with Vinaya rules; they were trained in theological argumentation for the purpose of unseating non-Buddhists and others holding unsound views; and they were supported by patrons because they were observant Buddhist monks. This last point is crucial. According to the Chinese records, Nalanda was a Buddhist institution in a world of competing worldviews. In some sense, its purpose was to provide a locus for a Buddhist outlook while it vied with others for ideological and political dominance.
Uncharitably, one could consider the contemporary inattention given to the above as a distortion of Nalanda's legacy. Yet this would miss an important point. Pragmatically, framing Nalanda as an ancient exemplar of the dominant contemporary model of education is a useful heuristic which captures enthusiasm for the project and permits a mosaic of actors to embrace the proposal. While ancient Nalanda was a religious institution which inculcated a set of religious values that would in turn produce a set of religious experiences, attitudes, and cultural formations, the Nalanda revival appears destined to be a secular university, in harmony with the rational-materialist cultures that have envisioned it. Nalanda's historical legacy thus stands in sharp contrast to the contemporary project, based on the ideal of the modern university as an institution that espouses dogmatological agnosticism, and dominates educational ideals across the elite strata of all global cultures. It is important to reflect on this contrast precisely because it is elided in modern discussions. Clearly, the gap between historical and future Nalanda is vast and comparisons between the two must be made carefully in order to avoid stretching historical fact in the service of present-day aspirations.
Nalanda's ancient prestige, glowingly burnished by the passage of many intervening centuries, affords a neutrality to the past and its staunchly Buddhist legacy. Indeed, the ideal of ‘Nalanda’ functions as a palimpsest where participating bodies can write, read, and reread multiple expediencies that further divergent goals. It is the remoteness of Nalanda's legacy that permits it to be so thoroughly reimagined and, as I go on to argue, in such strikingly dissimilar ways. In the rest of this article, I identify two major types of discourse on Nalanda. First, I show how Nalanda has galvanized a new wave of ‘Pan-Indo-Asianism’; then, I show how Nalanda has been framed as advancing Indian interests. While Nalanda is celebrated in the former type of discourse as the common cultural property of Asia, it is seen as one of the crown jewels of Indian civilization by the latter. Both modes embrace the revival, but favour divergent outcomes—a possibility which is facilitated by the pragmatic reframing of the project's past as outlined above. As will be clear, great differences emerge in the perceptions of Nalanda's legacy and the motivations behind steering its symbolic power.
Pan-Indo-Asianism, a-cultural Buddhism, and Asian education
Discourse on Nalanda reveals a fresh interest in ‘pan-Indo-Asianism’, expressed in three areas. First, the transnational support for Nalanda indicates a new readiness to affirm India as a centre for Asian spirituality and a locus of ‘Asian values’. In the twentieth century, independent India's pan-Asian ambitions were viewed warily by India's Asian neighbours. Now, through the lens of Nalanda, we can discern a new acceptance and affirmation of Indian antiquity as an apt candidate to represent and exemplify Asia. Second, Buddhism has long been viewed as a unifying regional tradition. Here, India is celebrated for its potential to enliven multilateral, intra-Asian Buddhist connections through its identity as the ancient birthplace of Buddhism. Finally, the Nalanda revival reveals a new interest in realizing an ‘Asian’ vision of education that would be distinguished from dominant Western models. With education as a favoured path to Asian cooperation, I conclude this section by exploring some of the most intriguing ideas put forth by Asian and Indian discussants to make sense of the proposed ‘spiritual’ nature of the new Nalanda University and to assess its potential contributions towards developing an Asian educational paradigm.
India as Asia, Asia as India
Intra-Asian regionalism has many historical antecedents and well-known interlocutors, such as Rabindranath Tagore in India, Zhang Taiyan of China, and Okakura Kakuzo (also known as Okakura Tenshin) of Japan.Footnote 36 To take one early twentieth-century example, Okakura famously summarized his views in the expression ‘Asia is One’, arguing that Asian peoples from Arabia to Japan shared a unity of temperament: ‘Arab chivalry, Persian poetry, Chinese ethics, and Indian thought, all speak of a single ancient Asiatic peace’.Footnote 37 As flagged by Garten, the notion of an Asian cultural unity has inspired a diverse body of advocates, but it has produced limited multilateral projects. Yet over the last decade, soft spheres such as education and culture have been identified by Asian extra-governmental organizations as priority areas for mutual cooperation. In India, the discourse surrounding Nalanda has created a space where it represents not just a rising India but an ascendant Asia in classically pan-Asian terms reminiscent of those from the last century. In ‘Our Vision’, the plan for the University confirms Asia's resurgence on the common basis of ‘peace and harmony’, as exemplary ‘Asian’ values:
Asian countries are coming together to forge a continent based on the foundations of peace and harmony. The decision of the East Asia Summit in 2007, at its meeting in Cebu, Philippines, to endorse the plan to re-establish the Nalanda University underscores the commitment to these values.Footnote 38
The vision statement then underscores the fact that Nalanda's ancient pedigree outranks the great European universities by at least a millennium. It also invokes a ‘hallowed universalism’ at some variance with the historical record just reviewed:
After teaching thousands of students for centuries, Nalanda ceased its existence just as universities were opening up in Bologna, Paris and Oxford at the beginning of the second millennium CE. The shift of centres of knowledge from East to West was symbolic of the eventual transfer of power which followed within half a millennium. There is now a perfect opportunity to recreate the hallowed universalism of Nalanda as a centre of knowledge. The second millennium CE ended with a tremendous resurgence of Asia after centuries of stagnation, division and decline. Asia is today synonymous with a dynamic entrepreneurial and innovative culture, based on knowledge and enterprise not forgetful of its past yet not afraid to face the future.Footnote 39
This striking vision statement affirms Nalanda as a key element of India's ancient legacy without mentioning India by name; it praises Nalanda's reputation as a centre of civilization, while disconnecting it from its religious character, partially through the assertion that it taught ‘students’ rather than monks. Most interestingly, while the Orientalist notion of Asia as ‘stagnant’ and in ‘decline’ is endorsed, it is then summarily displaced by the imagining of a modern, secular Nalanda that is ‘dynamic’, ‘innovative’, and an ideal standard-bearer for ‘new (undifferentiated) Asia’.
Several key Indian interlocutors have powerfully articulated a pan-Asian role for Indian civilization. To take one example, N. K. Singh, member of the Rajya Sabha (Bihar) and of the Nalanda Governing Board, has strongly supported pan-Indo-Asian ideals. Singh's political career spans more than four decades and his portfolio has ranged from trade and finance to energy and transport. Singh has successfully argued in parliament that the new Nalanda will illuminate Asia's past, it will succour the present, and it will pave the way for a future of cooperation between Asian nations. Most significantly, he twins Nalanda's revival—and Bihar's (and by extension, India’s)—with the broader expectation of the rebirth of Asia in the third millennium:
. . . the [Nalanda] revival and the Asian renaissance represent not merely the economic wherewithal with which we want to rebuild Asia, improve our life quality but in some way regain the intellectual and knowledge leadership which Asia had forgone 800 years ago. . .it could be a trend setter for the power of soft diplomacy. . . not only of pan-Asia but looking to Asia and the Pacific. . . [to] strike at the broader commonalities of Asia, Asian values. . . let us hope and pray that the new Nalanda University would be this voice of an enlightened Asia.Footnote 40
Singh's articulation echoes a widely held goal for the Nalanda project: to advance an ‘Asian renaissance’ centred in India. Many Indian intellectuals have supported a pan-Asian vision where India is part of the Asiatic community; however, independent India's foreign policy has been more typically nationalist in its imaginings of Asia. Singh's conception as a parliamentarian is thus notable for its strongly pan-Indo-Asian tone, especially so given the otherwise Indo-centric outlook of the Indian parliamentary debates, covered in detail in the third section of this article.
Amartya Sen continues to be Nalanda's most influential supporter both in India and abroad. His extensive comments on Nalanda also reflect pan-Indo-Asian priorities such as a ‘long-run goal’ to establish great Asian universities inspired by the model of ancient Nalanda. Pragmatically, Sen identifies education and research as an area in which ‘joint action is possible’ in Asia:
. . . Asian countries have many differences in political outlook and practice, and these differences are not going to disappear any time soon. But it is also important to live with each other in peace, and cooperate in areas in which joint action is possible. This applies particularly well to cooperation in education and research, involving all the countries of the Asian region.Footnote 41
This statement trenchantly summarizes Sen's approach to the project and, I believe, flags one of the driving levers of the project's appeal. Intra-Asian collaboration is an alluring goal but it has produced very limited forums for substantive and sustained engagements. To extrapolate from Sen's words, the arenas where Asian countries are able to find viable common ground for collaboration are limited. A new Nalanda, hosted by India but conceived of in pan-Indo-Asian terms, is a chance to unite respect for ‘broad-spectrum Buddhism’ with the dream of realizing a non-Western, alternative model of Asian higher education while creating a new fulcrum to reshape Bihar.
Outside of India, we need look no further than the official statements made by the East Asia Summit for evidence of ASEAN's approval of India as a centre for Asian values, which I will now briefly review. The Nalanda revival was initially tabled early in 2007 at the second meeting of the East Asia Summit, in Cebu, Philippines. The Nalanda initiative appeared as a priority, just after poverty eradication and energy, as follows:
We agreed to strengthen regional educational cooperation, noting that we could tap the region's centers of excellence in education for this purpose. Noting proposals to renew our historical ties, we welcomed initiatives such as the revival of the Nalanda University in India, to improve regional understanding and the appreciation of one another's heritage and history.Footnote 42
Again, in late 2007, the third East Asia Summit renewed its commitment, saying that ‘the revival of Nalanda University would create a centre for cultural exchange and inter-religious study and understanding in the region’.Footnote 43 This meeting resulted in the creation of the Nalanda Mentor Group as the primary body leading the Nalanda project.Footnote 44 Then, in 2009, the fourth East Asia Summit emphatically reaffirmed the role of ancient India (via Nalanda) as a regional hub of learning and religiosity, tying it to the three contemporary regional Asian blocs:
[The Summit was] deeply impressed with the sanctity and significance of the great ancient centre of learning in Nalanda that attracted many scholars from South, South-East and East Asia. . .Footnote 45
In this ‘Joint Press Statement on Nalanda’, the East Asia Summit released a definitive articulation of transnational support. Here, member states are recorded as having ‘appreciated’ and ‘encouraged’ the Nalanda revival as proposed by the India delegation, amounting to an endorsement of India as an appropriate site for a pan-Asian initiative. This marked a significant step in ASEAN's relationship with India.
In 2010, the fifth East Asia Summit praised the successful passage of the Nalanda Bill in the Indian parliament and singled out education as a premier mode of intra-regional cooperation, naming Nalanda as ‘an international institution of excellence with continental focus’.Footnote 46 At the sixth East Asia Summit in 2011, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh confirmed that work on Nalanda University was progressing well.Footnote 47 The seventh Summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2012) reaffirmed support for Nalanda and noted that Lao People's Democratic Republic had contributed financially.Footnote 48 Most recently, at the eight East Asia Summit, seven members signed a memorandum of understanding on Nalanda with India (Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Myanmar, New Zealand, Singapore); on 23 October 2013, China also signed this agreement.Footnote 49 These developments signal a new readiness within Asia and India to embrace shared humanistic goals, and to endorse India, through the imagining of Nalanda, as representative of a progressive and modern ‘new Asian’ renaissance.
(Buddhist) Asia ‘is one’
The Buddhist nature of Nalanda is celebrated as the common cultural heritage of all three interested regional blocs: South, Southeast, and East Asia. While this supports India's ambition to claim a position of cultural leadership under the rubric of historical Buddhism, it in turn leverages an essentialist reading of the Indian Buddhism of antiquity as a useful fulcrum to unite contemporary Asian cultures which practise divergent forms of contemporary Buddhism. As I demonstrate below, multi-party political discourse describes Asia's Buddhist connections in generic and ‘a-cultural’ terms, removed from religious belief or regional practices. For example, in the ‘Joint Press Statement on Nalanda’, the East Asia Summit formally endorsed the Nalanda revival as follows:
[the EAS]. . . welcomed India's initiative to revive the Nalanda University located in the State of Bihar in India. . . [and recognized that] Nalanda University was a great ancient centre of intellectual activity in Buddhist philosophy, mathematics, medicine and other disciplines.Footnote 50
In this crucial statement, Nalanda is strongly and explicitly related to ‘Buddhist philosophy’. This is a classically Orientalist characterization of Buddhism as an analytical system or a ‘philosophy of life’ rather than a lived religious tradition. As a rhetorical move, it distances the contemporary project from the celebrated history of its namesake—a site where monks lived, slept, and ate in accordance with Buddhist Vinaya rules or faced expulsion. Furthermore, the nod to Nalanda's Buddhist legacy is included in a list of other secular ‘disciplines’—mathematics and medicine—which undoubtedly echo a modern perception of the proper business of a university. The ‘vision’ for Nalanda University echoes this ‘a-religious’ representation, exchanging Buddhist monks for secular students as follows:
Nalanda is a word known across the world and for centuries. It stands for a university which attracted students and scholars from across Asia and even farther away. It was a centre of excellence for Buddhist studies, philosophy but medicine and mathematics as well.Footnote 51
This severing of Buddhism from devotional piety and its coupling with a secular modernity is reminiscent of the influential characterization of the religion by Anāgārika Dharmapāla of Sri Lanka (1864–1933). Dharmapāla famously depicted Buddhism as a religion that not only fulfils but also exceeds the criteria for modernism, pitching Buddhism as ‘a scientific religion’. In his address to the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893, Dharmapāla emphasized the ‘rationality’ of Buddhism as being on par with that of Charles Darwin and insisted that ‘nothing whatever be accepted on faith’.Footnote 52 While the Nalanda Mahāvihāra was certainly a centre of ‘intellectual activity’, the ancient institution's religious element has been completely excised in accordance with the requirements of a modern, secular university of the present.
Finally, it is worth reflecting on the centrality of the role played by a denatured Buddhism, unencumbered by living practices, in creating pan-Asian common ground for the revival. India is the ideal site to do this, as it links the vastly different practices found throughout the Buddhist world to a past that is so remote so as to present no contemporary challenges, only the ‘authenticity’ of antiquity. For example, Tommy Koh, Singapore's ambassador-at-large, located original Buddhism in India and tied the far-flung Buddhist countries to it as follows:
Located in Bihar, India, Nalanda University had preceded the founding of Oxford and Cambridge. It was a great centre of learning, not just in Buddhism, but also in mathematics and science. Buddhism originated from India and has spread to China, Korea, Japan, Sri Lanka and many of the countries of Southeast Asia. The revival of Nalanda University will connect our past to our present and our future. It is a symbol of Asia's cultural renaissance.Footnote 53
Were the project hosted by a nation with a distinctly Buddhist character, such as Sri Lanka or Thailand, high stakes would be involved in attempting to transcend the distinct and culturally embedded national formations of the host country and in merging them with other Asian partners’ particular Buddhist practices. Compared to the uninterrupted vitality of Buddhist traditions in Southeast and East Asia, for centuries Buddhism has had a marginal cultural influence in India. In locating the project at ancient Nalanda, India is read as a welcoming site for an a-historically ancient and a-cultural Buddhism that can expansively accommodate a mosaic of contemporary forms of Buddhism. In summary, characterizations of Nalanda as broadly representative of contemporary Asian interests exhibit a tendency to admire but, at the same time, underrepresent the very religious features which gave Nalanda its exemplary Buddhist character.
Spirituality and Asian education
In March 2006, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, former president of India (2002–2007), outlined a distinct vision for the Nalanda revival to the Bihar state assembly. He suggested that the revival should impart not just academic excellence, but ‘enlightened citizenship’, a concept he identified as having three features, ‘(1) value-based education; (2) religion transforming into spirituality; (3) economic development for societal equality’.Footnote 54 Kalam's high profile as the then-president of India and his associations with education and social reform lent credence to the proposal and, critically, helped to ensure the Bihar government's support for the project. As proposed, Nalanda's educational targets would be both conventional—‘excellence’—and unusual—‘spirituality’, a quality consistently showcased as one of the project's hallmarks.Footnote 55
Aspects of Kalam's original proposal have been broadly ingeminated in many of the East Asia Summit statements on Nalanda. These statements are echoed on the Nalanda University website, which proposes that Nalanda, as a ‘spiritual university’, would represent an alternative ‘Asian’ vision for education:Footnote 56
[o]ur goal is to match the excellence of Nalanda of the first millennium for the third millennium; its mission is to recapture the moral and character-driven model of education of old while refashioning it for the present.Footnote 57
Ideally, this alternative model would provoke a non-Western reassessment of broad pedagogical goals at the foundational level. For the definitive statement in this regard, the Summit's ‘Joint Press Statement on Nalanda’ must be revisited:
. . . [the EAS] supported the establishment of the Nalanda University as a non-state, non-profit, secular, and self governing international institution with a continental focus that will bring together the brightest and the most dedicated students from all countries of Asia—irrespective of gender, caste, creed, disability, ethnicity or social-economic background—to enable them to acquire liberal and human education and to give them the means needed for pursuit of intellectual, philosophical, historical and spiritual studies and thus achieve qualities of tolerance and accommodation.Footnote 58
This critical portion of the statement declared that the new Nalanda University will have a distinctly ‘Asian’ character which includes ‘spiritual studies’, in order to produce ‘tolerance and accommodation’. In 2010, the Indian minister of external affairs chaired an ‘Association of Southeast Asian Nations–India post-ministerial meeting’, at which the East Asia Summit foreign ministers reavowed their interest in the Nalanda University initiative, now described as a ‘symbol of Asia's cultural renaissance’.Footnote 59 Most recently, India's 2013 Memorandum of Understanding (currently signed with eight East Asia Summit member states) clarified the intra-regional obectives of Nalanda University as follows: ‘to build an Asian community of learning . . . to create an Asian community by strengthening our regional awareness . . . to impart education towards capacity-building of Asian nations in the domain of philosophy, language, history . . . ’.Footnote 60
The refurbished ideal of Nalanda has been incredibly successful in captivating Indian, Asian, and Western enthusiasts. As framed here, contemporary Nalanda should be not just as humanistic, rational, and scientific as the West but it should exceed those standards by also being morally and culturally resonant. In the third and final section, I explore how Nalanda is reread to serve particularly Indic concerns.
Indian visions of Nalanda
On 21 August 2010, India's upper house, the Rajya Sabha, passed the Nalanda University Bill and affirmed the nation's commitment to develop a modern university near the site of ancient Nalanda in Bihar. The lower house, or Lok Sabha, passed the Bill five days later. Analysis of the parliamentary debates and other Indian sources offers unique insight into the symbolic power of Nalanda to further a range of particularly Indian agendas that diverge significantly from the pan-Indo-Asian ones considered in the previous section. Below, I consider four aspects of the discourse around Nalanda which highlight how the initiative serves particularly Indic concerns in India. In some cases we see how pan-Indo-Asian themes are reconceived through a nationalist lens; in other cases, we find peculiarly Indian issues. In all cases, the inherent tensions between pan-Indo-Asian, transnational, and Indian nationalist interests are clear.
Indian (soft) diplomacy
Over the last two decades, Indian foreign affairs has included a strong emphasis on Southeast and East Asia through its ‘Look East’ policy, adopted in 1991. This policy signalled a major commitment by India to reorient attention towards its Asian neighbours with the aim of greater economic and cultural integration. As Christophe Jaffrelot has discussed, ‘Look East’ can also be seen as the contemporary iteration of India's long-term, nationalist interest in ‘Asianism’, in which ‘the existence of common traditions is . . . invoked to establish economic links more easily or to enter into regional organizations’.Footnote 61 After independence, Jawaharlal Nehru tried to rally Asian nations under India's banner but was largely unsuccessful, as many new Asian nation-states were uneasy about India's regional ambitions and its proprietary cultural attitude, based on the assumed continuities within ‘Farther India’.Footnote 62 In the era of ‘Look East’, Jaffrelot cautioned that India's overtly nationalist interpretations of ‘Greater India’ in ASEAN territory have limited the economic and intra-regional benefits of the policy.Footnote 63
Recently, some influential Indian voices have integrated the Nalanda revival into the purview of the ‘Look East’ policy. Veteran diplomat N. Ravi suggests that the policy be remade with Nalanda as a focus, in his ‘Look East Policy—Millennia Apart’.Footnote 64 Likewise, S. D. Muni, a scholar of international relations, takes a similarly instrumental approach to Nalanda regarding India's intra-Asian interests in his article: ‘Nalanda: A Soft Power Project’.
India has, till recently, been rather casual about and indifferent to its strength in the use of soft power in its foreign policy and diplomacy. The goodwill and admiration clustered around India's cultural footprints in Asia. . . have not been harnessed systematically. Many of the innovative proposals and initiatives have died under the burden of bureaucratic ineptitude and lethargy. It is only now that India is waking up to the use of this asset. . . It will spurt activities and processes towards building an Asian community and cannot be used as an instrument of competitive diplomacy in the region.Footnote 65
Muni, a realist observer who has been closely allied with India's state policy, accepts the idea that a ‘secular-Buddhist’ university in Bihar can act as an effective vehicle for India's ‘. . . unleashing its soft power on Asia and the world’ and act as a counterweight to ‘competitive diplomacy’ among Asian nations. He argues that the pan-Asian dream of mutual cooperation is imminently possible and that the Nalanda project could facilitate powerful new intra-Asian connections between nation-states based on common culture rather than trade and policy. But inversely mirroring the pan-Asian ideals introduced previously, Muni reconsiders India's historic legacy as a pragmatic lever to increase India's influence in the region.
Finally, as discussed in the previous section, the Nalanda revival has been envisioned as promoting a pan-Indo-Asian vision of Asian unity, with India as an exemplar of Asian civilization. During the August 2010 Indian parliamentary debates, many Indian members of parliament echoed similar themes. Yet the forthright style of many Indian parliamentarians produced statements that veer from the guarded language of international diplomacy to reveal an ardently reimagined vision for Nalanda, Asia, and ‘of course, a resurgent India’:
Karan Singh: [L]et this not be just another university. Let it be a genuinely trans-national university. . . let us re-establish the links between India and South and South-East Asia that were shattered by centuries of colonial rule. . . Asia is rising again after many centuries of servitude and I sincerely hope that this new Nalanda will become a symbol of a resurgent Asia and, of course, a resurgent India’.Footnote 66
A second representative example puts this sentiment in even more overtly anti-Western and pro-Indian terms:
Girija Vyas: Nowadays, the basis of our thinking and thoughts is European. Under India's lead, Asia is breaking away from that and taking on a new shape, in which we are on course to achieve signs of economic progress along with ASEAN, by means of (mādhyam) Nalanda university we will realize our ancient prestige (gaurav), in which there is something new and something old as well.Footnote 67
In these and numerous other instances the ‘pan-Indo-Asian’ rhetoric around Nalanda is reconceived in strongly nationalistic terms that reflect characteristically Indian concerns. In reflecting on the terms of the revival, it is striking to note how Nalanda has captured support for such different reasons. In Amartya Sen's treatment, the Nalanda project pragmatically serves the greater aims of pan-Indo-Asianism; in other hands, it is idealistically retooled to fit the interests of the Indian state. This reflects the incredibly broad appeal of the project, while simultaneously unmasking its inherent tensions. In other words, it is clear that Nalanda captures the imaginations of many—what is not clear is the extent to which these visions are shared.
Indic educational ideals
While the East Asia Summit statements invoke, but do not detail, how Asian ‘spirituality’ will shape Nalanda, Indian parliamentarians offer very closely articulated descriptions of what these educational ideals ought to be. Not surprisingly, we find that these visions differ from the ideals of tolerance, accommodation, and ‘Asian spirituality’ discussed in the previous section. Instead, these ideals are characteristically and paradigmatically Indic. Below, I discuss three of the most frequently used Indic terms in the Nalanda Bill debates and show how they reflect a distinctly Indian conception of knowledge and education which is tied to liberative soteriology, namely vidyā (knowledge, wisdom), dharma (values), and ātma (consciousness, self).Footnote 68
Vidyā was noted by Yijing in his seventh-century listing of Sanskrit-derived disciplines at ancient Nalanda. In the 2010 Nalanda Bill debates, vidyā is compared with Western values and educational ideals, and is celebrated as possessing greater moral weight. It is the most regularly recurring Indic term in the debates on the Nalanda Bill in both houses. One eloquent speaker defined vidyā using a well-known Sanskrit idiom, left untranslated in the proceedings:
Balavant alias Bal Apte: Information is relevant if it is knowledge, and, knowledge is relevant if it is blessed with wisdom, and, all these put together is one word in this country, which is called ‘vidyā’. Vidyā is knowledge with wisdom, and, we say, sā vidyā yā vimuktaye [that which liberates is knowledge].Footnote 69
Here, the outcome of acquiring vidyā is ‘liberation’, which has an experiential and moral character that is deeply tied to both Hindu and Buddhist soteriology. In the context of contemporary Indian higher education, such aphorisms are relatively common (if highbrow) locutions. Many Indian schools (at all levels) have a Sanskrit motto, which frequently contains the word vidyā. For example, the Sanskrit motto of Banaras Hindu University—‘immortality through knowledge (vidyā)’—similarly suggests that vidyā has a soteriological dimension.Footnote 70 While the pan-Indo-Asian discourse on Nalanda and spirituality affirms a general investment in the inculcation of moral values, Indian discourse on Nalanda explicitly links the acquisition of knowledge to spiritual liberation.
Another related word that appears frequently in the parliamentary debates—dharma—is notoriously difficult to translate from Indic languages. Attested in the Oxford English Dictionary since Sir William Jones's usage of it in 1796, dharma is translated in English as ‘ethics, custom, religion’ and so on. In the upper house, member of parliament M. Rama Jois engaged in an extended discussion of vidyā in relation to dharma, suggesting that part of Nalanda University's mandate ought to include an obligation to impart a sense of dharma to its students. Speaking in English, Jois argued that dharma acts as a pre-emptive moral curb against those transgressions associated with a lack of character: ‘. . . unless vidya is accompanied by character and humanness, it is dangerous’.Footnote 71 Similar language was used by member of parliament Pramod Kureel, who emphasized the moral character of ancient Nalanda and urged that this standard inform the new iteration of the institution: ‘Nalanda was not just for imparting education to students from the world over. Its role was more in terms of creating a value system.’Footnote 72 By contrast, the implicit suggestion is that ‘Western’ knowledge—perceived to be untempered by moral character—is substandard and even harmful.
Deeply interconnected in the parliamentary discourse on wisdom, ethics, and moral character is the suggestion that the meaningful education exemplified at ancient Nalanda facilitated students’ knowledge of a higher consciousness. Member of parliament Bhola Singh, speaking in Hindi, united these themes when he made a connection between Nalanda's curriculum and the potential to achieve knowledge of ātma (self):
Bhola Singh: Today, what we study, it's the opposite of (what was studied) at that time—what we are, what is humanity, where have we come from—that's what was studied then. . . [w]ithout knowing the self (ātma), one can't get to know the supreme consciousness (paramātmā). In this connection, the Nalanda university (viśvavidyālaya) had taken a historic step.Footnote 73
Just as in previous passages, Singh makes a clear statement in favour of Nalanda as an institution that should inculcate essentially Indian religio-philosophical attitudes and experiences. Likewise, N. Ravi echoed the language of the fourth East Asia Summit by including ‘spiritual studies’ in the purview of the University, but extended this significantly by claiming an Indian prerogative of ‘spirituality’, which could ‘catalyse’ the Nalanda revival movement for the next millennium:
[The] connection to Nalanda. . . could be the first step in our journey of the next thousand years. India is ideally placed to spur a movement catalysed by spirituality, to reach an ancient destination in the new millennium—a place that set ancient India apart as a pioneer in higher education.Footnote 74
These views recall earlier statements by nationalist pioneers of Indo-Asianism, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who admired the virtues of the other great Asian civilizations—China in particular—while proprietarily extolling India's cultural legacy to the ‘Asiatic peoples’, writ large.Footnote 75 Also, as a variety of spiritual parochialism, in which India is regarded as the origin of authentic spirituality, the contemporary debate again seems to take cues from the religious modernist movement of the last century. One of that movement's most famous representatives was Swami Vivekānanda of India (1863–1902) who idiosyncratically re-presented aspects of ‘traditional’ Hindu religiosity. In Vivekānanda's formulation of modern Hinduism, the very qualities most valued by modernity were not only present in ‘Hinduism’ since its origin but were, in fact, Hinduism's gifts to the world.Footnote 76
At one level, the contemporary visions share common cause with the transnational exhortations that Nalanda should be a ‘spiritual’ university. But at another level, the profoundly Indic character of these statements suggests the potential for deep pedagogical and philosophical tensions as the project proceeds. The original Nalanda perhaps succeeded in part because it espoused a comparatively unified worldview. The Nalanda revival so far has leveraged a broad-brush version of that view, driven partially by the contemporary ambition to develop a model of Asian education. But what will happen as views are refined regarding the spiritual or moral truths the project is meant to impart, and in locking down the ‘Asian’ nature of the curriculum? It is unclear to what extent these differences will truly challenge the dominant-Western mode of higher education. However, as the Nalanda revival evolves in its Indian setting and the first cohort of Nalanda faculty and students chart a path together from 2014 onwards, it is worth emphasizing the extent to which the robust national discourse on Nalanda is marked by widely shared Indic educational ideals.
Models of Indian education
In India, the term viśvavidyālaya is the usual Hindi translation of ‘university’; jāmi’a is the Urdu equivalent. Both terms are used to describe centrally administered, degree-granting institutions, such as the Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi. In a common practice, the University of Delhi uses the term ‘university’ in its official English name and retains viśvavidyālaya in its official Hindi name (Dillī Viśvavidyālaya). Both versions appear on its bilingual Hindi-English seal. Alongside these two terms—and occasionally in opposition to them—there are numerous other Indic terms for educational institutions which are important for understanding contemporary educational milieus in India. Most of these reveal a religious and/or community affiliation with Hindu modes of learning. Some of the most common include: vidyālaya, ‘abode of knowledge’; and mahāvidyālaya, ‘great abode of knowledge’, used widely by the Indian government for secular government secondary schools; sansthān, or ‘institute’ and anusandhāna sansthān, ‘research institute’; kalāmaṇḍala, ‘arts college’; and gurukul, a traditional Hindu residential school. Mahāvihāra, ‘great monastery’, and madrasa, ‘school’, are respectively associated with Buddhist and Muslim education. Nearly all of these Indic designations can be found in the contemporary titles of the 130 institutions deemed by the government of India to be universities.Footnote 77
Referring to the new Nalanda as a ‘university’ may appear to be one point that all parties can agree on as this designation has become the gold standard for institutions of higher learning around the world. Indeed, centres of learning outside of Europe—whatever their scholastic inheritance—have consistently adopted Western standards in converting their institutional designations to that of ‘university’.Footnote 78 The institution of higher learning at Nanjing, China, founded around 258 BCE, changed its designation to university in 1888; Al-Karaouine, founded in Fes, Morocco, in 859 became a university in 1947; and Al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, founded around 970–972, converted to university status in 1961. For better or for worse, the Western university model dominates global standards of education and has done so since at least the nineteenth century. However, in the Nalanda debates, several members of parliament raised the matter of Nalanda's designation in explicitly anti-Western terms, calling for the revival to use a different term—vidyāpīṭh—claiming that it would better match Indian values. For example, member of parliament Bharatkumar Raut contends that:
. . .the Nalanda spirit should be looking into the 21st century needs not only of India or South Asia, but also, of [the] wider global confluence of ideas and confluence of minds. . . [t]his university should be called ‘Nalanda Vidyapeeth’. . . University is a western concept’.Footnote 79
From all of the numerous Indic categorizations of institutions of learning, vidyāpīṭha—literally, pīṭha, ‘seat’, ‘chair’ or ‘place’ of vidyā, ‘knowledge, learning, philosophy, skills’—especially recalls the campaign for non-Western, non-colonial education that arose as part of India's Independence movement.
Vidyāpīṭh (or vidyāpīṭha) was associated with M. K. Gandhi's call to boycott British-led institutions of higher learning at a meeting of the Indian National Congress in Nagpur in 1920.Footnote 80 There are currently numerous vidyāpīṭhas, known as ‘deemed universities’, such as the Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth (Ṭiḷak Mahārāṣṭra Vidyāpīṭha) founded in 1921 in Pune, Maharashtra, and the Mahatma Gandhi Kashi Vidyapith (Mahātmā Gāndhī Kāśī Vidyāpīṭha) founded in 1920 in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. The latter was the first exclusively Indian-run institute of higher learning in British India.Footnote 81
There is thus an important history of indigenously conceived forms of higher education in India that is linked to Indian sovereignty and is expressly anti-colonial. It is this history that members such as Balavant (alias Bal Apte) refer to when they suggest that the term ‘university’ be abandoned altogether, arguing that English terminology is deficient and should be augmented with the Indian notion of vidyāpīṭha: ‘adopt that word, bring it into English and enrich that language’.Footnote 82
Apart from its historical resonances, the contemporary significance of the term vidyāpīṭha appears somewhat unclear. In the past, vidyāpīṭhas were associated with social uplift, while the colonial universities furthered social differentiation through English education. The first ‘modern’ Indian universities were the three Presidency universities, founded in 1857 in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, which were intended to impart the English language and European values. In Masks of Conquest (1989), Gauri Viswanathan argues that the establishment of the centralized university system in India advanced many imperial objectives, from producing candidates for the civil service to ‘creating a class that might emulate Europeans . . . and increase demand for the consumption of British goods [and] the advancement of European knowledge and European culture’.Footnote 83 Yet in the post-independence era, Nalanda University Vice-Chancellor Gopa Sabharwal notes that, in terms of gender relations, these universities achieved ‘more for the emancipation of women than any other institution . . . [and allowed] men and women unrelated by kinship, to interact freely’.Footnote 84
One potential point of distinction may be the positive emphasis that the vidyāpīṭha historically placed on inculcating morality. Viswanathan notes that the colonial government had a ‘. . . hostility to a moral emphasis in education’, which was set in the 1854 dispatch of Lord Halifax that informed the curriculum of the Presidency universities.Footnote 85 Yet contemporary Indian universities (in principle) embrace this mode as well. Banaras Hindu University, an institution intended to combine Western and Indian modes of learning and curriculums, identifies the following as one of its core objectives: ‘. . . the building up of character in youth by religion and ethics as an integral part of education’.Footnote 86
While it may be difficult to differentiate between the ethical nature of the modern Indian university and the contemporary vidyāpīṭha, the particular history of the vidyāpīṭha in India already represents a fully realized alternative model of education which resonates with India's Independence movement and confrontation with its colonial past. While pan-Indo-Asianists may extol Nalanda for its ability to forge Asian connections, other parties in India may see the new Nalanda as an opportunity to showcase Indic educational ideals and modern India's particular history on a pan-Asian stage.
Indian Buddhism, secularism, and egalitarianism
The idea of Buddhism, so important to the Asian imagining of the Nalanda revival, also has strikingly different modes of reception among certain sectors in India. When compared to the relative cultural influence of Buddhism in many ASEAN nations, Buddhism exerts a marginal cultural influence within Hindu-majority India; there are just eight million Buddhists in India, representing just 0.8 per cent of the general population.Footnote 87 However, contemporary Indian Buddhism has a highly charged affinity with the political enfranchisement of low-caste electorates, on account of its association with Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian constitution and a champion of low-caste equality in India. Born into a Dalit family, Ambedkar famously rejected Hinduism as inherently inequitable and converted to Buddhism in 1956 along with hundreds of thousands of supporters in Nagpur, Maharashtra.Footnote 88 This public political act mobilized a new movement of ‘Ambedkar Buddhists’ in India which is associated with the rejection of caste and caste-based inequality.
Numerically, a very small community of Indians professes to be Ambedkar Buddhists. Yet Ambedkar's relationship to social justice means that ‘Buddhism’ in India has a special link to the historically disenfranchised communities known as ‘Scheduled Castes’ (16.2 per cent), ‘Scheduled Tribes’ (8.2 per cent), and ‘Other Backward Castes’.Footnote 89 In the words of member of parliament Pramod Kureel, ‘the Scheduled Castes, “Scheduled Tribes”, and “Other Backward Castes” of this country. . . may not be practicing Buddhism. . . but as a value system [it] has a special place in their hearts’.Footnote 90 Collectively, these three groups potentially represent a strong numerical majority of the general population, so that Ambedkar Buddhist identity politics resonates with an influential section of the Indian electorate.
Ambedkar's repudiation of Hinduism also leads to an unusual connection between Buddhism and secularism that is highly specific to India. This is partially because of Ambedkar Buddhism's promise of a new egalitarian religious identity through denunciation of the Hindu caste system.Footnote 91 According to member of parliament Baishnab Parida, ‘[Buddhism] has established a new order and a casteless society which the great Buddha has given not only to the Indian people but to the entire world.’Footnote 92 In almost any other context, it is difficult to imagine a similarly robust relationship between a particular religion and secularism as a political ideology. Yet given India's Hindu-majority context and the role of caste-politics in Indian democracy, ‘Buddhism’—here read as the Buddhism of Ambedkar—is understood as being in concert with low-caste political goals and secular ideals. For this reason, Indian members of parliament representing low-caste voters may regard the Nalanda project as an avenue to advance the interests of their constituents.
Finally, Ambedkar Buddhism is strongly associated with the mid-twentieth century ‘revival’ of Buddhism in India and the rise of low-caste politics in western and northern India. As described by Ram Vilas Paswan, ‘[w]hen we talk of Nalanda, Buddhism comes to our minds which has given India significant identity in the world. Baba Saheb Ambedkar revived it in 1956.’Footnote 93 Prior to the large-scale conversion of Dalits inspired by Ambedkar, Buddhists in India were largely restricted to small Himalayan border populations, such as those in Ladakh, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh (which later included refugees from Tibet), and so on. In contrast, Buddhism has been a continuously relevant and dominant social force for many East Asia Summit nations—reform and renewal movements notwithstanding. In some East Asia Summit countries—whether Theravada or Mahayana—Buddhism may be the official state religion, as in CambodiaFootnote 94 or the de facto state religion, as in Myanmar and Thailand.
In summary, Buddhism in India has a complex history that lends itself to two very different readings. In the pan-Indo-Asian recension, India, as Buddhism's place of origin—is relatively unencumbered by contemporary entanglements of religiosity and national practices—and can thus offer a welcoming home to all contemporary and national forms of Buddhism without privileging or threatening the status of any of them. In the Indo-centric view, however, Indian Buddhism is richly resonant with numerous themes that are difficult to translate outside of India: the rise of low-caste politics, anti-caste movements, secularism (as opposed to religious communalism), the political empowering of Dalits, Adivasis, and others disadvantaged by the caste system, and so on. These divergent interpretations reveal the complexity of Nalanda as both an Asian and Indian symbol and its capacity to be framed in the service of very different agendas.
Prospects and reflections
The tabling of the Nalanda initiative is proof of the strong mutual desire among Asian nations to develop intra-Asian cultural relationships. Collective goodwill towards the project is deep, as acknowledged in an Economist editorial: ‘. . . the project's appeal is clear: Nalanda offers both a glimpse of a glorious past and a chance of a bit of neighbourly collaboration’.Footnote 95 Even China and India recently spoke in terms of this new common language of admiration, referring to each other as ‘neighbours’ and part of the ‘Asian family’ at a bilateral meeting between Wen Jiabao, the former Chinese premier, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in December 2010.Footnote 96
Initially, there were many doubts about the project's viability, particularly regarding funding. While all East Asia Summit members supported the project, only seven major commitments had been confirmed by late 2012, from China, Singapore, Thailand, and India. The largest contribution came from India: the Indian government committed ten million US$ towards the initial endowment (approved for release in January 2014), while the state of Bihar donated 446 acres of land.Footnote 97 In 2010, China ‘welcomed’ India's efforts to revive Nalanda and agreed to make a major donation. This pledge was fulfilled in November 2011 when Zhang Yen, the former Chinese ambassador to India (2008–2012), formally presented one million US$ towards the construction of a ‘Chinese-style library’ at the new university. In his address, he noted that, ‘Nalanda University is a symbol of the century-long cultural and (friendly) people-to-people exchanges among Asian countries in general, and between China and India in particular.’Footnote 98 In 2010, Julia Gillard, the former Australian prime minister, announced that Australia would contribute a Chair of Ecology and Environment Studies to India's Nalanda University, characterized as ‘a regional centre of learning’.Footnote 99 Finally, news reports in 2011 suggested that a private donor had committed one million US$, and in March 2012, the government of Thailand donated 100,000US$, while Prime Minister Manmohan Singh shared news of developments on Nalanda with Lee Myung-Bak, president of South Korea.Footnote 100
The university's proposed location in Bihar is inspired but it has also posed deeply challenging logistical problems for the project. Bihar has long endured a reputation as India's most troubled state in terms of law and order problems, human development indicators, infrastructure, caste-based violence, corruption, and so on. Numerous infrastructural milestones are planned, including the construction of an airport. Nevertheless, putting early scepticism in its place, Nalanda University is now reported to be on track to welcome its first batch of academic staff and students in September 2014.Footnote 101 Chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar has been heralded for his efforts to rehabilitate the state and was re-elected in a landslide for a second term of five years in November 2010. While Amartya Sen confirmed that Kumar's government has been ‘impeccably cooperative’, the project's success naturally depends on more than state (and federal) government support.Footnote 102 As just one example of local opposition, Chief Minister Kumar and then-president of India A. P. J. Abdul Kalam visited Nalanda in February 2008 where they were pelted with stones by local farmers aggrieved with the compensation offered for the land commandeered by the state of Bihar for the project.Footnote 103
At the federal level, there continue to be concerns about the role of the government in university affairs. The internationally scrutinized staging of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in October 2010 shows that effective implementation of large-scale multi-year projects—even those of great international prestige for the state—continues to be an issue for the federal government of India.Footnote 104 Amartya Sen has been a tireless advocate of all things Nalanda, but his remarks in some interviews since 2011 reveal dissatisfaction with ‘administrative delays’ and ‘bureaucratic control’ in India.Footnote 105 For example, Gopa Sabharwal was selected by the Nalanda Mentor Group as the university's vice-chancellor in September 2010, yet the appointment was not officially confirmed until March 2012. Some Indian mass media commentators, especially Tehelka and the Bihar Times, have been extremely critical of almost every aspect of the revival—from the inclusion of business and technology in the proposed curriculum and the up-and-down status of the university's website to the vice-chancellor's qualifications and salary and even the location of the university's temporary rented offices in New Delhi against the charge that they ought to be in Bihar.Footnote 106
Furthermore, the wisdom of launching this institution may generally be called into question, given that higher education in India is in need of reform. The Times Higher Education world university rankings are dominated by American institutions, but numerous Asian universities have made the cut—from Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore to China, South Korea, and Taiwan. Yet not a single Indian university is listed within the top 300 institutions, and only one falls within the top 400—the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. Ranked within the 301st and 350th range, IIT Bombay is part of the autonomously functioning IIT network, granted by an act of parliament in 1961.Footnote 107 And, almost simultaneously, the federal government launched a second international university with special operational status: the new South Asian University, which welcomed its first cohort of students in 2010. The rationale for this, as stated by one of its architects, was to ‘facilitate autonomy from bureaucratic stranglehold’.Footnote 108
As the project continues to move forward, it will have many challenges to overcome, perhaps none greater than reconciling the past Nalanda with the future Nalanda. And yet there are grounds for optimism. To understand why, it is instructive to consider the state of intra-Asian relationships among the Buddhist communities in nearby Bodhgaya, Bihar. There, for the better part of a century, representatives from various Buddhist nations have shown limited engagement with one another.Footnote 109 While these groups participate in some collaborative projects, they generally operate in tandem in Bodhgaya rather than in concert. However, a now-annual event (inaugurated in 2006) has newly united representatives from numerous Theravadin Buddhist countries in collaboratively chanting the Pali Tipiṭaka in the precincts of the Mahabodhi temple, the site where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment in Bihar.Footnote 110 Each country sponsors separate national stalls, where monks in the unique dress of their state distinctively intone the scriptures. Collectively, the event gives a moving impression of both the diversity and unity of practices encompassed by the Theravadin Buddhist schools. The final effect, however, is somewhat cacophonous, as each group simultaneously chants over one another at different levels of amplification. As illustrated by this anecdote, certain elements of Buddhism, such as reverence for the sites associated with the historical Buddha, may be embraced universally by Buddhists worldwide. But in the case of the Tipiṭaka chanting, we can see how difficult it can be to harmonize the highly refined and culturally embedded practices drawn from the mosaic of practices found among Asian Buddhists.
In contrast, the comparison between Bodhgaya and Nalanda is provocative: could a secular, modern university, which takes historical Buddhism as a symbolic icon, transcend national interests and norms? Can a denatured decoction of intra-Asian Buddhism and Asian education mediate the differences between pan-Indo-Asian and Indian visions of Nalanda? Will the intersection of these two streams foster the realization of a pan-Indo-Asian model of higher education? India's strategy of ‘looking east’ is being ardently reciprocated by those in Singapore, Japan—and even China—who are ‘looking west’ to India in the name of Buddhism, education, and a resurgent Asia for the third millennium. Analysis of the Nalanda revival project can thus offer important insights into contemporary efforts to develop an Asian model of education, through the rereading and rewriting of the ancient Nalanda Mahāvihāra from multiple intra-Asian perspectives.
