The wonder that was India: Retracing ancient Nalanda’s high-quality education parameters

There is no shortage of intellectuals, artists, writers and thinkers from around the world who acknowledge the greatness of India’s past in learning and culture. Higher education was implicitly a part of that great culture. It is worth citing some of those opinions.

While Mark Twain, the American writer, had many critical things to say about India, he had this to say about its historical contributions to world culture: “India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great-grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.”

If Mark Twain acknowledged India’s contributions to history, legend and tradition, the physicist Albert Einstein acknowledged that no scientific progress could have been made without the Indian contribution. He wrote: “We owe a lot to the Indians who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.”

Max Mueller, the German Orientalist scholar who translated numerous Indian texts from the Sanskrit language into English and German, famously said: “If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life and has found solutions, I should point to India.”

Mueller is also reported to have said that there was not a single thought that had arisen in the mind of anyone in the world that had not already been thought in India.

Romaine Rolland, the French scholar, had this to say: “If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.”

French scholar Sylvia Levi is fulsome in her praise when she writes: “She (India) has left indelible imprints on one-fourth of the human race in the course of a long succession of centuries. She has the right to reclaim … her place amongst the great nations summarising and symbolising the spirit of humanity. From Persia to the Chinese sea, from the icy regions of Siberia to the islands of Java and Borneo, India has propagated her beliefs, her tales and her civilisation.”

The present relationship between India and China is fairly acrimonious. Well-read Chinese acknowledge that in cultural, educational and philosophical terms they were for many centuries under India’s dominance. Hu Shih, a former vice-chancellor of Beijing University and ambassador of the Republic of China to the US, summed up the relative contributions of India and China in the following words:

India conquered and dominated China culturally for twenty centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.

Ironically enough, when the Indian defence minister Raj Nath Singh quoted Hu Shih in a speech, his remark greatly angered the Chinese owing to the current tensions between the two neighbours.

Following centuries of colonial rule under the British, India became, in the words of the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, ‘a wounded civilisation’. It has only now started to recover from the cultural wounds inflicted by the coloniser, and from having been reduced to an impoverished state. Till recently, India hasn’t had the money to preserve its ancient heritage in the way that western nations have. This is changing now as GDP increases and more money can be allocated for the repair and refurbishment of ancient monuments. Nevertheless, outsiders are often wonderstruck by the land and its architecture. This is what Keith Bellows, former editorin-chief of the National Geographic Traveller, had to say:

There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won’t go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colours, smells, tastes and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white, and, when brought face to face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.

Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge: The past, present and future of excellence in education, by Rajesh Talwar (Author)

Could the recent revival of Nalanda University be seen as symbolic of times to come?

It gladdened my heart to note that while the old Nalanda was destroyed by a barbaric Muslim invader, the idea of a new Nalanda University was first mooted by a charismatic, visionary and immensely popular Indian Muslim. In 2008, Abul Kalam Azad, the President of India, made the suggestion while he was addressing the Bihar Legislative Assembly.

Around this time, Singapore approached India with the same suggestion. Occasionally, an idea flowers at the same time in different places, for reasons we do not fully understand.

What do we know about the Nalanda University? Nalanda was an architectural and environmental masterpiece. With eight separate compounds, ten temples, meditation halls, classrooms, lakes and parks, it had a truly impressive infrastructure for its times. The atmosphere, too, was such that learning could flourish. We do know that it had a nine-storey library that could put many modern libraries to shame. While it focused on Buddhist studies, students were also taught medicine, mathematics, fine arts, politics and the art of war. The university housed ten thousand students and two thousand professors, an impressive teacher-student ratio even by present-day standards. Possibly the greatest global university of its time, it attracted visitors and scholars from lands as distant as China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia and other places in South East Asia.

The guru-shishya tradition in India goes back thousands of years. Could it be argued that before Nalanda there were, centuries earlier, large ashrams that also worked on the scale of a mini-university, providing education in many different fields? Certainly, Nalanda itself would not have arisen in a vacuum.

A critic may ask how it matters that India had great institutions of learning in its glorious past. The past is the past. Despite India’s civilisational head start, the Western world began to make progress and eventually not only overtook India but went so far ahead that today it appears impossible that India will ever catch up.

In response to such a criticism, I would say that the past remains of great significance. Knowing how things were at one time gives present-day Indians the confidence that they can do it again. This might seem strange or unscientific to those who are too prosaic in their thinking, but just as you never forget how to drive once you have mastered the skill, so also the Indian mind contains somewhere an unconscious memory of all its past achievements and greatness.

Although visitors came from many lands, it was predominantly the Chinese who left behind records of what they saw and heard. Today, when Indian students wish to know more about Nalanda, Taxila and other great Indian universities they must turn to what Chinese travellers wrote about them. Perhaps the Chinese have a better sense of history than the Indians.

What about Indians themselves? Did we not write about ourselves and our own institutions? It would be strange, if not inexplicable, if we did not. Probably such records were destroyed during the subsequent invasions and the destruction caused by invading armies from less civilised regions of the world. This was clearly the case with Nalanda, for instance, where fires from the burning of books in the library – one of the biggest in the world at the time – kept burning for three whole days.

It would seem that the Indians did not travel as much as the Chinese did. Was this because the Chinese institutions of learning were not as impressive as those in India? Such a view would flatter Indians, but let us try to be more critical in our thinking. A not-so-flattering explanation could be to argue that Indians were simply not as curious as the Chinese were. Yet this is a strange conclusion if we consider how closed China (and Japan) remained to the rest of the world for many centuries.

There is another, more plausible explanation. The biggest intellectual, philosophical and soft power export from India to China at the time was Buddhism. It was therefore natural for the Chinese, many of whom had converted to Buddhism, to go to India to visit sites where the Buddha had lived and preached and also, once in the land of his birth, to try to see how the institutions of learning operated at the source of Buddhism, the great world religion that had spread across most of China and large parts of Asia.

The above article is an extract from Rajesh Talwar’s book, ‘Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge: The Past, Present and Future of Excellence in Education’ (Bridging Borders publishers, Rs 350). Talwar has written on a variety of themes ranging from social justice to law and culture for international and national magazines, newspapers, and websites. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.