In the photo: Dr. P.M. Rajan Gurukkal
Photo: By special arrangement
Politics and the study of history have always been associated very closely, especially in the Indian context. The study of history as a discipline has undoubtedly encouraged many people in taking up politics as a career. Though most of us interested in the political discourse of India in general and Tamil Nadu in particular, and analyse the situations at any given point of time, what happens to the systematic study of history in understanding politics and other influencing factors that have shaped the society into what it is today? The status of history taught in Indian universities and colleges are not to this day, is scientific; neither the majority of students and teachers of history take up serious research. The following is an interview with Dr. P.M. Rajan Gurukkal - a historian who has specialised in the study of early south India. Dr. Gurukkal is also the Vice Chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam in Kerala, since November 2008.
DSJ: Why do we get very few good students for studying history in India, especially in the South ?
Prof Gurukkal: The basic issue is the socio-economics of absence of youth’s freedom of choice in their higher education. All over India the best scoring students go for medicine and engineering. The better ones go for management and business studies. The good among the remaining seek to join English language or economics or other social sciences. The worst join history or the regional language, though many brilliant students have aptitude to the discipline. This order of preference indicating hierarchy of intellectual capabilities is indeed connected to career prospects of each knowledge area, the compulsion of which accounts for as to why the youth are unable to go by their aptitudes. Such a situation of the predominance of low calibre students turned history into a shallow discipline taught by low calibre teachers.
DSJ: Is the present syllabus in the Universities good enough to produce quality students ?
Prof Gurukkal: Intellectually unchallenging syllabus, sterile curriculum and low quality teachers have made the discipline unattractive to good students. Even if any brilliant students seek to learn history, the socio-economically contingent shallowness of the discipline drives them away. The present syllabuses of history in most Universities in the Country are obsolete and too trivial to be nurturing advanced cognitive ability, deeper analytical faculty and higher theoretical capability. This is particularly true of the fate of history in most Universities of South India, which turn good students dull. Certainly, we have to substantially update and upgrade the content of courses in history by removing the redundant and importing the latest.
DSJ: Can you suggest any structural changes for attracting more students into studying history ?
Prof Gurukkal: Structural changes alone will not help. Entry of good students is essential, for which social demand for good graduates in history should increase, which is abysmally low today, due to the peculiar situation of history being least preferred by the bright students and hence invariably dominated by poor clientele. Nevertheless, appropriate and timely structural changes seeking to nurture higher cognitive, analytical and communicative capabilities can enhance quality of students graduating in history, which in its turn can increase their employability and hence the social demand for them. One potential structural reform relates to promotion of interdisciplinary approach and introduction of theory that can make the discipline more insightful and socially relevant to resolving predicaments of the present.
DSJ: Have you observed any major changes or new trends in history studying over the years from your student days to the recent times ?
Prof Gurukkal: New trends have been there in studying history. But their percolation to the syllabus and curriculum has been very slow. Focus on socio-economic history, historiography, theory, and regional history was a new trend in the discipline during my student days, which had some effects on the syllabus. Despite the emphasis of the trend accrued in the discipline over the decades, the level of its percolation in the syllabus is shamefully low. Needless is to mention the poor state of subsequent trends, such as the history of ideas, subaltern studies and gender. The latest trends like discourse analysis, deconstruction, human ecological analysis, human geographical studies, and environmental history are not absorbed at all.
DSJ: Do you think scientific way of teaching history is followed in the Universities in India ?
Prof Gurukkal: If we mean by the scientific way of teaching, a mode of teaching history enabling students understand on their own the discipline’s intellectual depth and social relevance, it is hardly followed anywhere as a rule. Nevertheless, individual teachers in a few Universities like JNU had practised it, which I can endorse as a beneficiary. An extremely small number of such great teachers in history may be available in a few Universities across the Country. Even at the level of research, teacher support is hopelessly bad. With the result, in matters of knowledge base, technical competence in handling the source material, analytical faculty, theoretical framework of comprehension and language power for effective exposition, majority of the history dissertations in our Universities are poor. It is a shoddy descriptive, narrative exercise and very rarely an explanatory theoretical project. Professional history is inevitably social theoretical.
DSJ: What are the other major challenges ?
Prof Gurukkal: The major challenge is that of the neo-liberal trade in higher education taking advantage of the Country’s socio-economic backwardness on the one side and middleclass careerism on the other. It is very difficult to attract good students to history in an age with highly paid career as its primary obsession. Market-friendly academic programmes will further push history to the margin.
DSJ: Do we need to have specialised programmes like M.A in Social History or Economic History and so on ?
Prof Gurukkal: Indeed, scholarly specialisation in history has led to extensive production of specialised knowledge and its publication commendable enough for Universities to offer academic programmes of exclusive kind. It is academically feasible for a University to offer M.A in social history or economic history, but it is that easy to succeed in generating social demand for such postgraduates and sustain the programme. Anyway specialisation devoid of theoretical holism is not of much social use and hence incapable of raising social demand. Introduction of social formation perspective can at once make special M.A programmes in specialised histories intellectually challenging and useful in the context of the present social developmental.
Prof Gurukkal: The basic issue is the socio-economics of absence of youth’s freedom of choice in their higher education. All over India the best scoring students go for medicine and engineering. The better ones go for management and business studies. The good among the remaining seek to join English language or economics or other social sciences. The worst join history or the regional language, though many brilliant students have aptitude to the discipline. This order of preference indicating hierarchy of intellectual capabilities is indeed connected to career prospects of each knowledge area, the compulsion of which accounts for as to why the youth are unable to go by their aptitudes. Such a situation of the predominance of low calibre students turned history into a shallow discipline taught by low calibre teachers.
DSJ: Is the present syllabus in the Universities good enough to produce quality students ?
Prof Gurukkal: Intellectually unchallenging syllabus, sterile curriculum and low quality teachers have made the discipline unattractive to good students. Even if any brilliant students seek to learn history, the socio-economically contingent shallowness of the discipline drives them away. The present syllabuses of history in most Universities in the Country are obsolete and too trivial to be nurturing advanced cognitive ability, deeper analytical faculty and higher theoretical capability. This is particularly true of the fate of history in most Universities of South India, which turn good students dull. Certainly, we have to substantially update and upgrade the content of courses in history by removing the redundant and importing the latest.
DSJ: Can you suggest any structural changes for attracting more students into studying history ?
Prof Gurukkal: Structural changes alone will not help. Entry of good students is essential, for which social demand for good graduates in history should increase, which is abysmally low today, due to the peculiar situation of history being least preferred by the bright students and hence invariably dominated by poor clientele. Nevertheless, appropriate and timely structural changes seeking to nurture higher cognitive, analytical and communicative capabilities can enhance quality of students graduating in history, which in its turn can increase their employability and hence the social demand for them. One potential structural reform relates to promotion of interdisciplinary approach and introduction of theory that can make the discipline more insightful and socially relevant to resolving predicaments of the present.
DSJ: Have you observed any major changes or new trends in history studying over the years from your student days to the recent times ?
Prof Gurukkal: New trends have been there in studying history. But their percolation to the syllabus and curriculum has been very slow. Focus on socio-economic history, historiography, theory, and regional history was a new trend in the discipline during my student days, which had some effects on the syllabus. Despite the emphasis of the trend accrued in the discipline over the decades, the level of its percolation in the syllabus is shamefully low. Needless is to mention the poor state of subsequent trends, such as the history of ideas, subaltern studies and gender. The latest trends like discourse analysis, deconstruction, human ecological analysis, human geographical studies, and environmental history are not absorbed at all.
DSJ: Do you think scientific way of teaching history is followed in the Universities in India ?
Prof Gurukkal: If we mean by the scientific way of teaching, a mode of teaching history enabling students understand on their own the discipline’s intellectual depth and social relevance, it is hardly followed anywhere as a rule. Nevertheless, individual teachers in a few Universities like JNU had practised it, which I can endorse as a beneficiary. An extremely small number of such great teachers in history may be available in a few Universities across the Country. Even at the level of research, teacher support is hopelessly bad. With the result, in matters of knowledge base, technical competence in handling the source material, analytical faculty, theoretical framework of comprehension and language power for effective exposition, majority of the history dissertations in our Universities are poor. It is a shoddy descriptive, narrative exercise and very rarely an explanatory theoretical project. Professional history is inevitably social theoretical.
DSJ: What are the other major challenges ?
Prof Gurukkal: The major challenge is that of the neo-liberal trade in higher education taking advantage of the Country’s socio-economic backwardness on the one side and middleclass careerism on the other. It is very difficult to attract good students to history in an age with highly paid career as its primary obsession. Market-friendly academic programmes will further push history to the margin.
DSJ: Do we need to have specialised programmes like M.A in Social History or Economic History and so on ?
Prof Gurukkal: Indeed, scholarly specialisation in history has led to extensive production of specialised knowledge and its publication commendable enough for Universities to offer academic programmes of exclusive kind. It is academically feasible for a University to offer M.A in social history or economic history, but it is that easy to succeed in generating social demand for such postgraduates and sustain the programme. Anyway specialisation devoid of theoretical holism is not of much social use and hence incapable of raising social demand. Introduction of social formation perspective can at once make special M.A programmes in specialised histories intellectually challenging and useful in the context of the present social developmental.
