Author: Raja Murthy
Publication: Asia Times
Date: September 27, 2011
URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MI27Df01.html
A grand pan-Asian plan to revive India's historic
Nalanda University has run into troubles, with allegations of favoritism and
a lack of transparency putting pressure on the project chief.
In its heyday between the fifth and 12th
century AD, the university hosted over 10,000 resident students and 2,000
teachers - particularly from China, Korea, Japan and even Greece.
India is rebuilding it as the Nalanda International
University, 10 kilometers near the stately ruins of the original site in the
eastern Indian state of Bihar. It's a joint effort also involving China, Thailand,
Japan, Korea, Singapore and some Southeast Asian countries.
While the Indian government is funding the
project, other countries have not specified their roles apart from hosting
annual meetings of the Interim Governing Board of Nalanda. The next conference
is in Beijing this October.
Nalanda and Taxila, now in the Rawalpindi
district of Pakistan, were the world's earliest residential centers of learning.
Nalanda graduates included the well-known
Chinese travelers and historians Hiuen Tsang (Xuan Zang in Chinese) and I-Tsing.
The monk Xuan Zang (602-664 AD), from Chen He village in northern China, spent
five years studying the Buddha's teachings there.
Chinese historians say Nalanda was the only
university outside China that attracted its noted academics.
Nalanda is said to have been destroyed by
the Turkish raider Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1193. Khilji is accused of killing
resident monks, and burning the nine-storey library and its millions of books
to the ground. The book collection was so vast, it is said, that the library
burned over three months.
Talk of reviving Nalanda had been in the
air for over two decades. More concrete plans came with the Indian parliament
passing the Nalanda University Act in August 2010.
Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the Thomas
Lamont Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, heads
the revival as chairman of the Interim Governing Board of Nalanda University.
Sen gave a sold-out talk at the Asia Society
in New York on September 22 on the new Nalanda. Delivering the inaugural Phillips
Talbot Lecture at the Asia Society premises in Park Avenue, Sen said the project
would honor India's long history for higher education, and would be important
not just for India, but for Asia and the rest of the world.
But the new Nalanda is having trouble taking
off. A significant setback came with former Indian president Abul Kalam quitting
the project in September, apparently over differences with Sen's blueprint.
It was Kalam's vision during his presidential
days to revive Nalanda. He has a varied background of being both a leading
scientist and a constitutional head.
Critics accuse the Nalanda governing board
of lacking transparency, such as in its appointment of a little-known professor
of sociology, Dr Gopa Sabharwa, as vice chancellor of the new university.
The original Nalanda University taught subjects
such as astronomy, medicine and mathematics. But its central purpose, and
for which it received patronage of great Indian emperors such as Harsha Vardhan
(606-647 AD), was a deeper study of the Buddha's universal, scientific, practical
teachings. This appears to have been pushed to the background in Sen's plans
for Nalanda.
The new Nalanda, expected to start circa
2013, will have a school of historical sciences and a school of environment
and ecology.
Sen's plans to include information technology
as part of the curricula, for instance, might not exactly be great unique
selling point for Nalanda - given that the world has expressed no serious
shortage of IT training centers.
Significantly, the host state of Bihar appears
unimpressed with Sen's vision of Nalanda. "What Bihar is going to have
perhaps is 'Amartya Sen International University' instead of Nalanda University,"
wrote a scathing critique of Sen in the Bihar Times, published in the state
capital Patna.
"All we want is the end of arbitrary
decision-making and more transparency in the functioning of the Nalanda project,"
says Ajay Kumar, editor of the Bihar Times, which has been reporting closely
on the Nalanda project the past five years.
"We are not against Prof Amartya Sen
or the project, but only against the ad hoc way it is being executed."
Kumar told Asia Times Online. "The feedback we are getting from a cross-section
of people here is discontent with the way the Nalanda project is unraveling.
Nalanda University is closely linked to the history and culture of Bihar."
Bihar was the epicenter of what is called
India's "golden age". Patna, which lies about 55 kilometers from
the Nalanda ruins, was formerly Pataliputra, the celebrated capital of Magadha.
Magadha was the seat of two of India's greatest
empires, Emperor Asoka and the Mauryan dynasty (321 to 185 BC) and the Gupta
empire (320-520).
The site of Bodh Gaya, where Prince Siddhatha
of the Gotama clan became a Sammasambuddha (a fully enlightened being and
the most compassionate teacher of men and gods) is also about 103 kilometers
from Nalanda. The area includes the famous ancient cities of Vaishali and
Rajgiir, which are closely associated with the Buddha's life.
Ajay Kumar pointed out that, Pranab Mukherjee,
India's then external affairs minister and current finance minister, says
he specifically stated in a June 2007 letter to Professor Sen that Nalanda
was being revived as a center for studying the Buddha's universal teachings.
This was the focus of the original Nalanda University. "But the Buddha's
teachings does not seem the focus of Sen's Nalanda University," says
Kumar.
The 77-year old Amartya Sen, who won the
1998 Nobel Prize for economics for his work on causes of famine, is known
for his work on poverty and some call him the "Mother Teresa of economics".
However, he continues to receive less than charitous appraisals over his handling
of Nalanda's second coming.
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