What makes Indians excel overseas? For one, foreign universities brook no servility. Instead, they foster innovation and encourage research
Srijana Mitra Das | TNN
Of all the words you hear on a university campus abroad – seminar, deadline, bar-hopping – here’s one you rarely encounter – ‘sir’, punctuating hesitant students’ questions, used by colleagues lacing disagreement with sarcasm, employed by young entrants addressing their seniors thus. This small difference explains why Indian academics – A K Ramanujan to Amartya Sen, Ranajit Guha to Jagdish Bhagwati, Homi Bhabha to Veena Das – have become big stars in universities abroad.
Of course, several practical facilities motor their success. The libraries of the world’s finest universities are incomparable against Indian counterparts. These enormous repositories of knowledge, staffed by efficient librarians, help you democratically access the most rare, insightful and diverse texts. For any academic, this is pure luxury. Gyan Prakash, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton, remarks, “The university does all it can to facilitate research. Its library is extraordinarily rich. If it doesn’t have something, it will acquire it for you, buying or securing it through inter-library loan promptly. No bureaucratic procedures, no long formfilling. For my book, Mumbai Fables, it secured newspaper and other materials that I could not find in India!”
Next, there is a variety of funding for
research, especially the path-breaking kind. Bikul Das, postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Medical School, whose discovery of ‘altruistic’ stem cells that can help combat illness made global news recently, recounts, “In 1999-2000, I tried to raise funding in India but failed. My mentors told me my ideas were very challenging, there were no prior publications. My idea was very basic, had no immediate commercial gain and was risky, so there were no funding possibilities from government or private sources.” The Assam-born scholar adds, “Locating to Stanford, I competed for funding and it’s tough. However, there are many small private foundations supporting novel ideas, including family trusts. Such support from private donors just does not exist in India…the Indian mentality is to spend money in weddings and festivals but there is no mindset to form a foundation offering research grants. Because of this, many innovative ideas die out in India. Our research institutes including IITs are filled with scientists just following research done in foreign universities…the result – none of our universities is ranked within the global 100.”
By contrast, foreign universities offer opportunities for path-breaking research – and push you to publish. Prakash comments, “You’re expected to be continually productive. The system conditions employment with permanent tenure, promotion and salary raises on your productivity and quality – underlying this is the idea that research enhances teaching. This means you seldom encounter bureaucratic or financial hurdles in research.” And there is stimulating intellectual comradeship. Prakash says, “The presence of colleagues who research other parts of the world and different disciplines encourages you to think more broadly and in an interdisciplinary way. You may be a historian but you find yourself interacting with a colleague in cinema studies, anthropology, literature, political science, architecture. I’ve benefited from such cross-fertilization of knowledge.”
But how, you ask, does all this tie in with the lack of saying ‘sir’? At its purest, an academic’s job is questioning established modes of living towards improving lives.
But ‘sir’ does not mean challenging established norms – it means accepting them, docketing vision inside traditional hierarchies of class, age, gender, ethnicity and sexuality – everything an academic is meant to challenge. Garga Chatterjee, post-doctoral scholar at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, says, “In US institutions unlike India, younger people question older scientists. That is not discourteous. Creativity is encouraged rather than copying ideas. Further, people with smarter ideas and better productivity are remunerated more, not an archaic one- salary-fits-all system that encourages mediocrity.” Chatterjee adds, “The foreign university fosters innovation. We reward servility.” Small wonder then our most argumentative academic minds excel overseas – and face a much harder time at home, sirji.
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