Building a Liberal Arts Tradition in India

Postcolonial nations often struggle with the legacy of higher education systems built by and for the benefit of former colonizers. In India, several visionaries have endeavored to design new approaches to higher education that are suitable to India’s unique context while taking inspiration from the US liberal arts college model. Interest in the liberal arts has grown - in an interconnected world, where a broader scope of understanding is required to craft solutions to societal challenges, young Indians are seeking an alternative to the specialized university model that has dominated the Indian higher education landscape since colonial times. This paper explores the practice of the liberal arts in India through three questions: How does the liberal arts approach fit within the Indian context? How have Indian universities built their own liberal arts tradition? What tensions do these universities navigate? I collected data through a document analysis and interviews with founders, faculty, students, and alumni at three new liberal arts universities in India. While communicating the practical value of the liberal arts to a largely unfamiliar population, the universities built their own liberal arts tradition to help students appreciate, analyze, and develop a commitment to improving the Indian context. At the same time, universities faced numerous tensions: responding to pressures to produce highly employable graduates while remaining true to their institutional ideals, balancing wisdom from both the western liberal arts model and indigenous Indian traditions, and fostering greater inclusion while maintaining financial sustainability. The study’s findings contribute to the field of higher education in India and other postcolonial countries seeking to create new culturally relevant education traditions.