Literary Latitude

Literary theory in India is taught in two very different institutional homes, and the difference is itself instructive. In the literature departments of central, state and private universities, theory sits inside a discipline with a long colonial genealogy, taught to students who have chosen literature as their subject. In the humanities and social sciences departments of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and other technical institutes, theory is taught mostly to engineering students as an elective, by faculty who belong to small composite departments housing literature, philosophy, economics, psychology and sociology under one roof. To ask how literary theory is offered and taught in these two settings is to ask larger questions about the politics of knowledge in India: what counts as useful learning, which languages carry intellectual prestige, how caste and class shape the classroom, and why some disciplines command status while others provide “service”. This essay examines the pedagogy and politics of theory teaching in both settings, considers how theory has created hierarchies among humanities disciplines and among the papers taught alongside it, and reflects on the conveniences and challenges of the interdisciplinarity that theory both promises and complicates. 

Any account of teaching literature in India must begin from the fact that the English department is a colonial institution before it is an academic one. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (1835) announced the aim of forming “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (Macaulay, 1835), and Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest (1989) demonstrated that English literary study was elaborated in India, decades before it existed as a discipline in England, precisely to perform this work of moral and cultural governance. The discipline that Indian universities inherited at independence was therefore already saturated with politics: a canon of British texts, an Arnoldian rhetoric of universal value, and an examination system that rewarded reverence. When literary theory arrived in Indian classrooms in the 1980s and 1990s, it did not enter a neutral space; it entered a discipline whose very existence theory could be used to explain. This is the first peculiarity of theory pedagogy in India: the theory paper often contains the tools for criticising the rest of the syllabus, so that a single MA programme may teach the colonial canon in the morning and, in the afternoon, teach Viswanathan’s account of why that canon was imposed.

The institutional arrival of theory in India can be dated with some precision. The debates collected in Svati Joshi’s Rethinking English (1991) and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s The Lie of the Land (1992) record a moment when Indian scholars, many of them trained abroad or at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages in Hyderabad (CIEFL, later the English and Foreign Languages University), asked publicly what English studies was for in a postcolonial nation, and whether the new theory could help answer the question. Susie Tharu’s edited volume Subject to Change: Teaching English in the Nineties (1998) carried the discussion directly into pedagogy, documenting curricular experiments that used theoretical questions about canon, gender and caste to redesign courses. Institutionally, theory was consolidated from the top down: the University Grants Commission’s model curriculum for English (University Grants Commission, 2001) gave literary criticism and theory a formal place in undergraduate and postgraduate syllabi, the later Choice Based Credit System (University Grants Commission, 2015) standardised paper structures across universities, and the National Eligibility Test (NET), the qualifying examination for college teaching, includes literary criticism and theory in its English syllabus, which guarantees that every aspiring lecturer in the country must study the subject. Within two decades, theory moved from being a controversial import debated in seminars to being a compulsory paper, an examination topic and a professional requirement.

This mode of arrival has shaped the dominant pedagogy, which may be called the survey of isms. In most departments, theory is taught as a single paper that marches chronologically through schools: formalism, New Criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and, increasingly, ecocriticism and posthumanism. The textbook that anchors this pedagogy across India is Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory (1995), whose clear summaries, “stop and think” exercises and worked examples have made it, for better and worse, the real syllabus of the theory paper; anthologies such as David Lodge’s Modern Criticism and Theory (1988) and later the Norton anthology supply the primary excerpts. The pedagogy of the excerpt deserves reflection. Students typically encounter Derrida through five pages of ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, Foucault through a fragment on the panopticon [Jeremy Bentham’s design for a prison in which all inmates can be watched from a central tower, used by Foucault as a model of modern disciplinary power], and Spivak through a summary of a summary. Gerald Graff (1992) argued that students learn intellectual positions best when they see them in conflict, but the survey of isms tends to present the schools as a peaceful museum, each in its own display case, with the quarrels that produced them edited out. The result, familiar to every Indian examiner, is the answer script in which “defamiliarization”, “differance” and “hegemony” are defined accurately and applied to nothing.

The examination system deepens this tendency, because in most Indian universities pedagogy is driven backwards from the question paper. Where theory is examined through predictable questions, “Discuss Barthes’s concept of the death of the author”, “Write a note on the mirror stage”, a bazaar of guidebooks and coaching materials springs up to supply model answers, and the classroom teacher competes with the keyed summary. Elaine Showalter, in Teaching Literature (2003), observes that theory generates a distinctive anxiety in teachers, who fear both oversimplifying difficult texts and losing students in them; in the Indian examination context this anxiety is resolved, too often, by frank simplification, since the teacher knows that the examiner will reward the reproduced definition rather than the risky application. The NET examination, being an objective-type test, intensifies the pattern: theory becomes a bank of facts, the year of S/Z, the names of Kristeva’s three phases of feminism, the difference between metaphor and metonymy in Jakobson, and candidates memorise theory much as an earlier generation memorised the dates of Shakespeare’s plays. The politics of this pedagogy is quietly conservative. A body of thought whose whole purpose, as Jonathan Culler (1997) put it, is the critique of common sense is transmitted as a new common sense, examinable and inert.

The language question is the deepest pedagogical fact of the Indian theory classroom, and it has no equivalent in the Anglo-American settings where theory pedagogy is usually discussed. The majority of students in state universities come to English literature through Indian languages, and English is their second, third or fourth language; theory then arrives as a further language inside English, a Latinate, abstraction-heavy register that is difficult even for native speakers. Probal Dasgupta, in The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue Syndrome (1993), described English in India as an “auntie” tongue, present in the family of Indian languages yet never quite a mother tongue, intimate and distant at once, and the theory paper is where this otherness is felt most sharply. Braj Kachru’s work on Indian English (Kachru, 1983) established that India possesses its own legitimate variety of the language, but theory is not taught in that variety; it is taught in translated Parisian prose. Good teachers respond with an unofficial pedagogy of translation, explaining “interpellation” through a Hindi or Marathi equivalent, glossing the sign with examples from Bollywood posters or matrimonial advertisements, and this improvised bilingual teaching, almost never acknowledged in syllabi, is arguably the most creative theory pedagogy in the country. Its lesson is significant: theory survives in India by being translated, not merely linguistically but culturally, and where teachers refuse this labour, theory functions as a new instrument of exclusion, dividing the English-medium elite from the rest.

The demography of the theory classroom gives these language politics their sharpest edge. The neoliberal expansion of higher education has transformed the student body of Indian literature departments, which now includes large numbers of first-generation learners from excluded sections of society, many educated in Indian-language schools. For such students, theory presents a double face. Taught badly, as untranslated jargon examined by rote, it functions as one more filter of exclusion, confirming the advantage of metropolitan, English-medium students who acquired the idiom early; the distance between the theory seminar at an elite centre such as Jawaharlal Nehru University or the English and Foreign Languages University and the overcrowded, understaffed classroom of a district college, where a single ad hoc lecturer may teach the entire theory paper to two hundred students, is itself a fact of political economy that any honest account of theory pedagogy must record. Taught well, however, theory can be experienced by precisely these students as a naming of their own lives: concepts such as ideology, hegemony, cultural capital and symbolic violence describe with precision the mechanisms of caste and class that the students know from inside, and teachers across the country report that Gramsci, Bourdieu and Ambedkar land in such classrooms with a force they rarely have in privileged ones. Guru and Sarukkai’s debate in The Cracked Mirror (2012) over whether lived experience authorises theory acquires, in these classrooms, a daily practical form, since the students possess the experience and are acquiring the theory, and the best pedagogy treats them as the debate’s rightful adjudicators rather than its objects.

The state has also entered theory pedagogy directly through digital platforms, with mixed results. The official e-content and massive open online course initiatives, e-PG Pathshala and SWAYAM, promoted further by the National Education Policy (Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2020), now carry full modules on literary criticism and theory prepared by Indian academics, and for students in colleges without theory specialists these free lectures and quadrant materials are often the only systematic instruction available. The democratising gain is genuine, and so is the pedagogical loss: the video lecture and its multiple-choice quiz reproduce, in digital form, the transmission model of teaching that theory itself criticises, delivering defamiliarization as information and dialogism [Bakhtin’s principle that meaning arises between voices] as monologue. The platforms are best understood as a supplement that exposes the deeper deficit, which is the absence of trained theory teachers across most of the country’s colleges, a deficit produced by decades of ad hoc appointment and by the concentration of doctoral training in a few metropolitan centres.

The politics of the theory classroom becomes fully visible when one asks whose theory is taught and whose thought is treated as raw material. The syllabus of the standard theory paper is overwhelmingly Euro-American: Indian students learn Saussure, Freud, Derrida, Foucault, Butler and Said, while Indian thinkers appear, if at all, in a separate optional paper. Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory (1992) provided the sharpest early critique of this asymmetry, arguing that the international division of intellectual labour assigns theory production to the metropolis and data production to the periphery. G. N. Devy, in After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism (1992), diagnosed Indian criticism as suffering a “cultural amnesia”, a forgetting of its own long traditions of thinking about literature, from Sanskrit poetics to the critical practices embedded in the bhasha [modern Indian language] literary cultures, and he argued that the eager adoption of Western theory extended the amnesia rather than curing it. The nativist position associated with the Marathi novelist and critic Bhalchandra Nemade, debated in the volume Nativism: Essays in Criticism edited by Makarand Paranjape (1997), pressed the point polemically: imported theory, on this view, answers questions Indian literatures never asked. The counter-argument, made by Harish Trivedi (1993) among others, is that there is no pure native position to return to, since colonialism has already mixed the traditions, and that the real task is critical negotiation rather than either surrender or refusal. The theory classroom in India is the place where this unresolved national debate is enacted, week after week, whether or not the syllabus admits it.

The most consequential Indian intervention in the politics of theory has come from Dalit thought, and it bears directly on pedagogy. Sharankumar Limbale, in Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature (translated by Alok Mukherjee, 2004), argued that the critical standards developed for mainstream literature, whether Sanskritic rasa theory [the classical Indian account of aesthetic emotion] or imported Western formalism, cannot do justice to Dalit writing, whose first commitments are to pain, protest and social transformation rather than to beauty; Dalit literature therefore requires an aesthetic of its own, derived from Ambedkarite values of liberty, equality and fraternity. Teaching Dalit texts through Barthes or Bakhtin alone, on this argument, repeats at the level of method the appropriation that Dalit writing protests at the level of content. Gopal Guru raised the institutional version of the same question in his essay ‘How Egalitarian Are the Social Sciences in India?’ (2002), where he described an academic division of labour between “theoretical Brahmins and empirical Shudras” (Guru, 2002), those authorised to theorise and those confined to supplying experience and data, a division he and Sundar Sarukkai then debated philosophically in The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (2012). For the theory classroom, the implications are concrete and increasingly visible in revised syllabi: B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936) is now taught in many departments not as background sociology but as theory, a rigorous analysis of how caste is reproduced through endogamy, scripture and graded inequality, and teachers pair Ambedkar with Foucault, or Jotirao Phule with Gramsci, so that Indian anti-caste thought enters the paper as a producer of concepts rather than a supplier of examples. Where this happens, the politics of the theory paper changes character: theory ceases to be a foreign prestige language and becomes a meeting place of critical traditions.

A parallel transformation has come through feminist theory and the institutional history of women’s studies. India developed women’s studies early by international standards, beginning with the Research Centre for Women’s Studies at SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai in 1974, and the University Grants Commission subsequently funded women’s studies centres across the country; the field’s development, documented in Mary E. John’s reader Women’s Studies in India (2008), grew out of the women’s movement and the landmark government report Towards Equality (1974) rather than out of literary theory, yet the two streams met in the literature classroom. Feminist theory gave the English syllabus its papers on women’s writing and its questions about the gendered canon, while Indian feminist scholarship, from Tharu and Lalita’s recovery of women’s writing to Sunder Rajan’s and Kumkum Sangari’s theoretical work, ensured that the feminism taught was not simply an import; students in many departments now read Western feminist theory alongside Indian debates on sati, personal law, the sexual division of labour and the intersection of caste and gender. Pedagogically, the feminist classroom pioneered methods that the theory paper at large still needs: discussion in place of lecture, the use of testimony and life-writing as theoretical material, and the insistence, central to feminist pedagogy everywhere, that the classroom’s own relations of authority are part of the subject matter. The politics here is again double, for the same decades that put gender on the syllabus saw women concentrated in the profession’s most insecure teaching positions, so that feminist theory is frequently taught, in an irony the field itself has analysed, by precisely the temporary women lecturers whose conditions it describes.

Theory has also generated hierarchies, and the first of these operates among the humanities disciplines themselves. Within the Indian university, the English department captured theory early and most completely, partly because theory arrived in English translation and partly because English already possessed the institutional advantages that Viswanathan (1989) traced to the colonial period. The effect was to renew English’s old supremacy in a new vocabulary: the department that once claimed to teach universal moral values now claimed to command the universal critical metalanguage, and departments of Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali and other Indian languages were positioned, unfairly, as theoretically backward, keepers of philology and appreciation. Devy (1992) noted the injustice of this positioning, since the bhasha traditions possess sophisticated critical resources of their own, and the asymmetry of translation makes it worse: Indian-language scholars routinely read English theory, while English-department theorists almost never read criticism written in Indian languages. Comparative literature, the discipline best equipped to correct this imbalance, has remained institutionally marginal in India, sustained in a few centres such as Jadavpur University; Amiya Dev (1984) argued that comparative literature is the natural form of literary study in a multilingual country, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in Death of a Discipline (2003), called for a comparativism that learns the languages of the global South deeply rather than consuming their texts in translation, but the prestige economy has continued to reward the English monopoly. John Guillory’s analysis of theory as “cultural capital” (Guillory, 1993) thus acquires a specifically Indian meaning: fluency in theory marks not only class distinction but the old colonial distinction between English and the vernaculars, now reproduced inside the university.

A second hierarchy operates among the papers offered within the literature department itself. The theory paper quickly became the prestige paper, assigned to the most senior or most ambitious faculty, while language teaching, composition, grammar and communication skills, the papers that most students most need, were pushed down the status ladder, often onto temporary and disproportionately female staff. Scholars of English studies in India have long observed this literature-language divide, and the volumes edited by Joshi (1991) and Sunder Rajan (1992) discuss how the discipline’s self-image as literary and theoretical depends on disowning its actual mass function, which is teaching the English language. Within the literary papers, theory redistributed prestige in a further way: the canonical period papers, Shakespeare, the Romantics, the Victorian novel, retained their weight, but new papers, women’s writing, Dalit literature, translation studies, popular culture, typically had to justify themselves through theory, entering the syllabus wrapped in theoretical rationales in a way that Milton never had to. Theory also became the gatekeeper of research. In most Indian universities a doctoral proposal must announce its “theoretical framework”, and the viva voce ritually tests whether the candidate has “applied” the framework correctly; the result, often lamented by supervisors themselves, is the mechanical dissertation in which a Foucauldian grid is lowered onto a novel. A pedagogy that treats theory as a compulsory frame rather than a live question thus creates its own hierarchy of intellectual labour, in which framing outranks reading, and Kapil Kapoor (1998) has added the pointed observation that Indian aesthetics, when it appears at all, is usually confined to an optional paper on Sanskrit poetics, politely shelved beside the compulsory Western theory paper, a curricular arrangement that itself teaches students where authority lies.

The research economy surrounding theory deserves its own paragraph, because the politics of the classroom continues into the politics of publication. Since career advancement in Indian higher education was tied to quantified publication requirements through the Academic Performance Indicator system, a vast market of dubious journals arose to sell the required articles, and literary theory, with its portable vocabulary, proved especially easy to counterfeit: the formulaic paper that “applies” a theorist to a text, feminism to one novel, trauma theory to another, could be produced and published at industrial speed. The University Grants Commission responded by instituting the UGC-CARE reference list of quality journals (University Grants Commission, 2019) to separate credible venues from predatory ones, but the deeper problem is pedagogical rather than administrative: a training that teaches theory as a framework to be applied, rather than a question to be thought, produces researchers for whom the mechanical article is not a corruption of method but its fulfilment. Guillory’s (1993) analysis thus completes itself in the Indian research economy, where theory functions as cultural capital in the most literal sense, convertible through publication points into appointments and promotions, and where the critique of instrumental reason is itself instrumentalised. Any reform of theory pedagogy that stops at the classroom door and leaves the incentive structure untouched will therefore reform very little.

The second institutional home of theory, the technical institutes, has a very different history, and it begins with the founding of the IIT system. The committee chaired by the industrialist Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, which reported in the 1940s, recommended higher technical institutions on the model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the MIT model, especially after its post-war curricular reforms, included a significant humanities component in engineering education; the IITs, established from Kharagpur (1951) onwards and declared Institutes of National Importance under the Institutes of Technology Act (1961), accordingly built departments of humanities and social sciences into their structure from the beginning, and Ajantha Subramanian’s The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (2019) documents this institutional history while analysing the social order the IITs created. These HSS departments are composite by design: a single department typically contains economists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers and literature scholars, an arrangement almost unknown in ordinary universities. Their teaching mandate is equally distinctive: they exist primarily to teach undergraduate engineers, through compulsory courses in communication and through baskets of humanities electives that BTech students must sample, and the All India Council for Technical Education extended a version of this mandate to the wider technical system when its model curriculum (AICTE, 2018) made courses in humanities, social sciences and “universal human values” part of the prescribed engineering degree. The National Education Policy (Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2020) has pushed further, directing all higher education, including technical institutions, toward “holistic and multidisciplinary” learning, and several IITs now run full degree programmes in the humanities alongside their service teaching.

The wider technical system reproduces this structure with fewer resources. The National Institutes of Technology were created by upgrading the Regional Engineering Colleges from 2002 onwards, and were given statutory standing by the National Institutes of Technology Act (2007); their humanities units are generally smaller than those of the IITs, weighted even more heavily toward communication teaching and a compulsory economics or management component, though several now run doctoral programmes in English and the social sciences. Beyond the NITs lies the enormous belt of private engineering colleges regulated by the AICTE, where “humanities” frequently contracts to a single communication skills course taught by overburdened staff, and where the mandated universal human values course (AICTE, 2018) is often the only humanistic content an engineering graduate encounters. At the other end of the spectrum, the older IITs have moved beyond service teaching into degree-granting humanities education: IIT Madras instituted a five-year Integrated MA in the mid-2000s with streams in English studies and development studies, several IITs admit MA and PhD scholars in literature, philosophy and allied fields, and newer institutes such as IIT Gandhinagar made an expanded humanities presence part of their founding identity. The result is a small but growing population of literature postgraduates and doctoral scholars trained entirely inside technical institutes, reading theory in departments where the corridor conversation is about machine learning, a situation with no precedent in the older university system and with pedagogical possibilities that are only beginning to be explored.

Teaching literary theory inside this structure is a pedagogical experience quite unlike the university theory paper, and its distinctive features deserve description. The students are among the most examination-successful in the country, selected through the fiercely competitive Joint Entrance Examination, but they arrive without the literary formation that the MA classroom assumes; there is no shared canon to theorise, and often little prior habit of reading literature at all. The effective teacher therefore cannot begin with the survey of isms. Theory enters instead through objects the students already inhabit: a course may reach Barthes through advertising and memes, Foucault through surveillance and the biometric database, Haraway and Hayles through the artificial intelligence the students themselves are building, ecocriticism through the climate data they analyse in other classes. In this setting the newest areas of theory, posthumanism, science and technology studies [the interdisciplinary field examining how science and technology are socially shaped], digital humanities and environmental humanities, are not advanced options but natural entry points, because they speak directly to the students’ technical world. C. P. Snow’s famous diagnosis of the “two cultures” (Snow, 1959), the mutual incomprehension of literary intellectuals and scientists, is thus tested daily in the IIT classroom, and the honest report is mixed: the gap is real, but it runs both ways, and engineering students, once engaged, often bring to theory a welcome bluntness, asking what a concept explains and what evidence would count against it, questions from which theory pedagogy everywhere could benefit.

The politics of humanities teaching in the technical institutes is, however, structured by a hierarchy far steeper than anything in the university. In the institutional imagination of the IITs and NITs, engineering is the core and the humanities are the supplement, valued officially in the Arnoldian language of breadth, values and communication, the engineer must be a whole person, and valued practically as training in the “soft skills” that placement interviews reward. There is an irony here that the history recounted earlier makes visible: the civilising mission that Viswanathan (1989) found in colonial English studies returns, in miniature, as the humanities elective that will humanise the engineer. The subordination is material as well as symbolic. HSS faculty in technical institutes carry heavy service-teaching loads in communication courses, their research is often evaluated through metrics designed for the sciences, journal impact factors and citation counts that fit laboratory publication rhythms rather than the humanities monograph, and their departments negotiate for faculty positions and doctoral seats within institutes whose funding, rankings and public identity are technological. Subramanian (2019) adds the deepest political dimension: her study shows how the IITs’ language of pure merit has historically naturalised upper-caste dominance while delegitimising reservation [India’s constitutional policy of affirmative action], so that the humanities classroom, where caste, gender and inequality can be named and discussed, is often the only formal space on a technical campus where the institution’s own social order becomes an object of study. Teaching Ambedkar or Limbale in such a classroom is not an academic exercise; it is a small political event, and both teachers and students know it.

Within the composite HSS departments, theory participates in a further, internal hierarchy among the humanities disciplines, and the pattern partly reverses the university’s. In the technical institutes it is usually economics that stands at the top, being quantitative, fundable and legible to engineering colleagues, followed by psychology and the other social sciences, with literature and philosophy at the fragile end of the spectrum; Martha Nussbaum, in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), described the worldwide devaluation of the humanities in favour of profit-oriented education as a “silent crisis” (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 2), and the internal economy of the technical institute is that crisis in institutional miniature. Yet literary theory has served literature faculty in these settings as a resource of self-defence. Because theory speaks the general language of signification, power, discourse and technology rather than the particular language of literary periods, it allows the literature scholar to claim relevance across the institute, to teach film, media, gender and the ethics of technology, to join projects on artificial intelligence policy or climate communication, and to supervise doctoral work that engineering administrators can recognise as research. Theory, which in the university created hierarchy, functions in the technical institute partly as a ladder, the means by which the least powerful humanities discipline makes itself interdisciplinary and therefore fundable. The same faculty member may experience both truths in one career, and the ambivalence is worth recording honestly.

This brings the essay to interdisciplinarity, which is both the great convenience and the great challenge of theory in all these settings. The convenience is real and should not be cynically dismissed. Theory is, as Culler (1997) defined it, interdisciplinary by nature, a body of thinking that ignores departmental fences, and in the composite HSS department it supplies the only shared language in which a literature scholar, a sociologist and a philosopher can conduct a joint seminar; concepts such as discourse, gender performativity, the archive and the Anthropocene circulate across the disciplines and make collaboration possible. In the university, theory similarly underwrites the new interdisciplinary formations, cultural studies, translation studies, film studies, women’s and gender studies, environmental humanities, digital humanities, that have grown alongside the traditional papers, and the National Education Policy’s official embrace of multidisciplinarity (Ministry of Human Resource Development, 2020) has given these formations administrative wind. For syllabus designers, theory offers a practical convenience too: a single theoretical rubric can hold together a paper that moves from a Sanskrit play to a Dalit autobiography to a web series, which no philological principle could do.

The challenges are equally real, and they are of three kinds. The first is the dilution of depth. Interdisciplinarity conducted through theory can become a circulation of the same dozen concepts across materials that no one in the room knows deeply; the seminar discusses the biopolitics of the database without anyone able to read the code, or the ecology of a bhasha poem without anyone able to read the bhasha. Spivak (2003) warned against precisely this shallow traffic, insisting that genuine border-crossing requires the slow labour of learning languages and disciplines rather than skimming them. The second challenge is asymmetry. In the technical institutes, interdisciplinarity almost always means that the humanities learn to speak to engineering, adding ethics modules to AI courses and communication skills to design projects, while engineering is rarely asked to learn the languages of the humanities; the traffic runs one way, and the humanities are valued as a supplement rather than an interlocutor, a pattern that repeats Snow’s (1959) asymmetry in institutional form. The third challenge is administrative capture. Bill Readings, in The University in Ruins (1996), observed that the modern university of “excellence” loves interdisciplinarity because it dissolves the disciplinary units that might resist managerial restructuring; in Indian institutions, interdisciplinarity can likewise arrive as a budgetary instrument, merging departments, multiplying course baskets and rebranding service teaching, without any of the intellectual integration that the word promises. The pedagogical task is to distinguish the interdisciplinarity that deepens questions from the interdisciplinarity that merely redistributes teaching loads, and theory, honestly taught, provides the critical vocabulary for making exactly that distinction, even about itself.

What, finally, would a better pedagogy of literary theory look like in India, given this whole landscape? The elements are already present in scattered practice and need only be named. It would teach the conflicts rather than the museum of isms, in Graff’s (1992) sense, letting students watch Picard argue with Barthes, Ahmad with Jameson, Limbale with the aestheticians, Guru with the theoretical Brahmins, so that theory appears as live disagreement rather than examinable doctrine. It would practise translation openly, moving between English and the students’ languages, and between Paris and the Indian street, treating the bilingual gloss not as a concession but as the method. It would provincialise the theory paper itself, teaching Ambedkar, Phule, Periyar, rasa and dhvani [the classical Sanskrit theory of suggestion in poetry], Nemade and Devy alongside Derrida and Butler, as producers of concepts in a shared conversation. It would dismantle the internal hierarchies it can reach, giving the language classroom and the communication course the intellectual respect and senior staffing that the theory seminar enjoys. And in the technical institutes it would seize the peculiar advantage of the setting, students who build the technologies that theory now thinks about, to teach posthumanism, environmental humanities and the politics of data as questions the students are equipped to answer from both sides. Theory came to India as a prestige import and became, at its worst, a new examination subject and a new marker of caste-inflected cultural capital; but the same body of thought, taught with translation, conflict and honesty about its own politics, remains the best available training in asking how meaning, power and value are made, and a country negotiating caste, multilingualism and a technological transformation of everyday life has more use for that training, not less, than the societies in which theory was first assembled.

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