Before the British, before the madrasas: a quieter argument about India's classroom origins

On a Monday morning in June 2026, anyone walking into a seminar room in Patna, Bhopal or Hyderabad can hear the same sentence, in different accents, in different languages, but unmistakably the same sentence: that the great university at Nalanda, founded, the textbooks say, in the fifth century, is the pride of India and the cradle of Asian higher learning. The textbooks are not wrong about the antiquity. They are, however, increasingly being pressed into a service they were never asked to perform. A recent column by anthropologist Meher Bhargava argued, gently but firmly, that the temptation to make Nalanda a billboard for a particular civilisational claim distorts the actual archive. The argument deserves more attention than it has received, because it concerns what Indian classrooms teach before they teach anything else: how to describe what came before the British, and what came before the madrasas.

The quiet provocation

Bhargava's complaint is not that Nalanda is overrated. It is that Nalanda is being asked to do work that history cannot support. The university, as the public record concedes, was a residential monastic centre of Buddhist learning, supported by royal patronage, which reached its height under the Pala dynasty between roughly the eighth and twelfth centuries, and declined under the combined effects of invasion, declining patronage, and the institutional collapse of Buddhist scholastic culture in eastern India. That is already a remarkable story. It is not, however, the story that is increasingly being told about it in public discourse, where Nalanda is invoked as a stand-in for a continuous, pan-Indian civilisational curriculum stretching back fifteen centuries and forward into the present.

The slippage, Bhargava suggested, is between what an institution actually was and what an institution is made to symbolise. A residential vihara of several thousand monks, drawing students from Tibet, China, Korea and Central Asia, is not the same thing as a national system of mass education. Treating it as one reads backwards from a contemporary political mood into a period that did not contain the categories being applied to it.

The wider conversation

The intervention sits inside a broader and well-documented conversation about how Indian history is taught in schools. The National Council of Educational Research and Training, the body that designs the central government textbooks used across much of the country, has been at the centre of that conversation for years. Critics from the academic left have objected to what they describe as a thinning of Mughal and Muslim content and a thickening of Vedic and temple-era content. Critics from the academic right have objected to what they describe as the residual Marxist framing of older textbooks. Both complaints converge on the same question: what does a child in Class 7 in Kanpur or Kochi learn about what came before 1947, and before 1757, and before the eighteenth century?

That question matters because the school textbook is the closest thing the country has to a shared civilisational curriculum. It is the one text almost every child reads, whatever the medium of instruction. When the framing of the pre-British period shifts, the shift is felt across hundreds of millions of classrooms.

Where the archive is thin

Here is where Bhargava's provocation bites. The honest record on mass education in pre-colonial India is, in many regions and periods, thin. Temple inscriptions, monastery records, copper-plate grants, traveller's accounts and the occasional firmāns of courts give fragments. They give enough to demonstrate that learning happened, that literacy in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Tamil and other languages was real, that grammar, astronomy, medicine and logic were taught at high levels of sophistication in particular centres. They do not give the historian a national system. They do not give a literacy rate. They do not give an enrolment figure. The temptation, when the quantitative record runs out, is to fill the gap with sentiment.

The same caution applies in the other direction. Madrasas, the Islamic seminaries that functioned across the subcontinent, are sometimes described, in both popular and polemical literature, as if they were a single uniform institution with a single fixed curriculum. They were not. The Ottoman-era and post-Mughal madrasa, the Deccani madrasa, the madrasa in eastern Bengal funded by particular merchant families: these are different institutions with different texts and different relationships to state power. Treating them as a single monolith is its own kind of distortion.

A question of proportion

What Bhargava is asking for, in effect, is a more disciplined historiography. Not a smaller India. Not a less confident India. Just an India described with the same precision one would apply to any other civilisation. Nalanda can be one of the great residential universities of the medieval world, and it can be that without being inflated into a national primary school. The Mughal court can be a centre of literary and administrative sophistication, and it can be that without being reduced to a reign of cultural vandalism. The British can have re-ordered Indian education in ways that historians have documented in detail, including the notorious dispatch of 1835 and its consequences, without that dispatch being either ignored or weaponised into a slogan.

The classroom, in other words, is not a place where civilisational scoreboards should be settled. It is a place where a child should encounter the evidence, see what it supports, see what it does not, and learn to tell the difference. That is a quiet argument. It is also, in 2026, a politically inconvenient one.

What is at stake in 2026

The classroom argument is unusually charged this year. New NCERT revisions are working their way through textbook committees. State boards in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka have introduced their own revisions with different emphases. The Supreme Court has been asked, in petitions filed earlier this year, to adjudicate what counts as a balanced representation of the pre-colonial period. None of these proceedings will settle the underlying historiographical question. What they will settle, or fail to settle, is which version of an honest answer is permitted to reach a child.

A defensible position is available. India has a richer pre-colonial archive than almost any country on earth. It does not need that archive to be inflated to be defended. It needs the archive to be read carefully, in the languages it was written in, with the categories it actually contained, and with the gaps honestly marked. The alternative is a curriculum that performs confidence and teaches, instead, the habit of substitution.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Nalanda, overview of the Buddhist monastic university, its Pala-era height, and its decline.
• Wikipedia, Education in India, survey of pre-colonial and colonial-era institutional forms including viharas, madrasas, pathshalas and British-era reforms.
• Meher Bhargava, column referenced in the lede, the underlying piece that prompted this editorial synthesis, treated here as a prompt rather than as a stand-alone factual source.

Desk note

Monexus treats the Bhargava column as a prompt for a wider conversation about how the pre-colonial Indian archive is publicly described. The article is filed on the culture desk because the intervention is historiographical; the politics it brushes against will be handled on the Asia desk in a separate, more narrowly sourced report.