The Ideological Capture of Indian Academia: A Critique of the Humanities and Social Sciences at JNU
Abstract
The Ideological Capture of Indian Academia: A Critique of the Humanities and Social Sciences at JNU
Ramaswami Subramony
This article is a comprehensive critique of the ideological transformation of Indian higher education, particularly in the humanities, social sciences, and English departments of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). It argues that the institution, originally founded to promote intellectual freedom and critical inquiry, instead became a centre of ideological orthodoxy that systematically erodes India’s civilisational consciousness. Drawing on the writings of scholars such as Makarand R. Paranjape, Kapil Kapoor, Rajiv Malhotra, and Shankar Sharan, the article traces how Western theoretical frameworks — Marxism, post-colonialism, feminism, and cultural studies — have replaced indigenous epistemologies rooted in dharma, śāstra, and viveka. However, there have been attempts to reverse after the political change in India in 2014, and the post-2014 Vice chancellors have attempted to change the eco system of JNU and make it nationalist. Through six sections, the article analyses the institutional and epistemic mechanisms of this transformation traces the ideological formation of JNU’s humanities and its departure from India’s civilisational ethos. Section 2 examines the spread of textbook Marxism and the systematic politicisation of pedagogy. Section 3 analyses the resulting erosion of civilisational memory and the moral confusion it breeds. Section 4 critiques the role of English departments and Marxist historians such as Ania Loomba, Romila Thapar, and Bipan Chandra in institutionalising Eurocentric and materialist narratives. Section 5 explores the broader cultural fallout — the diffusion of ideological deracination into media, art, and politics — resulting in moral relativism and civilisational fatigue. Section 6 focuses entirely on Shankar Sharan’s writings and YouTube lectures, notably JNU ka Sach (2016) and Marxism and Indian Academics (2020), which offer a systematic diagnosis of how Left ideology captured JNU through control of faculty appointments, syllabi, and research funding. Taken together, these analyses demonstrate that the crisis in Indian academia is not merely institutional but civilisational. The replacement of truth-seeking with ideological activism has produced a generation estranged from its cultural roots. The article calls for a civilisational reset — a reintegration of Indian knowledge systems into modern education and a renewal of the humanities as a space for ethical and metaphysical inquiry. The proposed remedy is not rejection of the West but an epistemic balance that allows Indian civilisation to interpret itself on its own terms. Only such a re-anchoring can rescue the university from moral exhaustion and restore it to its original function: the pursuit of wisdom.
Keywords: JNU, Humanities, Social Sciences, Marxism, Post-colonialism, Ideological Capture, Indian Knowledge Systems, Cultural Deracination, Academic Left