Classrooms Made of ‘Ticky Tacky’: What kind of Multidisciplinarity does the NEP endorse?

It is quite alarming to think about how a song conceived by a Jewish Socialist Immigrant in Daly City almost sixty years ago can evoke such a fitting image of what the Indian academic landscape might look like in a decade. Released in 1967, Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" would reflect the collective vexations of a burgeoning middle-class forced into a pattern of urban conformity and consumerist inertia. As academic institutions across the nation busy themselves in adjusting to a revamped, 'multidisciplinary' educational space, one is left to wonder- did Reynolds succeed in foretelling the emergence of what the NEP 2020 terms as "good, thoughtful, well-rounded" individuals almost half a century back? 

"And the people in the houses

All went to the university,

Where they were put in boxes

And they came out all the same".

Surely, we have ample reason to believe that she did. 

One could come up with plenty of synonyms of multidisciplinarity, but academic homogenization and anti-intellectualism would certainly not find a place in the list. To read multidisciplinarity as an integration of general and professional education or as an imperative to encourage students in the humanities to “do” more science and vice versa, is nothing short of a gross oversimplification of what the term actually entails. For a policy document that mentions "multidisciplinary" over seventy times, it fails to arrive at the very essence of multidisciplinarity as, needless to say, an intercommunation, but a necessarily autonomous one. Multidisciplinarity cannot be enforced at a structural level by dissolving individual disciplines, or by integrating them into a single homogenized curriculum. It entails an approach, and one that is cognizant of individual disciplinary perspectives while enabling them to independently interact with, and thereby enrich pre-existing knowledge systems. But surely, the stakeholders might argue, rigid disciplinary demarcation thwarts the growth of multifaceted academic research?

Certainly, unity in diversity does not imply a negation of diverse individualities, nor does unity translate to uniformity. From here, I would like to work towards an alternative reading of multidisciplinarity. Multidisciplinarity can, and is already being employed as a disciplinary methodology to resolve conflicts by tracing interconnections and intertextualities across different fields. And to do so, it becomes necessary to constantly improve on the epistemological foundations of individual disciplines, without which conducting any constructive interaction would be irrelevant, and even improbable. Such a communication need not be conducted over disparate and inadequately defined categorizations such as the "arts" and the "sciences", but must necessarily take into account the multiple branches that exist independently within these broad classifications. Multidisciplinarity requires a nuanced understanding of these categories, not their mindless integration. Such a reading of multidisciplinarity as an approach has been extensively used to arrive at a more holistic, and comprehensive understanding of complex social, historical or scientific phenomena. A case study conducted on the DNA Diversity of Solomon Islanders in 2010, brought together researchers from the field of Linguistics, Genetics, and Archaeology while the material cited was drawn from multiple fields ranging from Human Biology to Oceanic Linguistics. Such studies provide effective models of how scholarship from distinct, varied domains can collaborate without entirely nullifying their unique academic credentials. Similarly, the proliferation of journals which invite research based on multidisciplinary approaches can help nurture such models. The document’s pre-occupation with multidisciplinarity has prevented it from looking into, and evaluating the success of other existing forms of cross-disciplinary approaches, including interdisciplinarity, or transdisciplinarity. 

To suggest that integrated disciplines cannot be contrived is a misconception. Departments of cross-cultural, and comparative studies have gained increasing popularity as a preference for higher education. However, the idea of a nuanced understanding of disciplinary categorizations, and identifying common grounds once again come to the forefront. The condition of modernity has demanded that concepts like culture or religion must necessarily be understood against more than one context or source artifact like literary texts or musical records. As such, the likes of Comparative Religion or Comparative Literature must be encouraged at higher educational spaces to avoid the cultivation of monolithic, regionally confined perspectives. Again, Cultural Studies programs combine the findings from multiple select disciplines in order to arrive at a more holistic understanding of the cultural sector and its evolution. What these examples demonstrate is an alternative system of grouping based on common aims, or even research interests- a system that does not need to be stringently exercised across all existing departments. No university website or course description will define these departments as singular, homogenized superstructures set up to relieve the demarcations between other disciplines.

What are the implications of an 'enforced' multidisciplinarity for the humanities in the twenty-first century? As higher educational spaces get gradually integrated into "large multidisciplinary universities", how does intellect defend itself against homogenizing strategies that safeguard bourgeois moralities and institutional conformity? The student must necessarily navigate a way to avoid stepping into the demographics of the ideal 'professional' wage-worker, manufactured by the university to seek "employment in medium or high-productivity sectors". Only after the proposed measures are translated into action, will it be possible to evaluate the realization of an increase in accessibility and inclusivity that the policy has proposed to achieve in the educational sector. But as media outlets raise the cry for a uniform education that will pave the way for a seemingly indiscriminate common culture, one is led to ask the question: can historically internalized discrimination be entirely obliterated by introducing a uniform academic curriculum, and can long-term accessibility to education be secured by such methodological revisions? Multidisciplinarity does promote unity in diversity, but it does so without initiating a social or intellectual cohesion. While the New Education Policy of India recurrently stresses the importance of flexible curriculums, and the students’ autonomy in choosing their areas of interest, it is only within a given, pre-defined superstructure that these autonomies are allowed to be exercised. With "multidisciplinary abilities" functioning as a synonym for the qualifications required of a "skilled workforce", the learner becomes increasingly dehumanized, deprived of their intellectual and individual self identity. And they must unite, for once, to collectively resist being turned into "ticky tacky" by-products of the fourth industrial revolution. For surely, no clear-headed individual would like to be at the receiving end of Reynolds' scathing satire: 

"And they're all made out of ticky tacky,

And they all look just the same".