The university was an Indian invention. In Hindu tradition, education emerged from the
gurukul — the teacher's home, where students went to acquire learning. The Buddhists, however, congregated in monasteries, which became centres of learning in their own right, supplanting the home of the teacher. Nalanda was, of course, not alone as a prominent Indian university. Kasi (
Varanasi) and Kanchi were particularly renowned for their religious teaching, and Taksasila (
Taxila in today's
Pakistan) placed greater emphasis on secular studies; but Nalanda combined the religious and the secular, a Buddhist university offering a non-sectarian education to young men from near and far. These were the Oxfords and
Harvards of their time, centuries before either of those universities was founded. Today, our universities, barring an IIT here and a St. Stephen's there, are a long way short of world-class. Rebuilding Nalanda must be more than an exercise in constructive nostalgia. It must involve a new level of ambition, or it will be a futile exercise.
Nalanda was destroyed three times by invaders, but only rebuilt twice. The first time was when the Huns under Mihirakula laid waste the campus during the reign of
Skandagupta (455-467 A.D.), when Nalanda was only a few decades old. Skanda's successors Puragupta and Narasimhagupta promptly undertook the restoration of the university, improving it with the construction of even grander buildings, and endowed it with enough resources so that the university could be self-sustaining in the longer term. The second destruction came a century and a half later, with an assault by the Gaudas in the early seventh century. This time the great Hindu king Harshavardhana (606-648 A.D.) restored the Buddhist university, once again upgrading the buildings and facilities.
The desire for excellence
But nearly 800 years after its founding, Nalanda was destroyed a third time and burned by Turkish Muslim invaders under Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1197 A.D. This time there was to be no reconstruction: not only were there no equivalent of the Gupta kings or Harsha to rebuild it, but the university had already been decayed from within by the cancer of corruption on the part of its administrators and by declining enthusiasm for Buddhist-led learning. If we are to rebuild it 800 years later, we will need not just money but the will to excellence, not just a physical plant but a determined spirit. A great university is the finest advertisement for the society that sustains it. If we recreate Nalanda, it must be as a university worthy of the name — and we must be a society worthy of a 21st-century Nalanda