What the Galgotias University fiasco says about the fashioning of a new Indianness

The fiasco earlier in February involving a Chinese robot-dog, a private university that seeks “global” recognition and one of its employees with the ability to talk through drying cement is much more than just about the apparent decline in higher education.

It is also about the emergence of a new kind of Indian personality, one that has been in the making over the past two-three decades. While Galgotias University itself may or may not be aligned with certain ideological positions, the new Indianness is a much more general affair.

It is the result of an educational system beyond formal systems of schooling and university instruction: a vast ecosystem that is spread across large and small towns, air-conditioned and well-equipped campuses as well as hole-in-the-wall outfits. This is the ecosystem of “soft-skills” and “personality development” education that emerged, in its current form, around the mid-1990s.

The Galgotias University professor, who was her employer’s chief media representative through the episode, represents an aspect of the personality development refashioning of Indianness over the past three decades.

It is a decisive shift in how a “global” Indianness has come to be imagined. While many young people might undertake formal school and university education, they are simultaneously part of informal systems of soft-skills and personality development training that have come to be seen as supplementing formal degrees and crucial or economic and social mobility.

The personality development training ecosystem emerged in the context of a deeply asymmetrical formal educational framework, one where a very small section of the population had access to the best schools and universities. This produced a tiny population of social and cultural elites, who had access to the most lucrative occupations, whether in the government or the private sector.

This structural problem – not unusual in many ex-colonial societies – was, however, not thought of as a social issue. Rather, it became translated as a problem of “personality”. It came to be understood that those who lacked the benefits of family history, of caste and class, that might enable admission into educational institutions that consolidate and facilitate social mobility could overcome this handicap through learning new personalities.

There are several possible histories of personality development in India but perhaps the most significant lineage is the one that relates to the Rapidex English Speaking course, first published by Delhi’s Pustak Mahal in 1976. This was institutionalised in public memory in the 1980s when cricketing icon Kapil Dev became its public face.

The story of Rapidex and Kapil Dev is one that concerns the possibilities of rapid – if not sudden – transformations of the provincial, and educationally-disadvantaged, male self into a metropolitan being. In the intervening 20 years or so, the provincial female body has become a significant subject of a similar transformation.

Personality development training is not just about language training – though that is an important part. It, just as significantly, concerns the idea of bodily etiquette and the capacity to present oneself as “cosmopolitan”.

A vast network of personality development training institutes operate across India, each equipped with varying but shared “curricula”. Personality development curriculum is usually based on a random mixture of management jargon, dietary prescriptions, naturopathy, bodily techniques, self-help discourses, and frameworks drawn from “global psychology”. These institutes aim specifically to train young people to enhance their “existing” personalities in order to get a job of their choice. “Shortcomings” in personality are presented as preventing economic and social mobility.

There is, also, another kind of personality training institute that is not directly linked to securing a good job. It seeks to improve personalities for its own sake so that the new personality might achieve generalised happiness and fulfilment. These courses are usually run by American companies, charge hefty fees and offer training after work hours and on weekends.

The ideas propagated by personality development institutes have become an indispensable part of a general common sense about intelligence and getting ahead in life. The Galgotias University episode is linked to the rise of these new experiments in personality.

Making the ‘new’ Indian personality

First, a significant part of personality development is the idea that form is superior to content. So, how one presents oneself in public is, according to personality development and soft-skills training, equates to what one is. Form defines the content rather than the other way around. This is, of course, the kind of training that the service industry expects of those it is going to employ: a fast-food chain wants its employee to be constantly pleasant irrespective of how the employee might actually feel.

The Galgotias University professor who fronted up the media insisting that what she was saying at that particular time was important, rather than the facts of the matter or what she might have earlier said, are part of a new discourse of personality that has evolved from the personality development networks.

It is the present and how to grasp that present that marks the most significant aspect of the training and the making of the new Indian personality. Form is always changeable and hence presentable under multiple circumstances.

Second, the new Indian personality favours technology over science. Techno-sophistication is seen as an end itself. That is, cosmopolitanism consists in the capacity to use technology, for this too is about the presentation of the self. Form, like the ability to use a remote control, equals content – how that technology came about and what it means. Science involves a level of engagement with the world that is considered unnecessary.

The Galgotias University episode is much more than a reflection of decline in education standards. It is part of a broader trend in the imagination of Indianness itself. Its roots lie in the historically unequal nature of the educational system. The solution offered, however, was to reduce the problem of inequality to that of “personality”. It is this new personality type that is at the heart of the Galogotia University controversy.

Sanjay Srivastava is Distinguished Research Professor in the department of anthropology and sociology at SOAS University of London.