Taxilas no more
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IF you have travelled on the Grand Trunk Road, which we insist was built by Sher Shah Suri, towards Peshawar, some 90 kilometres from Islamabad, you come across a town called Kamra in Attock district, Punjab. Its namesake Kunal Kamra is in hot water in India these days as his stand-up act has not gone down well with the Shiv Sena and BJP. When people and institutions take themselves so seriously that they cannot take a joke, there is usually something very wrong with the ecosystem.
More on this some other time. For now, back up a little on the GT Road of Chandragupta Maurya vintage and stop at Taxila, then Takshashila. This prominent site in the Buddhist tradition, home to one of the earliest universities anywhere, today presents a ruinous view with tombstone-carving workshops lining both sides of a narrow excuse for a road leading up to the archaeological treasures of the Dharmarajika Complex and Sirkap.
That knowledge is power is not lost on conquerors. They want the vanquished to lose their cultural moorings and slightest pride, even in the deep recesses of libraries. The faith of opponents seems to make no difference. Bakhtiar Khilji is known to have ransacked the Buddhist seat of knowledge at Nalanda and burnt its libraries in the late 12th century.
Salahuddin Ayyubi, who lived around the same time, is alleged to have treated his co-religionists similarly at the Al Azhar Library in Cairo. Some accounts assert that Saladin, as he is known to the West, replaced the Fatimid era tomes of Shia tradition with Shafai’i literature instead of burning them upon assuming power in Egypt. The Fatimids, who rightly lamented the loss of Al Azhar’s treasures, glossed over their own alleged sacking of the great library at Aleppo, as per some accounts, when they took power in 1076, as the contents were not in keeping with Ismaili jurisprudence. Hulagu Khan’s sacking of Baghdad came in 1258.
That knowledge is power is not lost on conquerors.
Known for pilfering and looting antiquities and everything of value from wherever they went, the Brits burnt the Library of Congress alongside much of the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., in 1814. The attack on its former colony was in retaliation to the American attack on Canada and the burning of public buildings in York.
Universities continue to have a rough time everywhere. In a recent interview, Nobel Prize-winning professor of economics Amartya Sen pointed out ‘bureaucracy’ as the most persistent challenge for Indian universities. The problem, he said, is now compounded by two more factors: communalism and thought control by the executive. Our universities are no strangers to direct intervention by state institutions and their proxies. They are battlegrounds for ideological dominance supported by both state and non-state actors, local and foreign.
Much as one would like universities to compete in the realm of ideas and innovation, they are bogged down in existential battles ranging from federal to provincial funding to the appointment of vice-chancellors. Lately, Sindh has become a hotbed of controversy as the provincial government has empowered itself to appoint bureaucrats as VCs in universities across the province. The MQM, largely representing urban Sindh, asks that university admissions in Karachi be restricted to its residents. The senior minister representing the PPP, with its power base in rural Sindh, accuses the MQM of fomenting communalism. No matter who the perpetrators are, Dr Sen seems to have rightly pointed out that bureaucracy, communalism, and the executive’s desire for thought control are wreaking havoc in seats of higher learning.
Modi wants India to become a vishwaguru (teacher of the world). Amid newfound nationalistic and religious fervour, efforts are afoot to purge everyday Hindi of foreign influences and strengthen its Sanskrit core. The Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan governments have approved bills to call university VCs kulgurus; whether or not it revives the guru-shishya parampara (teacher-student tradition) remains to be seen. Our courts, too, from time to time, order the adoption of Urdu as the official language. The VCs are sometimes called ‘shaikh-ul-jamia’ and department heads ‘sadr-i-shoba’, lending Arabic gravitas to titles without any discernible improvement in the quality of instruction or research.
The university at Taxila was disrupted around the 5th-century CE, as the White Hun attacks from Central Asia made knowledge creation and sharing unfeasible. The monks, along with books and centuries-old oral traditions, moved to Nalanda, helping it become the mahavihar (grand monastery). Khilji’s sacking caused an 800-year pause at Nalanda, which was revived in 2010. Taxila, unfortunately, stands no chance of revival.
The writer is a poet. His latest publication is a collection of satire essays titled Rindana.
Published in Dawn, April 14th, 2025
