Teaching International Relations in Indian Universities: Issues and Challenges

Globally, it is in the recent past that the concerns for pedagogy in international relations (IR) have gained a new momentum despite the study of the discipline being more than a century old. Teaching–learning IR in India is also in an urgent need of one. Recently, much attention is drawn towards the necessity of greater theoretical rigour in Indian scholarship on IR to match global standards and her increasing visibility as an emerging power on the global scene (Paul, 2017). While the appeal of IR as a discipline is increasing among students at the undergraduate, post-graduate and research levels, evolving a robust pedagogy that encapsulates the relevance of the discipline to students from the vantage point of this part of the world is a challenge that teachers imparting knowledge about IR in India constantly struggle with. For long, the syllabi at the undergraduate level in various universities across the country did not touch upon the theoretical aspects at all (Bajpai & Mallavarappu, 2005), confining the focus to Cold War history and foreign policy. Introduction to theories and theoretical engagement with problems and issues in IR only took place at the post-graduate level in universities such as Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), University of Delhi (DU)3, Jadavpur University and in South Asian University (SAU) in the recent past. While JNU has an entire school dedicated to the study of IR (including programmes on area studies, international economy and trade), DU offered only a couple of papers in the master’s programme as subdiscipline of political science. The SAU also has a department dedicated to IR. With successive syllabus revision exercises in DU, the IR courses have been invested with rich theoretical content, and also the number of papers associated with relevant themes in IR has been significantly increased. However, the pedagogical concerns still loom large. How to navigate through the challenge of not making the discipline look like something which makes more sense from a Western lens only, where concerns that affect the post-colonial/global south/developing countries/non-Western countries, either Teaching–Learning Politics in India