Abstract
How was ‘talent’ perceived, identified and nurtured by the postcolonial Indian state? The book under review foregrounds this question and then links it with the broader question of how such perception and promotion of ‘talent’ was integrally connected with a certain idea of the nation. To address these, the author Rachel Philip picks an apparently less-discussed fragment, the National Talent Search Examination (NTSE), from the huge education apparatus in India. In the first five chapters, Philip focuses on the state’s side of the story. In the sixth and seventh chapters, the lens is reversed to understand the winners’ perceptions.
The first two chapters lay out the context in which Philip situates the NTSE. Applied psychology and its various ideas of ‘testing merit’ that were popular in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe had made their way into the education system in colonial India. After independence, education was initially a state subject until 1976. Over the first decade after 1947, the discourse of ‘national reconstruction’ rapidly gained importance, and by 1961 the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) was established to endow education with a more ‘national’ character. Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of nation-building emphasised the state’s role in the management of resources to enable planning and development. One such resource was qualified experts in science. Following such a vision, the NCERT conceived the National Science Talent Search Examination (NSTSE) in 1963 to locate ‘talented science students’ across the country. The state would then nurture and turn them into experts who would eventually serve the nation. Philip powerfully argues that the introduction of this examination captures the postcolonial moment that heralded two important shifts in the history of education. One, the discourse of the individual and the nation got congealed. Second, the state now had the power to create new identities—like the one of a ‘talented student’—and endow them with a certain symbolic capital as citizens of the new nation.
The book claims to depart from the existing literature on talent search by looking at ‘talent’ as a discourse and how it was inseparable from the discourse of the nation. The third chapter carries out a detailed analysis of the policy discourse on ‘talent’. Philip identifies two contrasting positions from the explicit statements of the policies. The predominant one considered ‘talent’ to be a ‘special potential for excellence’ inherent to certain individuals and thus deserving of the state’s attention. The second weaker voice that could be heard in only five policy papers perceived ‘talent’ to be general competencies that anyone could possess and thus was not in favour of the exclusionary model of the examination. The former camp, Philip argues, envisioned the nation as meritocracy and the latter saw the nation as democracy. Philip then teases out verbs, adjectives, collective nouns and synonyms that hinted at the implicit meanings of the policy rhetoric. The Education Commission Reports of the 1960s implicitly looked at the ‘talents’ as individuals awaiting states’ intervention. But the National Knowledge Commission reports of 2000s clearly acknowledged their agency and responsibility in their own development. This indicated a shift from the post-independence idea of national economy dependent on state-nurtured experts to post-liberalisation knowledge economy dependent on service work.
How did the state invest in the ‘talented’ individuals to tap their potential? The fourth and fifth chapters chiefly dwell on this question by closely reading the two phases of the examination. At the time of its launch in 1963, NSTSE was meant solely for science talents. Quite alarmingly, reports from 1976 revealed that 48% candidates did not avail the programme and the low career prospect of pure science made the programme unpopular. Thus, in 1977, the scope of the science talent exam was expanded into the National Talent Search Examination (NTSE), to include social sciences and professional courses. Philip observes that this change weakened the state’s earlier confidence in the programme. Consequently, the rewards and opportunities offered to the winners were revised and curtailed. Another major shift happened in 1985, when the exam was decentralised and state quotas were introduced after a report revealed the unequal distribution of candidates across states and districts. Philip perceptively points out that a geography-based disparity did lead to a change in the structure of the exam. But inequalities were not just geographical in nature. The ‘talents’ were largely urban, male, upper caste students. Although the reservation of SC, ST candidates was introduced in 1981 and the proportions were increased between 2005 and 2015, the awareness of caste-based inequality did not reshape the design of the examination. Both the written test, based on multiple-choice and essay-type questions, and the interview were meant to ‘objectively discriminate’ the high and low achievers. The discourse on ‘thought-type questions’ reflects how meritocracy could be sustained and reproduced by supporting students with greater access to social and cultural resources.
The sixth and seventh chapters reflect on the memories and perceptions of 11 men and 8 women who had once been the winners of the talent search. A majority of them came from urban locations, had supportive families and had one parent in academics or government jobs. Philip’s interaction with them reveals that they were quite self-aware about their ‘excellence’ and had a clarity about their interest in science. To them, the awards and incentives offered to the winners confirmed their ‘worth’. The scholars also shared their disapproval of the exam’s narrow scope of being restricted to pure science in its initial years and not open to applied sciences, engineering and medicine. This indicated the state’s inability to grasp how the ‘talented’ thought about career choices: they complained. Interestingly, at various points it became clear to Philip that most of the scholars subscribed to the meritocratic notions of ‘talent’ that the state propagated. Basically, the scholars were all largely aware about their advantageous social location that made them more ‘ready’ for the talent search. They also had a fair idea of the exclusionary tendencies of the exam and its male, urban, upper caste bias. Yet, Philip gathers from the conversations that they were largely in favour of a meritocratic argument against reservation. Their predominant worldview revealed they could not link the ideas of ‘talent’ and ‘nation’ to the structural and social conditions of Indian society.
The book is indeed a well-structured and rigorous micro-study of the trajectory of one examination to address the broader issues that have shaped education policies in India. However, at times it feels a little too confined within the world of NTSE. Of course, Philip does locate the beginning of the talent search exam in the discursive milieu of 1960s. Yet, more conversations with the political and social developments in the country over the four decades when NTSE went through various shifts could have added interesting layers to the story. Let me cite a few examples. Education was a state subject until 1976, when it was made part of the concurrent list, thus paving the way for a greater role of central policies in state education. In another nine years, in 1985, the national-level talent search was decentralised and state quotas were introduced. Does reading these two developments together add anything to the longer history of the fraught centre–state relationship in the domain of education? Similarly, the observation that a parallel reading of the Education Commission Reports from the 1960s and the National Knowledge Commission reports from the 2000s captures a shift in the discourse of knowledge as an industrial development–driven expertise to knowledge driven by service economy is quite an important one. How do we connect it with the widely debated questions on privatisation of education, liberalisation of the economy and the overall changing relationship of the state, economy and education during those 40 years, instead of just reading it as part of the implicit policy rhetoric on ‘talent’? The discussion on ‘thought-type questions’ that could effectively single out ‘talent’ is a really interesting one. A little more detail on what happened to the debate on multiple-choice questions over the years, particularly after social sciences and other disciplines were included, could have given a few more leads on how to pursue a changing history of examinations in India until recent times.
Finally, I wish the author conceptually engaged a little more with the rich literature on the sociology of ‘merit’, particularly in relation to the caste question. In the case of NTSE, the book suggests that ultimately the creators and the beneficiaries of the examination produced a largely meritocratic structure where ‘talent’ was considered to be intrinsic and thus in need of ‘searching and nurturing’. The examination, Philip incisively points out, thrived on distancing itself from classrooms and marginalisation of the teachers. She is clearly very critical of such a model that is ‘divorced from the realities of schooling and undergraduate education in India.’ But, the reader wonders, what is the function of this particular examination? Is it another example of how our educational institutions depend on a smooth functioning of the merit-discrimination system through examination-based differentiation, as scholars have already argued? Or does the NTSE add new dimensions and take this argument further? A deeper engagement with these points could have helped the readers understand Philip’s position on the political question of ‘merit’ more clearly. The conclusion seems to suggest that she is more critical about the model of this examination than the very idea of ‘talent search’ itself, and thus recommends NCERT to ‘explore other models of identifying talent’.
However, more than criticisms, these are actually some of the points that the book compels the reader to ponder on. Undoubtedly, the book raises fundamental conceptual questions for a critical understanding of not only education policies but also a wider social history of education in the post-independence Indian context. Let me end the review by mentioning that the section on the challenges of assembling the sources for the book is a useful reflection on the character of the postcolonial archive. Along with published reports and policy documents, the author had to file 35 RTIs to gather participation data from states and districts. It was an accidental discovery of a cupboard full of brittle old files that led her to finally compile a list of winners. This effectively hints at what to expect and how to navigate the not-so-organised post-1947 archive on education.
