By – Amlan Baisya , Assistant Professor, Department of Literature and Languages,
Easwari School of Liberal Arts, SRM University AP
It is a familiar moment in many university classrooms. A student, drawing from an adjacent domain, begins to articulate a connection—between a literary text and a psychological theory, between an
economic model and an ethical dilemma, between a sociological theory and a lived experience of a break-up. The observation is tentative, almost apologetic. Once the euphoria fades, before the idea could fully unfold, it is withdrawn, often with a self-corrective remark: “This may not be relevant here.” The classroom resumes its disciplinary rhythm. The syllabus advances, intact and uninterrupted.
Such moments are not pedagogically trivial. They reveal a deeper epistemic anxiety—an internalised uncertainty about the legitimacy of thinking across disciplinary boundaries. Despite the assumed rhetorical centrality of interdisciplinarity in the contemporary Indian higher education discourse, the lived experience of students suggests that disciplinary containment remains the norm rather than the exception.
In the Indian Higher Education (HE) context, this disjuncture is particularly striking. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 propagates an energetic reconfiguration of higher education, foregrounding multidisciplinary institutions, curricular flexibility, and holistic learning. It explicitly
necessitates the dissolution of rigid disciplinary silos and envisions universities as sites of intellectual convergence, where the sciences, humanities, and vocational fields coexist and interact productively. This vision is not merely aspirational; it is aligned with global shifts that recognise the inadequacy of single-discipline frameworks in addressing complex, real-world problems—from climate change to artificial intelligence, from public health crises to socio-political polarisation.
Yet, the transliteration of this vision into pedagogic practice has been uneven at best. While institutional reforms—ranging from credit flexibility systems to the establishment of interdisciplinary research centres—signal a structural willingness to change, they have not fundamentally altered the epistemological grammar of the classroom. Disciplinary boundaries continue to organise teaching,
assessment, and intellectual legitimacy. Interdisciplinarity, in this context, often functions as an institutional appendage rather than a pedagogic principle. Few days back, I was attending a Faculty Development Program on the pedagogical approaches in a communication skills classroom and I realised that teachers across the country were helpless in the assessment pattern of such courses: the standard question to evaluate the listening skill of a student is—What are the barriers to active listening? Let’s pause, take a moment and try to understand the inadequacy of a written answer to measure the improvement in the listening skill of a student. While skill enhancement is purportedly performative, its assessment is still theoretical.
Such gaps between policy and practice are neither incidental nor easily remediable. They are sustained and legitimized by a set of deeply embedded academic structures and incentive mechanisms. Departments remain the primary administrative and intellectual units of universities, with their own curricula, hiring priorities, and evaluative frameworks. Faculty members are trained and socialised within specific disciplinary traditions, and their professional advancement is contingent upon demonstrating depth within those traditions rather than breadth across them. To expect such a system to spontaneously generate interdisciplinary pedagogy is to underestimate the inertia of institutional cultures.
The problem is further compounded by prevailing models of assessment. Examinations and evaluative practices in most Indian universities continue to privilege clarity, precision, and correctness within narrowly defined disciplinary parameters. The capacity to synthesise insights
across domains, to navigate conceptual ambiguity, or to construct integrative frameworks is rarely foregrounded as a criterion of academic excellence. Consequently, students are implicitly trained to compartmentalise knowledge rather than to interrelate it. Interdisciplinary thinking, even when encouraged rhetorically, remains structurally unrewarded.
At a broader level, the persistence of disciplinary silos is reinforced by global and national ranking systems. Universities operate within an increasingly competitive ecosystem where metrics of performance—publications, citations, disciplinary impact—carry significant weight. While there has been a gradual recognition of interdisciplinary research within some ranking frameworks, the dominant evaluative logic continues to favour specialised, field-specific output. This creates a
paradoxical situation: institutions are urged to adopt interdisciplinary approaches, yet are evaluated through metrics that often marginalise them. The result is a form of strategic compliance, where interdisciplinary initiatives are developed as visible markers of innovation, while the core pedagogic practices remain largely unchanged.
Recent insights on higher education reform in India underscore this tension. Analyses of post-NEP curricular transformations indicate that while universities have introduced elective flexibility and multidisciplinary programmes, the integration across disciplines remains superficial. Students may enrol in courses outside their primary domain, but these courses are rarely designed to speak to each other. The burden of integration is thus transferred to the student, who must navigate disparate epistemic frameworks without adequate scaffolding. In effect, interdisciplinarity is reduced to an accumulation of disciplines rather than a reconfiguration of knowledge.
This conceptual misunderstanding lies at the heart of the problem. Interdisciplinarity is frequently equated with curricular breadth—the ability to choose courses across domains. However, genuine interdisciplinary learning entails a more fundamental shift. It requires an epistemological reorientation, where questions are not pre-assigned to disciplines, where methods are not territorially bound, and where knowledge is approached as inherently interconnected. Such a shift cannot be achieved through structural adjustments alone; it demands a transformation in pedagogic philosophy.
To that extent, the current discourse on interdisciplinarity in India risks remaining at the level of institutional design, without adequately engaging with the complexities of classroom practice. The emphasis on multidisciplinary institutions, while necessary, is insufficient if it is not accompanied by
a rethinking of how knowledge is taught, assessed, and valued. The challenge is not merely to create spaces where disciplines coexist, but to cultivate conditions where they actively intersect, interrogate, and reconstitute one another.
What might such a reconfiguration entail? It would require, at the very least, a shift from discipline-centred curricula to problem-centred pedagogies. Instead of organising courses around established fields, universities could design them around complex, real-world questions that necessitate multiple perspectives. A course on climate change, for instance, would not be confined to environmental science, but would integrate economic modelling, ethical reasoning, historical analysis, and cultural representation. Such an approach would compel both faculty and students to move beyond the comfort of disciplinary expertise and engage in sustained intellectual negotiation.
Equally crucial is the reconfiguration of teaching practices. Interdisciplinary learning cannot be effectively facilitated by a single instructor operating at the margins of multiple fields. It requires collaborative teaching models, where faculty from different disciplines co-design and co-deliver courses. This is not a matter of occasional guest lectures, but of sustained pedagogic dialogue. The presence of multiple disciplinary voices within the classroom can destabilise epistemic hierarchies and model the very processes of negotiation and synthesis that interdisciplinarity demands.
Assessment, too, must be reimagined. As long as evaluative frameworks reward disciplinary conformity, students will have little incentive to take intellectual risks. Alternative modes of assessment—portfolios, research projects, reflective essays—may potentially create space for integrative thinking. More importantly, they can signal to students that the ability to connect, synthesise, and critically engage across domains is not peripheral but central to academic excellence.
Finally, there is a need to interrogate the metrics through which institutional success is measured. If ranking systems continue to prioritise disciplinary output, universities will remain constrained in their ability to pursue genuinely interdisciplinary agendas. Policymakers and accreditation bodies must, therefore, consider more nuanced indicators of academic impact—ones that recognise collaborative, cross-disciplinary work and its societal relevance.
The classroom moment with which we began is thus emblematic of a larger crisis. Interdisciplinary learning in India is not failing for lack of vision. The NEP 2020 has already articulated a compelling framework. Institutions have demonstrated a willingness to adapt. What remains unresolved is the question of practice—of how deeply these commitments are allowed to reshape the everyday experience of teaching and learning.
Until interdisciplinarity is embedded not just in policy but in pedagogy, not just in institutional structures but in epistemic habits, it will continue to exist as a promise deferred. The challenge,
therefore, is not to advocate for interdisciplinarity in the abstract, but to confront the conditions that render it perpetually aspirational. Only then can the hesitant voice in the classroom find the confidence to speak—and be recognised as central, rather than incidental, to the act of learning.
