Varadarajan Narayanan

Areas of Interest & Expertise

  • Philosophy of Education
  • History of Education
  • History of Political thought
  • Collecting and Archiving Schoolbooks

Biography

Varadarajan Narayanan(Varda as he fondly called as) studied philosophy at Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, and then at the University of Hyderabad, before completing his doctoral degree at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He taught for two years at Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, before joining this University. He now teaches courses in the area of education studies for the MA Education programme. He is also associated with the Schoolbook Archive project, an open-access online portal to host schoolbooks developed and used in India and the subcontinent in the last two hundred years. 

Varadarajan Narayanan is working on three collaborative book-length projects: one, a collection of essays on Nai Talim; two, an edition of various curriculum documents that were prepared by the Hindustani Talimi Sangh; and three, a collection of interviews with contemporary scholars working on intellectual cultures in vernaculars of early modern north India. 

Courses

Publications:

Conversations on Schoolbooks:

This is a series of interviews with leading scholars and collectives on different aspects of schoolbooks production and use in India and the subcontinent.