Just a few months ago, we travelled across several states in Northeast India, meeting students, parents, teachers, community leaders, and University administrators as part of our outreach programme on student mobility, educational aspirations, and curriculum design. These conversations revealed that no admission interview, survey, or institutional report could fully capture. They offer a deeper insight into understanding the region’s educational landscape, disciplinary preferences, and perspectives of students shaped by local histories and socio-economic realities. And as liberal arts educators, our conversations revolving around the discipline were largely met with unawareness but curiosity and interest in knowing more about it. But one thing is for certain: the interdisciplinary nature of the programme is positively taken. The fact that students can choose and combine subjects from different disciplines generates lots of interest.
For decades, the educational aspirations of many young people in Northeast India have followed a familiar and traditional trajectory. Success was often measured by securing a government job, qualifying for the civil services, or entering a handful of established professional disciplines such as medicine and engineering. These aspirations emerged from a particular socio-economic context where public employment offered stability, mobility, and prestige. While these pathways continue to remain important, the region today is no longer the same. Hence, it is at this junction that we feel Liberal Arts education deserves a closer look, not just as an academic curriculum but also in the way knowledge of the region is produced.
Northeast India stands at the intersection of profound social, economic, and geopolitical change. As entrepreneurship grows, digital economies expand, cross-border connectivity strengthens, and new industries emerge, the demands placed on graduates are changing just as rapidly. The question is no longer simply what students know but how they think, collaborate, communicate, and solve problems that rarely fit within disciplinary boundaries. This is precisely where Liberal Arts education becomes relevant, not as an alternative to professional education but as a framework that prepares students for an increasingly complex world.
Can Liberal Arts bridge the gap in Curriculum Development with greater emphasis on Indigenous Knowledge?
For years, many scholars, educators, and civil society groups have expressed concern over the limited representation of Northeast India in mainstream curricula and academic literature. Across many schools and universities, the region often receives only brief mention, with its histories, cultures, languages, and intellectual traditions remaining largely absent from dominant national narratives. This curricular gap has contributed to the continued under-representation of NE India in academic discourse, reinforcing a sense of marginalisation and limiting opportunities for meaningful engagement with the region’s diversity and contributions.
As Liberal Arts philosophy is interdisciplinary, it presents a great opportunity for educators to address this imbalance. Universities and colleges have space to integrate NE histories, indigenous knowledge systems, colonial and postcolonial experiences, and contemporary issues into the curriculum. From curating immersion and service learning with local communities to a credit-based curriculum on Northeast Histories and Politics, it provides a plethora of courses that enable students to become producers of new knowledge grounded in their own histories and experiences. Perhaps the greatest promise of Liberal Arts education in Northeast India lies not merely in expanding academic choices but in transforming how knowledge itself is produced. It offers young people the opportunity to study their own societies through multiple lenses, document histories that remain under-represented, preserve indigenous knowledge systems, and generate scholarship rooted in local realities. For a region that has often found itself on the margins of national academic discourse, Liberal Arts presents an opportunity to move from being the subject of research to becoming one of its most important producers.
And, introducing Liberal Arts education does not necessarily require infrastructural development from scratch; this programme can be easily implemented by the existing colleges and Universities. It requires restructuring the existing model and tweaking it to bring in the ‘liberal arts education’ model of an interdisciplinary approach.
Dr Embassy Lawbei teaches at the Department of Liberal Arts, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru. She is engaged in teaching and research on media, conflict, communication and human rights.
Dr Prerana Srimaal is Head of the Department of Liberal Arts at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru. Her teaching and research explore interdisciplinary education, migration, cultural heritage, and curriculum design, with a focus on making higher education more locally rooted and socially relevant.
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue.
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