My time as Dean of Academic Affairs has coincided with the journey to Ashoka University – a multi-year journey from an idea to a material reality, from a set of guiding principles about a Liberal Arts curriculum to a fully implemented and functioning four-year undergraduate academic programme. We have by no means reached our destination: although Ashoka University was formally recognised by the Haryana State Government in June 2014, it has not yet become the finished article. Nor should it. The secret of a vibrant Liberal Arts programme – even as it is constructed out of the bricks and mortar of foundation courses, the pillars and girders of major and minor courses, and the jaali lattices of co-curricular courses – is that it is always a work in progress. Like the curriculum and pedagogy it embodies, a Liberal Arts programme must always be open to other possibilities and to the importance of change. The journey to Ashoka should never stop.

But I want to write also about another journey to Ashoka, one that has constantly inspired me in our journey to becoming a university. It is a journey that I take every day I come to campus, driving from South Delhi to Sonepat. It is a journey that has also intimately reacquainted me with the historical figure for whom our university has been named.

The daily journey to campus, anywhere between 70 and 100 minutes depending on the whims of the Delhi traffic, could so easily have become a monotonous chore. That it hasn’t palled for me in four years is testimony to the extraordinary cultural and historical richness of the city in which I live. I am reminded of Delhi’s antiquity most powerfully when I pass Feroz Shah Kotla, near ITO. This is a fourteenth- century fort built by one of Delhi’s Tughlaq sultans. On top of the crumbling but expansive fort, still frequented by many visitors after all these centuries, stands one of the pillars first erected 2,400 years ago at the order of the Emperor Ashoka and inscribed with his edicts for a more just society. The inscriptions remain surprisingly vivid: etched mostly in Prakrit, they also contain some sections in Sanskrit and Pali. These multilingual characters give some indication of Ashoka’s commitment to a pluralist ethos, one most resonantly pronounced in the edicts he had engraved on a

rock, near Kandahar, in Prakrit and, astonishingly, Aramaic, and Greek. Ashoka’s step-grandmother, after all, was most likely Greek. Not only the form but also the content of Ashoka’s edicts signal his commitment to pluralism: as one of them says, “Contact [between religions] is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines of others. King Piyadasi [i.e. Ashoka] desires that all his subjects should be well learned in the good doctrines of others.”

Even as Ashoka’s name was forgotten for two millennia, the pluralist society he envisaged thrived in his former territories, as is illustrated by the remarkable cultural, religious and linguistic diversity of the four or five miles following Feroz Shah Kotla. The red silhouette of the Jama Masjid’s minarets, the similarly red tips of the Pracheen Hanuman Mandir, the white onion domes of the Gurdwara Majnu ka Tila, and the multi-coloured prayer flags of the adjacent Tibetan refugee colony are all in close proximity, making neighbours of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist as well as Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Tibetan. Ashoka’s pluralist universe can be glimpsed further on the drive, on National Highway 1 just across the Delhi-Haryana border, in a Devanagari-script sign that tells us the Bhagwan Premsukh Mandir is located in Mohammedabad. This is the India that has inspired me these past four years: an India, prophesised by Ashoka, in which difference is not feared but welcomed as the basis of an ethical investment in multiple good doctrines and perspectives.

And at the end of the journey is the realisation of Ashoka’s promise: the university that bears his name. Contrary to the assumption that the Liberal Arts is a Western import to India, Ashoka University and its academic programmes build on the pluralist vision inscribed in the edicts. As I conclude my term as Dean, I am proud to have been part of a large team of people from diverse parts of India and the world, working across their disciplinary and cultural differences to create an undergraduate programme in which Urdu and Sanskrit are studied alongside French and Spanish. Where all students are expected to study arts and humanities as well as social sciences and natural and applied sciences, and where every undergraduate’s liberal education begins with being assigned a roommate who comes from a different place and has a very different story to tell. The journey to Ashoka is not singular, but plural; not one story, but many. May there be many more to come.