On Decolonization
Scattered Speculations on the Indian University
I have spent the last fourteen years continuously (almost) inside universities. Universities are like very good headphones, the noise-cancelling ones that some of my students move around with flung across their necks. Universities have effectively drowned out the noisy world outside its boundary walls. Universities have taught me to read books, write books, talk about books, be talked about through books, make love through books, shit on books, angst about books. Universities have also consistently generated employment, horizons of aspiration, a growing collection of books and bookshelves, varied range of intellectual friends and collaborators and nemeses among the dead and the living, and finally, an entry point to a cosmopolitan, bourgois life for me. The university is now a space that I consider home.
Why do Indians continue to go to university? What do universities do for us in the current sociopolitical milieu? I will address these questions mostly focussing on the question of Indian intellectual life in the current time. A large gradation of public and private universities exist in India. A bit of background about the nature and history of the Indian university first.
Indian universities have had a long history, dating back to the monastic university of Nalanda in the ancient Magadha empire (5th c. CE). These were seats of learning that enmeshed the sciences, the arts, religious/scriptural studies with more practical concerns like law and business. The model of the modern Indian university began with the three Presidency Town universities set up by the Court of Directors of the British East India Company in 1854 - Universities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta. These were fashioned after British universities, especially, the University of London. They had colleges - spread across the geographic boundaries of the respective cities - under their affiliation and governing umbrella. They became fundamental conveyors of higher education of an Indian middle class that was training to serve under British rule, especially in the lower and middle levels of bureaucracies of the Empire. An interesting educational experiment combining knowledge systems (especially, in aesthetic traditions) of India and other Asian countries, especially fine arts and music, was the Visva Bharati University and schools set up by Rabindranath Tagore at Shantiniketan (established first as a college in 1921) and the Sri Aurobindo International Centre for Education at Pondicherry.
After Independence, a lot of the new nation-state’s hopes in higher education were pinned on the new Jawaharlal Nehru University that was built in 1969 by an Act of the Parliament. The JNU - meant primarily to impart postgraduate graduate education - united many neglected areas of knowledge - like ancient and modern languages (including languages like Persian, Japanese, Sanskrit) - with modern social and political sciences, law and governance, environmental science, biological sciences, as well as defence and security studies.
With the advent and proliferation of the smaller, single-discipline-focused (or focused on a single area of inquiry) institute, with university status, I find that this rich history of university education in India has been obscured. The ambitious foray into the neoliberal world has resulted in the growth of a new urban middle class that privileged technical and financial/business education over other avenues of learning, in order to be well-integrated within the skill demands of the growing market-driven economy. Consequently, we see a growth of the IIT/IIM (while the first Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, West Bengal, was established in 1951, currently there are 23 such institutes spread across the country, coupled with 20 Indian Institutes of Management) model of focused/technical higher education that comes to be at the centre of the narrative of the aspiring urban middle-class that aim for a place in the global consumer conveyor belt. The NLUs (a tradition of national law universities begun with the NLSIU in Bangalore in 1987 under the pioneering vision of Prof. N. R. Madhava Menon) have joined this ecosystem of single-discipline institutes with a somewhat narrowly defined intellectual canvas to cultivate. This canvas is nonetheless cultivated thoroughly and yields routinely, a crop of professionals for the legal system, and indeed, for the thriving market of legal services across the country and beyond.
How do we salvage life of the mind for the university in this ecosystem on single-discipline unviersities which offer a deep-dive into a particular intellectual and/or professional concern - which offer deep and rigid boundaries between what counts and does not count as relevant knowledge? As one walks into the lobby of the academic building of the NLS, the words of Tagore are inscribed on the wall, but not one of a jurist. “Where the mind is without fear…” - words that Tagore wrote in a host of poetic and prosaic writings crying out loud for an agile, autonomous, fearless mind. He crucially warned in Japan and San Francisco lectures, against strong loyalties to nation, state, ethnicity and so on, in his expression of yearnings for such a free mind.
How do we cultivate this mind? How do we build and sustain unviersities, which must also offer conduits to sustainable livelihoods, that provide incubators for the mind that Tagore fantasised about? We are embroiled in myriad ego battles in our intellectual lives as academics as also students. There is a tendency to bandy about with various kinds of jargon as markers of intellecutal accomplishment at the university. I have noticed students easily proclaim themselves to be “postmodernists” without considering the diverse definitions and genealogies that the word comes to occupy, and without appreciating what a Modernist is and how it may or may not have any bearing upon one’s understanding of postmodernism. One often finds, that there are popular perceptions of philosopher or social/political theorists/ or jurists in the case of the law schools, that are considered appropriately attached to the social capital of the intellect. So one namedrops about Foucault, or Derrida, or Rousseau, or Rawls, but almost never about Huizinga, Dumezil, or Rahul Sankrityayan, or Tagore, or the Buddha. It is in contemplation of these economies of popular intellectual associations, that I wish to raise the question of decolonizing the intellect at the Indian (especially, the single-discipline) unviersity.
A friend and colleague has been entreating to consider seriously the question of an Indian sociology or social anthropology since that is the discipline I am trained in. And I have been reluctantly considering this question. I am reluctant to accept the predominant genealogy of Indian sociology as it is taught via Srinivas, Ghurye, Beteille and so on. In fact, the inception of Indian sociology departments, I feel, has destroyed the possibility of a novel genealogy that surpasses the modern, postcolonial conditions of production of sociologcial knowledge. We learn a great deal about the agrarian coutnryside, the life of caste-based communities, religious rituals, the slow growth of urban sociology and all of these things in such a departmental sociology. It gives us nuggets of wisdom filled into categories that predictably dictate what India is. These categories, no surprises there, are categories invented by colonial forms of anthropological and historical knowledge. The postcolony of India becomes a space fraught primarily with the category modernity and lack-thereof.
Are other sociologies and anthropologies available? To dig up the actual possibility of conceptualizing India outside the colony-postcolony dyad, one must, I think, go to literary, aesthetic and philosophical texts, I argue. Tagore’s Streer Potro (The Wife’s Letter) and Mahasveta Devi’s Mother of 1084 and Draupadi or Girish Karnad’s play Tughlaq, Abhinavagupta’s Natyasastra, Sri Aurobindo’s The Future Poetry, are all examples of an Indian struggle for self-definition. And all of these are texts of other genealogies of modernity, or whatever word one might concoct for a constant effort to engender a better version of the world. A wife speaking to her husband about a long-suffering marriage that she must walk out of. A mother discovering the underbelly of far left politics through the quest for the story of her dead son. A raped woman revolutionary confronting the power structures of state and patriarchy that expect to subdue her. A mad, pious Muslim king who struggles with handling power and constantly asks questions about justice. A commentary of the rasa theory of organizing one’s aesthetic life and impulse. And a masterful text on the power of poetry that might carry the currency of spiritual excitement. These are all hints at an Indian sociology from the inside, I think. Our attempts at decolonization on the site of the Indian university must begin with destroying the entrenchment of colonial categories that continue to organize our minds (in its aftermath) and thereby, any and all attempt at intellectual life.