From institution to mechanism
Instead of encouraging critical thinking, university is being forced to become a system for training people to fit the world they know and receive.
The time has come to make some provisional
sense of the tumultuous events that have convulsed the subcontinent over the
last two months. There is an intensity to the debate that is unprecedented in
the public life of the Republic. The image of the public university went south,
subjected to the extraordinary scrutiny of the Virtuous TaxPayer, as if
desperately seeking a small gnat to swat when the rampaging elephant of the
criminal bank-loan defaulter was also in the room. We are living through a time
when universities (particularly departments of social science and humanities) are
being seen as the incubators of hatred for the Indian nation, and campus
politics in particular has been described as a “disease” to be cured at all
costs. What has provoked such violent and righteous rage in the breasts of so
many Indians, among the marginalised and privileged alike?
Today, as the debate
over nationalism, its critics and its devotees, has moved beyond
the Marxist/Ambedkarite redoubts of Jawaharlal Nehru University/Hyderabad
Central University respectively, and made a generalised target of certain
political and cultural minorities, we also need to ask what the connections are
between what is happening in and to universities and the vociferous demands for
worshipful allegiance to the neo-nation.
It will not do to merely point to or deride
the obvious contradictions and inconsistencies in the irrational cacophonies by
which we are surrounded. Instead, we need urgently to make sense of and expose
the very rationality of these strident, irrational voices.
Yardstick of representations
We can begin by separating the concern about our public universities from the generalised moral panic that has now gripped all sections of the Indian citizenry. We all know that public universities both in India and elsewhere have nurtured political debates and struggles, from civil rights and anti-war movements to struggles for separate States (not so long ago, the All Assam Students’ Union morphed into the Asom Gana Sangram Parishad). Why has the fact that campus politics has for so long produced very important politicians on the Left, Centre as well as Right been ignored so systematically? What accounts for this widespread moral outrage, expressed not just by the predictable “fringe elements” or the Hindu Right, but by such respected corporate leaders and academic entrepreneurs such as Mohandas Pai?
We can begin by separating the concern about our public universities from the generalised moral panic that has now gripped all sections of the Indian citizenry. We all know that public universities both in India and elsewhere have nurtured political debates and struggles, from civil rights and anti-war movements to struggles for separate States (not so long ago, the All Assam Students’ Union morphed into the Asom Gana Sangram Parishad). Why has the fact that campus politics has for so long produced very important politicians on the Left, Centre as well as Right been ignored so systematically? What accounts for this widespread moral outrage, expressed not just by the predictable “fringe elements” or the Hindu Right, but by such respected corporate leaders and academic entrepreneurs such as Mohandas Pai?
What is new about the Indian campus today is
not only its enormous growth from being a preserve of the elite in the decades
following Independence to a reservoir of new talents and aspirations,
accounting for a full quarter of the college-age population. Campuses such as
JNU, which had long ago devised and secured an admission policy which went well
beyond state-mandated reservations to include “deprivation points” (which
incidentally are occasionally reviewed), have become among the most inclusive
and representative institutions of all. Which other institution includes so
visibly not only women and minorities but also all sections of the caste and
class spectrum? Certainly not even Parliament stands up to the yardstick of
representativeness — of gender, caste, class, ethnicity, and sexualities.
The vituperations against the public
university then appear to be much more pointed: they are reserved for the
perceived ingratitude of those who are, to adapt the Kannada writer Arvind
Malagatti’s searing term, “Government Brahmins”. The Government Brahmins are
those who have fed off the largesse of the state only to bite the hand that
feeds. The perceived illegitimacy of “politics on the campus” is aimed not
against the various shades of the Left, which, till recently, stood dangerously
isolated and endangered in the surge towards the dominance of market forces,
but against at least two strands of politics which have, at least in a
university like JNU, been uniquely and visibly allied. These are the
Ambedkarite forces and the feminists. Not only has the public university, for
the first time in post-Independence history, enabled the participation of the
widest range of its citizens in higher education, it has given them the
resources to think their social worlds anew, in an institutional space that
permits and encourages new structures and relationships. Sometimes, it means
challenging the structures and relationships which students are accustomed to
or have inherited. And these political formations, like most of the Left forces
with which they have allied, have actively and productively critiqued the
Indian state when necessary.
Claiming moral authority
This brings me to the second, and larger, frame within which we must place the new anxiety about politics on the campus. The eddying effect in the public life of India of the hatred for student politics would have been impossible without being linked to what was clearly revealed in the speech of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh general secretary Bhaiyyaji Joshi in Nagaur. The high-pitched, and seemingly irrational, darkly affective nature of the protests on the question of nationalism is explained by the way in which power has been organised in the Indian subcontinent for some time now, and at least since colonial times.
This brings me to the second, and larger, frame within which we must place the new anxiety about politics on the campus. The eddying effect in the public life of India of the hatred for student politics would have been impossible without being linked to what was clearly revealed in the speech of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh general secretary Bhaiyyaji Joshi in Nagaur. The high-pitched, and seemingly irrational, darkly affective nature of the protests on the question of nationalism is explained by the way in which power has been organised in the Indian subcontinent for some time now, and at least since colonial times.
Why, for instance, is there such flagrant disdain
and contempt for the rule of law? Is it really the new face of power, or one
that is being given new expression and shape? If the
lawyers/teachers/students/citizens of the country have, for the last 20 months,
been emphasising the necessity of respecting the legal authority of the state,
the shrill, strident voices of unreason precisely lay claim to the moral
authority of the nation. It is this sphere that is increasingly being envisaged
as no longer sharing its power with, but exceeding and indeed dominating, the
legal authority of the state. This refurbished moral authority of the nation
increasingly entitles the dark forces of unreason to “deal” with those who are
today clearly struggling to escape the ascribed structures of family, clan, and
caste to build, however partially and incompletely, a new social world.
The moral panic that has gripped large
sections of the Indian public is thus related to the fears about the
democratising opportunities offered by campuses today. In this expression of
outrage, the newly moralising Right has left no stone unturned, even displaying
the full flowering of a pornographic imagination, by producing a new “drain
inspector’s report”, an examination of the detritus of the campuses. It aims to
replace critical thinking with worship, forms of hard-won equality with
structures of deference, and forms of new community-building with a return to
the ideal of the patriarchal “family”. (The proposal of the Indian Council of
Historical Research to institute fellowships that will foster a Guru-Shishya
parampara which will tie a shishya to a relationship of obedience
and honour, rather than thinking and debating, is only the sign of things to
come.)
Meanwhile, in keeping with forces that have
long been unfolding, since the days of the United Progressive Alliance regimes
Mark I and II, the university is being pushed away from being a full-blooded
and lively institution, which encourages critical thinking, if necessary, of
the state, and dreaming of new worlds, to being a mechanism for training people
to fit the world they know and receive. That is why the truly representative
“nations” which have been constitutionally created and sustained — namely
universities such as Allahabad, HCU, Film and Television Institute of India,
JNU — must be thoroughly undermined and reconstructed for the unreflective
neo-nation to triumph.
Source | The Hindu | 11 April 2016
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
Upcoming
Event | National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence
(NCFL 2016) during April 22-23, 2016.
Note | If anybody use
these post for forwarding in any social media coverage or covering in the
Newsletter please give due credit to those who are taking efforts for the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment