Critical Humanities from India

Contexts, Issues, Futures

D. Venkat Rao, D. Venkat Rao

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351234924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The field of humanities generates a discourse that traditionally addressed the questions of what is proper to man, rights of man, crimes against humanity, human creativity and action, human reflection and performance, human utterance and artefact. The university as a philosophical-political institution transmits this humanist account. This European humanistic legacy, which is little more than Christian anthropology, barely received any questioning from cultures that faced colonialism. In such a context, this volume attempts to unravel the 'barely secularized heritage' of Europe (Derrida's phrase) and its fatal consequences in other cultures. The task of Critical Humanities is to explore the ways in which the question of being human (along with non-human others) today from heterogeneous cultural 'backgrounds' can be undertaken. The future of the humanities teaching and research is contingent upon the risky task of configuring cultural difference from non-European locations. Such a task is inescapable and urgently needed when tectonic cultural upheavals have begun to show devastating effect on planetary coexistence today. It is precisely in such a context that this collection of essays on critical humanities affirms, 'without alibi', the urgency of collective reflection and innovative research across the traditional disciplinary and institutional borders and communication systems on the one hand and Asian, African and European cultural formations on the other. Critical Humanities are at one level little more than communities on the verge (critical) but whose centuries long survival and resilient creations of cultural (and /as natural) habitats are of deeply enduring significance to affirm the biocultural diversities of living that compose the planet.

Topical and timely, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and teachers of cultural theory, literary studies, philosophy, cultural geography, legal studies, sociology, history, performance studies, environmental studies, caste and communalism studies, postcolonial theory, India studies, and education.

1
Education and structures of moral formation

The limits of liberal education in India¹

Shashikala Srinivasan

When we examine the narrative of crisis in the institution of the university as articulated in the West and non-West, we find a striking difference. The story told of the university in the West is often one of decline of liberal education. The anxiety is that the university of culture, central to which is the idea of humanities, has fallen prey to the global market and given way to the university of administration. The typical response to such a crisis has taken the form of a recognition that yet another moment has emerged when the conception of education has to be clarified, the original arguments recovered and reasserted.² In contrast, in postcolonial Asian contexts such as India, the story told is one of the university of culture and the corresponding idea of liberal education and learning never having taken root. It is this conviction that underlies the more recent response of a few scholars who have proposed that the solution to the current crisis in the university is the introduction of liberal (arts) education.³ While one may readily accede to this solution, on reflection, the solution is stranger than it first appears. The 19th century university has always been tied to the idea of liberal education. If despite the university being around for more than one and half centuries in India, liberal education has not taken root, then it is unclear as to what it means to introduce liberal (arts) education as a solution to the current crisis.

Has the scholarship on the university in India been driven by a search for an answer to the question of institutional crisis and the idea of liberal education not having taken root? In the first section, I examine the dominant diagnoses forwarded to understand the crisis in the university in India. I extract a peculiar feature of the contemporary debate on the university: though the scholarship is keen on understanding the crisis in higher education, it does not talk about the core concepts of education at all. It instead sees external reasons – institutional, social, political and managerial issues – as causes for the crisis. Why is this so? This silence, as I show in the second section, is not because there is something deficient with our social fabric, but because the concept of education as Bildung (self-formation) or the realization of the moral agent as a self-determining individual that undergirds the modern university derives from a theological frame and is not easily accessible to us. When this normative model of education comes to us with British colonization, far from being neutral as the ‘sciences of man’ may expected to be, it is evaluative and detects a ‘moral lack’ in the natives. Liberal education in India is therefore aimed at the moral transformation of an entire people. I trace the debate on the effects of liberal education and the distortions that manifest as a crisis in the late 19th century in the third section. In the last section, I show how Tagore and Gandhi respond to the late 19th century debate and reopen the question of education and formation. They offer a diagnosis that is as relevant today as it was then and which the contemporary scholars on education entirely miss: the crisis in education is a crisis in education. I analyze Tagore and Gandhi on education in order to show that underlying their problematisation of liberal education is another conception of education involving different structures of moral formation that we have barely begun to conceptualise.

Contemporary diagnoses and proposed solutions

Contemporary scholarship on the university in India is replete with the rhetoric of crisis. However, till date, we have no systematic analysis of the crisis or an assessment of the various explanations forwarded to explain the phenomenon. With some effort, we can extract four basic explanations in the scholarship that attempt to understand the problem.

The first strand of scholarship locates the problem in the structural limitations of our institutions which are said to bear the imprint of colonial times. Given the formulation of the problem, the solutions are structural in nature: the creation of more deemed universities and autonomous colleges, the restructuring of the system of affiliation, the creation of research academies within the ambit of the university, and so on.⁴ However, institutions are always more than just the physical structure. They are formalizations of already existing organized patterns of actions and traditions of learning in a particular community. Without having an adequate understanding of these underlying conceptual and learning structures, we can mistake effects for causes. After all, it is possible to say that what are identified as causes, such as unplanned expansion of affiliated colleges and the decoupling of research from the universities, are more an effect of incomprehension or a lack of self-understanding of the nature of modern institutions than being the cause of the crisis.

The second response locates the problem in a systemic collapse of our institutions of higher learning and emphasizes quality with a managerial focus on governance and measurement as solutions.⁵ Often, the lack of quality in higher education is correlated to the lack of quantity. The National Knowledge Commission, for instance, followed this route and recommended an increase in the number of colleges, universities, infrastructure, funding and doctoral students. This is despite the fact that in many state and central universities, enrolment is way below the expected levels (Tilak 2007: 630). Moreover, the paucity of good research proposals in recent times has been a greater area of concern than lack of funds per se, at least in certain disciplines (Deshpande 2008: 26–27; Vaidyanathan 2008: 21). Further, the concept of quality remains fuzzy and mostly of rhetorical value. Rather than focus on any core aspects of education, it restricts itself to an instrumentalist approach to education and a narrow understanding of learning as ‘something that can be planned, predicted and accurately measured when it has occurred’ (Kumar 2010: 10). While the concept of quality may help indicate the problem, it does not help us conceptualize the nature of the problem which clearly lies outside the ambit of a managerial gaze.

For the third strand of scholarship, the crisis is one of inherited intellectual frameworks. Postcolonial studies, for instance, argues that the crisis of our institutions is the result of the imposition of alien frameworks of categories and thoughts produced in another culture. When these sets of ideas and institutions are transplanted into the non-Western contexts through British colonization, they not only limit our understanding of these cultures, but have unforeseen and complex consequences, the effects of which are still to be investigated (Joseph 2006).

While the mismatch between concepts and ‘lived experience’ is a common theme that runs through much of postcolonial writing, the emphasis of each is different. At the risk of sounding reductive, one could say that while Ashis Nandy focuses on the imperialism and alienness of European categories which violently fit the people of a different culture into certain given normative European categories, Partha Chatterjee focuses on the different trajectories these concepts take in our context making a case for ‘our modernity’, Chakrabarthy calls for ‘provincializing Europe’ and Kaviraj on the limited penetration and externality of these concepts and institutions in India.⁶

It is unclear, however, why ideas, concepts and institutions cannot be imported from one culture to another. For instance, if we take the example of natural sciences, we find that nobody would dispute the universality of concepts such as gravity, mass or force, despite the fact that natural sciences originated in the West. What determines the mobility of a concept? What kind of concepts lose their cognitive value in a different cultural context, and why? These questions remain unanswered. Although the postcolonial theorists draw attention to the disjunction between experience and inherited intellectual frameworks, a generalized understanding of the problem is insufficient for our purposes and the space of higher education continues to be opaque to us.

The fourth response, mostly from a section of humanities scholars and social scientists, questions the very perception of crisis. It attempts to nuance the generalized understanding of the problem in two ways: by showing through empirical analysis that the crisis story does not hold for all of South Asia equally and its extent also varies across institutions and disciplines (Chatterjee 2002a), or by arguing that the motif of ‘decline and crisis’ is a reflection of changes in the social context (Deshpande 2008: 25–28). Here, it is not the crisis as much as its perception or the crisis discourse itself that is seen as requiring investigation. Chatterjee’s attempt is to draw attention to the fact that the crisis is not a macro phenomenon as it is often thought to be but a result of micro, region-specific or perhaps even institution-specific problems which cannot be generalized. He observes that where institutions have indeed declined, it is due to varied reasons: in some cases, the foundations for research were not properly laid out, in some political reasons played a role and, in certain other cases, it was due to the withdrawal of government funding and the changing nature of research. Deshpande sees the changing place of academia, the entry of new castes and classes into higher education into spaces hitherto occupied by the elite and the later generations having to share intellectual and institutional space with much larger numbers as the reasons behind this perception. Implicit in Deshpande’s formulation is the idea that the crisis discourse itself is an expression of interest groups in the society.

While one can agree that we need to take into account the changing social composition at various levels, it is not clear why this change should result in the growing but ‘false’ perception that there is a crisis in the Indian higher education. Even if this is the reason for the perception, it should be possible to counter it through other means such as garnering statistical data to show that it is a faulty perception, without any basis in evidence.⁷ Besides, if we assume that ‘good’ institutions should be able to produce creative, independent thinkers irrespective of the social background of the students, then their failure to do so is reason enough to think about the vitality of our institutions. After all, strong, vibrant institutions are likely to have the ability to initiate students (irrespective of their social background) into the tradition of learning they embody rather than themselves be transformed by the interests of varying groups who come into these institutions (which is more often the case in our context).

While sociological factors are indeed extremely important to nuance our understanding of the crisis, as an explanation of the crisis, it remains unconvincing: rather than explain why people perceive a crisis if there is none, it merely ‘explains away’. To use an example, if a pencil appears bent in water when it actually is not, a good explanation must be able to tell us why it appears bent without questioning the integrity of the perceiver’s experience. This should also be the case when we seek to explain the perception of a crisis in higher education. Instead, the perception of the crisis itself is seen to be generated by one’s location and therefore an immoral act driven by interests. If all accounts can be reduced to interests of groups, then each explanatory account, including the one under discussion can be charged of furthering specific interests, ad infinitum. If our arguments, perceptions and use of concepts are, as Mehta puts it, mere ‘ruses of power’, primarily structured by our identity and class/caste interests, then why bother to have a discussion at all? (Mehta 2006: 2425)

The various diagnoses considered above, despite their differences, share a puzzling feature. Although each strand of the scholarship is an attempt to understand the crisis in the sphere of higher education (directly or indirectly), they do not talk about the conception of education at all. The debate on the crisis in higher education quickly becomes a crisis in institutional structure, a governance issue, a reflection of crisis in politics or an expression of interest groups indicative of the divided nature of the Indian social fabric. This is true even of postcolonial scholarship which deals specifically with the domain of education. Influenced largely by Said’s Orientalism, this strand of scholarship sees education as a reflection of politics: as a site for either manufacturing consent for those in power or one of resistance by the oppressed.⁸ Why is this so? What is the specific conception of education underlying the modern university, and why is it not easily accessible to us? For an answer to this question, we have to turn to the emergence of Bildung or education as self-formation that emerged as the highest good (summum bonum) in late 18th century Prussia (Beiser 2003), leading to the rise of the Humboldtian ideal of the university, the model that is still with us today. Grasping the concept of Bildung will not only make us appreciate the depth of the debate on education in the West, but will also allow us to identify the line of thinking, the ‘category habit’,⁹ that governs this model of education.

The idea of Bildung (education as self-formation)

The concept of education encompassed by the term Bildung emerged as central to the European cultural-intellectual landscape in the late 18th century. The term, however, has its origins in 14th century mysticism and is based on the biblical doctrine that man is created in the image of God.¹⁰ The idea of Bildung as seeking self-perfection derives from the theological model of learning where one moves towards God by means of self-fashioning, where the soul (the copy) models itself after the original that God has imprinted in each of us. In its religious form, the model was related to the monastic order and involved spiritual practices, central to which were (a) absolute obedience to the master of the monastic order and (b) contemplation of one’s thoughts (involving introspection of one’s conscience which was anterior to all actions, will and desires) to separate those ‘true’ thoughts ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: crossing (the) legacies
• 1 Education and structures of moral formation: the limits of liberal education in India
• 2 In-discipline(s): diversity, disciplinarity and the humanities
• 3 Sites of learning and intellectual parasitism: the case for new humanities
• 4 Why communalism is an Indian problem: the relationship between communalism and Hinduism in colonial discourse
• 5 Sacerdotal violence and the caste system: the long shadow of Christian-Orientalism
• 6 Caste as an impediment in the journey of a Bhakta: Lingayat Vachanas, jati and aadhyatma
• 7 River literacy and the challenge of a rain terrain
• 8 Accents of memory: critical humanities and the question of inheritance
• 9 Indian culture and its social security system
• 10 The politics of knowledge, here and now: a conversation with Ashis Nandy
• Glossary
• Index