Society

An Area Of Openness

Nursery of path-breaking scholarship, early detecter of democratic trends, CSDS turns 50

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An Area Of Openness
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She has studied, taught and researched in reputed institutes around the globe, in Oxford, Chicago and Boston. But dropping anchor at the faculty of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), one of India’s premier social sciences and humanities institutes, has been an achievement for Ananya Vajpeyi. “It’s one of its kind that combines commitment to research with an engagement with public life,” she says.

Jeebesh Bagchi of the Raqs Media Collective that co-founded the Sarai programme at the CSDS also finds the idea of the “public life of thought” compelling. “It’s not passive but about intervening in the intellectual environment,” he says. So, the CSDS scholars write in varied forums (once Illustrated Weekly was dominated by their essays), take part in TV discussions and debates, participate in governance and policymaking and have been involved in significant social movements. “It’s not a bunch of academics doing their own thinking. It’s...a definite engagement with the social context in which knowledge is produced,” says Vajpeyi. In other words, a campus that’s not cloistered but in constant dialogue with the world outside. A dialogue that has been continuing now for 50 years from a Civil Lines bungalow built in the year of Indian independence.

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As CSDS—a brainchild of Rajni Kothari, and also called ‘the Centre’—enters its 50th year, it marks the golden jubilee of a prized intellectual capital it has nurtured and promoted over the years: academics, thinkers and their research work and thought processes that have had an impact not only in the academic world but the wider public domain.

Director Rajeev Bhargava says the centre’s trajectory runs parallel to Indian democracy—till the ’50s the democratic process was confined to elites. It deepened in the ’60s, when the centre also took roots. “It has been rigorously obsessed with democratic processes. It had healthy respect for democracy and utter irreverence for anyone within it,” says sociologist and former senior fellow Shiv Visvanathan. No wonder, its heyday was when democracy was under threat, during the Emergency and the years after when it engaged with emerging social movements. Perhaps the only other influential institute in the capital has been the Centre for Policy Research.

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Open minds A faculty meeting comes to an end on the lawns

The early research on democracy in India was limited. The centre aimed at studying democratic processes in terms of political factors and causes, political stakes and struggles, factional and electoral considerations etc. In its first decade it came to be known for its pioneering empirical work on Indian politics, with Kothari’s Politics in India as the first systematic and comprehensive study of the national political system by an Indian. Later, initiatives like Lokayan had a major impact on non-party politics.

Founded at a time when Indian varsities were dominated by western political thinking, the centre was focused on making sense of the Indian democratic realities. “It was an alternate conception of western ideas and also westernisation of Indian ideas, about simultaneously working with and questioning both the western as well as homegrown models,” says Bhargava. A significant work to emerge on the relationship between “the colonisers and the colonised” was Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy. There were several other significant minds associated with it—D.L. Sheth, T.N. Madan, Ramu Gandhi, Deepak Nayyar, Sudipta Kaviraj, Bhiku Parekh. “It allowed for freedom, autonomy, unconventional critiques and also collaborations not possible within the university system,” says senior fellow Ravi Sundaram.

Over 50 years, the centre has kept in tune with changing times and remained relevant. Take the issue of caste. “Post Independence we believed caste will disappear. But it has come to play a very important role. So we worked on caste coalitions, on emergence of new classes,” says Bhargava. Sheth’s work on caste and democracy is an example of that. “The centre kept the secularism debate alive in the ’90s, and didn’t build consensus around it,” says Bagchi. In the ’80s, it was among the first to warn of a blind faith in technology and, in particular, of development-induced displacement.

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At the centre, nationalism has always been critically debated, and human rights been strongly advocated. A recent milestone has been the Lokniti programme that pioneered empirical studies of elections and comparative democracy. “Electoral data, exit polls etc commonplace today on TV are the centre’s contribution,” says Bhargava. It played a pioneering role in setting up Sarai in 2000 to focus on media, urban life, cinema, memory and contemporary culture, intellectual property law and the public domain. The latest focus is on the electronic revolution—new technologies like the cellphone and the birth of new public spaces like the internet and e-mail.

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But criticism has been rearing its head. Bagchi believes the centre lacks lateral growth and evolution. “It should have multiplied into five more such institutes in different places,” he says. Visvanathan says the centre’s  “great imagination is now over”. He remembers it as a “happy adda of Delhi, an informal creation with a small set of rules and openness for quirky things”. “Now,” he says, “it has become richer and more rigid.” If there was lively debate but little consensus then, now it’s more homogeneous, he feels. “Now it has become aggregative, data-oriented.” The most telling example of the openness lies in how he was recruited—over a table tennis match. “Now it’s 25 forms and a panel of 40 experts that you’ve to get past.”

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But despite this, the centre marches on, that too at a time when other institutes have buckled under or exist in a limbo. Now the focus is on the workshops and seminars to mark the occasion. A discussion on ‘life of mind in public’ is planned. The languages programme is planning a peer-reviewed social science journal in Hindi, a first of its kind for India. As Bhargava says, “Most institutes flounder with the departure of founders, but CSDS lives with profound purpose.”

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