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‘Why Can’t A Civil Society Activist Become A Minister?’

The world-ren­owned scholar was in Mumbai to deliver the 16th Vasant J. Sheth Memorial Lect­ure

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‘Why Can’t A Civil Society Activist Become A Minister?’
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Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and director, Mahindra Hum­anities Centre, was in Mumbai to deliver the 16th Vasant J. Sheth Memorial Lect­ure. Amidst a packed schedule of lectures and panel discussions, he took an evening out at his Cuffe Parade residence to talk to Prachi Pinglay-Plumber. A world-ren­owned scholar with works such as Nation and Narration and The Location of Cul­ture, Bhabha favours an integrated vision of humanities and the sciences. Excerpts:

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Is India as a country turning more intolerant, conservative, right-wing?

There is a rightward, conservative tend­ency in many countries. In Europe, cou­ntries in economic peril throw up extreme right-wing parties that pin their economic woes on migration rather than poor national governance and irresponsible fiscal management. In India, there is a potent blend of conservative politics garbed in religious discourse that is more mythologically manipulative than theologically accurate. This is not the spirit of God; it is the dire use of sacred mythology and metaphor to set one part of the population against the other. But people turn to the effective populism of intolerant right-wing politics when there is a collapse of persuasive, progressive leadership from those who cherish democra­tic, secular traditions of tolerance that make India an inspiration to the world.

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Is the liberal space thinning globally?

I don’t believe it is. The liberal space is being reconfigured differently across the globe. There is a global crisis of confide­nce in the discipline and determination of political parties to carry out their agendas with integrity, embracing the ethical principles of transparency. Back­door deals, smokescreens, under-the-table negotiations—all these violations of the democratic process are commonplace; they are all indulged in while disi­ngenuously and hypocritically uph­­olding demo­cratic principles. The legal process is often protracted and access to it can be obstructed by a range of social prejudices and economic inequities.

In such conditions, you have political and social movements that focus on single issues and use the social media to voice their protest and organise their political programmes. The protest against anti-democratic, totalitarian governance became the singular issue in the Arab Spring; anti-corruption is the central issue for the Aam Aadmi Party. These groupings often don’t have the more holistic, multi-dimensional vision and mission of traditional parties. But, at the same time, they highlight their causes; are as concerned with political process as with outcomes—the ends don’t justify the means; and they are less mired in corruption or self-serving compromise.

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Do you think the civil society can participate in political process?

Civil society networks and organisations have a major role to play. They occupy the space between the people and the government. They are con­stituted as a network between trade unions, lawyers, NGOs, the media, pressure groups etc. Civil society doesn’t have one creed or ideology; it’s a network of heterogeneous but collaborative ideas, a matrix from which new groupings and associations emerge. During the Arab Spring, groups that really articulated the spirit of freedom were civil society groups—not only party cadres but writers, activists, workers. Civil society is an agent of change and why would a civil society activist not become a minister? The transformative energy often comes, in times of crisis or transition, from disaggregated, amorphous alliances of peoples rather than preconstituted political parties.

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Do you think it is possible to have meaningful social transformations?

The transformations we need depend to a great extent on effective educational reform that connects academic knowledge with civic ethics; scholarship with citizenship; and teaches people in the digital age to make a distinction between information and knowledge. Until we deal with the problem of access to education across strata, we cannot talk of creating a liberal space. Enrolment must not be confused with actual attendance; too often, poverty—rural and urban—keeps children from accessing education. What is “on the books” and what happens in the classroom are two things.

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Knowledge depends upon carefully taught principles and protocols of interpretation that always connect the world of facts with the realm of values. The liberal arts and humanities are absolutely crucial in the education for responsible citizenship and civic consciousness, but this is the very educational sector that is being slashed across the globe—starved economically and disrespected intellectually. India might be one of the worst offenders in this respect.

Have quantitative sciences been devoid of values unlike humanities?

In the sciences the outcomes are fantastic but often the means to those outcomes have been problematic—use of animals; environmental degradation; most famo­usly the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (1932-1972) conducted by the US Public Health Service to study the progress of untreated syphilis amongst rural African American men who were given to believe they were receiving free healthcare.

The desire to improve the human cond­ition is shared across knowledge systems. The difference is, the humanities does not simply focus on outcomes. Every act of judgement and interpretation involved in the process of developing an argument in the humanities demands a self-appra­isal by the writer/resear­cher of the ethical values in what is being proposed. The process is as important as the product. The end does not justify the means. The process itself is an ethical issue. The humanities highlights, at each step of the formation of its knowledge, disciplinary or informal, the presence of a framework of values behind every asse­rtion of fact or judgement. If “Knowledge is Power”, as Bacon and Foucault asserted almost three centuries apart, we could say of the Humanities: it teaches us that Know­ledge is Truth and Beauty, Justice and Generosity carefully wrought together.

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Are they now coming together?

We now see a huge increase in integrated humanities at Mahindra Humanities Centre such as digital humanities, medical humanities, legal humanities. There is a new integrative inter-disciplinarity, where the notion of ethical values is an important part of knowledge formation, and the Humanities are in the forefront of this integrative process. You can see that the humanities are now ready to play a larger role in policy issues and I hope to steer the Mahindra Center in that direction with the help of my colleagues dispersed across the disciplines.

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How do you think the internet interfaces with the process of knowledge?

I go back to my point: information is not knowledge. Information is not innocent. People feed you information for their own ends. At the end of the day, you have to turn information into knowledge. For that you have to learn to interpret, which demands careful, time-consuming reading—print or digital. To learn “to read between the lines”, to decipher a groundwork of values and perspectives that may not be visible but are implicit—these are eminently humanistic ways of learning and teaching. That’s why the emphasis on language, whether in literature or law, is so central to the Humanities.

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Is this specific feeding of information shaping our times?

We have now entered the age of security. In 19th century, the age of progress, the idea of progress and industrialisation dominated. Those who founded empires justified their political oppression by saying that they were bringing progress and modernisation to countries that were retrograde or obsolete in their thinking and their governance. The 20th century was the age of bipolar politics, ideological warfare between the Russia and America, democracy vs. totalitarian states. In the background, third world was trying find its own vision and mission.

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The 21st century is really the age of security - whether you enter an airplane and are frisked, whether you demonstrate and are shot. The whole nature of security, from the body that is afraid to be blown up by a bomb, to foreign policy, is emphasized in our time. We are continually having to adjust between being safe and being unfree, between security and rights. Where do we draw the line?  

What’s ‘the skewed knowledge map’?

Wikipedia has about 8,000 articles on Antarctica, much more than Africa or any South American country. Such a disfigurement in the very map of know­ledge! Of referen­ced research papers, 84 per cent are from the UK, US. A crass imbalance in the construction of global knowledge. It should make us think creatively about knowledge tran­smission, its means, how we validate it.

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What impact does the brain drain have on civil society?

We only think of the brain drain as a process of the net loss of effective intellectual scientists or engineers etc. to India. There is another way to look at it. At the decisive moment in which you are being educated to choose a career and make a creative mark in life, you are away from your country. All the dreams of change, all the aspirations associated with vigorous youthful thinking are lived out in another country, not ones own. Perhaps you will return with useful qualifications, perhaps you wont. What is lost to your country, your culture and your people, is the contribution you could make to your society and to civil society within your nation or your region. The loss to “developing” countries is not only the loss of intellect. It is the loss of all the contributions that could have been made by the several generations that have been “brain-drained” to further civil society: their contributions to everyday life, interventions in the media, political parties or processes, protests, new forms of life and their influence on evolving social norms. We have always thought of the brain-drain in instrumental, technocratic terms; we need think of the problems of “lost generations” (if I may call it that) as a loss of youth of a society at a very crucial stage where they make contributions as thinkers, doers and agents of change.

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How does society view the humanities today?

Once at a dinner I was introduced to a boy who wanted to pursue the humanities in a very coveted school in Mumbai. His parents were summoned by the school principal and were advised that with his intellectual gifts he should be doing the sciences. He would be wasted on the humanities. Only one story, but say no more. In education institutes liberal arts are the least well-funded. In UK, there is 25% cut on arts and humanities. In India it has been laid down to sleep and die. The Indian government had a several billion dollar project for a number of technical universities. Where are the arts and humanities?

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How different was it when you left?

Soon after independence people were fired with the notion of nation building, social, cultural, political equity. Groups and individuals were committed to further the future of their countries in the post-colonial world. People lived this dream out of commitment, though the material resources were not there. Then the universities went in decline, research money was not available. If you wanted to be at the forefront, you didn’t have support, encouragement.

Now the material resources seem to be here but their uses are completely skewed. Now I see availability of resources without the right priorities. This government, which is full of people who went Oxford, MIT, Harvard, at the IMF, the World Bank, cannot put these priorities firmly and strongly on the agenda for this country. What you do not have is the dream of social and cultural transformation. Today we have a very narrow view of what progress and success is, and much of it seems to be about the profit machine. Profits are fine. But how does it profit a great nation to pursue such a narrow measure of success?

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Finally, how do you see India today?

Many old problems are exacerbated in the new global age—literacy, women’s education, infant mortality, access to courts, health provision. The problems become graphica­lly serious, the desert looks ever blea­ker, where you have oases of prosperity and indulgence. But this is still a young country. The ambition and intelligence of the people is impressive. I encounter it most directly in the classroom: a large number of the most impre­ssive students and colleagues I have had the privilege of knowing have come from India. The difficult circumsta­nces enc­o­urage a kind of flexibility and courage, in thinking and doing, that often leads to innovation. The great thing is, what is old or traditional is never obsolete, unless politically forced into a blind and deaf orthodoxy. The Past is continually part of the present. There is a social intelligence that moves from past to present, restlessly back and forth, enshrining neither tradition nor novelty, and attempting to envisage a third way of the future.

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A shorter, edited version of this appears in print

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