Home > Liberation Main Page > Index August 1998 > ARTICLE

The Politics of Academics

 

Arvind N. Das

The recent controversy started by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party over academics in general and history in particular has raised an interesting question. Why is the BJP so afraid of history? It might have been supposed that history should have been attractive for a party which is so rooted in the past as to have an ideological mooring that is almost antediluvian. But there is a difference between mythology and history and while legends is the stuff in which the party revels, the BJP obviously shies away from an actual engagement with the historical past.

The fact that the BJP-led coalition has packed the Indian Council of Historical Research with its fellow travellers is not the only indication of this. That act can be attributed, as indeed it has been by one of the parivar’s most articulate apologist writing in weekly newsmagazines, as mere replacement of the Congress jobbery with the Sangh’s jobbery. Every regime does throw some crumbs to its intellectual rationalisers even as the political practitioners feast on the loaves and fishes of office.

Distribution of patronage in academia is an old game which has been played by different parties at different times. However, there seems to have been a curious connection between peasant and student activism and officially sponsored social science research in India. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, just when the movements of militant agricultural labourers and poor peasants were finding their loudest echoes in the campuses around the country and vast numbers of students appeared to be restlessly seeking ways to transform society, number of institutions of higher learning were set up through official patronage. Now that the threat from those fronts seems to have abated, the same institutions are languishing, apparently afflicted by terminal illnesses or worse.

Perhaps the most noted of such institutions was the Jawaharlal Nehru University, set up at the height of the Naxalite movement, with the avowed aim of giving at least radical or potentially radical sections of the intelligentsia place under the official sun. A well-endowed university, JNU lived up to the expectations of its founders. It provided a controlled environment for the airing of "leftist" though, a hothouse as it were for "inconvenient" ideas which could be quarantined within its ivory towers. The virus could thus be checked from spreading and infecting other, more vital parts of the body politic. The ambience of JNU was so deliberately created that it appeared to allow for free debate when in fact it was, largely, an inward-looking, almost incestuous institution engaged in internecine disputes among "leftists". The encouragement given by the Establishment to what D.D. Kosambi derisively called "Official Marxists - OM" tied them to the apron strings of the rulers. Meanwhile, as in the dead textile industry where the first generation of workers proudly flew the red flag and the fourth generation blindly follows the Shiv Sena’s bhagwa, JNU too has seen the saffron surge. It is only when students like Chandrashekhar once again established the integral connection between radical peasant activism and creative academics that JNU rediscovered its touch albeit briefly.

JNU at least has had the redeeming feature of the presence of students a feature that has to some extent stimulated its teachers to carry on research. Other purely research institution set up at about the same time as JNU have, by and large, not had even this advantage. Indeed, the "professionalisation" of social science research in the early 1970s created an enormous but intellectually under-employed unintelligentsia whose productivity, low to begin with, has, over the years, gone down both quantitatively and qualitatively. And, the prime institution responsible for this state of affairs is the Indian Council for Social Science Research and, to lesser extent, its "poor cousins" the Indian Council of Historical Research and Indian Council for Philosophical Research. ICSSR, and ICHR and ICPR for that matter were set up with the intention of separating research from teaching, a principle flawed in its very premises.

The problem was that these "specialised" research institutes had some resources but lacked a problematique, precisely because they were cut off from the mainstream of society. Thus, as long as they could not escape noticing what was happening in society on account of its sheer intensity, they did attempt to get involved in the major discussion regarding the "mode of production" particularly in the context of the on-going agrarian unrest in the 1970s. However, as soon as the force of peasant movement abated somewhat, these specialised researchers either switched on to more arcane concerns or, by and large, lapsed into inactivity. Worse, in a situation where such institutions had no exciting research agendas they became mere places for doling out patronage to ever-decreasing circles of beneficiaries. As their grants declined in real terms because the state did not see them of any great importance, the fight for such institutional patronage became ever more fierce and cliques and coteries developed. Many of these operation under the cover of "ideology", pretending to be "leftist" despite the fact that they had little contribution to make either to critical research or militant movements. Some prominent adherents of the Sangh parivar were also part of such coteries although today they have joined the chorus against the Congress-leftist jobbers.

In any event, a large group of researchers in Indian had been converted into bureaucrats by then through the process of their criticality having been substituted by career security. The ICSSR, for instance, did little research on its own, it did "research management". And even this management was of a very low order, almost proto-capitalist in orientation: it was more about doling out money on a putting-out system and on a patronage-clientilist basis than organising research in a creative way. The System was satisfied.

However, there is a certain desperate illiberality in the behaviour of the present regime in this regard. While the Congress itself and other governments belonging to what has been called the "Congress system" undoubtedly patronised those whom they considered to be their "own", they also sought to accommodate, if not even co-opt, at least some others who were seen as heterodox. Thus, the Sangh parivar’s favourite archaeologists and historians like B.B. Lal, K.S. Lal and B.R. Grover also battened under the Congress dispensation in organisations such as the Archeological Survey of India and the Indian Council of Historical Research. It is of course not surprising that many of the same people who had no problem earlier serving "pseudo-secular" regimes should today seek favours as part of the Sangh parivar’s nomenklatura.

Unfortunately for the Sangh parivar, however, the matter of hegemonising culture even of the formal kind is not as simple as that of merely selection of its watchdogs. History, in particular, is a complex matter and mere appointment of academic bureaucrats cannot either mythologise it or trivalise it to the Sangh’s satisfaction.

History is too important a matter for that, and even the solemnity of historians cannot take away its essential liveliness. In the first place, it is necessary to affirm that solemnity is not necessary for history, indeed the best history must recognise temporal and spatial incongruities, must realise that there are oddities of perception, errors of parallax caused by hindsight. Secondly, history must not be seen as merely a matter of the past: the annals and antiquities are useful only inasmuch as they can be made to relate to the present. Thirdly, history is in essence the study of the future, and, like other types of futurology, it can only be approximate in its predictions, particularly since human agency can never be totally predictable.

It is these aspects of history that cause debates among historians. In the last thirty years many new issues have been added to the debate on historiography and the most radical of these has been the challenge of post-modernism. There has in fact been a denial by Roland Barthes among others, that the past has any independent existence at all. Such writers argue that it is only the representation of the past by historians that is the reality of the past. Indeed, what is being reconstructed is essentially a series of "texts" and "discourses". Jacques Derrida and his acolytes took this line of argument further by stating that indeed there is nothing outside "language". This ‘all is "text"’ view undermined the empirical basis of history. Michel Foucoult, yet another major influence on the debates among historians, argued that the past consists of patternless events and it is the historian who imposes a narrative order over these. The nature of the order naturally depends on the prevailing, even hegemonic, discourse of the time and, therefore, history writing is clearly linked to the discourse of power.

There is little to suggest that the ideologues of the Sangh parivar, even the most sophisticated among them, those who have in their time have also contributed to Subaltern Studies, are consistent followers of Barthes of Derrida of Foucoult. What is apparent, however, is that even they, instinctively or otherwise, accept the idea that history-writing is an aspect of power. And, since, for the present at least the political formation to which they have pledged their intellectual resources is majority into power-play, they rationalize its view of history.

The problem is that the Sangh parivar as a whole neither has, nor can possibly have a consistent view of history. Gathered within its folds are some of those devoted practitioners of empiricism in extremis: archaeologist. For them, producing evidence of a broken pillar here, the fragment of an inscription there, potsherds and human artifacts from beneath the earth of Ayodhya, evidence that is historically verifiable or not, is as significant as it is for the leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to assert that faith is more important than the toils of dusty old diggers. The two together only produce a particularly pathetic specimen of cynicism, pseudo-secularism combined with sheer bigotry. And yet, history-writing of one sort or the other must be a part of their discourse of power, they must fill the bodies of historians with their own (or owned) people even as they accord greater sanction to mythology than to history.

However, those who take history, with all its glorious uncertainties seriously, must grasp the truth, which ironically has been acknowledged by one of the Sangh parivar’s embarrassed apologist who claims greater sophistication than the vandals of the Bajrang Dal, that "history is a study of man and his blundering evolution." The significant word is "evolution". Monkey gods may have their place in mythology but human history is too important and complex to be left to be monkeyed about by bigots, zealots and office-mongers.

 

Home > Liberation Main Page > Index August 1998 > ARTICLE