LETTERS Issn 0012-9976 Ever since the first issue in 1966, EPW has been India’s premier journal for comment on current affairs and research in the social sciences. It succeeded Economic Weekly (1949-1965), which was launched and shepherded by Sachin Chaudhuri, who was also the founder-editor of EPW. As editor for thirty-five years (1969-2004) Krishna Raj gave EPW the reputation it now enjoys.
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Self-reliance of Indian Intellectuals
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read with keen interest the article by Claude Alvares (“A Critique of Eurocentric Social Science and the Question of Alternatives”, EPW, 28 May 2011) and his response to Anirudh Deshpande (“Steeped in Eurocentrism”, 15 October 2011) where he concludes, “if we are incapable of this act of decolonising, of formulating our own sociological assumptions, political theories and psychological insights, we should shut down our universities instead, because by keeping this mindless circus of borrowing and mimicry alive we only cause stupendous pain to the students who come to us in good faith”. I suspect that social scientists are more likely to be gripped by these feelings than natural scientists. Their genuine contributions have been largely ignored by the world and they have not produced a Raman or a Bose. In engineering and technology, we are entirely dependent on the methods and practices developed mainly outside India. I believe that among all disciplines, we, the engineers, are the least concerned about our dependence on the West. A theory proposed outside India, if applied correctly, produces an equivalent result here. Rural and semi-urban India has accepted the supremacy of the West and its own inferiority. But the urban middle class, although under the spell of the West, shows a remarkable ambivalence towards it. On the one hand, it vehemently opposes so-called western values and ideas, and on the other, it chases successful non-resident Indians (NRIs) as national symbols (many of them such as Sunita Williams are not even remotely Indians). No one has written more incisively than Nirad C Chaudhuri and, more acutely, than sociologist Ashis Nandy on this phenomenon. Such feelings are not limited only to Indians. The Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk, puts it like this, “The upper classes of most of the non-western world legitimise their power and wealth saying to their people ‘Oh, we aren’t like you. We are westernised and European and we are civilised because we have Western education september 29, 2012
and we wear Western clothes.’ But then faced with criticism from Europe over human rights or free speech they say ‘Oh but we are not like you because we are Indian or Chinese, we have old traditions, different measurements and our culture is different. We are ancient civilisations so our societies have to be seen and measured differently’ ” (“A Story, a Book and a Living, Throbbing Museum”, The Hindu, 28 April 2012). Edward Shils long ago pointed out these feelings when he interviewed hundreds of Indian intellectuals (“The Culture of the Indian Intellectual”, The Sewanee Review, Vol 67, No 2, 1959). Reading his commentary, one cannot but feel these feelings run deep among Indian intellectuals. They draw away from Western ideas because they make them dependent and corrode the dignity of the national experience, but they are also drawn back to them because of their universal scope and amplitude. They write articles denouncing their fellow intellectuals and support their arguments with quotations from Western authorities. The root cause of our ambivalence lies in our close encounter with the West and goes back to the nationalist movement of pre-Independence days which created an intelligentsia whose heirs we find around us today. During the struggle for Independence, it must have been genuinely hard for some to pursue their studies in India. Whatever the reason for leaving the country for education abroad, those days there was one immense benefit of this education: it widened one’s mind and prepared one better for a career, whether in the colonial government or in opposition. After Independence, the context and possibility changed, but the patterns of our mind did not. Our policymakers, planners, and politicians have been doing two things: publicly arranging for a vast expansion of higher education and, privately, arranging for their heirs to be educated in the US and Europe. A sociologist once wrote of listening to a speech of an educationist at his university, “pleading that we become self-reliant in our education here and now; and learning a few months later that he is arranging to send his vol xlviI no 39
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daughter to Cambridge, having sent his son there few years previously”. Now their sons and daughters are back among us having become more combative than their parents in denouncing the implementation of foreign ideas in their glorious motherland. The reason for this appetite for the foreign becomes more visible when we notice that a huge premium is put on foreign degrees. A foreign degree is not only appreciated by those who know nothing of that particular type of education, it also gives an added advantage in employment in our institutes. In the IITs, we often heard our intellectual leaders claiming that their products were as good as any in the world. But, then, why give special treatment to a foreign degree which was given to them when they were appointed to the faculty? If our products are still very inferior then why do they make such fraudulent claims of parity on their behalf? And if they are equally good or nearly as good, then why put such a high premium on a degree from MIT or Harvard or Cambridge while making new appointments? The nationalist rhetoric of “our products are equally good” no doubt serves some useful political purpose, but it unnecessarily blurs the policy of appointments. The social networks through which the advantages of a foreign degree are taken and given are complex and run very deep in our society, though they are not difficult to detect or expose. These days I live among a species which is notorious for leaving the nation: namely, the IITians. Young people in our universities and colleges, no matter how idealistic, are very much aware of the high premium on foreign degrees. This makes them mix a certain amount of cunning with their idealism, if any. As long as they are in India, the more articulate among them will complain about imperialism – academic or otherwise – how it is polluting their nation and how the science and scholarship of the nation is controlled by the puppets of the West. But all of it vanishes when he himself comes of an age when he/she is ready to go abroad for higher studies. On my campus in IIT Bombay, there is no visible idealism. The ecosystem of IITs does not make students very conscious of any hypocrisy when they go abroad. If Economic & Political Weekly
EPW
september 29, 2012
there was a little concern in the past, it has been removed by movies like Swades. They fancy themselves in a world where an NRI is a messiah who alone can solve the problems of poor Indians. There is still something which troubles them for they feel the need to justify why they are leaving, even though no one really wonders why. When our intellectuals send their children abroad, they must be considering the advantage for their children’s careers. And when they make a public declaration of their immense faith in the nation’s institutes, they must be aware that this is an aid to their own career. If there is some idealism left, it is an idealism that is easy to combine with self-interest. How is one supposed to take seriously people who “broaden their mind” abroad and then try to foreclose this advantage to others with national rhetoric? Dilawar Singh Graduate student IIT Bombay
Tiger, Tourism and Conflicts in Kaziranga
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he Kaziranga National Park is a complex ecosystem with both social and wildlife dimensions. While Kaziranga is officially highlighted as a success story in conservation, there is a crisis building over the future of the park and the fringe villages. Changing aspirations, lifestyles, and shifting land-use patterns have contributed to a crisis in the coexistence of humans and wildlife in the park. The temporary halt to tourism in core zones of tiger reserves, decreed by the Supreme Court, has been another wake-up call. The complete removal of community rights and traditional livelihoods has influenced the attitude of the local people towards conservation and coexistence. However, the Supreme Court ban would remove the so-called “core tiger areas” from public attention.
Kaziranga was opened to interested visitors in 1937 and two elephants were available for taking the visitors into the sanctuary. Kaziranga’s fame as one of the best spots for viewing wildlife and its popularity amongst tourists has been growing since then. Prior to 1950 the facilities for tourists were limited and the accommodation consisted mainly of a public works department inspection bungalow at Kaziranga and a forest rest house at Baguri. This accommodation was found grossly inadequate for meeting the demands of an increasing number of visitors, following which one visitors’ camp at Kaziranga and later on two tourist lodges were constructed by the department on a small hillock at Kohora and one forest rest house was also constructed at Arimora. At present there are four government tourist lodges at Kohora. In the recent past a large number of private lodges have also come into existence. According to official figures, the number of visitors to Kaziranga has grown from 19,525 (1997-98) to 1,12,845 (2009-10). A large number of local people are engaged directly or indirectly in the tourism industry of the park. There is now a serious social crisis in the fringe villages because of the possible loss of livelihoods of the villagers. There are protests which have taken up various issues relating to corruption in the forest department, the monetary involvement of some nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in local activities and community rights. If we are serious enough and want to save the park from the poachers, vested interest politicians and so-called NGOs, legal authorities have to create a people’s participatory approach that will take local villagers into confidence. Rakesh Soud Doctoral student Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Guwahati
Web Exclusives The following article has been uploaded in the past week in the Web Exclusives section of the EPW website. It has not been published in the print edition. Read it at http://epw.in “A Judicial Doctrine of Postponement and the Demands of Open Justice” – Sukumar Muralidharan Articles posted before 7 September remain available in the Web Exclusives section. vol xlviI no 39
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