The Crisis Within Education: An Excerpt of G.N. Devy's Lecture Which IIT-B Cancelled

Last week, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, cancelled a lecture by celebrated scholar G.N. Devy. Reports said that the committee to regulate such lectures decided to call it off on the eve of its delivery on January 31. 

The following is an excerpt from it.

§

The present century is often described as the ‘knowledge century’. We cannot be sure if this tag will stay valid until the end of the century or whether future historians will characterise this period as the ‘Age of Knowledge’ as has been the case with the Dark Ages or the Age of Reason in the past.

Perhaps the description sums up the euphoria resulting from the information explosion and the technologies surrounding the exponential growth in the information generated every passing second. It is possible that this epithet may not be sufficiently adequate for characterizing our time. The century has also been forecast to be the era of water wars, an age of deathless humans, an epoch of ecological termination, and the moment for an irreversible merger of the physical and the digital.

The ‘knowledge century’ label is open to discussion and is not incontestable. Indeed, self-perceptions of human civilizations can change quite radically over a relatively short temporal span. But if at all, the present century can be viewed as a unique era in human history, marking a new kind of engagement with what is considered ‘knowledge’, it would be interesting to reflect on where India stands in relation to this new turn in history. 

Though it cannot be said with any certainty for want of the  census that was to take place in 2021, perhaps India has already  surpassed China’s population level. Also, the demographic proportion of the younger population in India at present is the largest ever in India’s history, with more than half of the population below the age of 25. Of the entire global population, nearly one in every 12 humans is a young Indian for whom meaningful education is the most assured means of finding a decent livelihood. Education, knowledge production and research leading to widening of the horizons of thought and imagination, therefore, ought to be seen as important concerns of our time. Considerations of how and how much knowledge is produced, how it is transacted and how it is responding to social inequalities and ecological disconnect add to the vastness and complexities involved in a study of knowledge and education in India.

Having spent close to half a century in and around universities, and having elsewhere presented academic research and essays, I thought it not too inappropriate to present my observations on the theme through a reflective statement. I do not intend to present a position or positions in it. Quite often, analytical studies have a purely subjective weave as their flip side, a tacit class-bias presented as ‘objective’ culture-critique.

To the extent possible, I have avoided such analysis.

I would therefore like to describe this lecture as the ‘reflections’ of a person for whom knowledge and education have been serious concerns for several decades. When I began working as a young researcher in literary studies in the early post-Independence years, the colonial experience was the obsessive interest of the day. Most forms of formal knowledge, scientific disciplines and social sciences were seen as having originated in the colonial ‘transfer of knowledge’. Scholarly debates revolved around the question of acceptance or rejection of these forms of knowledge. These debates were happening in several disciplines, if not all of them, ranging from history to literature, architecture to aesthetics; but invariably the reference point was the knowledge of the colonial mind.

During the 1980s, the interest started shifting to discussion of disparities inherent in every intellectual transaction between the colonizing Western cultures and the post-colonial societies. These discussions were fascinating and produced several works of great brilliance. They gained in significance as similar discussions had been taking place in other post-colonial cultures. In Western intellectual circles too colonialism and post-colonialism acquired as much centrality as the Cold War and imperialism had enjoyed earlier. I have chosen to overlook in this address many of the valuable insights generated over the decades in both these phases as they are by now well-settled in the arena of the history of cultural relations.

Given, however, the significance of the enormous amount of descriptive and analytical studies that those two moves produced, both within India and outside, I begin by briefly alluding to some of the iconic period-statements in the next section, before moving to the discussion of the more contemporary, and no less significant phenomena having a profound bearing on the question of ‘knowledge’ and education in India. These phenomena include the rapidly sinking fortunes of ‘natural memory’, technology of knowledge incubation and knowledge reception, and the sanitisation of ‘knowledge’ effected through several exclusions – linguistic, ethnic and epistemic. This book, therefore, reflects on the condition and crisis of knowledge as much as it is, by implication, about the condition and crisis of our democracy. In order to analyse the present status of ‘knowledge’ in India and the problems at the heart of India’s higher education, this lecture will focus on four important elements: 

First, the idea of ‘knowledge’ in Indian tradition(s);

Second, the trajectory of ‘memory’; 

Third, the patterns of social exclusion and their effect on ‘knowledge’ construction; 

and finally, the impact of technology on the forms of knowledge.

An ancient civilisation, with amazing wealth of philosophical, literary and scientific treatises and unparalleled continuity of ‘the life of the mind’, India nonetheless was not at its most creative when the colonial scholars started exploring Indian thought towards the end of the 18th century. Besides, for a variety of complicated reasons, the creative springs of ideas and imagination current in the bhashas at that time were not found to be of sufficient interest by the colonial English officers.

Their focus remained almost entirely on literature and the texts in Sanskrit and Persian. Given the context of political domination, even a rather casual compliment from Goethe for the imaginative power of Kalidasa’s play Shakuntalam appeared to the Indian mind as great a victory as, a century later, the Nobel Prize in Literature for Rabindranath Tagore. During that one and a quarter century – from the founding of the Asiatic Society in the 1780s to the beginning of World War I and the struggle for India’s independence – any compliment from a European scholar was generally hugely overvalued, reflecting India’s complete loss of cultural self-confidence. Hence, the generous praise that Friedrich Max Müller lavished on Indian thought was received by the Brahminical classes with ecstasy. He stated in a lecture to the Indian Civil Service aspirants in London:  

 “If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic  race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more established after the European pattern were too expensive for the people, and therefore they could not possibly overtake the thing. I defy anybody to fulfil a programme of compulsory primary education of these masses inside of a century.”

A century after the Mahatma’s uncharacteristically passionate outburst, if we are to take a relatively more objective view of the colonial impact on India’s knowledge traditions, two significant elements deserve attention. The first of these is that the pervasive cultural amnesia about India’s intellectual failures and accomplishments seems to have hampered our ability to establish organic links between the past and the present.

For the last two centuries, Indians have either entirely dismissed all that we had cultivated as ‘knowledge’ in theory as well as a million everyday tasks. Or else, we tend to think that ancient India had all-encompassing knowledge in all domains and tend to glorify that imagined past. But unquestioning adulation or complete dismissal is no substitute for a critical perspective.

The second element was the frequently noticed ‘time lag’ between the knowledge in the West and that in India and the absence of parity between knowledge production in the global West and the global South. Countries such as Ireland, Canada and Australia too had to fight Western disapproval of knowledge coming from former colonies. But the intensity with which Indian scholars have felt this discriminating attitude has generally been more acute. It would be fair to add that the colonised African countries have had an even greater difficulty in having their forms of knowledge acknowledged as ‘universal’ knowledge. The African reactions too have been far more pointed. As a result a whole cultural movement called ‘Negritude’ sprang up in reaction in many African countries.

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, the most eloquent of the spokespersons for Africa’s selfhood, wrote in his memorable book, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms: 

“I am suspicious of the uses of the word (the Third World) and the concept of the universal. For very often, this has meant the West generalising its experience of history as the universal experience of the world. What is Western becomes universal and what is Third World becomes local… The Eurocentric basis of seeing the world has often meant marginalising into the periphery that which comes from the rest of the world.”

The colonial disruption in India’s self-perception and the uneven cultural relationship emerging out of the context of the West’s intellectual domination of the colonised people continued to prevail well beyond the formal end of colonial rule. The intellectual biography of D. D. Kosambi, one of India’s more original thinkers in the post-Independence decades, brings home poignantly the cultural asymmetry in the field of ‘universal’ sciences. Reflecting on the response to his fundamental contribution to number theory in mathematics, Kosambi observes that an Indian contribution to a theoretical field of knowledge usually met with suspicion and disregard. When Kosambi proposed that the Poisson distribution would explain the prime number theory, he had to spend several years to get a sympathetic audience among Western mathematicians.

He comments in despair:

“Every competent judge who saw only this radically new basic result intuitively felt that it was correct as well as of fundamental importance. Unfortunately, the Riemann hypothesis followed as a simple consequence. Could a problem over which the world’s greatest mathematicians have come to grief for over a century thus casually be solved in the jungles of India? Psychologically, it seemed much more probable that the interloper was just another ‘circle-squarer’. Mathematics may be a cold, impersonal science of pure thought; the mathematician can be thoughtless, heatedly acrid, even rabid, over what he dislikes… I had to fight for my results over three long years… There is surely a great deal to be said for the notion that the success of science is fundamentally related to the particular form of society.”

In my own work, during my formative years, I have often taken a position that would be akin to Dharampal’s painstaking research, showing how British colonial rule in India destroyed the traditions of education existing during the immediately preceding era. I have also commented in detail on the cultural amnesia that set in as a result of the colonial encounter.

Similarly, several eminent thinkers and educationists and various reports on education have pointed out the loss of originality in pedagogic practices and knowledge production in India caused by the imposition of a language that is not one’s mother tongue for the purposes of higher order cognitive transactions. However, though the colonial experience can be justifiably held responsible for India’s disproportionately low contribution to ‘knowledge’ during the last two centuries, focusing on colonialism alone may not yield the complete story of our failure.

It is possible to counterpoise Dharampal’s research with another significant work of research, one that has had equally enormous impact, but quite differently, on our self perception. That work is the text of a lecture that Babasaheb Ambedkar was to deliver at Lahore – but could not – and was published in the form of a book titled Annihilation of Caste in 1936. Ambedkar presents in this work a scathing analysis of the social inequalities prevailing in India for over two millennia and a passionate plea for genuine equality. Dr Ambedkar was probably the most educated of the Indian leaders of his time with degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics.

‘To educate’ the deprived classes to create an equitable society was one of his non-negotiable articles of faith. Ambedkar’s analysis opens up the ‘knowledge’ question in India, taking it beyond the easily available proof of the culpability of colonial  domination, and takes it back to the ancient times when various theological schools inscribed discrimination as a social norm in India. My purpose is  not to judge Gandhi or Ambedkar. It is common among Indian intellectuals to position Gandhi and Ambedkar as intellectual adversaries and take umbrage on behalf of one or the other.

My aim is not to assess either Ambedkar or Gandhi and their views on knowledge or education; the aim here is to look at the question of knowledge and its formally institutionalised means, education. There is no doubt that caste discrimination in the past and in the present, the colonial cultural domination and the continued ‘knowledge imperialism’ of the West, have had an effect in reducing ‘knowledge’ in India to pauperisation and ‘education’ in India to a savage mockery of the idea of education. To take both these givens into account should benefit any analysis of the  condition of education in contemporary India.

Yet, as the 650 million Indians born after 1990 look up to moving forward into the 21st century, with education as their most desired means for that movement and ‘knowledge’ as the driving engine for their very survival, it may be beneficial if an analysis of ‘knowledge’ can be carried out from ‘within’, by looking at itself without unduly shifting the focus to the impact of colonialism or the legacy of caste hegemony.

In doing so, I do not intend in the least to deny the primacy of these factors in any analysis of the condition of education in India.

G.N. Devy is a former professor and cultural activist, best known for the People’s Linguistic Survey of India and the Adivasi Academy created by him.