New philosophies of justice, sustainability and vulnerability

Dark Side Of Learning Recognise hierarchies in knowledge

By SHIV VISVANATHAN Times of India, 05 Jul 2006

What does knowledge mean for the new postindustrial societies we are dreaming of ?...It is the Indian national movement that created the idea of a post-industrial society. Ananda Coomaraswamy, geologist and art critic, coined the term during the debates of the swadesi movement. We realise that knowledge is not a singular term. The history of knowledge is about how different knowledges interacted with or subjugated the other. Without Arabic knowledge, the modern West would not exist. Alternately western science has often sought to museumise other forms of knowledge. The first question we ask then is how we adjudicate between forms of knowledge.

Does tribal knowledge yield to scientific knowledge about the forest? Does OBC have many craft communities listed within? How do we respond to their knowledge in this process of change? It would be terribly parochial if the commission were to restrict itself to scientific knowledge. India is a land proud of its diversity whether of the 1,000 varieties of mango, or 50,000 varieties of rice. Yet there is a correlation between poverty, or more accurately, subsistence and diversity. The question the Knowledge Commission would face is do we sustain the sites of diversity or do we go for market choice?

The battle between industrial choice and the cultural idea of alternatives will be a poignant one. Justice is about access, but what kind of access to diversity are we going to guarantee? Any society that wants to be secular and is searching for a new locus of merit must adjudicate between fairness and justice. The two have often been confused. When a Brahmin girl gets 98 per cent in school and fails to get admission in a Chennai medical college, we face a sense of unfairness. How does one communicate to her what scheduled castes and tribes have undergone?

One must realise that knowledge through the instrument of the census has a paradoxical role to play — the instrument designed to eliminate caste entrenched it further. Can knowledge help create secular identities we are looking for, the sense of professionalism, the idea of citizenship? Can these provide an escape from the nested identities of caste and ethnicity or must we invest in caste as the identity kit of the 21st century? Knowledge creates community but it can also threaten community. Knowledge also imposes a structure of deskilling.

The question we will face in the future is how do we rework the idea of progress in a society caught in so many different time warps? Can justice to the Dalit be also justice to the tribe? Try answering it through the debate on the Narmada dam. Do we recognise the diversity we are so fond of — that the diversity of our agriculture and craft belongs to specific communities? Does the Knowledge Commission argue for their IPRs or does it go for the latest agricultural technologies which might create an enclosure movement in the countryside?

The crisis of agriculture is a double crisis of knowledge and inequality. Do we go for biotechnology or for a diversity of agricultural styles which maximises security? One can’t think of knowledge only around IT and e-governance. The questions have to be of a different kind. But it does emphasise one thing. If we start with reservation and knowledge as opposite poles, we lose our creativity. Both economic growth and justice need a different idea of progress. Inequality cannot be understood through profit and GNP.

One has to measure access to nutrition, information, community, water to understand inequality. Ours has not been a knowledge-centred debate. We are still relying on a colonial form of knowledge — the census and a colonial tactic, reservation. Both of these ideas see society as stock, when society should be seen as a set of flows. Emphasising reservation and neglecting atrocities will not do. This will help us evade the fact that often the worst caste atrocities are not the infliction of the Brahmin but of the new OBC classes. The OBC is both the victim and perpetrator. In fact, to ignore it creates new forms of identity politics which threaten the pursuit of justice. It would be paradoxical if a Knowledge Commission were to reorientalise India in the name of caste.

Max Weber once hinted that democracy is a function of two vocations, science and politics. Just as politics challenges the hegemony of expertise, science questions the urge to populism. Democracy needs the tension between the two, the see-sawing battles between knowledge and politics. But to create these battles we need institutions like the university which bracket knowledge without reducing it to an applied science, an ideology or a utopia. The university also has to think about new philosophies of justice, sustainability and vulnerability. It cannot do so if it is not protected from the immediacy of politics. To deny it that possibility is to deny democracy new ways of dreaming and dreaming politics in particular. The Knowledge Commission should dream of conditions beyond the immediacy of current politics. The writer is a social scientist.