Written as the School of Critical Humanities was being dissolved in the newly named The English and Foreign Languages University (formerly CIEFL)

Institutional Alibis

We live in destitute postcolonial times. These are destitute times for thought and reflection. Destitution in matters of thinking concerns the inability to know what questions to ask, what inquiries to pursue. Our ailing public institutions – the universities of higher learning – have given up the imperative to think; they have abandoned the persistent need to reflect on the nature and purpose of the university. Expediency seems to norm the governance of the university today.

But, perhaps, the university itself is a part of the problem. The university itself is, perhaps a disorienting and disoriented institution for thought in colonial and later times. The modern university – a European creation – was conceived to organize, shelter and disseminate divided fields of knowledge production. The knowledge thus produced and organized was essentially about the world, the self (“Man”), their relationship and their representations. As the divided domains became more and more productive, as they brought forth positive knowledges about the world and the self, the university could only house the domain experts. As the fields developed internally validated objects and protocols of inquiry, only the domain-validated individuals who functioned in accordance with the calculus of the field could touch the field. In other words the university secured for itself and for its progeny the position of a mediating agency for/of relations between the world and the self and their territorial representations. The university became the expert domain for production of specialized knowledges.

The university, thus, as an arena for disaggregated knowledges is nonetheless a philosophical and political ideal. It is a philosophical concept as it was conceived to develop comprehensive and total knowledge about the world and the self – a knowledge that is “autonomous” in its existence and effect. Man as the subject and object of knowledge, man as the inquiring agent and the object inquired into, underlines the political impetus of the modern university. Man as the sovereign agent of knowledge can penetrate every domain and horizon – of the world and self – and secure mastery over the target of inquiry. In other words, the university is quintessentially – irrespective of its divided domains of inquiry (“higher” and “lower” – science and non-science) – a humanistic enterprise. It moves on the axiomatic of the presumptuous mastery (of man) over the self and the world.

The “ends of man” that the university projected for itself are, sovereignty and mastery of knowledge – it must be emphasized, the reactive effect in an intellectual-cultural-historical milieu peculiar to Europe. The humanistic enterprise of the university was conceived of and advanced as an autonomous, sovereign activity floating outside the substantive and totalising fold of the complicitous theological and political forces. The university was projected as a secular alternative to the political-theological muddle of European cultural history. But reactive formations cannot easily find their coveted Archimedean spaces to distance themselves from and objectify their sedimented cultural provenance. Reactive secular formations continue to be haunted by the displaced, distanced, repressed religio-theological presence of European past (the “re-turn to religion”, “Eastern Europe”, “Soviet Union”, “terror” etc.). Presumed ruptures and breaks turn out to be confused repetitions.

The university in India is a colonial implant. It is a European implant with all its political philosophical and cultural baggage. It is a graft imposed with utter disregard for the tissue texture of the host culture. For the graft itself was conceived as a part of a whole good bestowed upon a “nation” to be civilized. The crisis of the university is symptomatic of the larger institutional crisis resulting from the modular “goodness” insensitively deployed. Whether and how the modular form of “good society” – a reactive formation to the core in a crisis-ridden Europe – will fare in the world will largely depend on the model’s responsiveness and responsibility for the rhythms of the host culture. Since the colonial good was assumed to be an a priori good, the host’s potential or possible response to the intruding good remains foreclosed. The postcolonial destitution is the effect of a protracted failure to reasonably imagine the potential or possible response of the silenced host. On the contrary, even to this day we continue to be fed the stories of “death”, “desuetude” or “sudden death” of the host culture’s creative critical potential “on the eve of colonialism”. The glory of European-colonial universalizable good continues to be projected as a heliocentric terminus for the global self-fashioning. We are yet to conceive of the possibility of a response, while caught in the grafted network, beyond the disciplinary, methodological and valorised forms of representation institutionalised by the university. An almost impossible task – yet an unavoidable necessity to cross the colonial-postcolonial abyss.

The European implant of the university functions on the premise of disregarding and denying any promise or potential to the regenerative pulse or tissue of the host culture. There is no future – let alone any future anterior – for the host culture except and only in accordance with the disciplinary protocols of the social sciences – in conformity with the object-making demands of history and anthropology.

The humanities that ought to unravel reflective destitution of our times and plunge into the colonial abyss to forge new response to the crisis of the university, succumbs to topical, expedient inquiries whose models are set elsewhere. Given the humanistic essence of the university, at least the humanities could have, one would have thought, inquired into the philosophical and political implications of the university in its implanted contexts. Who is the implied human in the humanities? If human creativity and innovation, human reflection and performance, human utterance and artefact are the concerns of the humanities, does the (post)colonial university concern itself with and enable anyone in its location to reflect on the potentialities of these singular human creations? Is there a place for humanistic axiomatic – the patented legacy of European implant – in these discredited reflective, creative practices of the host culture? If the humanities are not oriented toward inquiry into reflective modes and media, their material manifestations and their idiomatic reach and depth, what are the ends of the humanities in their implanted contexts? The humanities are yet to address such questions at an institutional level in our contexts.

Professional Grafts

To continue with the organic metaphor, every pharmacological or pharmocogenomic venture will have not only its effects but its side effects as well. The colonial transplant of the university bears testimony to these effects. The worst effects of the graft can be noticed in a thoughtless replication and multiplication of the modular university. The “best” effects of the transplant can be captured in professionalized production of disciplinary knowledges by just a handful of individuals in very few (metro) universities. Consequently, the “best” productions only strengthened the guardrail of the European module; they doubly reinforce it through “native” participation for disciplinarized information retrievals. There is hardly any inquiry, in these best efforts, which is attentive to the ends of these institutional knowledge productions beyond the disciplinary calculi – let alone turning attention to the possible promise or potential of the host culture’s response. As they have internalised the goodness of the university (along with its European baggage), these “best” efforts promptly divided the host culture in accordance with the received disciplinary protocols. They offered to fragment the host culture into positive knowledges. They have done little to rethink the ends of the university.

In other words, the “best” and the worst are deeply complicit in their unthinking extension of the philosophical-expedient effects of the colonial implant. The much touted newer prosthetic, now threatening to usurp the postcolonial educational body politic, the Knowledge Commission, is clueless about the postcolonial abyss over which it offers a rainbow for crossing. Like the science and technology education, the Knowledge Commission is spawned by the pragmatic-replicative threads. In line with the global regulatives, it would encourage fabricating contract researches, adorning (outsourced) services-outfits and project rainbows to citizens. Every tin-drum leader will promise such a replicant Knowledge-University to his constituency. Such enterprises can only aggravate our postcolonial destitution. The worst are full of passionate intensity.

Today no discipline and no institution is in a position to even think of plunging into the abyss over which our precarious times float, and grope for reflective fibres from the discarded, discredited and denigrated, without a chance, dregs of the host culture that lives on with the colonial transplants. This groping in the abyss, it must be noted, is without guarantees. Unlike the European transplants – whose promise of good health was advanced and universalised with unquestioned guarantees – the postcolonial groping, if it were to take place, would be a step without guarantees; it can only be a step without a path, a movement without destination, an interminable, restless searching without ends.

Today no discipline and no institution is in a position to take the step into the abyss. For such a step requires the force of reasoning imagination. The modern university is in no position to nurture this force – for the ontological ground of the university could conceive the latter only in dividing reason from the imagination and subordinating the latter to the former. The university is quintessentially the product of the principle of calculative reason. All the faculties (“high” and “low”) are constituted by the rational imperative. Imagination does have a place in this schema but with the calculative-disciplinary frames called literary studies, art or aesthetics. But all these shelters of the imagination are the inescapable progeny of philosophical conceptualisations. Subordinating the imagination to the valorized faculty of reason has normative sanction from the classical antiquity in European intellectual cultural history. This constitutive principle of the university and its demarcated disciplines continue to be dominant in the “best” operations of the university.

Postcolonial Abyss

Whereas the impulse of reasoning imagination, not pitched in opposition to the heritage of the principle of reason – actually moves on with a vigilant, passive temperance toward it – enacts its thinking contextually or context-sensitively. Discrete in its performance, the impulse of reasoning imagination silently and passively embodies or carries on the pulsating rhythms of intractable inheritances of reason and imagination. Unaware of or indifferent to any valorised normative order of a violent hierarchy of dominant reason and subordinated imagination, the impulse of reasoning imagination replicates itself innovatively in discrete heterogeneous forms and disperses itself variedly. As an impulse without fixation, the reasoning imagination forces itself through and beyond events, things, agencies and contexts. As a generative force it morphs and transforms itself, disseminating genres in its trail as it pulsates through its contexts; it generates without end.

It is into such pulsating adestinal rhythms of reasoning imagination that the modular “good” of the European transplant invades. The invasive transplant can recognize the rhythms of the host only when they are subsumed into the normative hierarchy of the violent invader. The invasive normative humanist order with its presumed break with a theopolitical order would have little to communicate with the multiply differentiated, heterogeneously proliferated a-normative (or heteronormative) rhythms of the host culture. As a colossal pedagogical enterprise, colonialism ventures to norm the host by implanting discursive and institutional orders. Needless to say that these orders are dedicated to reinforce the European model as the universal cultural referent. The singular chance for displacing Eurocentric confidence gets evaporated in the advancement of European pedagogical venture. From Kant to Habermas this seductive storyline is intact. Programmed in the transplanted discursive and institutional orders, the postcolonial citizen is increasingly made insensitive to the surviving intimations of the host culture. The postcolonial is yet to reflect on these intimations from outside or beyond the intellectual cultural, historical and politico-philosophical legacies of ethnocentric Europe. European cultural intellectual past continues implicitly and explicitly to regulate postcolonial attitudes toward the host culture. We are yet to move beyond the guardrail of received legacies.

It might look incredible but the glaring fact, for instance, remains that colonial/postcolonial Indian intelligentsia – the clientele and beneficiaries – of the university has done little reflectively to move beyond colonial attitudes toward the culturally vibrant phenomenon like “caste”. European attitudes toward caste are European attitudes; there is nothing in European culture that prepared it to respond with responsibility toward the lively rhythms of “caste”. Finding it immeasurably slippery, dizzyingly simulacral, paganly monstrous, differentially replicative, apparently normed but resiliently norm-less, deeply natural but obviously cultural, “caste” emerged from European mentality as a wholly stigmatised object.

Castes of Thought

“Caste” vindicates the limits of European sensitivity and responsibility to what does not conform to European cultural referent. “Caste” exposes European failure to respond to the most unique opportunity it has had to overcome Eurocentrism – a colossal epistemic failure to respond to something radically different. Unfamiliar with, insensitive to profoundly heteronormative currents of life/living, European irresponsibility stigmatises caste on the eve of colonialism. The colonial epoch – the colossal pedagogical effort to change minds – consolidated its stigmatising attitude by turning caste into an object of discourse, a “textual” and empirical construct – and institutionalised the discourse. Awed and cowered by the colonial pedagogical power, silenced by the representationalist procedures and evidentiary practices, the colonial subject was more and more impelled to seek voice through these very channels. Colonial pedagogy nurtured desire for such grooming – it accrued material benefits along with lucrative mind change for the in-formed native. What escaped this pedagogical self-fashioning remained condemned to the fate of silence. In the course of time, the university – the template of the principle of reason – bred and replicated the “best” and worst voices groomed in the new discursive pedagogical modes. The clamour of these voices more and more immunizes them from the silences. This auto-immunization is the continued abdication of responsibility to the silenced.

The social sciences service the machine of discourse on caste – and it is in the nature of the machine to replicate what it has been designed or programmed to do. In accordance with their divided “specialities” the social sciences divisively aspectualize the “caste problem.” Irrespective of the disciplinary calculus, the dominant dogma concerning the stigmatised figure of caste remains common across disciplines. Given the substance of their object of inquiry – European canon – literary studies and philosophy transcend themselves from “caste debates.” It is doubtful whether the discipline of philosophy – a classically valorised profession of inquiry – in the Indian context ever ventured to reflect on the “caste question” unencumbered by Indological verities. In other words, one wonders whether philosophical inquiry or literary imagination ever risked inquiring into the potential for any thinking in general in the stigmatised and denigrated phenomenon called “caste”. One wonders why such an incredibly heteronormative phenomenon like “caste” (which is, incidentally, just one among many other cultural rhythms) did not encourage the possibility of critical unravelling of the violence of the mono-logo-theo-normative order of the West. The continued absence of such inquiries is eloquent testimony to our postcolonial destitution – a sign of the programmed way in which thinking and imagination gets regulated.

The colonial transplant effect is so productive that irrespective of the discipline and political parochialism, in the (post)colonial “public use of reason” there is consensus about the stigmatic nature of caste. It is an a priori evil and emblem of totalised oppression and one can only in “public” repeatedly give vent to this abjection. One cannot not think, in “public”, of condemning it, recommend its eradication, repeat catechistically its inhuman oppression. One can only wish, in public, of purging oneself of this abominable virus from the host tissues and fluids. One cannot think of any phenomenon in the (post)colonial epoch which evokes such a patterned, unified response across the intellectual terrain of the West and the subcontinent in the “modern” period. The ringing or reigning irony of this intellectual culture is that it proclaims its loyalty to unconditional exercise of reason in public and open-ended search for truth. But such a “noble heritage” has not encouraged any original inquiry – an exercise in public use of reason – into this enigmatic, asystemic norm-nature (erroneously) called (in nonsensical Portuguese) “casta”, beyond the patterned condemnation of it as a stigmatic object.

It is difficult to think of events and contexts of Western cultural history – however radically evil they might have been – that remained foreclosed for inquiry in rigorous and innovative ways. European modular goodness seems to implant precisely such a mechanism of foreclosure in the colonial body culturale so that it continues to replicate itself in the programmed ways. If “caste” is little more than a pure embodiment of oppression as the postcolonial cognoscenti across the disciplines and media cockily declare (“centuries of oppression”) and if it can be talked about only as a relentless oppressive mechanism – are we prepared to extend the same logic of foreclosure to all oppressive organs? Then how legitimate is it to continue to speak and think in the English language which championed slavery and colonialism and continues to inflict oppression on a planetary scale today? How legitimate it is to continue to celebrate the Western intellectual heritage (of noble thinkers and writers), which is a part of a culture that decimated populations for millennia, engineered and legitimised radical oppression on the others? The point that is so crudely belaboured here is that even such oppressive lineages of the West continue to have chance of being inquired into in different ways (hence their archival memory). No such fate is granted to cultures that faced colonialism – cultures whose rhythms and ways of being get stigmatised. They are obliged to endure a discredited exit.

For sure, the thematic of caste is very much in circulation in the public realm in our postcolonial times – its stridency is rather unparalleled in any other epoch. Every conceivable public constituency – formal, party-political, academic, media, judicial, and “democratic” – deems it mandatory to evoke the “caste problem” today. The din of caste discourse drowns everything else in the public use of reason across these domains. Yet the staggering fact remains that the transplant effect of abjection remains with such certainty in public use of reason: “caste” is a relentless totalising signifier of oppression: period! Public use of reason is yet to free itself from the transplant effect of guilt or shame and reflect on this much maligned and ill-thought praxial trope called “caste”.

All the sanctioned assertions about “caste” (through calculated reasoning of number and classification) in ill-thought unities and rampantly expedient discourses can only reinforce the transplant effect. They have done nothing to redress the postcolonial destitution of our times. Instead of risking a plunge into the abyss that the transplant effect has generated between the host culture and the programme of self-fashioning it sanctioned, these assertions most ironically reconfirm “caste” – through the gesture politics of championing the “oppressed.” Sanctioning or reducing the reflection on caste only to the overdetermined phenomenon of oppression, these accounts not just fall prey to the logic of denegation (disavowing what they practice) but continue to foreclose the risk of inquiry.

Any inquiry into “caste” that does not conform to sanctioned programming and which invites attention to the colonial effect of self-fashioning will be denounced as “casteist” (whatever that may mean) – that is, perpetuator of oppression. The crippling irony of this situation, which hardly receives attention is, that both the alleged oppressor and the veritable liberator are compelled by default as it were to attend to the enigma of caste. But, as Naipaul said it decades earlier, “the mind will not be allowed to think in India” – especially in matters concerning the complexity of “caste” (incidentally Naipual himself nurtures the received stance about caste: it must be eradicated.) Neither the quota bankers nor the quota busters are in a position to measure the cultural complexity of “caste”. Yet, “caste” like other rhythms, will continue to texture Indian living but will remain more and more un-rethought or will circulate only in sanctioned ways. Political correctness is another name for sanctioned ignorance.

Un-Archival Impulses

Every cultural form and every cultural composition in India, every verbal and visual genre that was invented and circulated over millennia was generated on the singular axiom: know yourself by knowing your kula (varna, jati). That is, one’s life and awareness are deeply related to one’s location in a kula. In other words, singularity of one’s existence and one’s sense of it are contingent upon one’s sense of the singularity of one’s own community and its existence. “Indian” cultural formations are woven with such fractal multiplicity of singularities. Discrete in their living and reflective compositions of speech and gesture, each of these singular communities is also intricately related to the other.

A radical impulse of difference and distance structures these multiple singularities – it enables the affirmation of the discrete (singular) and the related (“continuous”) existence and expression of these formations to move on. The most significant effect of this radical impulse is that it enabled each of these singular communities to affirm their living on in irreducibly distinct idioms of their voices and gestures, of compositions and artefacts. The heterogeneity of these idioms is immeasurable and inexhaustible (Manu outlines the generative template of such proliferation; Kautilya and Vatsayana enumerate – differently – the distinct idioms of such existents and their creations in the forms of chatushshastikalas – the “sixty four arts”). The cultural genealogies of these multiple singular communities can be traced back to the beginning of the first millennium (and even further into antiquity) – and their idiomatic narrative, visual and performing compositions proliferate in situation-sensitive modes. As can be noticed, these radically heteronormative proliferative singularities of culture and community get reduced to a stigmatised object called caste in the colonial epoch. The depth of our destitute times can be felt when one senses the demarcating distinctions of these idiomatic communities foreclosed for examination at an epistemic level.

In a word, in the “Indian” context (although not limited to it) – one cannot think of culture without the sense of the multiple singularities of community and their idiomatic articulations and inheritances. Neither these communities – which are themselves idiomatically differentiated internally and in relation to their counterparts– nor their articulations can be subsumed under a normative discursive order. No wonder European human sciences – which spawned a catachrestic discourse called Indology whose implicit cultural referent and implied reader are quintessentially Euro-centred – neither could respond to the call of these simulacrally and deliriously varied singularities – nor could they vouch any responsibility for them. With cultivated disregard for the unknown other, they violently imposed normative schemas on these formations; as a part of their protocols of representation these human sciences tried to circumscribe their proliferating multiplicity by manuscripting them, centralizing them through primitive accumulation modes for archives, normed standards for them in forging “critical editions”. It is impossible to think of the spread of the human sciences without the replication of the normative order and without the powerful reiterative techniques of scribal and print mechanisms globally.

Towards Critical Humanities

The colonial epoch unleashes an asymmetric confrontation between cultures of memory and the culture of the archive. This epistemic confrontation between mnemocultures that performatively embody memories in speech and gestural forms and the culture of the archive that objectifies and discursively institutionalises memories is still an unexamined and un-thought event. It remains un-rethought as the violent translational mechanisms of the archival-representational colonial transplant-effect continues to be dominant in the form of the university. With the acceleration of the archival techniques and capabilities, with the consolidation of archival capital (with unabated primitive accumulation modes), the asymmetry between mnemopraxial cultures and communications on the one hand and the mnemotechnical dominant on the other gets violently aggravated and orchestrated. In all these matters the university and the humanities are at stake.

The university is a humanistic concept – it is both the effect of and the arena for celebrating human potential and mastery. The university generates and circulates human productivity. Yet the university is fundamentally an objectifying, archontic institution. It is aimed at producing and accumulating positive knowledges. Irrespective of the discipline, the dominant current of the university remains from its inception positivistic and referentialist. At one level, the crisis in the universities, of the humanities (in the West) concerns this heritage of calculative reasoning that accumulated positive archival knowledges of/in the university. The crisis of the humanities in the university (in the West) concerns the foundational violence of the hierarchic division between reason and imagination that was validated and institutionalised through the university worldwide. But the crisis gets managed in the West by dismantling or downsizing of the humanities or redesigning the university to go telematic – a calculated move that today aims to invade life itself for its archival potential.

The crisis in the university in India (if any) has little to do with any attempt at grappling with the transplant-effect. The university in India is yet to unravel the foundational premise of calculated reason that programmed to generate positive knowledges. The humanities in India are yet to reflect on the distance and difference between the mnemopraxial cultures and communities and the violence of mnemotechnical archival mechanisms. The traditionally demarcated disciplines of imagination and reason, literature and philosophy, are yet to reflect on the validity of this epistemic demarcation and the legitimacy of its universalist spread. They are least prepared to learn to learn about the mnemopraxial reasoning imagination.

If the humanities are obliged to deal with human creativity, reflection and human invention, human utterance and artefacts, shouldn’t the humanities in non-European locations begin to reflect on the human creations and inventions and above all their discarded and denigrated accounts of the question of being human and its relation to the enigma of symbolization in these accounts? In other words, are the humanities (and the university) in India in a position to respond with responsibility to the creations, and reflections of multiple singularities of the heteronormative communities? Are they in a position to measure their inventive response to the epistemic question of being human beyond the calculus of (un-thought) disciplinary rationality (say, of folklore, history and ethnography)? In short, are they in a position to unravel the epistemic confrontation that the violence that the colonial epoch had initiated between embodied and enacted memories and the objectified and archival inscriptions? An unfortunate No! to these questions indicates the depth of our destitution.

The university and its component disciplines in India circulate and replicate themselves in accord with the template installed in the colonial epoch. Capitulated to the expedient discourses and manoeuvres and regulated by the calculative mechanisms of number and classification, the university expands its ill-thought regime. It has increasingly become apparent that the university has little to offer – except the inflated degrees with declining and value – to its expanding constituencies in terms of epistemic mind change to alleviate our destitution of postcolonial times. For even to meditate on such cultural tectonic changes across epistemic rupture that the European transplant effect has erupted, one needs to rekindle and nurture intimacy with the idiomatic singularities of what the discrete but related communities have proliferated mnemoculturally – in speech and gesture, in performance and artefact over millennia. The transplant-effect has ruptured the idiom and the modular humanities have done little to learn to suture the ruptured fabric of these discarded and discredited multiplicities of idiom. On the contrary, the class-mobile “beneficiary” of these modular humanities, the denegating inheritor of these stigmatised communities, is tacitly (and often willingly, in complicity) groomed to distance and differentiate himself/herself from the singularity of his/her cultural genealogies. The humanities rarely engaged with the ruptured idiom outside the received European or Europeanised modules. The humanities are yet to prepare itself for learning from the reasoning imagination that textures the verbal and visual idioms of the ruptured epistemies.

Living on with the colonial implant our ailing academic institutions are yet to learn to respond to and be responsible for “critical humanities.” They are yet to affirm the promise of these multiple singular monstrations of being. Our abyssal destitution awaits the yearning of/for critical humanities even as we mourn our postcolonial times.