Excerpts from the foreword by Professor Yash Pal to the Report of ‘The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education.’ December 2009.

(We are gratified that the logic of the report supports the premises of The South Asian Idea.)

We were struck by the fact that over the years we have followed policies of fragmenting our educational enterprise into cubicles. We have overlooked that new knowledge and new insights have often originated at the boundaries of disciplines. We have tended to imprison disciplinary studies in opaque walls. This has restricted flights of imagination and limited our creativity. This character of our education has restrained and restricted our young right from the school age and continues that way into college and university stages. Most instrumentalities of our education harm the potential of human mind for constructing and creating new knowledge. We have emphasized delivery of information and rewarded capability of storing information. This does not help in creating a knowledge society. This is particularly vile at the university level because one of the requirements of a good university should be to engage in knowledge creation – not just for the learner but also for society as a whole.

…..

We would like to point out that there are no great universities in the world that do not simultaneously conduct world class programs in science, astronomy, management, languages, comparative literature, philosophy, psychology, information technology, law, political science, economics, agriculture and many other emerging disciplines. Indeed the emerging disciplines do their emerging because of infection or triggering by other fields in the same university. That is the reason that such universities are so great and our academics keep going to them. Our argument is that they would not be great if they could not accommodate people from many other disciplines. Put together, all the disciplines, breed value into each other. If forced to stay in isolation from each other they would not have the character demanded for greatness. It is our strong recommendation that the new Universities, including those we call Indian Institutes of Technology – or Management should have the character of such world-class universities. Furthermore, the existing Institutes of Technology whose competence as excellent undergraduate institutions we do recognize (also their brand name) should be challenged to play a bigger role – for example similar to that of great universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) or Caltech. In addition, like these great universities of the world they should engage with a much wider universe of knowledge, both at undergraduate and post graduate levels.

…..

I would like to mention our deep concern in respect of two matters:

Mushrooming engineering and management colleges, with some notable exceptions, have largely become, mere business entities dispensing very poor quality education. We have made some recommendations in this regard.

Deemed Universities have also mushroomed. Most of them do not belong to the same class as those recognized as such twenty years ago.

…..

You would notice that we are placing supreme importance on the character of universities. They must create new knowledge. Besides making people capable of creating wealth they have a deep role in the overall thinking of society and the world as a whole. This job cannot be performed in secluded corners of information and knowledge. It would be silly to deny the practical role of experts in areas of science, technology, economics, finance and management. But narrow expertise alone does not make educated human beings for tomorrow. Indeed, speaking more seriously, one could almost say that most serious problems of the world today arise from the fact that we are dominated by striations of expertise with deep chasms in between.

The complete report (popularly known as the Yash Pal Committee Report) can be accessed here.

Back to Main Page

The controversy in India over the proposed separation of Telangana from Andhra Pradesh as a new state brought two thoughts to mind: the irony of history and the tyranny of fashion.

There is little argument that many states in India are very large in area and population – much larger than many countries – and that there is a good case that smaller units can lead to more effective and participatory governance. Thus the call for decentralization is credible and consistent with the fashion of the day.

But think back now to 1947: At Independence India had about a dozen provinces governed directly by the British and over 500 princely states governed by treaty with hereditary local rulers who accepted British sovereignty in return for local autonomy. Could you have more decentralization than 500 states that had a coherence imparted by the legitimacy of tradition?

What happened in 1947? For Macaulay’s children – “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” – tradition was equated with backwardness and the ways of Europe with modernity. It was the fashion of the time, the European nation-state, which served as the model for the reorganization of India.

Could this be considered an irony? It were the traditional states that lost their identity and were merged into the alien British provinces as India was reorganized into 14 provinces and 7 union territories. One could conceive a process in which the British provinces could have been absorbed back into the princely states which could then have been rationalized by the merging of the many postage-stamp sized ones into their larger neighbors. This process could have yielded an outcome with, say, fifty sub-national units.

But this would have called for a different India, one that would have built on its own traditions. The British deviation, with its preference for ‘Anglicists’ over ‘Orientalists’ with which Indians went along, sent it on a trajectory that is now being painfully reversed. India began with 14 states that had few roots in tradition; it almost doubled the number in 1971 using language as a criterion. The direction was right but the criterion was just as arbitrary as the one used in 1947. Is this becoming evident now when language-based states are themselves fragmenting?

It is worth noting that the arguments from above for reorganization are couched in the fashionable discourse of efficiency and better governance. But the demands from below are really about the recognition of identity. And what better identity can there be than one rooted in tradition, a tradition that was sacrificed at the altar of modernity?

This speculation must address one aspect that would undoubtedly come up immediately – the popular image of the princely rulers as sybaritic and incompetent wastrels. While surely some amongst the 500 or so rulers would have qualified for these epithets, the general characterization is a gross caricature. That was how the British wanted the rulers to be seen to justify their encroachments and that is what their policies indirectly encouraged. Once all real authority for governance was taken out of the hands of the hereditary rulers, they had nothing left to do with their forced leisure than to fall into the stereotype, and some indeed did. In actual fact, prior to the British interventions, many of the states were quite well governed, often better than they are governed today, a recollection that lives on in many memories.

The evolution of the Indian Union can be contrasted with that of the Malayan Union which was established in 1946 as a single crown colony incorporating all nine traditional states in the territory. This union was dissolved in 1948 to be replaced by the Federation of Malaya restoring the autonomy of the rulers (Sultans) in the Malay states under British protection. While modern Malaysia has a parliamentary system of governance, the federal head of state is the king who is elected to a five-year term among the nine hereditary Sultans of the Malay states.

The Malaysian experience is highlighted only to refute the inevitable objections that such an outcome would never have been possible in South Asia. It was an outcome that needed a self-confidence and a sense of history on the part of the Indian elites. It reflects a mix of tradition and modernity that provides both a sense of identity to citizens and continuity to politics, one that provides an evolutionary path as the population itself modernizes, and one that the British themselves have not discarded at home. The absence of such continuity has been felt less in India than in Pakistan and Bangladesh that are rent apart at every political transition without the stabilizing symbolic figures with whom the citizens can identify.

The challenge for India now is to find a way to contain its fragmentation having given up the framework that could have provided it an anchor in tradition. What are the options and what is the logic that would govern the process?

Back to Main Page

By Radhika R. Yeddanapudi

I received a birthday card from my father yesterday. In his familiar, right-leaning hand, he had written, “I believe this is your best birthday yet.” I imagined this card landing in the future in a stranger’s hand, perhaps in an old curiosity shop. What will the stranger make of my father’s allusion? A job, a promotion, an achievement of some sort? I wanted to ask my father to what he referred but decided against it. He may not have wanted to, or even been able to, articulate exactly why the birth of my son represented the best that my life could offer, only that he felt it.  I remained silent out of a mixed sense of inadequacy, propriety and maternal pride: a new living being can inspire and effect change in a way that no achievement can.  

My son Himadri was not real to me until we brought him home from the hospital. The involuntary nature of pregnancy, labor and childbirth left me feeling like there was nothing I could control, and hence the child of this natural set of events seemed quite unreal. At home, for the first three weeks, he was mostly represented by agonized crying, dirty cloth diapers that needed washing, continuous acquaintance with his by-products, arguments with my mother about child-rearing practices and sleeplessness. After my son’s birth, my husband was home for two weeks and woke up unfailingly at night, but he could not erase the angst and disorientation I felt when alone with Himadri. Motherhood seemed as vast and lacking in signposts as the Thar desert, and I, like that beast of burden, the camel, had to be the ship that carried its tiny passenger to a safe shore. My first lesson, therefore, was that the stay-at-home mother is “on” all the time. I was reminded of a word of advice from a colleague at my last job – when one is a manager one is on all the time: there are no weekends, time off or other reprieves from that role.   

I cannot say that this realization sat well with me; perhaps as a modern, educated woman, I find it hard to say that it could possibly sit well with me. Motherhood I had viewed as a “sexy” phase where women looked great, were confident, and did a million things successfully while still having great careers and producing well-behaved, obedient children. What I couldn’t have known is that while the mother-to-be is revered in all cultures, the mother herself is ignored postpartum or, worse, she is told “Your child, you are the expert,” or “For my child, I would do anything. Wouldn’t you?”! While pregnancy maybe unexpected, being a mother is expected. As the closest and sole companion of the child, the mother is to know him and decode his communication for others to enjoy. Society sends the unspoken message that being a mother is part intuition and part logic, but for the most part I have experienced it as a confidence game. I make decisions for the child and by making decisions exude a faux confidence both to society and to the child. If this is parenthood, small wonder then that since time immemorial adolescents have been disillusioned! I was surprised to learn that even though I was childless till my early forties, I had managed to convince society of my ability to rear a child. 

While society was convinced of my ability to rear a child, I was not convinced of society’s desire to support me in raising this child. Since I have been living in North America for the past 17 years, even the experience of being foreign has been internalized into my daily existence, until it seemed the “normal” North American life and my life were the same. Having a child has renewed my sense of isolation – more food for poetry but scarily prosaic in reality! How am I to explain to this child, who surely belongs here, that I still feel alien, that he may experience discrimination despite having one native parent?  Other South Asian mothers tell me of the moment when they decide to hide their disenchantment with their adopted countries so as not to alienate and terrify their children. Will that happen to me too?  

A few weeks ago Himadri subjected me to the first of his curiously grown-up gazes – curious, experimental with new found expressiveness against my loving yet guarded one. In the afternoon light, he lay with eyes wide open, while nearby I sat stealthily working on the computer, almost cowering from fear of his demands. After an hour of silence, he burst into a single, frustrated cry – lonely and uncomprehending! Here lay a sentient being, just too small and helpless in this new, alien environment, where two months previous, he had been master of his amniotic sea. He too, like me, had desires, hunger and the need for human company. It was the first time in my life that I felt guilt for putting my needs before another’s. 

Being a mother is a political act. For years I watched film and TV mothers: actresses who convinced us that mothers protest, strike, and even kill to protect and advance their young, sometimes even killing one of their young for their convictions, a la Nargis in Mother India. Men could be dismissed or scorned, but mothers were a different animal. Motherhood seemed to confer an authority and dignity even on the youngest of them.

I longed for that authority without recognizing the centrality of motherhood and thus for 41 years my politics remained impersonal and somehow theoretical. I never felt authentic enough – always in either the wrong place or in the wrong time – South Indian in Delhi, an Air Force brat with no regional affiliation, a non-immigrant in America, working in international development while wanting to write: I lived in a world of ideas. 

Having a child, however, is a fact. Every decision regarding Himadri, who is only three months old to date – spending, eating, using cloth or disposable diapers, buying toys, getting shots, reading stories, speaking in different languages – forces me to examine nationalism, internationalism, environmentalism, education, self-worth and culture. The self-imposed fog of inauthenticity has momentarily cleared and I have glimpsed how ideas shaped me and how they will shape Himadri. The option for detachment is fading, bringing a strange and new sense of relief.

I would be dishonest if I did not admit that I sometimes view Himadri as a rival with whom there is a primal struggle for time. While Himadri may continue me in a genetic sense, he is not me, not a clone. Himadri needs me to fulfill his most basic needs, and likely even when older he will not care how I find the time to fulfill myself. Amidst the early mornings, the late nights, the exhaustion, the headaches and the emotional moments, I have to do and live. Here is a time of practice, ambition not as a step up, but a long and winding road – no glory, no spotlight in the future, only a continuous refining and defining of meaning through the daily grind. Where previously my desires and ambitions were always a thing separate and removed from my existence, now my existence and continuation is the road of ambition. As surely as the wind that breaks down rocks, my little boy is whittling away excess! 

Perhaps in pregnancy I had a premonition of how this little boy would change and shape my life. The two names I chose for him were Himadri and Orestes – Himadri being the snow-capped mountain; Orestes the mountain-dweller or mountain conqueror. These names are to be taken together to signify one who conquers himself, but I also chose Orestes to recognize the child’s role in fulfilling the mother’s destiny. In Greek mythology, Orestes kills his mother; in my case, I assumed – correctly – that he would kill my ego.

Radhika’s last contribution to The South Asian Idea was Delhi – The City Remembered.

Back to Main Page

I will come back to what Michelle Obama has to do with this topic after I present the facts that are pertinent to the story. These facts are fairly well known but it was nice to find them described succinctly in Jared Diamond’s book (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) that I started to read again at the urging of Vinod.

Here is the essential statistic: on average, each citizen of the US, Western Europe, and Japan consumes about 32 times more resources and puts out 32 times more waste than do inhabitants of developing countries.

The leaders of all developing countries aspire to lift the living standard of their citizens to match those of the developed ones – the elites are already living at that level shaping the aspirations of the rest of the citizens. The East Asian countries have been growing rapidly over the last quarter century and the goal of the Indian government is to grow the economy at ten percent per year for the next twenty years.

Is this a feasible proposition? Diamond calculates that if every developing country citizen adopted the living standards of developed countries, the global impact in terms of resource use and waste generation would multiply by a factor of twelve. And he notes: “I have not met anyone who seriously argues that the world could support twelve times its current impact.”

People in the Third World aspire to First World living standards… Even in the most remote villages and refugee camps today, people know of the outside world. Third World citizens are encouraged in that aspiration by the First World and the United Nations development agencies, who hold out to them the prospect of achieving their dream if they will only adopt the right policies, like balancing their national budgets, investing in education and infrastructure, and so on.

But no one in First World governments is willing to acknowledge the dream’s impossibility: the unsustainability of a world in which the Third World’s large population were to reach and maintain current First World living standards…. Even if the human populations of the Third World did not exist, it would be impossible for the First World alone to maintain its present course, because it is not in a steady state but is depleting its own resources as well as those imported from the Third World… What will happen when it finally dawns on all those people in the Third World that current First World standards are unreachable for them, and that the First World refuses to abandon those standards for itself?

I thought of this as I heard the chatter surrounding the state dinner in Washington for Dr. Manmohan Singh. All the talk was about Michelle Obama’s ensemble that must have cost over $10,000 – it took over a dozen persons working more than twenty days under the supervision of a hotshot designer to the glitterati. In all likelihood, it would be worn just once. And then I imagined the prime minister’s wife taking out a sari she has probably worn before, and will wear again, tying up her hair as she does every day, and accompanying her husband to the White House. This is a huge contrast in living styles and standards – the opulence on one side not fazed by the deepest economic crisis for generations and over ten percent unemployment; the modesty on the other not dented by almost double digit growth for over a decade.

How will these trends play out in the future? My guess is that the First World is unlikely to abandon the lifestyle that it takes for granted. But would the billions in South and East Asia resist the temptation of emulating them? And, if not, would it be a fair outcome to the distribution of global resources.

Both presidents Obama and Hu Jintao are going to the Copenhagen climate talks with pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But this should not be mistaken for any intention to decrease the desired rates of economic growth. All it means is a commitment to be more efficient in the use of energy, i.e., to use less energy per unit of output – the output itself is not to be restrained. One can draw a parallel with the goal of increasing fuel efficiency of automobiles – by itself that is not enough to reduce the total amount of fuel used; the gains can be offset if the number of miles that automobiles are driven increases in proportion which has been the case to date.

Given this dilemma, do we have a choice not to question the notion of progress that we have taken for granted and that has become synonymous with the relentless growth of GDP? Instead of developed and developing societies, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss spoke of “hot” and “cold” societies. “The hot societies are the modern ones, driven by the demons of historical progress. The cold societies are the primitive ones, static, crystalline, harmonious. Utopia… would be a great lowering of the historical temperature [yielding] freedom in which man would finally be freed from the obligation to progress, and from the age-old curse which forced it to enslave men in order to make progress possible.”

Is there an alternative conceptualization of progress that could make everyone better off? Or, are we condemned to either accept an unfair distribution of global resources or to hurtle down the path of an inevitable confrontation?

The excerpt on Claude Levi-Strauss is from an essay by Susan Sontag, A Hero of Our Time, in the New York Review of Books, November 28, 1963.

Back to Main Page

Who is Going to Bail it Out?

By Anjum Altaf

We have all read the stories about very big entities failing and being bailed out – these include cities like New York, countries like Mexico and Pakistan, and corporations like General Motors and Bank of America whose businesses were bigger than the economies of many countries. All of them defaulted on their debts – went bankrupt – and were bailed out by an entity that was bigger than them, the US Government alone or in concert with other developed countries.

The combination of size and of the existence of a savior, the protector of last resort, gives rise to a dilemma that is known as ‘moral hazard.’ When an entity believes its failure would damage the rest of the system and that there is someone who will not allow that to happen, then it loses the incentive to manage its risks prudently.

This is quite easy to imagine. If the corner bakery fails no one would bother about it – this is considered the strength of the free market which promotes efficient competition by weeding out incompetent firms. But when General Motors fails, this logic is suspended because GM’s failures could trigger cascading failures throughout the auto industry and its service economy. Because the managers of General Motors believe this, the incentives that guide their behavior and that of the owner of the corner bakery are quite different. For example, GM managers can take outsized risks and give themselves big bonuses even when the company is making huge losses. Similarly, Pakistan’s leaders can mismanage and pillage the economy knowing American policymakers have determined that Pakistan cannot be allowed to fail – which is great for the leaders but terrible for the citizens.

This brings us to a consideration of the world in the context of the global climate crisis. What can be bigger than the world? But, if the world fails, who will bail it out? Allah maalik hai is all and well but even if we fall back on that divine cushion we should remember the corollary that God helps those who help themselves. So, how exactly are we going to help ourselves in this crisis?

Let us leave aside for the moment two contentious issues: Is this crisis for real and, if so, is it the doing of human beings? My interest is more in figuring out how one goes about thinking of such an issue – so let us assume that it is real for the sake of argument. (The Government of Maldives already does and is looking to buy land in anticipation of a rise in sea level that would submerge the islands. South Asia is projected to be amongst the most affected regions by global warming.)

I find useful an analogy similar to the comparison between General Motors and the corner bakery in the context of moral hazard. Think of two households; however, instead of size, now focus attention on the differences in the nature of household budgets. Suppose the monthly household budget is Rs. 20,000 that you get in cash at the beginning of the month. In one case, you know that if in a particular month you break the budget (expenditures exceed allocations), you can borrow the balance from a bank or be subsidized by your father. In the other case, if you go over budget, your house is repossessed – it’s the end of the game. The first is known as the ‘soft’ budget constraint; the second as the ‘hard’ budget constraint. As you can imagine, the softness or hardness of the household (or business) budget constraint has a great impact on individual behavior.

Now apply this analogy to the environment. Clearly, our behavior reveals that we have been living in a world where we feel we are governed by a soft environmental constraint – we believe we can borrow against the future, i.e., we can have economic growth now and have the luxury of cleaning up its environmental consequences later. At the present time, the starkest example of this is China which is fueling its rapid economic growth by building more than one coal-fired energy plant a week. As a result, seven or eight of the ten most polluted large cities in the world are in China with some known and many unknown health impacts on the residents.

Presumably, China believes that it can follow the path treaded by the West. Western cities were environmental hell-holes well past the Industrial Revolution but most were successfully cleaned up later – the London and LA smog are still remembered by many people (the former so well described by Eliot in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). The scenario in India is very similar to that in China, only less intense, which is not for any lack of trying by the Indians – inefficiency can at times be good for you.

But what if the environmental constraint is no longer soft? What if the decades of abuse of the environment (at least since the discovery of oil-based energy) have now turned it into a hard constraint? What, if that last unit of carbon dioxide emission that would trigger an unstoppable runaway process is close at hand? What if we have arrived at the tipping point beyond which all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again?

This is what an increasing number of scientists are warning – we are close to such a tipping point. And this opens up a host of interesting issues. Climate change does not know any borders – in the end it will not matter whether the bulk of the damage was done in the past by the now developed countries.  The innocence of the developing countries will not save them – as mentioned before South Asia would be one of the most affected regions from sea rise at one end to glacier melt at the other.

So, how are developed and developing countries going to find a mutually acceptable agreement that is both fair and goes far enough to make a difference? What kind of rules and morality applies in situations like these where the whole system is at risk and there is no one to bail it out. I can’t help my mind going back to the partition of the Indian subcontinent – its leaders kept bickering and were unable to find an acceptable agreement leading to a million deaths and ten million homeless. Is human shortsightedness, false pride, sheer stupidity, and lack of feeling for ordinary people going to make us witness a replay only now on a global scale? This time there might be no one left to gloat over the superiority of one side over the other.

It is useful to end with what has been termed the ‘boiling frog’ analogy: if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.

Will we allow ourselves to be cooked to death? Is it hubris to think humans are any wiser that frogs?

For the implications of climate change in South Asia see the special Autumn (October-November 2009) issue of Himal Magazine. For an essay competition on the tipping point, that fateful last tonne of carbon dioxide, see The Ecologist.

Back to Main Page

Maupassant provided us the opportunity to reflect on the social pecking order in South Asia and Kabir’s comment has pushed the door wide open. There is so much space for speculation that it needs a post by itself to fill. In doing so we can bring together a number of themes that have figured prominently on this blog – in particular those of modernity and democracy in South Asia.

A lot has been written about French salons and there remain disagreement on the details – I will choose selectively to motivate the discussion:

A salon is a gathering of intellectual, social, political, and cultural elites under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation.

The salon evolved into a well-regulated practice that focused on and reflected enlightened public opinion by encouraging the exchange of news and ideas. By the mid-eighteenth century the salon had become an institution in French society and functioned as a major channel of communication among intellectuals.

A whole world of social arrangements and attitudes supported the existence of French salons: an idle aristocracy, an ambitious middle class, an active intellectual life, the social density of a major urban center, sociable traditions, and a certain aristocratic feminism.

The period in which salons were dominant has been labeled the ‘age of conversation.’

Theatres of conversation and exchange – such as the salons, and the coffeehouses in England – played a critical role in the emergence of… the ‘public sphere’ which emerged in cultural-political contrast to court society.

Wealthy members of the aristocracy have always drawn to their court poets, writers and artists, usually with the lure of patronage, an aspect that sets the court apart from the salon. Another feature that distinguished the salon from the court was its absence of social hierarchy and its mixing of different social ranks and orders. In the 17th and 18th centuries, salons encouraged socializing between the sexes and brought nobles and bourgeois together. Salons helped facilitate the breaking down of social barriers which made the development of the Enlightenment salon possible.

Put all this together and a fairly clear picture begins to emerge. One can see the evolution in society whereby a public space is created outside the patronage of the court and in this space individuals on the strength of their talents and freed from the stigmas of social hierarchy engage in conversations about ideas that form the core of the Enlightenment. And this paves the road to the French Revolution in 1789, the fading out of the monarchy, and its gradual replacement by a democratic political order. (For an understanding of the factors that drove this evolution, read the first part of this excellent essay on Hobbes. The economic historian, Dierdre McCloskey, makes the extreme claim that it was these conversations that explain the modern world, not material or economic factors.)

The contrast with South Asia should also be obvious. The patronage of artists by the courts was very similar to that in France but the creation of independent spaces for public discourse never took place, radical ideas of equality and liberty never took hold, and the hierarchical social order was never disturbed. As a result, a social revolution did not take place in South Asia.

Notwithstanding the absence of a revolution that would have done away with social inequalities, South Asia inherited a democratic order as a legacy of British colonial rule – a democratic order into which the ancien regime survived with its privileges quite intact. Not surprisingly, in this undisturbed social hierarchy, the wielders of authority remained at the top and mere talent at the bottom.

As we have argued in earlier posts, this reversal of sequence is what makes the evolutionary process in South Asia so unique and fascinating – democracy and the vote are being used to both bring about equality and to force the acceptance of a belief in equality. Democracy is the instrument that is substituting for what the Enlightenment and social revolutions did in the Western world. And all this is taking place without any real sharp discontinuity in the intellectual and moral worldview of the typical South Asian.

Given the nature of the dynamic, it is no surprise that the struggle for the socially marginalized is proving to be so long drawn out and painful. The privileges of birth are yielding ground only very reluctantly to talent. Not for nothing does South Asia remain one of the last bastions of dynastic rule.

One last thought: can we think of blogs as modern-day equivalents of the French salons? If yes, does that give us some new ideas on how to use them better?

Back to Main Page

There is a sentence in Julian Barnes’s review of two novels by Maupassant (1850-1893) that struck me with unusual force and I wish to use it to reflect on our societal values in South Asia.

Barnes is talking about four pages in one of the novels that describe Parisian salons, “the tactics of the women who run them and the talented men who frequent them.” And here is the sentence that should knock a South Asian for a six:

Maupassant discusses the pecking order of guests: musicians at the top, artists next, writers coming a close third, with other riff-raff like generals and parliamentarians occasionally tolerated.

I am not making it up – you can look up the original here. Go over the pecking order again and take a few moments to let it sink in. Who is he calling occasionally tolerated riff-raff? And who is at the top? This is like standing South Asia on its head, isn’t it?

The unanswered question is obvious. Why are the social pecking orders of late nineteenth century France and twenty-first century South Asia so entirely reversed?

I don’t have an instant answer to this and leave it for discussion for the moment. But I do have Maupassant’s reasoning for the pecking order in the France of his time:

He notes how musicians are treated like royalty and inspire a fetishistic following; artists can be a little unreliable and rough-mannered, but worth it; while writers are useful because they talk a lot. Among the latter, your poet is more idealistic, and also more trustworthy, than your novelist, who ‘loots and exploits and gnaws away at everything he sees. With him, you can never feel safe, never sure that one day he won’t lay you naked on the pages of a book.’

Note that he does not even bother about the riff-raff that is only occasionally tolerated in the salons. It is clear that it was individual achievement, the acknowledgement of distinction by one’s peers, some mark of originality, which opened the door to intellectual companionship. Authority and position were not accomplishments of a comparable order and did not count for much.

And this is how it should be, shouldn’t it? So, why is it not like that in South Asia? Or, is it?

Back to Main Page

There has been a spirited debate triggered by Mark Slouka’s essay (Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School) and in this post I am setting down what I have taken away from the discussion.

Science and the humanities are both ancient and great traditions and I doubt if there is anyone who would set them up in an antagonistic zero-sum confrontation the way people tend to do in the case of science and religion. Both are vital and necessary elements of a balanced education. That much should be a statement of the obvious. It is only when we focus on their different strengths that we enter into an interesting discussion.

To posit their differences very starkly one can oversimplify a little and adapt the argument of a recent article on religion and science: humanities ask about the why, science explains the how; science researches matters of empirical fact, while the humanities are concerned with matters of ultimate values; scientists use empirical techniques and theories to account for the physical and material world, whereas the humanities are concerned with the non-material aspects of life. Science cannot provide the answer to our metaphysical questions and the humanities cannot explain how nature works.

The same article uses the example of the global climate crisis to show how the two are related. Human beings will only be able to respond appropriately to the crisis when the best scientific information is combined with the values and motivations that emerge out of asking what it means to be human, who we are, and how we should act in the world. Questions like these are at the heart of the humanities and in an excellent article Stanley Fish shows how just reading Milton can help us get to grips with almost all of them. (It was the inspiration for the Ghalib Project on this blog.)

An important issue in our discussion has been realization of the importance of critical thinking as a necessary condition for the achievement of a just and ethical society. While the importance of critical thinking is beyond question, its relationship to science and the humanities has not been articulated clearly. I would argue that one must differentiate between strands of critical thinking that are peculiar to the domains of science and the humanities. The critical thinking that goes with the pursuit of science has to do primarily with speculation and reasoning; in the case of the humanities the focus is on abstraction and analysis. One cannot do good science without the ability to think critically – all the great scientists were also great thinkers – but science may not be the best vehicle to teach the kind of critical thinking that was the concern of Mark Slouka, i.e., the thinking needed to investigate the nature of our humanity.

I think it is important to realize that critical thinking cannot be taught theoretically – one cannot have a Critical Thinking 101 and hope to be successful. Critical thinking is learnt by osmosis and while science and humanities nurture their own domain-specific types of critical thinking, well-rounded human beings need an exposure to both. We need to know the shortest path between two points and we also need to know where the two points ought to be located.

Some of these differences stem from the varying nature of enquiry in the sciences and the humanities. Science involves the search for truth and scientists dig deeper and deeper to uncover that truth – but there is, in general, only one true answer to a proposition in science. This is most obvious in mathematics, the purest of sciences – the answer to a math problem is either right or wrong. One speculates about the possible answers and reasons and experiments the way to the one that is true. In the humanities, on the other hand, there is no right or wrong answer – there are multiple answers, some more coherent or persuasive than others. In getting to terms with these multiple answers one learns the qualities of tolerance, detachment, openness, and equanimity, and gracefulness.

One can visualize these very different perspectives by imagining a class in mathematics and in literature. Both subjects are intrinsically beautiful but the nature of the interactions between peers is quite different. In the former one is seeking a certainty, in the latter learning to deal with doubt – what Claude Levi-Strauss terms the “philosophical attitude par excellence.” His description of the trauma of ‘anthropological doubt’ should be very familiar to those who have been part of a tutorial class having to read an essay to a half dozen peers ready to tear the argument to shreds: “This doubt consists not merely in knowing that one knows nothing but in resolutely exposing what one knows, even one’s own ignorance, to the insults and denial inflicted on one’s dearest ideas and habits by those ideas and habits which may contradict them to the highest degree.”

Needless to say, neither the creative scientific attitude nor the nurturing of open thinking in the humanities can be achieved without teaching of high quality. But one can infer from the above why the teaching of the humanities might be that much more onerous. In a class in science, one finds out sooner or later that one’s answer to a problem was wrong – and that information is enough to make one seek the source of the mistake and to correct the thinking that led to the error. Nothing like that process of self-directed learning exists in a class in the humanities – the instructor has to provide the feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the argumentation, its logic, and coherence. If the class is too large, if the teaching assistants are not sufficiently advanced, if the mid-term assignments are not returned till the final, virtually no real learning may take place in a course except a superficial familiarity with the works of a particular author.

When one combines this inherent difficulty with the fact that school teachers in the humanities are accorded a lower status than those teaching math and science, that students and parents have come to think of the humanities as of little worth in the competition for jobs, that society encourages the best and the brightest to gravitate to well-paying professions – it is only then that one realizes the gravity of the challenge that Mark Slouka highlights in his essay.

It should also be recognized that because the ability to reason and the capacity of being open minded are imbibed by osmosis, the intellectual make up of a young adult is more or less determined by the end of high school. The style, the content, and the quality of South Asian school education are all devastating in this regard – it is no surprise that we are producing excellent technicians who are quite out of their depth in fields outside their narrow specializations and that the quality of political leadership has declined rather than improved over the years.

Mark Slouka is right to raise the danger flag even though, at its best, American school education is very much structured around open enquiry and colleges ensure that every student, no matter what the final choice of major, takes enough courses across the humanities and the sciences to measure up to the needs of an educated citizenry. Slouka’s concern is that the increasing orientation of society geared to the corporate bottom line – a phenomenon very well articulated by Lewis Lapham – is ‘dumbing down’ the humanities, transforming them from the engine of subversive thinking to a toothless appendage of big business.

This may well be true. If so, America would lose its cutting edge and become more like South Asia – a huge pool of technically qualified people with diminished creativity and its democracy would begin to fray at the edges. But this drift in the orientation of society cannot be attributed to the dominance of science. It has very different causes and the causality runs in the reverse order. It is the dominance of corporate interests that is dictating the allocation of resources in education with the balance shifting away from the humanities. One only has to look at South Asia where this is already the case although for somewhat different reasons.

There is one last aspect that needs highlighting. Critical thinking, whether the variant nurtured by science or the one by the humanities, is a capability that is independent of ethics and values. It is necessary to question the greed, cruelty, injustice, and the spurious ideologies that riddle our society but it is by no means sufficient. Values and ethics belong to the realm of social conscience that has its roots in a different domain – and the search for that domain has an interesting and tortured history.

Back to Main Page

You must have had the experience of catching just a part of an interesting conversation and wondering how it might have evolved. It happened to me today as I moved past an African and a South Asian who, the words suggested, was a Pakistani. I heard the African asking, “What do professionals like you really want to see happening in Pakistan?” And    before I could hear the answer the words were swallowed by the silence.

It was a good question at a time when Pakistanis seem to be living from day to day just hoping for the situation to stabilize. What kind of Pakistan might middle class professionals really want beyond this immediate crisis if they got around to thinking about it? I would have loved to hear but the opportunity was lost. I wondered then what I might have said had I been given that part in some role-play exercise or in a mock UN format.

Let me try and imagine the elements that might comprise a vision capable of eliciting support across the spectrum of Pakistani professionals and would-be professionals who are now in schools and colleges.

First, there might be agreement that Pakistan should make the transition that has been achieved in Latin America – from the dominance of the military to stable democratic rule with the military unambiguously answerable to the civilian leadership.

Second, that the country should have an authentic civilian leadership – not one manufactured by the military as a cover for its control or orchestrated by the American government to further its strategic interests.

Third, that this authentic democratic leadership should turn its focus inwards to address the major issues that have reached crisis proportions. For this to happen, the leadership should put aside the aggressive designs that have been pursued in foreign policy and call a truce with the country’s neighbors to create the space and release the resources needed to address domestic issues.

Fourth, that the domestic agenda should give the highest priority to amicable relations among the constituent elements of the union by giving much more autonomy to the provinces.

Fifth, that the leadership should focus first on the bottom third of the population consigned to sub-human existence for over sixty years. This would involve reallocating resources for employment, education, and basic services for the most deprived groups in the country.

Sixth, that there should be guaranteed civil rights and equal access to justice for all Pakistanis.

Seventh, that Pakistan should transition to a society based on merit with accountability to the public of all office holders and service providers.

I feel the above would constitute an agenda that could hope to command the allegiance of a majority of Pakistani professionals. Beyond this there would remain critically important issues but ones that would prove divisive. Amongst these would be issues like the separation of church and state, the end of discrimination against women, the reform of the public school curriculum, and the teaching of the performing arts in schools. These would remain partisan issues that would call for a continued struggle within Pakistani society.

Of course, the big issue would remain the achievement of the vision outlined above but articulating it as the basis for the coming together of civil society would be a necessary first step. Hearing the question framed by an outsider made me realize that perhaps Pakistanis have not given sufficient importance to this preliminary requirement for social and political mobilization. Clearly their political parties have not put forward any coherent or comprehensive or even contending visions for the future of the country.

This was a hypothetical exercise in role-play for me and I am curious to know the extent to which Pakistani professionals would agree to it. I also wonder what other South Asians would have to say – what in their view should Pakistani professionals be wanting for the Pakistan of tomorrow?

Back to Main Page

By Anjum Altaf 

Bruised and battered as Indian women might be (psychologically, not physically as the poll on this blog suggests), there is another side to Indian femininity reflected in the myths of powerful goddesses. I came across an interesting perspective on this in David Shulman’s review (A Passion for Hindu Myths, NYRB, Nov. 19, 2009) of the new book by Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History:

Sometimes the history of India looks like a story about endless waves of virile invaders from the north-northwest – Scythians, White Huns, Afghans, Turks, and, most recently, the British – who slowly grow soft and decadent under the insidious influence of the dreamy, langorous, mystically inclined Hindus…. [But according to Doniger] India’s astonishing talent for absorbing and transforming the peoples pouring in from outside, seen through a Hindu lens, has nothing to do with any softening or melting down of a hard, preexisting monolithic culture; it is, rather an active process of selection and pragmatic recycling, with the female principle – mare, queen, dancing girl, or goddess – driving the rather helpless (often foreign) male.

I was reminded that the same process was underway with the British as documented by William Dalrymple in The White Mughals. At the beginning of the nineteenth century one in three British men were living with or married to an Indian woman and according to one English description of some, they “wear immense whiskers, and neither will eat beef or pork, being as much Hindoos as Christians, if not more; and, having come to this country early they have formed opinions and prejudices, that make them almost natives.”

Of course, as we well know, the magic of absorption failed for the first time in the case of the British and there was a decisive turning point recorded also by Dalrymple in The Last Mughal. This culminated in the revolt of 1857 followed by a growing demand for the British to quit India. Dalrymple attributes this change to two major causes: First, that in 1803 the status of the British changed from being just one of the contending powers in India to its sole rulers giving rise to the arrogance of superiority. Second, the arrival of evangelical Christian missionaries with a low opinion of Indian ‘heathens’ in need of salvation led to the growth of Indian resentment. The humiliations inherent in the ‘White Man’s Burden’ changed the dynamic from one of absorption to one of antagonism.

I suppose if I had read Dalrymple’s books earlier I might have been convinced by this explanation. But I hadn’t; instead I had read GS Cheema’s The Forgotten Mughals: A History of the Later Mughals of the House of Babur and had extracted a different explanation from it. In his book, Cheema has insightful observations about the forgotten British – the English women:

In the old days, there were very few European women and the officers of the Company rarely went ‘home’ on leave. Usually they returned only on superannuation or when compelled by ill health. In India they lived like the Indian umara, and took to wife Indian ladies who were sometimes ladies of quality. From them they learnt the language and customs of the people, and acquired a much more sympathetic understanding of the complexities of the Indian world.

The gentlemen of the old school “maintained Indian households with bibi-ghars and were perfectly at home in Persian and Hindustani.” For example, Lt-General Sir David Ochterlony, the first Resident at the court of Shah Alam II (1759-1806) lived the life of an oriental ameer “complete with hookah, oriental robes and a bibi-ghar well stocked with dusky beauties.” Ochterlony, who had been away from England for over 50 years, had thirteen Indian wives and every evening he escorted all of them around the Mughal capital, each on the back of her own elephant. Ochterlony’s assistant William Fraser had six or seven wives – the shocked remark about the men in whiskers was about Fraser and Edward Gardner, another of Ochterlony’s assistants.

Cheema depicts the Residency as an important center of social life:

Members of the imperial family… nawabs, rajas, and courtiers of the Qila-e-Mualla would be guests at entertainments which were of the traditional type… There was no attempt to replicate English garden parties or formal dinner-balls. Liquor flowed freely. In the background could be heard the gentle gurgle of the water-pipe or hookah, while the nautch girls danced to Persian or Hindostani songs.

Cheema’s explanation of the big change in India has to do with the arrival of English women:

The bibi-ghars were shut down, concubinage went into the closet, and the mem laid down the law in her house… the onset of every cold season in India brought a number of unmarried English maidens — the ‘fishing fleet’ — who would come visiting relatives in India in the hope of hooking a husband…the easy intercourse between Indian and British officers became a thing of the past.

It is important to note a fact of history – the opening of Egypt at the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. Prior to the opening, ships from England had to go around the Cape of Good Hope, a journey that consumed five to six months. Access through Egypt cut the time by more than half. One consequence was a major increase in the number of British women and missionaries traveling to India.

The timing fits both the Dalrymple and Cheema explanations. I sent a tongue-in-cheek piece I had written earlier on the subject to Dalrymple but he was not convinced writing back that the alternative explanation placed too big a burden on the English woman.

Dalrymple is the historian and I am not so I am not quarreling with him but I did confirm that his long bibliography to The White Mughal does not refer to Cheema’s book. So, it is possible that he had not given this aspect much thought. I continue to think that it is a dimension that deserves more consideration. All invaders prior to the British (post 1815) came to India with few women and it was the human need for physical companionship that provided the lubricant for social interaction and gentle absorption – what Dara Shikoh captured in the evocative title of his book Majma’ al-Bahrain (The Mingling of Oceans).

One can apply the same dynamic to all the foreign jihadis that descended much later in history in Pakistan’s tribal areas at the invitation of the Americans and the Saudis to fight the Russian invaders in Afghanistan. All of them came as single males and lived with or married local women. As a result, the local tribes are now perplexed when they are asked to throw out the foreigners or to give them up. What foreigners? One can easily imagine that the situation would have been quite different had these jihadis arrived with their families much as corporate executives do when posted abroad in the globalized economy.

There is one other implication of this line of thought that upsets Wendy Doniger’s Hindu-centric female principle as the explanation for the absorption of virile invaders into a soft Indian society. If we extract the right conclusion from Cheema’s argument, we can explain virtually everything by the fact that the invaders (and traders) were men who needed female company. Before the Muslim invasions, all the Indian women were Hindu. By the time the British arrived, there were Muslim and Sikh women as well and there is no evidence the invaders were seduced disproportionately by Hindu women. The central story in The White Mughal is in fact about a Muslim woman.

The point I had tried to make in what I had written earlier was to highlight the profound contribution of Indian women to our social history, bruised and battered as they might be in their everyday lives. Imagine the latent power that has been suppressed for all this time and what it could mean if allowed to flourish in all the other fields of life – politics, economics, science, commerce, and war.

Back to Main Page