PUBLIC announcements after SAARC meetings are generally boring and predictable. They range from statements on sustainability, stability, cooperation, peace or development. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent announcements after SAARC were not very different. Except for one line. Almost absentmindedly, as if it was a fragment from a different speech, he announced the need for a South Asian University (SAU). There was also an irony to it because the idea of an SAU, invented and nursed by civil society, has been quietly appropriated by the Indian nation state. Its pedigree is totally different. It was a collective idea, a salad tossed and dressed by NGOs, social movements, civil society groups. It is this latter genesis that needs to be understood.

This essay is divided into four parts. It begins with the idea of South Asia; then explores possible precedents for a South Asian university. It goes on to state the minimum normative requirements of such a university and finally, explores a few exercises that could graduate into projects or programmes of the university.

One does not have to read Gramsci to realize that one of the major challenges facing us is simple: ‘define or get defined’. Dominance today is exercised mainly through the categories that are embedded in the systems of knowledge. The challenge before us is to understand our own world in terms of our own categories. In this context, the question is: can South Asia reinvent itself in new ways?

Instead of remaining stuck in a series of stereotypes, South Asia must be seen as a different kind of knowledge society. Though one often talks of a modern university as a knowledge system, it is equally important to understand cultures as knowledge systems and the relation of the university to the wider culture.

 

South Asia cannot be just a geographical concept. To reduce it in this manner is to lose the possibilities of culture as politics. South Asia is a metaphor for the possibility of a whole range of alternatives. In fact, we cannot do without these alternatives. Imagine if India was to develop into an America. It would need the resources of six planets. How can the idea of SA evade such a pre-emptive future? What we need are spaces for major ideas where everything can be recycled, reused and reinvented in new ways.

If there is one idea that captures the South Asian dynamic, it is the notion of composting. As a process that combines decay and creativity, it allows for plurality. Nothing is totally alien, nothing is totally rejected. It includes both micro and macro time. South Asia is a place where ideas lost elsewhere find a niche. Ashis Nandy once called it a clearing house. It is the home of great religions, many ethnicities and a refuge for some of the most inventive NGOs, a Vavilov’s home for the diversity of ideas. The South Asian University must incorporate and represent these ideas. The ideal university emphasizes not only diversity but connectivity. It includes the marginal, the defeated, the radical, the eccentric, and the dissenting – a fluid geography of different imaginations.

These knowledges must not be seen as a stock, a store, a godown or a museum, or even an archive of ideas, but as a flow. This avoids Orientalizing them. In fact ideas must be nomadic and migratory and the university must mimic them. We can consider the South Asian University in terms of three earlier experiments.

 

The first is of course the United Nations University. In a positive sense the UNU in its most creative avatar was successful in highlighting the linkages between human rights and development. One of the best examples are the WIDER projects, especially those of Amartya Sen and Frederique and Steven Marglin. Yet the UNU was not really open to alternatives. While helping to create a more open-ended economics, it did so without challenging the basic tenets of development or science.

A second kind of experiment centres around the search for alternatives, clusters like those which developed around Ivan Illich and CIDOC, experiments like the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), the World Order Models Project (WOMP) and the World Future Studies Federation. These groups were very creative during the Cold War era, presenting some of the more interesting critiques of development. However, these institutional experiments had little to say on globalization and its challenges for our part of the world. For example, Wolfgang Sachs’ Development Dictionary needs to rewrite some of its entries to face the challenge of globalization.

The third cluster, centering especially around social movements in science and technology, like the Intermediate Technology Group of Schumacher or the Patriotic and People oriented Science and Technology (PPST) group, emphasized the power of local and traditional knowledge and even gendered knowledge.

 

Looking through the lens of these earlier experiments, attempts towards SAU today must confront four facts. First, many of the major dissenting ideas on development, state, science, and nation have come from grassroots movements rather than from universities. Second, one must recognize the creative and entrepreneurial function of NGOs who have served both as instruments for creativity and dissent and as extensions of many existing regimes. Third, that dissenting knowledges and groups have been increasingly co-opted by the establishment – the World Bank and other such agencies. They commonly speak in the language of culture, sustainability emphasising local voices, marginals, diversity, rights and so on. This is an appropriation of our language creating a strange political irony. Fourth, we must recognize that many of the above imaginations have yet to develop a comprehensive response to the challenges of globalization.

So at one level the SAU has to reinvent the current ideas of democracy and meet the challenges of what post-modernist and post-industrialists call the rise of the knowledge/information society. In essence, it has to be an exercise in the politics of knowledge.

 

At a more conceptual level, the South Asian University must simultaneously be a syllabus, a constitution and a community. A syllabus in South Asia has to reinvent pedagogy. It cannot be based on the dominant idea of a paradigm. South Asia is mulit-paradigmatic. Only such a politics of knowledge can redeem marginal and dissenting groups committed to alternative lifestyles and livelihoods. A syllabus has to be lifegiving. A textbook cannot keep museumizing defeated groups and possibilities. In that sense, a syllabus has to go beyond the interdisciplinary to the multicultural.

Ziauddin Sardar has repeatedly shown that multiculturalism must transcend political ethnicity. He argued that Britain cannot really become multicultural till the National Health Service incorporates Indian and Pakistani notions of health. Staffing a NHS with Indian and African doctors is not enough. A multicultural health effort would include not just medicines and doctors, but notions of cure, healing, pain, death and dying that accompany them, contextualizing an obsession with the canonical. The idea of South Asian knowledge has to rebuild the idea of the intellectual commons around the university. Becoming captive to the grammar of intellectual property or patents would destroy the South Asian University. Imagine a time when we have to patent a raga or a moment in jazz.

The SAU in a constitutional sense has to be an encounter of languages. One is referring not just to ordinary languages but the specialized vocabularies of development, psychiatry, agriculture, medicine, politics. Consider the idea of politics. One should try to go beyond the current ideas of rights, sovereignty, self-reliance, state, border, or compensation and look for alternative terms in our culture. This is based on the belief that no act of translation is fundamentalist. In reviewing new vocabularies, we can reinvent the current ideas of sovereignty, state, citizenship responsibility and thus create a new vocabulary for relationships.

 

As a conceptual community, the SAU must encompass and go beyond tribe, caste, class, nation. Every South Asian is a nested ensemble of identities from the primordial to the currently official. For example, such notions of community could help redefine notions of humanitarianism around hospitality. We have to take local ideas of syncretism and graft them onto transnational communities. We must use our ideas of communion and community, about nature to create new trends in ecology.

On the basis of this bare outline, one of the projects needed is a search for an alternative defence strategy and structure. One can push the point further and ask: does this need an alternative notion of violence? Peace, after all, as Ivan Illich has pointed out, is not just the absence of militarism or a conversion of guns into butter. Butter can sometimes take more lives than guns. The transition from militarism to development may not critically bring down the level of violence in a society. For instance, let us openly debate whether peace in Sri Lanka needs standard conflict resolution or a different notion of healing and difference to be worked out.

South Asia is a neighbourhood of disasters. In fact, disasters are rarely singular. Most people experience them in a quick cycle of drought, flood, earthquake, epidemic. Disasters have become theatres of thought where the state seeks to judge both its competence and that of civil society groups like religious sects, or NGOs seek to develop new philosophies and communities to grope with pain and suffering. The question that faces one immediately, in the context of the Kashmir earthquake, is: should not the LOC have become a line of contact, communication and community during the recent disaster? Should India have left it to the ineptness of bureaucrats or could it have reworked the rituals of disaster beyond aid? Can one improve on Roerich’s idea of the White Cross which was designed to protect archeological monuments in times of war? Instead of restricting ourselves to a particular segment (patients) or objects (monuments), could we have taken the lead to declare an entire area as a zone of peace without borders?

 

Finally, consider the idea of ecology. The Himalayas is the great commons of South Asia. It is sacred, strategic, an embodied cosmology for every South Asian. Can we create a new civilisational ecology around the Himalayas? These mountains are more than the facts of geology, ecology, strategy, religion, or geography. The challenge is: what is that bigger vision South Asia creates around the Himalayas rather than reducing it to a defence or tourist problem.

I am not actually saying much about the actual concrete organization. However, Imtiaz Ahmed’s recent paper on the South Asian University tempts me to make one observation. He visualises a university with the department of gender studies in Delhi, water management in Nepal, peace studies in Pakistan. I think the notion of the university must be much more virtual, a collection of networks rather than a department with a house or buildings. There is a danger of segmentalization and territoriality in Ahmed’s suggestion, even as I confess that my ideas on it might be too loose and blurred. Any idea of the South Asian University must contend with the possible futures. If one reads between the lines, Ahmed’s preoccupation is more with history and memory rather than with the future. The question of the future must engage with the idea of globalization and what it does to the lives of people in the Third World. If globalization is one form of imagination, can the SAU locate it more modestly in the diversity of other imaginations? These are hunches, thoughts that I am struggling with tentatively.

Let us remember the SA University can only be a set of modestly arrogant experiments, hypothesis and dialogues; it must not legislate a syllabus if its aim is to pluralize the future. The excitement of our project lies in diversifying both the present and the future.

 

The proposal for any South Asian University must avoid a top down view even if it foregrounds leading organizations in regional civil society. The latter might want to impose ‘their’ chosen syllabus on the society to immunize it from both communalism and bad nationalism. This could easily become a new kind of experts’ prerogative in the name of populism. There is a danger of think tanks substituting for the social fabric of the university. Simultaneously, it also forces us to ask whether the current idea of the university is the best way for an intellectual revival, especially when many of the great debates have bypassed the academe.

A South Asian university should seek to create a community of individuals devoted to the democratic imagination. It may then be imperative not to have a standardized syllabus but instead create a community of conversations which can then evolve into a series of innovative political positions. In fact, one can go as far as to suggest that in the initial years, the SA University should not have any fixed curriculum but give space for conversations so that a different kind of agenda can gradually emerge.

 

This essay is an attempt to sharpen the idea of the South Asian University to locate it within a broader framework of ideas. It also sharpens the challenge to Manmohan Singh and other state leaders. They have borrowed a civil society invention, in fact a collaboration of several South Asian groups. They should recognize their gift and celebrate it. A ‘borrowed gift’ has its own challenges. Singh has to improvise on it, turn it more democratic through dialogue and conversation, and offer it as one example of how South Asia reinvents democracy and hospitality to ideas. Such an effort must go beyond the current ideas of a left and right to create a more open, inventive world. Nothing is as fecund and as banal as an idea whose time has come. The South Asian University may be one of the great contributions to the idea of a knowledge society currently more obsessed with technology rather than institution building.

 

References:

Frédérique Apffel Marglin and Stephen A. Marglin, Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture, and Resistance. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990.

Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other: The New Imperialism of Western Culture. Pluto Press, London,1998.

Shiv Visvanathan, ‘Democracy, Plurality and the Indian University’, in M. Cross, N. Cloete, et. al. (ed.), Diversity and Unity: The Role of Higher Education in Building Democracy. Maskew Miller Longman, 1998.

Wolfgang Sachs, Development Dictionary. Zed Books, London, 1992.

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (ed.), The Quality of Life. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993.

Ashis Nandy, ‘The Politics of Indigenous Knowledge and Contending Ideals of the University’, in Ruth Hayhoe and Julia Pan (ed.), East-West Dialogue in Knowledge and Higher Education. M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1996.

 

* This paper grew out of my work on South Asian futures. I would like to thank Ashis Nandy, Shiv Visvanathan, Imtiaz Ahmed and Saba Khattak for their conversations.