Books

COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: Recent Experiences in the Indian Social Sector by Avik Ghosh. Sage Publications, Delhi, 2006.

THOSE familiar with the area of communication and development will surely have heard of Avik Ghosh. He was, among other things, a co-founder of CENDIT (Centre for Development of Instructional Technology) in 1972, an NGO that pioneered the use of audiovisual technologies for development communication. He subsequently joined the National Literacy Mission and worked as a media coordinator for the Department of Adult Education. He has worked in various national and international organizations and is deeply committed to the idea of using communication for development. I provide this introduction at the outset to underscore that Ghosh has been a practitioner of development communication strategies, not merely a utopian spectator and, therefore, it is important that we seriously consider his observations.

As Ghosh states in the introduction, the book emerges out of his professional association with ‘large scale state-led/donor assisted development programmes’ and as a response to a ‘paucity of documented experiences regarding the application of communications technology.’ As a professional responsible for evolving and implementing communication strategies, the book is a documentation and assessment of the various projects that have used communication technologies as an integral aspect of development projects.

The first part of the book provides a historical background to the ‘evolving nature’ of communication technologies in development processes while the second part forms the substantive core of the book. In this section the author focuses on the social sector programmes in the area of literacy, population and rural development. Ghosh uses the term communication technologies to signify ‘a whole system that includes setting objectives based on research, programme design and planning, application of hardware, preparation of materials and professional management that is accountable.’ The key feature that distinguishes the efforts under discussion has been the attempt to decentralize planning and implementation by mobilizing local groups and communities to take active part. The specific programmes discussed in the book include the efforts of the National Literacy Mission that has perhaps been one of the most creative attempts made by the Government of India where radio and TV played a major role. This is followed by a discussion of India’s population programme that focused on family planning methods which came in for a great deal of criticism by women’s groups. The section on rural development discusses specific case studies from different regions. The book is propelled by Ghosh’s conviction that the ‘importance of communication in facilitating social change is not understood or appreciated by the government.’ He argues that for social change to happen in a developing country, it is imperative that people have the right to information and are allowed to participate actively in development programmes that concern their own lives. This, he says, is India’s communication challenge.

The book is a rich and detailed compendium of information for students, scholars, activists and practitioners involved or interested in processes of development. The discussion around the National Literacy Mission is particularly significant for communication scholars as the programme made innovative use of media materials. It was personally gratifying to see a separate section on the late Safdar Hashmi’s contribution to the literacy mission as many of us remember singing his well-known literacy song, ‘padhna likhna seekho’ which had the contentious line, ‘bookh se marne walon’. (Learn to read and write, O those who die of hunger/Learn to read and write, O those who work and labour.) Ghosh writes that since the contentious line (referring to those who die of hunger) had to be changed and Safdar was no more to do the needful, Doordarshan just went ahead with ‘padna likhna seekho…’ My memory may not be very accurate on this but I seem to remember the line being changed to ‘padhna likhna seekho, o bhookh se larne walon’ (Learn to read and write, O those who struggle with hunger) even while Safdar was alive.

In the last chapter, Ghosh makes a strong argument for professionalising the business of development as the government had failed to deliver its development promises thereby losing the trust of the people who, in turn, are becoming more and more abject and despairing. He argues his case quoting many examples including the disastrous Narmada Valley project. Ghosh challenges the prevalent idea that simply delivering messages to the people – through broadcasting or otherwise – will automatically lead to behaviour change. He argues that behavioural change is slow and difficult because it involves confronting deep-rooted orthodoxy and social prejudices. Therefore, development initiatives, if they are to be at all effective, have to go well beyond the production of media materials. (This may seem obvious to some but it is surprising how many people still believe that development is all about getting the ideas ‘out there’.)

Ghosh believes that the social sector should learn from the marketing strategies and consumer profiling of the private sector. While this may work insofar as reorganizing the delivery chain pertaining to services, it is unlikely to prove effective in social sector interventions where longstanding values and prejudices are at stake. Marketing strategies advocating behaviour change (like selling the idea of mobile telephony) do not challenge the status quo, whereas behavioural change in the social sector requires a radical remaking of social relations and hierarchies. Of course, no one is more aware of this than Ghosh himself who has detailed the difficulties of facilitating social change at the local level.

This book is a valuable addition to debates and discussions around India’s development programmes and there is much to learn from a person who has practised what he has preached. My only criticism is about the style of the book since it sometimes lapses into reading like a report. I wish it were more conversational and easy to read. But that is perhaps a small price for what the contents have to offer.

Shohini Ghosh

 

THE ECONOMICS OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN INDIA: The Challenge of Public Finance, Private Provision and Household Costs edited by Santosh Malhotra. Sage Publications, Delhi, 2005.

THE book presents the results of a survey undertaken by UNICEF in 1999 in seven Indian states, six of which are low performing states as far as elementary education is concerned, i.e. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Assam and West Bengal, and one, Tamil Nadu, is a success. The focus is on financing of elementary education in these states, though attempts are made to link this to enrolment, retention and policies followed within these states. The book addresses an important need, i.e. an analysis at the state level, rather than an overarching national level analysis, recognizing the fact that states across India are now following different trajectories for meeting education needs. State specific stories and differences remain important voids in our understanding of elementary education in India, as does a detailed understanding of the pattern of educational finance.

However, if one looks forward to a new rigour and depth of analysis, the book disappoints. A state level analysis offers two opportunities that are of considerable interest for academic as well as policy purposes. The first is that of rigorous cross-state comparisons that could focus on variations of policies, finance and outcomes across states and thereby improve our understanding about emerging patterns. Surprisingly, this is not attempted in any depth in the book. The tendency instead is to note general trends, most of which are already quite well-known. Comparisons across states are made on some counts, but rarely satisfy because these are interspersed with several broad and overarching statements about policies, quality and so on such that the argument remains diffused.

The second opportunity that this book presents is of an in-depth, state specific analysis in which the pattern of financing of education could be made comprehensible in terms of the overall educational scenario and policies of each state. The book does contain separate chapters on each of the states mentioned above which summarize indicators related to access and enrolment, give a brief idea of the quality of schooling and parental response, and provide a detailed picture of public as well as private expenditure on elementary education. Though it contains useful reference material for those interested in elementary education in these states, and is an important contribution to the study of educational finance, most chapters are crowded with difficult-to-read iteration of facts and data that they often confuse rather than illuminate.

A problem with the book is that while quantitative data with respect to access, enrolment and finance has been presented in detail, aspects that require a qualitative understanding, such as policies or quality of education are meted out rather superficial treatment. This may have been acceptable had the book confined itself to the presentation of facts that have, in fact, been investigated in the survey. But the discussion is extended rather casually to policy, and recommendations are made without an in-depth analysis. For instance, at some points in the book, the shiksha karmi and para teachers in Rajiv Gandhi pathshalas of Rajasthan, and the guruji of the Education Guarantee Scheme of Madhya Pradesh are clubbed together as ‘para teacher’, though each of these presents a different model with different outcomes. This is followed (with the exception of the chapter on West Bengal), with an easy acceptance of the spread of schooling through para teachers. Neither the extensive debate in the country on this issue, nor the very significant variations in strategies and experiences vis-à-vis ‘para teachers’ across states, form a background to this discussion. ‘Decentralization’, is similarly posited as the answer, without introducing its various meanings in the context of elementary education in India, or any engagement with the historical experience of states such as Rajasthan that decentralized elementary education considerably in the 1950s and the 1960s and the success story of Tamil Nadu in which decentralization did not play a role. Such cursory treatment leads to conclusions and policy prescriptions that fail to match the complexity of the situation.

To sum up, the book does take a direction that seems appropriate at this point of time, i.e. it examines the state-specific picture and educational finance in detail, and will consequently provide useful material for researchers. However, it also wanders into the area of policy without adequate analysis, and makes policy prescriptions that are diffused and do not take into account the actual experiences of the states studied.

Rashmi Sharma

 

DALIT STUDIES IN HIGHER EDUCATION: Vision and Challenges edited by Arun Kumar and Sanjay Kumar. Deshkal Publication, Delhi, 2005.

WHAT is dalit studies? Is it a new field of study seeking to establish itself in the academy? When does a new field of study emerge? How can such an arrival be discerned? These were some of the questions evoked by the volume under review, for inclusion in the curriculum is also an inscription of power. It imparts universal recognition to fields of enquiry and opens them up for further research and critical scrutiny. This book consists of papers, course proposals and reports of a series of advocacy workshops organised by Deshkal Society for the inclusion of dalit studies into the social sciences university curriculum in Bihar. These workshops held during 2004 in some of the universities of Bihar involved scholars both local and from different parts of the country.

While there is no unanimity about dalit studies, there is a sense of transformative potential that besets its advocates. Take for instance Sanjay Kumar’s views: ‘Dalit studies should not be treated as a mere body of knowledge; rather there is a need to construct a new perspective that cuts across all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities to comprehend the Indian reality’ (p. xviii). In the same vein Arun Kumar counterposes the conventional mode of ‘description of the quotidian socio-economic existence of dalit communities’ to a ‘dalit vision… [which] must empower and impel academic pursuits to delve into the social relations that produce and reproduce the material and ideological basis of dalitness’ (pp. 1, 4). On the other hand G. Aloysius stresses the horizontal ramifications of dalit studies when he says, ‘The new agenda of social sciences, whether known as Dalit Studies or not, needs to be critical, inclusive and emancipatory’ (p. 14). Gail Omvedt considers dalit studies, ‘not so much a study of dalits as a study of Indian society as a whole from a dalit perspective’ (p. 19). K. Satyanarayana contends that, ‘Dalit studies is a critique and a new perspective and has the potential of formulating entirely new fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, dalit culture and so on’ (p. 86).

But to play a transformative role in the humanities and social sciences, dalit studies can hardly afford to be exclusivist. Is dalit studies the prerogative of only dalit bahujan scholars or is it incumbent on any radical scholar to adopt the standpoint? Dalit writers have serious reservations about non-dalits writing from their perspective. As Satyanarayana explains while engaging in a critical survey of Telegu literature, ‘Literary theorists and cultural historians need to pay attention to the way Dalits are trying to argue their case for writing about Dalits. In this sense, whether you have written supporting or reforming or attacking Brahmins, dalits now want dalit characters and dalit life to be portrayed. It doesn’t matter how secular you are, the place now has to go to the Dalits… They would not like the upper caste writers to write about dalits and about dalit literature today’ (K. Satyanarayana: ‘Dalitism: A Critique of Telugu Literature’, in S. Poduval ed. Re-figuring Culture, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2005, p. 88). Yet dalit studies can emerge as a field only when it becomes imperative for the non-dalits to adopt its perspective. Presently the latter can contribute to dalit studies by essentially ‘writing under erasure’.

The essays in the book survey different aspects of history and literature especially in northern India to indicate the possibility of framing specific courses. Reports in the volume testify to the successful incorporation of such courses into the social science syllabi of some universities like B.R. Ambedkar University, Muzaffarpur. However, the question whether its curricular advancement can proceed without epistemic universalism remains. A plurality of viewpoints on dalit studies could well serve as a fillip to a neglected field.

Anjan Ghosh

 

THE TROPICS AND THE TRAVELING GAZE: India, Landscape, and Science 1800-1856 by David Arnold. Permanent Black, Delhi, 2005.

The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze presents a masterly account and perspective on the consolidation of both empire and science, specifically through the discipline of botany in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although echoing the title of Mary Louise Pratt’s book, Arnold goes much beyond the framework provided in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). While Pratt had illustrated the ways in which European assumptions fashioned the observations and travel accounts of European travellers to Africa and the Americas, Arnold’s questions about the ‘tropicalization’ of India are more historical in nature. Writings about landscape, travel, environment and scientific disciplines, Arnold demonstrates, were not merely expressions of the European response to an alien landscape; they also contained the ingredients of a ‘Spatial History’. Borrowing the term from Paul Carter’s 1988 masterpiece, The Road to Botany Bay, Arnold attempts to break down a linear narrative of the historical depiction of land and landscape in India by including multiple perspectives on the European travellers’ accounts of the region as well as ideas of Indian tropicality and botany.

Starting with the dramatic increase in travel writing in the early nineteenth century, Arnold goes on to analyze European styles of observing and recording landscape before steering our attention to the qualitative change in the nature of travel writing as military activity and territorial expansion gave the British a new sense of ownership over India. The restless and itinerant empire also impacted the practices of science through what Arnold characterizes as the ‘scientific reconnaissance’, enabling the mapping of the diversity of the Indian landscape. Yet, as Arnold, the historian of medicine is quick to point out, India was also a veritable ‘deathscape’ where cholera, malaria and dysentery resulted in high mortality across class of the white rulers. Moreover, for the European traveller in India, particularly missionaries, the landscape reflected the ‘horrors’ of Hinduism with its numerous immoral practices.

The most conceptually challenging chapter in the book brings together the apparently disparate notions of Romanticism and Improvement and demonstrates how the two were intertwined in the Indian context. While Tod invoked Byron’s ‘magic of the ruin’d battlement’ in Rajasthan, Hooker’s romance of the lofty Himalayas echoed the new way of relating to nature that had marked nineteenth century Romanticism. However, the inevitable comparison with European landscapes complicated the romantic approach to nature in India. In the face of the romance that India promised, the desire for ‘humanized, cultivated and orderly landscape over a wild and unkempt one’ was a fairly widespread one. In this way, Arnold argues, the mutually opposed notions of romanticism and improvement were yoked together in the travel narratives about India.

The next chapter, ‘From the Orient to the Tropics’, traces the resonance of yet another conceptual realignment that took place around the same period. Arnold recounts the shift from an Oriental India to a ‘tropical’ one strategically through the fragmented life stories of James Rennell, surveyor and cartographer and the French naturalist Victor Jacquemont. Rennell’s Memoir, first published in 1788, used the route survey method and revealed its Orientalist character in its choice of pre-British sources. Soon afterwards, alongside the more comprehensive trigonometric surveys of William Lambton and George Everest, there developed a richer vocabulary of place that invoked for European readers a far more complex description of the Indian landscape. Travellers like Jacquemont, who had experienced the lush profusion of vegetation in Haiti, Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope, brought with them a set of expectations that the diversity of the Indian landscape failed to meet. Arnold demonstrates how the transformation of India into a tropical landscape was further complicated through such encounters giving rise to a new category – the ‘poor tropics’ – which lacked both fecundity and abundance.

The last two chapters trace the links between ways of doing science in the colonies and at the seat of empire. The link consolidated botany in two ways: it enabled the popularization and commodification of Indian plant life in Europe and created an epistemology based on scientific investigation in the colonies. Yet the creation of this new knowledge system was often weighed down by its stressful encounter with indigenous knowledge of plants. As well, it was challenged by the diverse taxonomic practices of colonial botanists. Despite their usefulness to colonial botany, the role and agency of the Indian collectors and Indian illustrators like Vishnu Prasad, Arnold argues, remained a subordinate one in the larger context of metropolitan science. On the other hand, local European expertise remained extremely important to the consolidation of science in India, as the last chapter demonstrates. Arnold takes up the example of the botanist Joseph Hooker and elaborates the emergence of botany as one of the principal routes to the appropriation and tropicalization of India. Hooker embodied the contact point between peripheral colonial science and its metropolitan centre that was to influence professional scientific practices, his friendship and correspondence with Darwin representing the route through which the idea of the tropics came to be institutionalized in modern scientific thought.

Arnold’s story is a persuasive account of the simultaneous consolidation of Empire and Science. However, one wonders why he does not trace the consolidation of botany further, specifically to the establishment of the Botanical Survey of India in 1890? Another key question that remains unanswered is the relationship between indigenous pharmacopoeia, western medicine and the growth of botany as a discipline. What influence did writings such as those by O’Shaughnessy on the uses of cannabis in 1839, for example, have on the institutionalization of botany? In the seventeenth century the Dutch naturalist Hendrick van Rheede had already put together the Hortus Malabaricus. Although Arnold briefly mentions the role played by this text in creating the Malabar as a tropical paradise, he does not adequately address the specific nature of its impact on English botanists as such.

Finally, Tropics makes a significant contribution to the series entitled ‘Nature, Culture, Conservation’ jointly edited by Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Ullas Karanth. The book is particularly well produced and has a beautifully designed cover that makes up for the black and white botanical illustrations inside. However, one cannot help wondering if the monopoly of Microsoft now compels Indian publishers to choose American spellings for a book produced in India.

Indira Chowdhury

 

GOD ON THE HILL: Temple Poems from Tirupati by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2005.

THERE is this Venkateswara of Tirupati, god of the wealthiest Indian temple, to which around 20 million (or more) pilgrims throng every year, and which boasts of average collections (cash, jewellery, or hair) approximating Rs 200 crore a year. This god is the ‘vaddikasulasvami’ (lit. indebted god; god of/with interest on debt); he can be counted among the largest indebted characters in the state, part of which (debt) he ‘trades’ for the boons bestowed on his devotees!

And then there is this kondalavadu – god on the hill, a god with a love life as exciting as his life steeped in debt – the god whose intimate space is now for all to partake of, thanks mainly to the compositions of his ‘own’ poet, Tallapaka Annamayya.

Annamayya or Annamacarya as he has come to be known, is the only other ‘star’ of Tirumala-Tirupati, holding his own with the celebrated Tirupati Venkateswara, the god of the hill, a poet whose compositions have been part of the temple treasury ever since he composed his padams in the fifteenth century. The book under consideration carries the temple poet’s select compositions – of both erotic sringara and philosophical padams (translated into English).

Why Annamayya? Velcheru Narayana Rao says, ‘You can’t but be attracted by the power of his poetry; and he has an important presence in the bhakti tradition…’ (personal communication). And both Rao and Shulman point out, ‘Annamayya shows us a Tirupati close to the one we know today – a highly dynamic and successful entrepreneurial system built around a god of individual, subjective temperament, responsive to each of his visitors. By composing some thirty two thousand Telugu padam-poems to this god (if we are to believe the figure given by his grandson, Cinnanna... Annamayya invented a style of lyrical intimacy that became a form of worship. His surviving poems are also, perhaps, one of the major and universal achievements of classical Telugu literature, one of the major literatures of pre-modern India’ (p. 99).

More personally, the Annamayya one knew growing up in a milieu that one did, was the bhakti poet-singer, the favourite of the Tirupati god, Balaji; even more the one M.S. Subbulakshmi popularised among the Carnatic music ‘rasikas’ or the one popularised by musicians in Andhra Pradesh who specialise in ‘light’ or ‘semi classical’ genre of singing. Annamayya’s songs fitted well both in the semi-classical (popular) music and the classical traditions unlike the compositions of the saint Tyagaraja. Annamayya undoubtedly enjoys an iconic status in Andhra Pradesh.

So, another selection on Annamayya – or Annamacarya – that was how one initially approached the book, the scholarly credentials of the two behind this volume notwithstanding. But in the poems selected the book reveals Annamayya in a new light. For a moment, outside of the typified ‘bhakti’ contexts. Annamayya himself becomes the reincarnation of Nammalvar in his hagiography, accepted as the successor of the bhakti tradition (p. 112) and canonised. (p. 114). New, both in terms of the compositions selected, as well as the historical and contextual location of Annamayya and his work.

It was a pleasant surprise to read a wide range of sringâra poems, giving the poet a different dimension, setting him apart from the bhakti tradition he later became identified with. Sample this –

 

‘You put your hand on her shoulder

but you look straight at me

She hugs you to her breasts

While you press your foot to mine

Is that how you play?

Reckless you make love to her

While you fold me in your blanket… Only you can get away with it.

How about a little privacy?’

(Valavu pai kosaraite vadi mogacatu gada, p. 65)

 

‘You needn’t come any closer

Just ask me from a distance…

You embrace me, you coax me:

You’ll have sandal all over you,

Straight off my breasts.

You made love to me, god on the hill

Now you’re drowning in my passion

You needn’t come any closer’

(allantan unde metal anatuv ayya… p. 71)

 

The book is essentially aimed at a western audience, which perhaps explains the choice of these poems. At the same time, the poet’s philosophical contemplation and a certain disillusionment with the world about him, peculiar to much of the bhakti tradition seeking the ultimate union with the god, is clear in a poem such as this:

 

‘…I wander the world, doing all sorts of odd things

for a mouthful of rice

I live all my life with women

 

For that one second I forget my body.

My life is cheap deal

If I take you, god on the hill, for my god

What will you say about how I lived?

I must be crazy…’

(enta verri… p. 88)

 

In translating the authors have perhaps kept a certain kind of audience in mind as reflected in the use of phrases like ‘I must be crazy’ or ‘keep a lid on it’ (komaliro intulaku guttu valada. p. 84).

Historically speaking, ‘approximately thirteen thousand Annamayya poems were inscribed on some 2,289 copper plates that were kept in a vault like room in the temple, the so called sankirtana bhandara’ (p. 104). On this last aspect, Annamayya himself says, perhaps with some sarcasm –

 

‘…Even one poem should be enough

To make you care for me

Let the rest of them lie in your treasure.

Your name that is endless

Is cheap to buy

But worth a lot…’

(p. 95; ‘dâcuko ni padalaku tagane jesina pujalivi.’)

 

Annamayya is very much part of the larger temple edifice/structure at Tirupati that in no way undermines the beauty of some of his verses in praise of the god on the hill in the âdhyâtma padams on philosophical musings on the world – naa naati baduku naatakamu bringing the world and its moorings to a staged drama. As the authors point out, ‘neither of the two types... – bhakti erotics or courtly sringara– really captures the uniqueness of Annamayya’s achievement… these padams are love poems of a new type – entirely human, individualised, unrestrained (and) highly subjective love poems largely resistant to classification in the familiar categories’ (p. 113).

The most significant aspect of the book is the location of Annamayya and the element of sringâra in a larger historical cultural context. For instance, the deity Venkateswara himself has an earlier mythological base which traces its roots to a local goddess cult. Apparently there are inferences drawn on the hand gesture of the image in the central shrine as being more feminine on account of this earlier feminine tradition. The Tallapaka lineage to which Annamayya belongs has an original affinity towards the local goddess Caudesvari. A complex female/feminine mythic corpus thus surrounds the god at Tirupati which, in some ways, feeds into the ‘fascination with the feminine identity in specific senses – especially the notion of a deeper or hidden femininity (which) comes through in the sringâra padams’ (p. 118).

Such an explanation, though possibly somewhat far-fetched to serve as a justification for the kind of sringara padams that Annamayya composed, is nevertheless significant and demands greater critical undertaking. Even as it points to a certain influence of a popular cult or cultic system which informs Annamayya’s padams, physical and intimate, the feminine identity of the god on the hill demands deeper analysis. In fact, yet another origin legend talks of a Jaina identity for the deity Venkateswara, later converted into a Vaisnava idol.

It is nevertheless true that – as the authors point out – the temple with the ‘thriving cash culture built into the myth of Venkateswara’ (which) ‘was partly achieved through the work of Annamayya himself. Annamayya modelled the highly personal relationship of the devotees to the god and gave voice to the immense range of imaginative modes through which this connection could be realised. In substantial measure, his vision was shaped by the original Tallapaka milieu, with its intense relation to the local goddess and its esoteric Nath tradition... By the time the Annamayya padams were inscribed on copper plates and diffused throughout southern Andhra and Tamil Nadu in the sixteenth century, both Annamayya himself and the god he worshipped had been radically transfigured… Annamayya’s poems created Venkateswara, the god on the hill, as we know him today…’

The sub title, ‘temple poems’, though, seems restrictive and limiting if you consider what the authors say in the afterword (pp. 113 ff), in terms of the difficulty in ‘brand (ing)’ Annamayya’s poetry. These are, however, ‘temple poems’ in so far as they were part of the temple edifice and temple culture at Tirupati at large. The book only adds to the substantial work (in the series) on Telugu literary texts and literary tradition that Velcheru Narayana Rao and Shulman have been engaged with for some time.

R. Uma Maheshwari