THIS essay seeks to contextualize the current moment of ‘higher education reform’ in India, in terms of a longer history of disciplines and interdisciplinarity. Social science disciplines as we know them today emerged in the early 20th century in India. Until then, most self-consciously modern intellectuals wrote ‘essays’, which free-wheeled through a variety of themes – philosophical, historical, literary and scientific. Early 20th century intellectuals began criticizing this 19th century amateurish and meandering style of intellection. Bengali historians, for instance, argued that Bankimchandra Chatterjee had done a great disservice to knowledge by proposing that history writing was everybody’s patriotic duty, with the result that every other local literate was churning out unruly narratives in the guise of history.

Social sciences henceforth began to be imagined as a form of knowledge based on technical training and specialized skills, distinct from the calling of intellection as such. And social scientists became pedagogic figures distinct from that of the general public critic and commentator. Clearly, this was a moment of disciplining of knowledges. This was also the moment when separate departments began to be set up in our universities – economics and political science seceded from history, vernacular literature became separate from English, and the number of journals and writers simultaneously publishing on science and social science became fewer and fewer. The primary emphasis now was on method as that which defined and delimited each particular discipline.

 

In the post-1947 decades, the disciplinary format was reconsolidated in a new way. The already well established separation between the arts and the sciences was now supplemented by a new distinction – that between applied and basic research. The division of disciplines thus became predicated upon the ends to which a particular knowledge-form could be put. In other words, disciplinary distinctions were no longer simply to do with method, because by this time, the so-called scientific method had colonized all disciplines, including a conventional humanities subject such as history. This was the hegemonic moment of Indian developmentalism.

High-end technological and applied research began to be seen as the driving force of nation-building. Education policy began to emphasize primary education as a basic developmental index, and neglect general university education as that which, from colonial times, had turned India into an unemployable mass of low-level clerical population with graduate degrees, even as it promised to produce good citizens. Science, technology and economics were soon taken out from within universities and housed in new institutions such as the IITs and the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG). Subsequently, development studies, sociology and political science (to the exclusion of humanities) were relocated in what later became the ICSSR institutions. These became the locus of ‘research and development’, aside of the university, which continued to offer ‘general’ education in all these subjects, including the humanities, to the mass of the nation. This produced, as we know, a social and academic hierarchy among students of sciences, social sciences and humanities, just as it produced long-lasting contradictions between research and teaching, pedagogy and policy, criticism and expertise.

 

The 1970s saw a revolt ‘from below’ against disciplinary regimentation and exclusion. This was the moment of the rise of anti- as well as cross-disciplinary endeavours, primarily with the coming of gender studies. Subsequently, in the 1980s and ’90s, postcolonial studies, dalit studies and, to a limited extent in India, cultural studies emerged as self-consciously interdisciplinary fields. This critique of disciplines was grounded in the rise of new political identities in India – the woman, the dalit, the colonized, the minority and so on. Knowledge began to be rethought through the question of subjectivity, recasting ‘method’ as a political rather than merely an epistemological question.

Yet, these new interdisciplinary fields were typically accommodated in the system through the creation of separate programmes and centres, thus allowing the parent disciplines to remain more or less unperturbed, especially in the university system. This was also the inaugural moment, it must be remembered, of the so-called ‘massification’ of higher education, with hitherto excluded classes and castes demanding not only development, literacy and employability but also inclusion in the social and intellectual space of the academy. This changed the nature and dynamic of the classroom, making it a more explicitly political and socially fraught space – and requiring, at least in principle, a greater degree of ‘disciplining’. The domain of research, increasingly distant from teaching and increasingly a domain of expertise, on the other hand, boasted more and more of methodological flexibility and therefore, of interdisciplinarity. But even here, interdisciplinarity took the form of a methodological eclecticism across archival, ethnographic, philosophical, linguistic and literary techniques – an eclecticism which mostly remained at the level of contingent and individual academic practice and did not emerge as a collective rethink.

 

The beginning of the 21st century is a new moment. The developmental take on knowledge has by now run thin. Earlier, research ‘problems’ seemed obvious – poverty, illiteracy, underdevelopment, traditionalism, transition and so on. Now uncertainties of a different order face us – whether about the future of the planet or capital or proliferating technology or genetics or mutating virus. ‘Problems’, therefore, are no longer self-evident, nor easy to diagnose and grasp, even by the expert. Consequently, today we have a new take on knowledge – namely that all forms of uncertainty and risk can and must be turned into epistemological models, into knowledge problematics. Hence, the call for new forms of knowledge and catchwords such as research and innovation (rather than, as earlier, research and development). Hence also, neologisms such as ‘knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge worker’ – symptoms of a new kind of hegemony of the very idea of knowledge over our social and political life.

Today, we see two distinct turns in public discourse. One, we see a new emphasis on reforming higher education, instead of just focusing on primary or universal education. Higher education is meant to create citizens of a knowledge society but also ‘capitalize’ the population itself, till now seen as a liability, as an economic resource. And two, we see an official preference for interdisciplinarity, which is notable given that interdisciplinarity was till very recently an unofficial, radical academic position.

 

We have two official imaginations of interdisciplinarity at work in today’s India. One is based on a critique of increasing specialization and fragmentation of knowledge as has happened in the last half a century. This position, as reflected in the Yashpal Report, argues for complete or holistic education and seeks to bring together ‘professional’ training and social science education. We have seen some concrete moves along these lines recently – such as in the reconstitution of pass courses in Delhi University colleges, in the diktat by the university executive that all departments should offer interdisciplinary courses, and in the setting up of the ‘school’ rather than departmental system in new universities. (Thus, the Ambedkar University in Delhi departs from the earlier JNU model through the institutionalization as schools of erstwhile dissenting, cross-disciplinary fields – such as gender studies, performance studies, development studies and environmental studies.)

At the same time, we see a restructuring of management and technology curricula with greater components of social sciences in them – marked by the transformation of earlier ideas of social work (a la the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, TISS) into ideas of corporate social responsibility, public accountability and the institution of research and dissemination funds by capital. Note that the goal of this imagination of interdisciplinarity is a future unity of knowledge, which seemingly was lost in the professionalization and instrumentalization of knowledge by the earlier developmental imagination. This imagination of interdisciplinarity takes teaching and mentoring as the main medium through which knowledge would eventually change for the better.

The other official imagination of interdisciplinarity is somewhat different, and is reflected in an emphasis not so much on teaching as on high-end research. This imagination is voiced by the Knowledge Commission and by many recent corporate research initiatives. This is a project of setting up a research space around a new and difficult object of research – such as alternative energy, environment or genetics – and then assembling a diverse group of intellectuals from different disciplines around it. The recently floated idea of ‘innovation’ universities is precisely this. Note that this is an avowedly pragmatic model of interdisciplinarity, where the object of study itself is meant to generate an epistemological pull, transforming existing disciplines in unprecedented ways both in terms of method and intellectual subjectivity. Indeed, many academics in India too have argued in favour of this ‘object’-centric model of interdisciplinarity, especially from within environment and urban studies.

 

How does one engage with these official moves for interdisciplinarity today? A set of questions come to mind. The first set of questions is about the institutional form interdisciplinarity assumes. Within the university model of teaching, are we looking at a future integration of disciplines – a dissolution of boundaries and a proliferation of courses under one large and heterogeneous social science rubric as has been attempted by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata in their M.Phil. course in the social sciences? Or are we looking at curricular changes within the existing departmental structure in which every discipline creates a set of interdisciplinary courses from a particular perspective and offers it to students across the board, in the process perpetuating a formal distance between their core and interdisciplinary courses?

 

Or should we simply consider turning the university into a vast and diverse faculty, and setting up multiple programmes through different disciplinary combinations? Do we institute interdisciplinarity at the undergraduate level, encouraging specialization MA onwards, or vice versa? At which stage of study does interdisciplinarity bring in greatest returns? What is the way of thinking of interdisciplinarity across sciences, social sciences and the humanities, which goes beyond the two currently available modes – one, the instrumental use of the social sciences to establish public accountability for the sciences and two, the creation of sub-disciplinary fields such as philosophy of science, history of science and ‘science studies’, which is really a sociological take on science?

Again, if we assume that interdisciplinary set-ups must be established around new objects of study, are we then looking at an infinite proliferation of centres and institutions of research? What else might be the mechanisms of incorporating newer and newer objects of study, and institutionally accounting for obsolescence of older and exhausted ones? Finally, how do we rethink the classroom, the laboratory and the seminar in the context of interdisciplinarity?

 

The second set of questions is more difficult – namely, how do we think about the parameters of criticism and evaluation in the context of interdisciplinary research? We know that historically, disciplines grow and change through the development of an internal tradition of criticism and evaluation. Of course, individual disciplines borrow insights from other disciplines too in order to effect internal changes. And yet, through all these cross-disciplinary adventures, the attempt remains to sharpen the particularity of a discipline’s own critical tradition. History, for instance, has fruitfully reinvented itself in the last hundred years through encounters with first economics, then anthropology and then literary studies – and yet by virtue of that very fact further consolidated its own disciplinarity and indeed, in India, transformed neighbouring disciplines such as political science and literary studies by making them more and more historical. This is indeed a story of the success of a discipline, but very far from a story of interdisciplinarity.

In other words, if we take interdisciplinarity seriously, we must think hard about critical and evaluative criteria that are autonomous of criteria internal to the antecedent disciplines. It could be said that in the model of interdisciplinary set-ups around particular objects of study, the object itself could be the ground for generating such criteria. However, this could lead to a new kind of instrumentalization of knowledge. Also, as Marilyn Strathern’s important work on ‘audit’ has shown, evaluation across different knowledge set-ups necessarily produces the need for a supra-authority, which undertakes criticism and evaluation, not necessarily by claiming to be an academic entity itself but through a general and generic audit activity.¹

In this format, academia is meant to self-assess and self-regulate, but according to what appears as a set proforma. This supra-authority could take, as far as I can see, many forms. It could be a managerial body (as with funding institutions), or it could be a regulatory body (as with other domains of service such as telecommunication) or indeed, it could simply be the notion of a ‘society’ or ‘ethics’, which is seen to offer objective criteria across the board such as ‘relevance’, ‘time-line’, ‘outreach’, ‘productivity’, ‘accountability’ and so on. The point, however, is obvious – that such supra-disciplinary criteria might at best produce evaluation, but hardly ever criticism. Are we then looking at a context where evaluation and criticism become two distinct imperatives? What would be the implications of this?

 

The third set of questions I have in mind relates to language. The issue of language has most commonly been raised in India in contexts of teaching. Here, language is seen primarily as a matter of communicability of content, presumed to be already and sufficiently available in English. Connected to this is the question of availability of reading materials in Indian languages. As of now, in teaching contexts, language thus comes up primarily as a translatability question.² Hence, the recent governmental initiative of the National Translation Mission, which however seems defunct even before take off.

To my mind, the problem here is that we have failed to establish translation itself as a worthwhile academic act – based on research, offering employment at par within academic institutions and bringing formal credit to students specializing in it. Also, in contexts of research, the language question is barely ever raised. It is presumed that high-end research would happen by default in English. Indian languages will of course figure in such research if they are social sciences, but only as primary materials (drawn from archives, fieldwork, interviews etc.), subsequently cooked in English before being served as knowledge, as it were. Finished products of research then would be translated back into the vernaculars for purpose of dissemination.

It is important to note here that since the 1950s, translation of ‘regional’ literature into English, especially under the aegis of the Sahitya Akademi, has been central to our cultural imaginary. More recently, translations of feminist and dalit writings from the bhashas into English have further reinforced this centrality of translation and have impacted social sciences positively. Yet, what this has also done, paradoxically, is create an image of the Indian languages as primarily ‘literary’, i.e. structurally resistant to academic articulation – and this, despite the large volume of intellection that goes on routinely in vernacular domains, often outside enclosed academic institutions and in the larger public sphere of essays, journals and little magazines. In this context, I think it is useful to draw in the language question within the purview of our thoughts on interdisciplinarity.

 

First of all, we could consider if it is worthwhile setting up ‘translation studies’, within or outside universities, in the shape of an interdisciplinary field – rather than simply presume that translation is either a matter of individual multilingual skill or a subsidiary field to language and literary studies. We must admit that different disciplines have evolved different languages of thought, and academic translation requires a simultaneous engagement with these distinctive conceptual languages. The question of academic language thus is tied to but not reducible to the question of English versus vernacular or spoken versus literary. We must ask then if social sciences share the same conceptual language irrespective of whether they are carried on in English or Bengali or Malayalam?

If not, which is most likely, then the interface between vernacular social science domains and the formal, academic domain is not merely that of translatability but also of interdisciplinarity. That is, the language question here is embedded in the larger question of the relationship between distinct bodies of knowledge with different norms, forms, protocols and textual genres. In other words, translation studies must open unto the interdisciplinarity question – because in the context of social sciences, translation is a matter of both conceptual and linguistic translation, of transactions both across disciplines and across language domains.

 

Second, we can also reverse the above question. That is, we can ask if interdisciplinarity itself should be seen through the prism of the language question. In other words, when we put two disciplines such as history and economics face to face, are we actually also looking at two languages of articulation, which can only speak to each other through translation or through the mediation of an altogether different third language, which gets produced out of the event of coming face-to-face? In other words, do we get any further purchase in thinking interdisciplinarity by seeing disciplines as different languages seeking to access a common or a shared object of knowledge, rather than by seeing disciplines as primarily constituted by incommensurably different objects of knowledge and different methods?

 

Finally, we can also consider setting up in our academic institutions centres of ‘regional studies’ – somewhat similar to, yet distinct from, the ‘area studies’ model of US universities. What this does is to subsume, yet critically foreground, the language and translation question within a larger problematic of what is today being called the ‘vernacular domain’. These centres, of say Tamil studies or Bengal studies or North East studies, would call upon all social science disciplines (including economics, film studies and environmental studies) to simultaneously engage with the ‘region’ in India. It will be within this larger framework, then, that we address simultaneously the question of language, of vernacular social science, and of translation. Needless to say, this would require a critical rethinking of what it is to mark out regions, without simply validating the political boundaries of the Indian federal space.

Let me end here. All this has been only by way of provisional thoughts, seeking out further discussion among academics, students and policy-makers. One thing seems certain to me though – that talking about higher education today calls for not just a discussion on pedagogy and research in the abstract. We also need to raise the questions of disciplines, interdisciplinarity, institutional form, evaluation and above all, language – all this in the same breath. This essay is a modest attempt to do exactly that.

 

Footnotes:

1. Marilyn Strathern, ‘A Community of Critics: Thoughts on New Knowledge’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12(1), 2006, pp. 191-209.

2. Satish Deshpande, Social Science Teaching in Hindi: an Inventory and Analysis of Popular Textbooks in Six North Indian Universities. Report of the project supported by Ratan Tata Trust and CSCS, 2010.