A Centre’s vision

THE Centre turns fifty in a few months. While fifty is well past the mid-life of an individual, it is hard to predict what it marks in the life of institutions. To believe that we are young betrays a healthy self-confidence about our future – much life still lies ahead of us.

This newly invented rite of passage of a young institution is a good occasion to reminisce about its past, its birth and early days – as well as to imaginatively reflect on how we reached where we are today and what possibly the future holds.

The Centre is poised today to move into a new, third phase in its intellectual life. Born in 1963, it began with an earthy motivation to grasp the nuts and bolts of Indian politics – not as it was imagined in secluded conclaves of the mind or how it appeared to starry-eyed romantics but as an arena of decision making enmeshed in power-conflicts and factional struggles. Rajni Kothari’s Politics in India was born amidst the hurly-burly din of Indian politics and so was the Centre that formed its nurturing backdrop. Even so, the India it so scrupulously studied was aspiring to become a modern westernized society with a subcontinental flavour in all its beauty and ugliness. More precisely, beauty was its telos and the many home-grown warts, the irritating speed-breakers preventing a smooth transition. Its very name, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, carries the grain of this stadial consciousness.

In the 1970s this began to change. Some stimulus may have been provided when its co-option as the new Centre of Political Studies at JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) was permanently stalled, but the stronger impetus undoubtedly came from the powerful mood of dissent sparked by the Emergency that caused an open-eyed self-confrontation. As a result, the central aims of the Centre began to alter fundamentally.

Surprisingly, the motto of the Centre then could not have been very different from the motto of the Enlightenment: have the courage to use your own understanding. An inability to rely on one’s own understanding is a sign of self-incurred immaturity, self-incurred because it is lack of courage and resolution, not absence of ability, that keeps us in the throes of immaturity. In this second phase, the Centre began to shed this. Immanuel Kant is hardly a philosopher one associates with the Centre but a very Kantian move this appears to be!

Perhaps this influence was mediated by a reading of K.C. Bhattacharya’s classic essay, ‘Swaraj in Ideas’. Bhattacharya spoke passionately about the woeful condition of cultural enslavement in which Indian elites were trapped the moment they allowed their own traditional cast of ideas and sentiments to be superseded without comparison or competition to a new cast representing a somewhat alien culture. To be sure, there is nothing wrong in embracing elements of another culture, no matter how different it is from one’s own. The point is that neither western modernity nor indigenous tradition must be blindly accepted or rejected. Instead, a decision must be taken after a full and open-eyed struggle is allowed to develop between both. The mark of cultural subjection is to bypass this struggle and to succumb in abject surrender, without a fight, to one of these contending forces.

In the ’70s, the Centre developed the courage to say no to received wisdom and to revel in the struggle between different traditions of thought and practice. Western categories had possessed Indian intellect like a ghost. The Centre now began to exorcise this ghost. As it felt the ‘scales fall from its eyes’, it must have experienced a rebirth – the feeling of having launched towards a true Swaraj in ideas.

Though our field of study is no longer restricted to politics conceived narrowly and includes social/cultural processes, coming to grips with nuts and bolts continues to engage several scholars at the Centre today. So does a close scrutiny of the connection between evidence-based research and policy. Empirically grounded social and political theory too has gained greater valence. But a very real excitement in the Centre emanates from the conviction that the subtle and deft manner in which western categories interact with non-western ones needs to be properly tracked and that the many problems encountered by humanity cannot be resolved unless non-western traditions are imaginatively retrieved. It also flows from the confidence that a new third moment has finally arrived in which categories of social sciences nourished by non-western intellectual traditions will be generated. Scholars at the Centre wish not to waste this opportunity. After all, we owe it to all those who worked hard at the Centre to clear the ground for the launch of this initiative.

Being clear-eyed about one’s research agenda is an important element in institutional imagination. But clarity of vision has other ingredients of which I mention six, which to my mind are crucial to the continuing good health of the Centre.

First, every academic must be given the confidence that ‘getting it right’ is worthy of maximal respect and critical to institutional flourishing. And ‘it’ in this context means some version of truth, coherence, plausibility, verisimilitude and so on. Banal as it may sound, evidence, argument and meaningful narratives in support of claims and proposals are deeply valued in the Centre. Research is a social practice striving to achieve the above mentioned internal goods.

But the very same practices also bring with them a different set of goods that, following the philosopher Alasdair Maclntyre, can be called external goods – fame, money, power. At heart, internal and external goods are constitutively conflicting. They are rivals that can eliminate one another. Academics, scholars and intellectuals can easily lose a sense of the internal goods of their practices if they are lured by power, money or fame. This is not to say that external goods are irrelevant or unimportant and must be shunned. They may be accepted as byproducts of our activities but must not be set as our primary goals. To do so is a recipe for failure – for shallow, ephemeral gains so common amongst the mediocre. Had the Centre lost a sense of this distinction it would have been dead long ago. At the Centre we try to create a cultural milieu in which internal goods matter.

A second component of clear vision is to have a distinct understanding of what precisely we are trying to grasp and get right. It is not inappropriate to mention evidence-based research in this context. But it is crucial to understand, particularly in the social sciences, what really counts as evidence. For it is not brute, objectified data that we strive to gather. Any empirical data that completely bypasses the internal conceptions/descriptions of agents we study is entirely useless. Grasping the nuts and bolts of social, economic and cultural processes is in large part understanding the conceptions of multiple agents engaged in them, to get a hang of what they believe, want, need and value.

Furthermore, these agents, no matter how poor or impoverished, cannot be viewed merely as biological organisms who require food, nutrition, clean water, clean air, shelter and safe sex. They are humans in exactly the same way that we researchers are – people who need and value friendship, companionship, family and community; people who have the capacity to reflect and self-reflect; people who imagine and fantasize about other worlds, who need to tell stories about themselves and so on. We frequently study the poor and are satisfied with acknowledging the simple, material deprivations from which they suffer. But poverty has an impact on other ingredients of human flourishing. The Centre takes all these other dimensions seriously and endeavours to be ‘excellent’ at studying human life in all its richness and complexity. My colleague Ashis Nandy often talks of ‘political theory emerging from the slums.’ I take this to mean that theory must be grounded in evidence-based research on the self-understandings and practices of ordinary humans in all the above mentioned richness and complexity.

Third, crucial to the survival and good health of any institution is the importance of grasping the distinction between thinking about institutions and institutional thinking. Thinking about institutions is a detached, academic endeavour, from an observer’s standpoint, rarely an understanding from the inside. Thinking institutionally is what is learnt by experience at the job. It is constituted by a grasp over dynamic processes. It is built on insights picked up while handling complex and difficult situations within institutions. It involves a series of practical judgments that presuppose sensitive immersion in the multiple engagements required by institutions. CSDS would not have survived if from time to time some of its members had not thought institutionally.

To think institutionally is to reflect on every relevant matter keeping in mind the larger aims of the institution. It is to be able to spot the specific capability of each of its members, give public recognition to this potential and show how it connects with and complements rather than undermine the skill of other members. It involves a capacity to draw each individual member together to form a team in order to accomplish specific tasks. In short, thinking simultaneously of particular members and the whole institution is one of the hallmarks of institutional thinking.

When successful, institutional thinking convinces every member that all realistic effort has been made to take into account all factors relevant to decision making. It enables a common mind to develop on when talent and performance must be given their due, and when age and seniority matter, and when members roughly equal in talent or seniority need to be treated as one cluster rather than separately. Institutional thinking is conducted in the medium to long duree; decisions taken today must keep past precedent in mind, but also future ramifications. It involves the recognition that every single member brings with her a personal and social rhythm, a certain way of leading one’s life that changes but does not disappear in the Centre. Above all, it recognizes that personal requirements and goals differ from institutional ones, may even conflict with each other but can be reconciled.

For example, an academic institution must performs several tasks: there is first the goal of primary research, the relentless and obsessive pursuit of discovering something new or getting something right. There is the more sober, painstaking task of scholarship that refines existing knowledge, simultaneously preserves and nourishes it. Then there is teaching to do, training people in skills that reproduce research and scholarship, and the job of public dissemination – reaching out to the wider public that, in the ultimate analysis, provide much of the point to what we all do, and finally there exists an obligation to grasp the overall point of each of these assignments. Each one of us, at any given time, can play one or two of these roles with considerable degree of success. Some may have the ability to do all of them over a period of time. But an institution requires that almost all of them be done all the time. It is critical therefore that each does what he is best at doing in a way that fulfils the overall need of the institution. And, the ultimate success of institutional thinking is every member of the institution taking legitimate pride in the achievements of others.

This brings me to my fourth related point. A good institution must be genuinely pluralist. It must under-stand that a complete idea of institutional flourishing is not possible by relying on any one set of capacities, one set of virtues, one way of using the intellect, one kind of scholarship, one approach, or one methodology. It must be a mix of all of these, accompanied by genuine respect for each. Unless this is done, some people within the institution will feel alienated and the objective we set out to achieve will remain unrealized.

It is not easy to be a pluralist. Scholars do not always appreciate the wild intellectual ambition of researchers nor researchers the painstaking intensity of scholars. Neither identify without difficulty with the skills of public disseminators who are perplexed and annoyed by the lonesome pursuits of the former. Yet, no institution can thrive without a genuinely pluralist ethos.

Fifth, research institutes, especially those funded by the state, are often expected to be policy oriented. The Centre is not opposed to this view but it rejects a technocratic conception of policy in favour of a more socially engaged conception. It thinks of policy not as coming top-down but as maturing over a period of time, and emerging from a much larger discourse of which it is a part. Indeed, so are politicians and other political agents. All are important players in the whole process but then not the only ones. Furthermore, the Centre knows that enough can be apprehended about these only when the views and perceptions of the wise and learned people from every segment of society are taken into account. Wisdom often lies not with extraordinary but with ordinary people who live their lives thinking they are ignorant but in fact know a great deal. True, intellectuals can be ‘honest brokers of public reason’, but only if the scope of public arena where this reasoning takes place is widened by making it inclusive. Their voice, interests and views must count.

A sixth and final issue is one on which clarity is harder to achieve. What is the core identity of CSDS? What kind of an institution is it? Given that its primary activity is research and scholarship, what is its relationship to politics? How strongly political can it be? Obviously, individual scholars have political sympathies, sometimes distinct, at other times fairly amorphous. Nothing unusual about this. Conceivably, a few might even have party affiliation. This is their individual right. But qua institution, CSDS cannot have a singular or narrow political identity, at least not in so-called ‘normal times’.

But matters are rarely this simple. The line between social science research and politics is not always easy to draw and between direct political advocacy and indirect, research-mediated advocacy, perhaps even harder. Some members may blur the distinction more frequently, pushing the Centre further and further towards direct advocacy. This can cause some anxiety in an institution. My own view is that this is just about ok so long as they view direct advocacy as an activist moment in a three-stage intellectual process that starts with deeply reflective background understanding and ends with a superior grasp of both the previous moments.

It would be fair to say that current consensus in the Centre on such issues is this: CSDS is an open, vibrant, public space. It values civic engagement and remains connected to the broader politics of civil society and state institutions. But it is not just any other public space. The Centre has a distinct academic character. Our collective self-understanding is that we are a community of researchers committed to shaping significant public and academic debates within India and abroad. Though all of us do not claim to be public intellectuals, each takes seriously the responsibility to link research to the broader effort of enhancing the quality of collective life, especially in India.

Institutions in India often fail to retain the fundamental vision that first animated them. They begin to flounder with the departure of their founders. They neither die nor survive, existing endlessly in limbo. It is thus a remarkable achievement that CSDS continues to live with profound purpose in its 50th year.

RAJEEV BHARGAVA