Communication

IT is celebration time. After all, for fifty years the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) has led intellectual debate in many key areas and charted its own research agenda, largely autonomous of the establishment on the one hand and the market on the other. This is certainly no mean achievement.

Celebrations, however, are risky exercises. Like nation states, when institutions celebrate, they rewrite their own histories. Looking back at the past and writing about it is never an innocent exercise. The problem, of course, becomes much more complicated when we consider that the celebration of fifty years of an institution is possible only because it continues to exist today, with new personnel, new energies, new questions and a new sense of relevance. Times change and demand of any living institution that it change as well. Were it the case that the institution was still replicating what the founders started doing fifty years ago, without breaking any new ground, what would there be to celebrate but the passage of time?

However, it seemed to me that the predominant mood in the November 2012 issue of Seminar (639, Institutional Legacy), was merely the celebration of the passage of time: the recalling of past episodes from an eventful existence, as if we were in the evening of our institutional life now. What is striking is that even from that eventful life of our earlier generation, the Seminar issue singled out one strand – that of empirical political science, especially survey research and election studies. The great secularism debates and the vigorous critiques of modernity, development and science that are associated in the public mind with CSDS have been virtually excised from this account, except for very cursory, passing references. While there is much that is debatable in this presentation of the past, in this brief note I shall confine my comments to some issues raised in Yogendra Yadav’s article, ‘A difficult transition’.

I do not have anything to say about large parts of the article which are focused on the Lokniti programme. Some debatable observations about recent institutional history too need not detain us here, irrelevant as they will be to a wider public. Rather, I will focus on two key intellectual questions that Yogendra has raised, in the spirit of a conversation that he has invited us to join in his essay.

First, his ‘worry’ that intellectual diversification at the Centre has seen it ‘lean more towards the humanities end of the social sciences’ and the consequent marginalization of the study of ‘mainstream politics’ (77). Simply because a particular view of CSDS history represents it as synonymous with empirical research on mainstream politics, there is no reason why all future generations have to justify themselves by doing the same. That would be a strange idea of intellectual life. Further, if research and intellectual activity are to engage with and theorize our contemporary experience, it is by no means obvious why politics must be accorded a privileged place in that study. Developments in critical thought over the past decades have opened up new objects of social life for research in exciting ways. Life itself has posed new questions today that many of our colleagues respond to in their work: media and technology, cinema, urban environment, education, identity and popular culture, some of which were initiated by the Sarai programme in the early 2000s. Yogendra makes it sound as if virtue can be associated only with the generation of ‘hard data’ about mainstream politics.

Such analysis is only one view of what constitutes the political amongst CSDS faculty. I would argue that Yogendra’s particular model of political research places too much emphasis on using numbers to evaluate voting behaviour. Let me put this provocatively: media-driven research has led to a situation where even the kind of theory-informed empirical research that used to happen in CSDS during the Kothari-Sheth-Nandy era has quietly been buried. For example, consider this from Rajni Kothari’s piece in the same issue of Seminar, highlighting the ‘core areas identified by the Centre in the initial years’: ‘Historical modernization, political leadership, party-system and state politics, electoral behaviour, sociology of political change, culture-personality studies in modernization and political socialization…’ (17). It is clear that empirical research for the first generation covered a much wider ground than just voting behaviour. It is another matter that these thematics bear the strong imprint of the then dominant paradigm of modernization theory and behaviouralism.

Nobody today can seriously claim to study political change without close attention to the languages of mobilization, the self-understanding of social agents and say, the ways in which jokes and popular (even ‘vulgar’) literature might play a role in de-legitimizing power. Recall for instance the work of Subaltern Studies historians in India or the fascinating work done on the French and Russian revolutions.

Yogendra’s insistence on the rigid political science/humanities distinction rests, I’m afraid, on a failure to engage with the fact that today to study even some of the themes signalled in Kothari’s list calls for a very close attention to language, literature, history and cultural forms. Increasingly, therefore, scholars across the world have been led to abandon the strict boundaries between social sciences and the humanities. And these, contrary to what Yogendra believes, are no fads but developments that arise out of a continuous interrogation by scholars of their own methodological practices.

This brings me to the second issue that Yogendra’s piece raises. He makes a virtue of his (and presumably the earlier CSDS) ‘refusal to follow the global academic establishment’ – and has often pointed out that our keeping pace with intellectual developments elsewhere in the world is a sign of our subordination to ‘the fashions in the global academy’. Three points need to be made here:

1. As I have indicated above, the early Centre’s understanding of politics and society itself bore the imprint of structural-functionalism, modernization theory and behaviouralism. Never were our predecessors completely free of the influence of the US academy. It is to their credit, however, as Ashis Nandy and Kothari say in their interviews in the Seminar issue, that they soon became dissatisfied with the domination of categories handed over to them through western theorizations. To them the empirical became a way of amassing evidence that would enable a different kind of political theorization. The task of critique was carried out by them very effectively, but I would argue that simply amassing evidence could never by itself produce new concepts.

2. To this day, election studies continues to function with disciplinary frames and methods imported from the ‘North American academy’. Indeed, it functions within a double ‘heteronomy’. Apart from its continuing reliance on the frames of the western academy, its research is strongly driven by the demands and momentum of the corporate electronic media. Questionnaires in Lokniti’s surveys have a large number of questions that relate to matters of long-term significance; only a few questions pertain to voting preferences. But all that sees the light of day is voting data because that is what the media demands. The rest remains unused and untheorized because the media industry is not interested in it. That is why Lokniti got ‘overwhelmed with data collection at the cost of analysis and writing.’ (76)

3. Finally, no amount of ‘empirical research’ can ever produce new concepts, for its entire logic is predicated upon collecting ‘data’ around concepts that have already been handed down ‘from the West’. All you can say, in amassing such data, is that our experience does not conform to the injunctions of western theory. What is required is theoretical work on that mass of data – which is precisely what has been abandoned. Neither Ashis Nandy’s critique of the nation state and secularism, nor his thesis of the ‘intimate enemy’ are products of survey research. They arise out of a close reading of Tagore, Gandhi and a whole range of other figures, as well as his engagement with popular culture. This is quite in tune with what many scholars at CSDS are doing today: reading texts from other traditions, exploring intellectual histories other than those of the West, in order to grasp how the modern experience was being understood by thinkers in these parts of the world. If we are serious about ending our tutelage of western theory, we need serious, patient work oriented to producing other accounts of the formations of the political, of so-called secularization, and so on. This is a huge task that requires a move away from endless pontification and stance-taking, towards actual concrete work. And this task has to be undertaken away from the media spectacle, with the recognition that there will be no immediate results.

It is because of this recognition that our colleagues today are engaged in bringing the question of Indian languages and knowledge formations to the fore. As a part of that exercise, a research journal in Hindi is in the process of being launched. A teaching programme that frames the political around the idea of the contemporary has also been undertaken, which reflects the search for a more complex entry point into our specific experience.

A wide range of scholars across India – and some in CSDS – are engaged in the task of reconstituting social thought, with the full awareness that we need to engage with much that is valuable in western thought, even while we reject its universalist claims.

Aditya Nigam

CSDS, Delhi