My last post ended with a hortatory line and someone asked me if I was doing something myself or only asking other people to do things. I would like to assure all concerned I am doing my bit for the cause and if I were to start writing about the things that I do, this blog will turn into an advertisement for myself, something that I am not very keen about. In my many years as a student of the social sciences, I have observed that in the case of India, the social sciences have atrophied completely. With the exception of a few pockets such as Delhi and Kolkata, the social sciences never even had the opportunity to be properly grounded. Even in the case of Kolkata, the social sciences have not been oriented towards what is considered to their true nature, that of being a liberal art. But those are small issues that I do not intend to focus my attention too much on. Nevertheless, I did make that statement about the Kolkata version of the social sciences not conforming to the liberal arts with a reason. In the Western world one saw the social sciences incepting in an atmosphere that was conducive to free thinking. Free thinking was the desire of the individual to define and organize oneself on rational grounds in a way which would facilitate that individual's realization of the true potential of the self. Into this scenario were born the social sciences which took advantage of the liberality of a society that allowed the individual to do what I have talked about in the preceding sentences. The social sciences then were an extension of the liberal arts and at best a slightly more pompous version of the arts. All things considered pretensions apart the subject matter of the social sciences and the liberal arts is the same. Therefore that which is considered to be "social scientific" knowledge is one that still deals with the question of the individual and his/her place in society. Karl Marx, in his attempt to ground the study of human society in what he called "objective material conditions" created an epistemological break by seeking to eliminate the one variable for whose sake the study was being carried out - the human being. But by and large the agenda that even the Marxists and Marx had was very much consistent with that of the liberal arts. I know that you are thinking that this is a lecture on what the social sciences are and wondering about what the post itself. I have deliberately done this in order to demonstrate that whatever be their pomposity, the social sciences came into being for a purpose, and when we teach social sciences in India, we do that without even knowing what that purpose is and how it came into being.
The state of social science education in India is poor. There are many reasons for this but the most significant of them is the fact that the social sciences have got lost in an ocean of stupidity. After the attaining of independence the spirit was such that people took pride in their own culture and justifiably so. But when this pride in one's own culture is stretched to illogical levels, it only becomes jingoism that is completely devoid of any meaningful content. And that is what happened with the education system in India and especially so the social science education. One may ask why the social sciences especially? If that is your question you will find the answer to that in the following sentences. Most of the time when certain words find circulation in the sphere of public speech they begin to loose their true import and meaning. After a while they remain merely words with no specific content or meaning and therefore they become vacuous. Nevertheless they continue to circulate in the public sphere with people talking at each other than to each other. Education, the term or the word, has sadly met the same fate. People today talk about education without having the faintest idea about what is involved in it. For most education is a degree that one receives, to some it is a sacred cow and if you are in Andhra Pradesh it is a business opportunity. None of these correspond to what education is or should be. Armed with this inability to properly define education we have successfully created stereotypes about what it is and therefore we think that one who has 95% marks is educated or one who has a good job is educated and so forth. The furtherance of these stereotypes has created a mess that is now very difficult to clean up. In all this the very elementary purpose of education - that of enlightenment - has been forgotten. Compounding the situation are the pursuit of money and material happiness.
In this process the social sciences have suffered more and disciplines such as history have been reduced to the documenting of fictitious and peurile things. They have also become weapons in the hands of bigots. So why did this happen. The answer is simple. The social sciences when they were born in the West had a form that was consistent with the content. It has remained more or less like that till date. However, in India it is a different story. We have taken the form and have tried to stuff it with whatever we thought was the appropriate content. This parody of sorts happened because of the desire to study in one's own tongue and when there is no body of knowledge to support that ambition or aspiration, things are bound to go wrong. The true pursuit of social science entails either a translation of all Western content into whichever language that one wished to study in or the creation of an alternative body of knowledge. In India's case neither has happened and as a result people study the same book in their mother tongue, from class eleven to Ph. D. This means that higher qualifications are awarded for studying the same book. What is even better is that in spite of the ten odd years that go into the study of the same book, the students are still at a loss to explain what it contains. Social scientific education is a necessity in any society, for it is the tool that one can use to have an audit of the functions of society, politics and governance. Not only can it audit, it can also provide with good alternatives to bad policies and programmes. It is also a necessity for a good and enlightened democracy. In the case of India, the necessity for proper social sciences is even more heightened for obvious reasons. A society that has become fissiparous and threatens to fall apart needs good social sciences. And that is missing. Are the other sciences any better? The answer will be yes, but only a little. The other sciences are armed with mathematics and numbers which are considered to be lingua pura and therefore they are not bogged down so much by the problems of language. It is therefore completely a categorical imperative in order create a proper social scientific knowledge and once again create the globally competitive Indian. I will talk about more of the same in my next post.
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