Chai Lit is a carefully crafted space for a
non-hierarchic engagement with thought, creativity and narratives, indeed a
crucible to encourage silences to be overcome in order to transform despair
into hope through affirmative action. Words and silences, each in their own
ways, create inflexibilities and traps as we are often lost in the labyrinth of
influence, repression, fear or self-censorship or at the other end of the
spectrum, the certainties of dogmas and prejudices. The stultification of the
mind often inhibits the full realization of creativity, critical consciousness,
inclusive sensitivities and humane insights.
On an invitation from Dr. Richa and Dr. Yogesh
Pratap Shekhar, the organizers and co-founders of Chai Lit, I travelled to Gaya
with two young minds I have had the privilege to have taught: Amritendu Ghoshal
and Prabhat Jha. The introduction to the seminar did not follow institutional
patterns: no prayer song, no lighting of the ceremonial lamp, no bouquets, no
formal introduction to the speakers and contributors. The content was more
important than the trappings, the seriousness of the matter was accorded the
highest value, the façade did not exist. The windows were open for the ideas to
flow.
Amritendu spoke of the necessity to develop a rational
critical sense and engage with political issues that invariably affect our
lives. The necessity to oppose injustices comes from being able to identify
them and their operative modes through a developed critical political
consciousness. Later during the interactive session, political activism on
campus with its manipulative strategies and being a seminary for public
political careers were set over and against the understanding of politics and
its expression through debate and dissent. Billed as Knowledge Kitchen, the
seminar became the microcosm of an ideal university campus.
Prabhat had two poems to offer. They were incisively
satirical exposing the cynical quest of power using rhetorical and divisive
strategies acted upon by vigilante groups following thew master’s voice: beef
ban, book ban, film ban, we are inhabitants of Ban de land. Prabhat’s
excellently scripted play Sawaal par Bawaal was read by the playwright himself
and Dr. Richa with a vitality that comes from convictions about an inclusive
idea of India where free speech and comity are threatened with violence into
silence and where participatory democracy is extinguished to facilitate the
birth of demagogues. In a short address that followed. The same points were
reemphasized and the need for organic intellectuals stressed. As interludes
between thought sharing, poems were recited, notably Shilpa’s reading of Kedar
Nath Singh’s poem Vigyan aur Neend.
I spoke in
the defense of the humanities, framing its decline within the growth of later
capitalism and social utility of disciplines whose worth may be quantitatively
measured. I attempted to locate the disquiet in the formation of knowledge in
colonial models both exogenous and endogenous and drew upon the coercive and
divisive implications of Aristotle’s Law of Identity. I tried to show how STEM
disciplines with their accompanying examination patterns have reduced problem
posing cooperative teaching-learning as dialogue to an uncritical junk-food
pedagogy. During the course of the discussions, I pointed out how nothing is
innocently neutral as the tool to construct the world, language, is nearly
always political. Dr. Pranav Kumar spoke of furthering the process of
decolonization drawing upon indigenous resources rather than on western models.
No model however is the exclusive monopoly of a specifically identifiable
community; these may be incorporated, transformed and mediated within
indigenous contents. Gandhi fashioned an indigenous anti-colonial movement
bring together disparate influences as wide as Tolstoy, Ruskin, Edwin Arnold
and Thoreau on the one hand and
Raichandbhai, Gokhale,, Buddha,his mother, wife, maid and scriptural
sources of the east. Exclusionary readings have negative implications because
the totality of insights remain inadequate.
Personal narratives were cited by a number of
participants to indicate the toxic politics of exclusion and the problems of
correcting perceived historical injustices. The nationalism debate, an
inevitable staple of the public sphere was energetically pursued. It seemed on
occasions that many institutions are refurbishing the idea of a university and the
idea of India in a strategic manner in which being a liberal and a free thinker
has little legitimacy. During the course of the debate, Professor Yogesh Pratap
Shekhar defined nationalism as derivative that homogenizes an imagined
community through perceived commonality of aspirations. However, the process of
homogenization may exclude a number of social formations as is the mobilized political
practice today. Who belongs to a nation? A participant suggested that all those
for whom India is the matribhumi which
is commonly understood as homeland. But this notion is problematic and
arbitrary because nations are not fixed entities and one’s nationality may be
at variance with one’s homeland.
The discussions would have continued had time not
been the final arbiter. Knowledge Kitchen had succeeded in creating a possibility
to think otherwise.
