The complicity of seminars

Shiv  Visvanathan

Winter brings strange migratory birds to Delhi. They are dull in plumage but colourful in their pretensions. They claim to wed knowledge and power and seek to predict the validity of the future. The academic and his ritual seminars are epidemic in Delhi, while Kolkata feasts on film and Chennai goes glut on music. This academic is a strange creature and needs an ethnography of his own. In fact, one should begin with a caveat.
Most of these seminars do not take place in the university but at the Nehru Museum, India International Centre, at the Hyatt or Taj Hotel. Knowledge, in fact, becomes a strange form of conspicuous consumption and such knowledge is not easily accessible to the ordinary academic. These are for stars, or clubs of foreign-returned scholars desperate to display their expertise before local policy-makers and foundations.

University & dying knowledge
It is strange to watch their performances because one realises that the university as a home of knowledge is dying. Yet, few things are as precious to our culture as the university. The Indian university is, for all its confusions and contradictions, a wonderful institution. It is starved, treated with contempt, replete with vacancies and yet in the middle of this desert, a real oasis of knowledge survives under one or two teachers.
The paradigm might have broken down but exemplars survive, transmitting the magic of knowledge to a few. Take any college on any campus and one can identify this rare species of the Homo Academicus.
All this academic can claim is the loyalty of a few students, and a satisfaction of being a local legend. Sometimes, the density intensifies as in history where local colleges had a whole array of outstanding historians serving a plurality of perspectives whether Marxist, nationalist, subaltern or postmodern.
Many such academics have served as conscience keepers, trustees, custodians of these sites as the institution crumbles around them. Even they realise things are changing as students accuse them of downloading knowledge or prefer tutorial college models to their efforts at pedagogy. Yet, any critique of academics must begin with a salute to these valiant teachers who kept the faith.

Real jugaad
As a species, one knows they are disappearing. They sustained a miracle of excellence on very little. Technologists and managers often talk of jugaad. Management theorists have appropriated the word but the real jugaad
came from the academic striving to sustain passion and curiosity on second-hand books and dog-eaten classics. These stalwarts have now been forgotten or shunted aside, as their breezier cousins hold the floor at clubs in Delhi. These clubs literally function as the new salons of knowledge and policy creation.
This other academic is a vain creature. He seeks to use knowledge to affect power and he pompously calls this policy. Policy soon creates its own version of the intellectual serving state and corporation. It is clear there is no innocence to scholarship now. One watches our academic talk of solutions, problem solving, of expertise, of policy implications. The very people he studied as persons or subjects are now objects of analysis.
The citizen is no longer a “man” of knowledge. He becomes an empty slot to be pushed around. Policy and policy-makers now decide on behalf of a citizen creating a new calculus of pain. As one of the new breed of market economists put it, we have to decide when to inflict pain, now or later, but pain cannot be avoided in policy. The voice was utterly surgical, matter of fact, without really being therapeutic. Displacing people seems an   inevitable part of urbanisation and the new expert asks us to deal with it impersonally.

Language of casualties
One is reminded of the nuclear expert Herman Kahn asking us to fight a nuclear war so one can understand the language of casualties. Policy is now a calculus of pain, of who suffers and when, so some others might gain. The naked openness of the definition is startling. No one asks who allows this expert to make such decisions. He tacitly assumes he is part of the elect. The academic expert does not realise that his very language allows how to move huge blocks of people, to decide their fate and future.
The odd thing is that there are sensitive people in these seminars. Yet, the power of the paradigm is such that dissent seems weak and wishy-washy, in fact even apologetic. The land-grab game we call urbanisation leaves these radicals as admirers of the very thing they condemn. Sometimes, you wonder whether it is the antiseptic and affluent milieu that sanitises their dissent. Their critique of violence and attempt to defend human rights appear as little stories bucking huge statistical trends.

Search for winning trends
Today, radicals and dissenting academics sound like orphans adopted by the establishment. They are allowed to mouth their opinions as set pieces forming a predictable part of such seminars. They provide the human-interest interludes in the ruthless search for winning trends.
There is a sadness here, a tacit complicity which is disturbing. Dissent seems helpless, a rant of Rip Van Winkles against futuristic trends. In fact, ironically, even predictably, some of the most creative dissenters work for World Bank. It is almost as if dissent is no longer an act of conscience but a comic interval between two major discussions of policy. Adding a few naysayers provides the right seasoning to policy, to make it appear open ended.
There is something more tacit and sinister. One senses the logic and trajectory of violence more clearly at the level of ideas. Violence has a way of transforming itself from liminality to normalcy. What appears genocidal seems mundane a decade later and policy literally incorporates it. One talks of huge demographic displacements as if one is brushing one’s teeth. Policy incorporates violence and sanitises it as a part of logic, an agenda.

Idea of progress
Present in it is the idea of “progress” as a part of the social contract. The doctrine of progress allows the state or any self-styled development agency to impose violence on the margins, the minorities, the underdeveloped as tribal, nomad merely in the name of policy.
Within such a discourse a slum is a pathology, a threat, an epidemic to be eradicated. Sadly, even radicals in their search to justify the informal economy spilt the slum into productive and unproductive parts thus collaborating in the destruction of the slum. Here scholarship, ethnography and a plurality of perspectives could serve as a break on such ideas. Unfortunately, the academic sits silently as policy is enacted.

Academics as storytellers
Policy also speaks a jargon, a standardised language of World Bank, IMF, and the development agency. Such a jargon cauterises pain, destroys an openness to suffering. Somehow, the language of cost benefit has no comprehension of the life worlds that have been destroyed. The logic of inevitability and profit seems to create a climate for displacement. What one needs is not the universalism of economics but an attempt to break down this language into dialects, where the local and the vernacular allow for other ways of conceptualising suffering, pain, loss and even a different calculus of profit.
One needs academics to serve as storytellers, as munshis, recorders of resistance sustaining the alternative ways of conceptualising such narratives. One misses the old fashioned Gandhians and Marxists arguing policy in academic seminars. The new technocrats of policy seem to dominate.
As I was thinking these thoughts, I paused, took a break, for tea, realising conferences breed on tea and coffee. Sipping tea, I look at a hotel mirror and see myself armed with seminar handouts, a prize file and realise I am one of an army of seminarists that haunt Delhi. The seminar, I realise, creates the hegemony of policy. No government can do without seminars where civil society is brought in line with the latest official ideology. The mirror signals my complicity.
The writer calls himself a social sciences nomad