At odds with dogmatic assumptions

Shelley Walia

Sitting in my study in the mountains, lost in the thick of greenery around me and listening to Vivaldi’s Concerto for cembalo and Mozart’s Serenade for Winds, I recall the days spent at seminars in Cambridge in the 1990s. The sessions began after dinner and often carried on to the next evening. The question hour would go on endlessly while the speaker would try to engage with all, firing up our gusto. Our insights began to show signs of mellowness. We became adapt at articulating the romance and the significance of our observations. We felt self-assured, because our teachers made us feel important. We began to matter as humans who had a mind of their own. Disagreement was always welcome. Such were the unconventional and lively days that I spent in the company of my classmates, my teachers, my parents and my sisters.

I needed no urging to take up my profession in the field of literature that was considered a non-profit and futile area to choose, a field without high-prestige credentials. Earlier on in my life, I began to engage critically with the limits of disciplinary complacency and the insincerity of epistemological purity. Cultivating a critically engaging voice and fearless speech for the urgent matters of fair play and parity in the world became my calling, a voice that was the raison d’etre of my vocation, unique, spirited and without the resonance or imitation of what has gone by.

I did thrive, but now, away from it all, I seem somewhat disenchanted with a spiritual and intellectual bankruptcy of the existence of many in the academic profession, replete with dogmatic assumptions, with the struggle for rising up in the social hierarchy, of tasting the humiliation of failure and the fragility of success. The outcome of one's work was not gratification, but the material success of the attainment. The love of hearing applause seemed to be the end of learning. A conspicuous form of ruthlessness underpinned the profession I had so fondly pursued. Colleagues exalted within themselves at another's failure while remaining silent and derisive at someone's success. Often I saw at seminars, an arrogant question being shot at the speaker, more out of a sense of intellectual assertion than humility of finding out a satisfactory answer.

More than anything, around me there seemed to be complete academic insularity with no concern for forms of institutional and systemic injustice. It is now observed that largely, the academic establishments have fallen in line with the state ideology, concerned more for their self-image and their patrons, as opposed to keeping scholars who had the stamina to disagree.

I now realise it was not success, but the simplicity and spontaneity of life that matters most, especially an intellectual activity of curiosity, quiet contemplations and new delights in thinking about the more human questions and the need for reflection on the constant struggle between a sense of justice and the harsh reality of customary rules and regulation, of the tension between the people and power.

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