बनारस का साड़ी उद्योग और विकास का मतलब

(To be published in Karigar Nazariya)

नयी सरकार बनने के बाद विकास के नाम पर गतिविधियाँ और भी तेज़ होती जा रही हैं. विदेशी पूँजी निवेश और श्रम कानून के "सुधार" से लेकर भूमि अधिग्रहण तक मोदी सरकार कई जन विरोधी कदम उठा चुकी है. लेकिन यह भी सच है कि विकास के मुद्दे पर लगभग सभी पार्टियां एकमत हैं, फिर वह कांग्रेस-भाजपा हों या सपा-बसपा. ऐसे माहौल में कारीगर समाज को चाहिए कि वह विकास की पूरी सोच को मौलिक चुनौती दे और वह सारे मुद्दे सार्वजनिक बेहेस में लाए जिन्हे बेहेस से बाहर किया जा चुका है.

उदहारण के तौर पर दो मुद्दे ले लीजिये: मशीनीकरण और बाज़ार. हस्तउद्योग का मशीनीकरण और बाजार का विस्तार ये दोनों विकास की आम परिभाषाएँ हैं. मगर यह दोनों ही केवल आर्थिक आयाम हैं जिनमे कोई सामाजिक मूल्य नहीं हैं. या यह कहिये कि पूंजीवादी व्यवस्था में मशीनीकरण और बाज़ार का विस्तार जान विरोधी रूप धारण करते हैं, बेरोज़गारी और विस्थापन की शकल में. कारीगर नज़रिये से सवाल मशीनीकरण बनाम हस्तशिल्प या बाज़ार के होने-न-होने का नहीं है. सवाल यह है की कारीगर समाज में और पूरे देश में अगर लोगों के अपने इल्म और ज्ञान के बल पर खुशहाली लानी है तो इस के लिए अर्थव्यवस्था किस प्रकार की होगी? फिर इसमें मशीन की कितनी भूमिका होगी और बाजार की कितनी यह सवाल दोयम दर्जे के हैं.

साडी उद्योग पर एक नज़र डालें तो यह साफ़ हो जायेगा की सवाल हथकरघा बनाम पावरलूम का नहीं है. आज पावरलूम के तेजी से फैल जाने से प्रोडक्शन तो बहुत बढ़ चूका है, लेकिन कारीगर की कमाई पर कोई अच्छा असर नहीं पड़ा है. अगर पहले हथकरघे पर एक दिन में एक मीटर कपडा बना कर डेड सौ रूपया मज़दूरी मिल रही थी, तो आज मशीन पर एक दिन में एक कारीगर दस गुना कपडा तैयार कर लेगा लेकिन दिन की कमाई वही डेड सौ रूपया रह जाएगी क्यूंकि मज़दुरी घट कर एक मीटर की १५ रुपये होगी. बिजली की परेशानी सो अलग. यानी कुल मिला कर कारीगर अपने को वहीँ का वहीँ पाता है. बनारस का कारीगर इस वस्तुस्तिथि को भलीभांति समझता है. लेकिन अपने आपको दोष देने की बजाये कारीगर को नीतियों को और उस ढांचे को चुनौती देनी होगी जिसके चलते "विकास" का उसे कोई फायदा नहीं होता।

इसी तरह नए नए राष्ट्रीय और अंतर्राष्ट्रीय बाज़ार उपलब्ध होने से कारीगर को मौजूदा अर्थव्यवस्था में कोई ख़ास फायदा नहीं पहुँचता। और अगर पहुँचता भी है तो सिर्फ चंद लोगों को. मोदी सरकार ने बड़ा लालपुर में बुनकरों के लिए ट्रेड फेसिलिटेशन केंद्र खोलने की घोषणा तो ज़रूर कर दी है क्यूंकि सरकार विकास चाहती है और विकास का मतलब है बाजार का विस्तार. लेकिन आज बाजार की रचना कारीगर के हित में है ही नही. तो इसके विस्तार से उन्हें क्या लाभ होगा? कपडे के बाजार की रचना पर नज़ार डालें तो यह दिखाई देता है की तेज़ी से बदलते फैशन के दौर में रोज़ नए डिजाइन आते हैं. और इससे जो रिस्क पैदा होता है वह कारीगर ही को झेलना पड़ता है. पूँजीपति प्रोडक्शन से जुडी जोखिम अपने कारीगर के कंधे पर डाल देते हैं. यानी डिजाइन चल पड़ी तो फायदा पूँजी वाले का और नहीं चली तो नुक्सान कारीगर का!

विकास के पक्षधर ये कहते नहीं थकते की हम भविष्य के बारे में सोचते हैं और देश को आगे बढ़ाना चाहते हैं. इनका विरोध हस्तशिल्प को "बचाने" की बात करके नहीं किया जा सकता। हमें भी आने वाले कल की ही बात करनी होगी. न कि परंपरा की या बीते हुए कल की. लेकिन हमारा कल बेरोज़गारी और विस्थापन वाला नहीं होग. कारीगर समाज को यह दावा पेश करना होगा की वह सबकी खुशहाली का रास्ता दिखला सकता है. अगर कारीगर समाज संघठित तरीके से विकास पर सार्वजनिक बेहेस चलाये तो मेक इन इण्डिया, विदेशी पूँजी आदि सब योजनाओं और नीतियों पर हो रही चर्चा को अर्थशास्त्रियों और अन्य पढ़े-लिखे लोगों की चंगुल से छुड़ा कर समाज के बीच ला सकता है. यह एक ऐसी बेहेस होगी जिसमे "विकास" "औद्योगीकरण" आदि को लेकर कोई पूर्वाग्रह नहीं होग. न मशीन बेहेस के दायरे से बहार होगा और न बज़ार.

Interviews with Sunil and Chitra Sahasrabudhey, Vidya Ashram, Sarnath, India

During my stay in Varanasi for my PhD field work this past year, I sat down for a chat with long-time political activists Sunil and Chitra Sahasrabudhey of Vidya Ashram. I have uploaded the videos on a Vimeo channel here. Issues discussed are mainly to do with the social basis for radical change in India today.

Sunilji elaborates on his concept of the "bahishkrit samaj," the externed society, i.e that vast majority of India society which did not find a place in the new colonial society and continues to be the "informal economy" today. He also talks about the concept of lokavidya (knowledge among the people) and its relationship to radical politics today.

Chitraji discusses feminism from the bahishkrit pespective and also talks about the relationship between lokavidya and the local market.

Again all the videos are cataloged here.

Knowledge Satyagraha: Towards a People’s Knowledge Movement

Video of a talk I gave on the ideas and work of Vidya Ashram, a collective that I am part of here in Varanasi and where I am based this year. The rest of the talks at this conference (Critical Point of View: Wikipedia Research) are available here.

Amit Basole (IN) Knowledge Satyagraha: Towards a People’s Knowledge Movement from network cultures on Vimeo.

Lokavidya and Intellectual Property Rights

I am cross-posting a old post of mine from Lokavidya Panchayat, a blog run by Vidya Ashram in Sarnath, Varanasi. This is a post I wrote recently on issues that arise when we talk about intellectual property rights for people's knowledge (lokavidya).

1. Lokavidya: Protection versus commodification
The legal system of patents, copyrights, trademarks and intellectual property rights regimes in general is key to ensuring that knowledge can be traded in the market as a commodity. Clearly defined property rights are the basis for good contracts and good contracts enforced via the legal (police, judiciary) apparatus of the State are the basis for efficient market transactions. Most conclusions in economics that glorify the virtues of allocation via free markets rely on the existence of clear, enforceable contracts. Commodifying knowledge itself (as opposed to the fruits of knowledge, or knowledge embodied in products) is difficult due to the non-rival nature of knowledge. Non-rivalry means that the use of the commodity by one person does not preclude simultaneous use by another. Thus unlike a shirt or a computer, a design, a blueprint, a way of doing things, can be used by many people at once. This non-rival nature of Knowledge has been appreciated for centuries. Knowledge has begun to be seen as a valuable asset in the past two decades with the emergence of the Knowledge Society or the Information Economy. Pressures on its commodification have therefore increased. However the very same technological forces that have placed focus on the revenue-generating potential of knowledge have also created more impediments to its commodification. I refer to Information and Communications Technologies which bring the non-rival nature of knowledge into sharp relief. The controversies surrounding pirated music, scholarly paper, books and so on in electronic form clearly demonstrate this. The non-rival nature of knowledge which makes it nearly costless to reproduce (mimic) is however a double-edged sword. Even as progressive movements such as FOSS or open-access libraries emerge to take advantage of non-rivalry with the aim of undercutting corporate profits, so also, corporate and formal sector entities are able to "lift" knowledge from the people without due compensation to them while asserting that corporate use does not preclude use of the same knowledge by society at large. Since the dominant discourse around property rights for knowledge revolves around patents, copyrights and so on, proposals are also being floated for protection of lokavidya via similar IPRs. In the general climate that views knowledge as a revenue-generating asset, "poor people's knowledge" has attracted attention from international development agencies as another possible way to challenge poverty. If only poor people could take advantage of the knowledge they possess (by participating in the world market, of course), they could begin to climb out of poverty. But this demands a legal system of protection for their knowledge.

An incremental advance over lokavidya can generate windfall profits with the help of patenting regimes. A hypothetical example will clarify. Knowledge of several medicinal herbs is part of lokavidya. This knowledge is the result of accretion over many years and is a product of the ongoing knowledge activity of many ordinary men and women. In Marxian terms much of this knowledge is produced for its use-value, not its exchange value. That is, it is produced for use, not for sale. Much of it is also in the public domain and access to it is open to all. Companies which are interested in the knowledge for its exchange-value (its profit earning potential) can take advantage of the open-access nature of the knowledge. They can make a small incremental change to it, say alter its potency, isolate the active principle, or make some other small chemical modification to render it a "new product." This can then be patented and sold for profit. Even if the presence of the new product does not preclude the use of lokavidya, the fact still remains that the knowledge activity that contributed to the lokavidya commons was not rewarded or recognized.The above scenario calls for some thinking on ways and means to protect lokavidya from such appropriation. However, lokavidya by its nature is dispersed and difficult to trace to a single source. How can it be patented or copyrighted? More fundamentally, should it be? What other ways exist besides modern IPR regimes to protect lokavidya from appropriation while using it for the benefit of its holders? Perhaps some lessons can be learned from the history of the commodification of land.

2. Some analogies between Knowledge and Land

Of course unlike knowledge, land if a rival good (its use by one person precludes its use at the same time by another). However by analogy with land, one can identify two reasons for commodifying knowledge. One, in order to buy and sell knowledge itself and two, in order to earn rent on its use. Both these ways to earn revenue from knowledge are commonplace today. Patent fees and royalties are an example of the second. They are analogous to rent on land. The commodification of land via the process of enclosures has been well-documented in Europe. Via this process that Marx referred to as "primitive accumulation," land held communally, largely through informal systems of governance, is converted into private property. Via a similar process today, the knowledge commons, of which lokavidya is a large and important part, are being enclosed for profit. The transformation of knowledge from communally held lokavidya to privately held patents and copyrights in underway and has been underway for a long time.
Enclosures destroyed self-sufficiency in land use. Does the new system of Knowledge Management destroy self-sufficiency in knowledge production and use? Restoration of self-sufficiency in land use, i.e. land reform, though it became a revolutionary call in the context of highly unequal distribution of land-ownership, really amounts just to redistribution with the existing private property regime. So also the demand for patents and copyrights for lokavidya is appearing as a progressive cry when it only entails a wider, more equitable application of the same private property regime in the Knowledge domain. The land enclosures in Europe were as much about creating property rights as about consolidating and concentrating those right in a smaller number of hands. Do lokavidya enclosures follow a similar pattern? Will a call for IPRs for lokavidya be revolutionary in the current context, or will it merely strengthen the current trend towards increasing commodification of Knowledge? This is an important question that proponents and supporters of lokavidya must answer for themselves.

Can we imagine alternatives that go beyond both: lokavidya freely available for appropriation and lokavidya protected via IPRs?

Autonomous Global University

As a part of the Edu-factory initiative on understanding transformations in the modern university (see previous post), the Vidya Ashram collective contributed the following write-up on the idea of an autonomous global university (the participants in this round of discussion were asked to reflect on the idea of such a university). Entire contribution is below.

Knowledge Against Society

Twentieth century has been a century of knowledge production. It has also been a century of unprecedented violence. The knowledge that we produce is eventually turned against ourselves and against the whole society. While this was also true of the modern university, knowledge society that is in the making now seems to be singularly designed to appropriate knowledge and turn it against the producers of knowledge in the service of global capital and global machineries of violence.

The university in the modern era was the prime location of knowledge production, which claimed to take society out of the darkness of ignorance into enlightenment and from a regime of scarcity to a condition of abundance. While the university did produce a great deal of knowledge the motion of this knowledge was such that it ended up being a handmaiden of profit and domination. On account of its' sole authority in knowledge production, the university became complicit in suppression of society's knowledge. The bargain that the university made offered a space of pure enquiry, of knowledge for knowledge's sake, of pursuit of knowledge without interference from power. The university defended this privilege as much as it could. Now this privilege is being withdrawn.

The university has undergone major transformations in the twentieth century. A massive expansion of university has been going on. Millions have access to higher education. Protocols of knowledge production in the university have been challenged from various directions. Women, blacks, erstwhile colonized, workers, rebels – all have challenged the higher education scenario in the world. But along with these processes of democratization of knowledge, a parallel movement of militarisation and industrialization of knowledge production was ushered in with the Manhattan project. These two processes, of democratization and militarisation/industrialization, seem to have come to a head in the 1960s which saw numerous student actions on campuses across the world.

Now the global order is reinventing itself. In the information age, there is not going to be a privileged set of knowledge producers who will be allowed an autonomous space, a safe haven to explore and invent. Knowledge will be harnessed from the whole cultural field and subjected to regimes of cognitive measurement, knowledge management, and information enclosures.

Hierarchies of Knowledge and Labour

Exploitation of labour was the hallmark of industrial society. Exploitation of knowledge is now being added to exploitation of labour to build the foundations of a new capitalist system. Knowledge from all locations – university, internet, religions, ordinary life – are sought to be harnessed and exploited in the service of the building of this 'knowledge society'. Technologies of virtuality play an essential role in this management of knowledge. Living knowledge and its exploitation is essential ingredient of the new production systems unlike the earlier systems which depended on knowledge embodied in machines and routines. These developments open the way for a self-awareness of workers as bearers and producers of knowledge. There is no contradiction between knowledge and labour, nor is there a gulf between 'knowledgeable bodies' and 'labouring bodies'. Such contradictions stem from the division between mental and physical labour – a relic of the earlier industrial civilization. However, it is now perhaps the time to foreground human being as an epistemic being.

The category of labour as it was constituted in the older capitalist system and as deployed even by socialist and communist ideologies of workers' emancipation implies a hierarchy of labour in society – intellectual labour, industrial labour, women's labour, artisanal labour, agricultural labour, primitive labour, the idler and so on. It seems to us that this labour hierarchy is implicitly constructed on the basis of the knowledge hierarchy among the various kinds of knowledge that exist in society. University knowledge and modern science and technology occupied the space of knowledge while women's knowledge, farmers' knowledge, artisan's knowledge, tribal's knowledge were considered a product of habit or accident if not expressions of pure superstition. We reject such descriptions and the resulting hierarchy. Even in the modern era, such knowledge in society that we call lokvidya has played an important role in the survival of the people whose knowledge traditions these constitute.

If we grant that there is no hierarchy among various locations of knowledge in society and that all kinds of knowledge have a role to play in the reconstruction of society, grounds for non-hierarchical solidarities across many boundaries is prepared. Moreover, epistemic recognition of lokvidya opens us to a vast realm of living knowledge traditions in society as forms of autonomous knowledge activity. This also creates the condition for people to see their own knowledge traditions as sources of strength, and not only as means of survival.

Unlike the industrial society, the knowledge society does recognize lokvidya. But lokvidya is recognized only in order to benefit economically from it. In fact, the relation that knowledge society constructs with any knowledge is essentially one of economic exploitation. Knowledge society is built on the integration of any knowledge by economic exploitation.

Autonomous Global University (AGU)

Edufactory Collective's proposal of the formation of AGU is a bold idea. It has the potential to project a transformative perspective on knowledge society. We support its formation.

To say that AGU is autonomous is to say that the knowledge activity of such a university is free from political interference, economic pressures and military requirements. This requires that it has a political and ideological significance of its own.

Autonomy in the context of knowledge in this age of corporatisation means above all regulation of knowledge activities by epistemic norms derived from knowledge activity outside the market. Knowledge activity outside the market relates to a large part of knowledge in society, lokvidya and various cultural, political and other expressions and representations which are consciously kept autonomous.

Autonomous Global University (AGU) is not just another site of knowledge production. It is a site of cooperation among knowledge producers and a site of non-cooperation with the global regime of knowledge. It is a university in so far as its stock activity is knowledge activity. We can perhaps think of it as a union of networks and organizations. Of necessity, it will operate mainly through the virtual realm. But it is composed of acts of resistance and acts of organization on the ground.

AGU values all kinds of labour and all kinds of knowledge equally. AGU looks at knowledge as a means of reconstruction of society and individuals. AGU looks at knowledge as means of liberation, livelihood, culture. AGU thus works for the recognition and representation of all forms of knowledge in society. AGU seeks to step out on the periphery of time and gaze into the future. It seeks to build an imagination of the future society which is not just a variant of global capitalism. Through its activities it seeks to create idioms of global emancipatory transformations.

AGU looks at why our knowledge is turned against ourselves. It seeks to build solidarities across borders of the university and within the universities, solidarity of all bearers and producers of knowledge. It is not a bastion of creativity and production. It is an organ of dialogue, solidarity and organization. It seeks to organize the relatively empowered section of knowledge producers which are located in the university in order to challenge the global mechanisms of exploitation and violence. It seeks to expose the ways and means by which knowledge becomes an instrument of profit and a weapon against society. AGU seeks to emancipate knowledge from this condition.

For this purpose, AGU seeks to spread the virus of non-cooperation to all universities. We have read about the various auto-education intiatives in the earlier round of discussion - in Argentina, Europe, US, India - and about movements of students and precarious workers in Greece and other places. The various auto-education initiatives and movements at the borders of the university and within it can be read as acts of non-cooperation with the institutionalization of a new order of knowledge. This new order of knowledge exploits students, teachers and their knowledge for profit and control. These acts resist the enfeeblement and enslavement of knowledge producers and seek to liberate knowledge from the clutches of dons, managers, and rent seekers.

AGU seeks to link these acts of non-cooperation to create forums and launch activities that direct an uncompromising light on the prevailing order of things. By being a site of dialogues and translations, AGU seeks to sow the seeds of a social movement of knowledge, a Knowledge Satyagraha. Knowledge satyagraha means the insistence that knowledge activities be regulated by epistemic norms independent of the market, the insistence that knowledge be linked to values of truth and justice. 'Non-cooperation' and 'satyagraha' as forms of political action are legacies most notably of the non-violent mass movement against the British Empire during the Indian freedom struggle and the civil rights movement in the US.

AGU seeks to participate in a reconstruction of knowledge and initiate a reconstitution of university. It explores ways and means of building and instituting a new imagination of university that operates in an environment of knowledge abundance. It seeks to reinterpret and reorganize the vast amounts of knowledge that have been generated by the university so far. It challenges the prevailing institutionalized differentiations of knowledge like the one between the sciences and arts. It seeks to reinterpret human sciences by inscribing human being as an epistemic being at its core. It seeks to develop new principles of integration of knowledge.

We understand that the challenge of actualizing a vision like this is immense. All the tools available in the virtual realm – website, mailing list, wiki, blogs, social networking – will have to be configured and reconfigured. The relation between the virtual life and the ordinary life will also have to be reflected upon, since we are seeking to connect the two. The new institutional form of AGU will have to be elaborated further and its relation with other institutional forms defined. Since this is the first time we are discussing the construction of an autonomous global university, we felt we will try to articulate a possible vision for AGU, rather than try to work out all aspects of it.

Lokvidya And AGU

From the point of view of relationship with the market lokvidya activity may be divided into three parts:

First, lokvidya which has been co-opted by the global market often through the new techniques brought into existence by the Internet. Secondly, Lokvidya activity that operates on the margins of the market. This however contributes greatly to the creation of riches by its numbers and vastness. Household production of all types based both on artisanry and farming belong to this category. Thirdly, those lokvidya processes that have no immediate economic value attached to them and are therefore outside the market.

Globalisation has tried to construct trade routes and linkages for an economic exploitation of all such activity but what gets left out still constitutes large social reality at least in countries like India. A lot of work at home and in remote geographical areas is of this type. Women's work in the house which includes bringing up children, daily health care, balanced food, cooking, sanitation and cleanliness, decoration etc. is work of this type which is definitely based on a steady understanding and knowledge of human beings and their surroundings. To this category also belongs a large part of the activity of tribals and indigenous people in remote areas. They grow food on small plots of land to eat, make and repair implements of their use, build houses, and collect forest produce as food, medicine and fuel. Their life is split into two parts, one constituted of all these knowledge-based activities outside the market and other of work in the market as workers for wages. Similarly, almost all households, including often the very organized urban households too, have these two components, one of women's work outside the market and the other of men and women earning through the market.

So there is this huge expanse of activities of women and tribals and part of the activity of peasants and artisans which is outside the market and is based on their knowledge which is modified and upgraded regularly and is full of innovations. We would like to further explore and would like to invite others to explore what relevance this aspect of lokvidya can have in constructing an epistemic frame of reference which may provide the guidelines for knowledge activity of an autonomous university.

Vidya Ashram

We end with a brief introduction to some activities and plans of Vidya Ashram which bear an affinity with the initiative for the construction of an autonomous global university. Vidya Ashram was set up three years ago at Sarnath near Varanasi. Sarnath is the place where Buddha first expounded his philosophy of becoming.

Among other activities, we have organised a series of dialogues on Knowledge in Society in various fora associated with World Social Forum process during last four years. The dialogues were held at Hyderabad, Mumbai, Karachi, Delhi. We intend to take these dialogues to university, among computer professionals and generally among people. We hope that these dialogues will lead to the formation of a new academy. This academy, which might possibly be named the Lokvidya Academy, will seek to reconfigure relations between different kinds of knowledge in society and between knowledge and society.

Last year Vidya Ashram formed an Emancipation of Knowledge Forum. A group of 30 young men and women from the Sarnath region have joined to shape this forum. Attempts to extend it around Varanasi are going on. We hope that this forum can develop as a platform for various organizations and movements to come together to explore the political significance of the knowledge question which might lead to new radical forms of politics.

- Vidya Ashram
February 2008

Some reflections on knowledge hierarchies and the autonomous university

I am part of a discussion list called "Edu-factory" which hosts discussions on the transformations currently ongoing in the university (corporatization etc) and on possibilities and avenues for creating non-hierarchical, autonomous universities. Last week I had to make a scheduled post on this list for discussion. Here is my post (the full text is also at the Edu-factory website). My earlier contribution to the list (for the previous round of discussion) is here.

My fundamental concern in my own work lies in knowledge production outside the University and in unsettling the real and perceived hegemony of the university as a privileged site of knowledge production. I see social theory produced within the western Academy and its satellites all over the world as unable to break the hold of European liberal-radical thought and hence look to see if other types of emancipatory/liberatory discourse can come from non-university sites. So in a sense, the first hierarchy I concern myself with is that between different types of knowledges as defined by their institutional sites of production. Since knowledge produced in different locations in society also acquires labels such as "serious knowledge" versus "trivial knowledge", formal versus informal/tacit, etc, I am interested in investigating these labels. My first edu-factory post on Eurocentrism and the multiplicity of knowledge production sites was reflective of these concerns. So while I am not insensitive to the debates on the changes in higher education systems in the neo-liberal period, my interest in them is located within this "larger" framework.

Since this round of the Edu-factory discussions is supposed to focus on "hierarchy within the higher education market, and the university as a place of hierarchisation in the labor market" my first thought was that I would not have much to contribute towards this, particular given that many people on this list have done excellent work on this issue. I have been reading Marc Bousquet's "How the University Works" with great (and morbid) interest. Being a graduate employee myself, and also somewhat active in the grad employee union on campus, I recognize the importance of such struggles. The capitulation of faculty-student body to the "will of the administration" is depressing. One anecdote will suffice. Last Spring, my institution, the University of Massachusetts decided (that is, some top manager decided in the collective name of the University) to award an honorary doctorate to Andrew Card, a close associate of George W. Bush and one of the pre-eminent architects of the War on Iraq. It is hard to call this a "controversial decision" because barring a few hard republican party supporters, the faculty and the graduate and undergraduate student bodies were quite united in their opposition. Despite repeated demonstrations and protest, including booing and placards inside the hall as Card was awarded the degree (see video of this) the administration went ahead with its plan. To me this blatant disregard of student and faculty opinion was emblematic of the process of change described by Bousquet. This was in Spring 2007. School resumed in the Fall with hardly a whisper about this whole fiasco. Only after decades of restructuring (of both organization and discourse) could the management have such confidence, confidence in the pliability or ineffectuality of the faculty and the student body.

But all this is not news and is only preface to my main point. I persevered in submitting a post because of the second aspect of the question raised by Edu-factory editors: How to construct an autonomous university? The first part of the discussion on hierarchies is supposed to inform the second part on autonomous universities. Here I believe that some lessons from the Indian experience could be the more relevant rather than my own experience in the Western Academy. In the context of India, this discussion on hierarchies and autonomous university assumes a different guise. We are now speaking not only about hierarchies created by higher education institutions in the formal labor market (the world of written contracts, tax-paying firms and employees), but also in society at large, where a vast number of individuals will never go to university or participate in the formal labor market. Yet their lives will be shaped by the university. A farmer has never gone to agricultural college where an agricultural scientist works. Both have knowledge but the knowledge of both is valued differently by society and by the market. These two will never compete directly for the same job (can the farmer be a visiting professor at our hypothetical university?). The scientist produces knowledge in the form of scholarly publications. The farmer produces knowledge in the activity of growing his crop. The veracity of the scientist's knowledge is tested by peer-review and replication in the laboratory or field. The veracity of the farmer's knowledge is tested by nature's "review" and replication in life. In response to a mistake, the scientist retracts his research paper/finding, in response to a mistake a farmer may lost a significant proportion of his income and go into lifelong debt. Further the farmer's knowledge activity feeds me, yet I value his knowledge less. Why?

I am guilty of posing a simple binary and I have belabored the example but I do have a point. I am sensitive to the interactions and porosity of borders in my example (the farmer could be using hybrid seeds developed by the scientist). But this does not alter the fact that there are two compartment in the first place (between which the porous border runs) and that the two interact asymmetrically. The hierarchy between farmers and scientists or artisans and engineers, is not peculiar to India or even the developing world. Neither is the university the only institution implicated in the construction of such hierarchies (the famous institution of "the market" is another). Note that I am not saying that "knowledge produced in life" is always and everywhere considered inferior to knowledge produced in the university or in the laboratory. But it is sufficiently general a phenomenon to warrant interest. Particular when we think about the characteristics of an autonomous university, I think we should think about how it will incorporate different types of knowledge. In India at least, a very large part of knowledge production and transmission, particularly of the kind that is directly relevant to sustaining livelihoods, takes place outside the university. An autonomous university would be required to be conscious of the multiple locations of knowledge production in society, be they with farmers, artisans, women, indigenous peoples. As Gigi Roggero noted, "The division between intellectual and manual labor...is not objective, but a device to hierarchize and to control labor power." An autonomous university would be founded on a non-distinction between the two, at least as far as respect for knowledge goes. It will recognize that all work is "knowledge work." At the Vidya Ashram in Varanasi, via the concept of dialog on knowledge in society, we have arrived at a concept of a "lokavidya academy" (loka = people/world, vidya = knowledge) which will be an academy that attempts to recognize and represent all types of knowledge in society.

On a related note let me bring in the issue of language here. The role of language and translation and of global English, has already been brought up several times in this round. To this discussion, I would like to add another dimension of language, namely, the role of language in formalization of knowledge, in making informal knowledge formal. The university, almost by definition produces and distributes formal knowledge. This question is particularly relevant in the Indian context because the language of higher education is English but this language is spoken by a very small minority of Indians. The University is complicit is maintaining this hierarchy of languages. This is a very old and heavily debated issue in the post-colonial context. Ngugi wa'Thiongo has written about it, as did Gandhi and Ram Manohar Lohia in their day. Thus a very important challenge facing the autonomous university is the issue of the language in which education will be imparted, knowledge will be produced. To restore prestige to people's knowledge, prestige will have to be restored to their languages. I am not saying anything terribly new. In the current climate, as India becomes more and more dependent on insertion in the global economy to sustain her "magical" rates of economic growth, English language training centers are booming. But the new economy only has place for so many. The majority is once again excluded and it is their own knowledge in their own languages that sustains them. The medium of instruction for higher education remains an extremely complex and controversial question today. And again I don't pretend to have an answer.

This brings me to the final and perhaps controversial point on localism and the autonomous university। Jon Solomon in an early post raised this issue and it was brought up again in a later post, from where I quote. The worry is "that the various attempts to construct alternative or nomadic university experiences might end up reproducing ossified forms of national and cultural resistance to the neoliberalization of the university."

This statement needs some unpacking. It is clear that many forms of resistance to neoliberal globalization are in fact national/cultural (even the preeminent challenge of Islam, can be interpreted along culturalist lines). Which of them are "ossified" and which are not? By what criterion do we distinguish the two? While Jon may have intended something different, in the liberal/radical European tradition of social thought (in which we may include Marxism) there is a tendency to frown upon cultural/nationalist resistance. It is equated with conservatism, parochialism and backwardness. It is somehow inferior to cosmopolitanism, internationalism, globalism. We want to be culturally global (but not economically global, at least not in the current form of globalization). Of course we are sophisticated enough to distinguish between being culturally global and being culturally the same. We don't want homogenization (mcdonaldization) but neither do we want insularity. But to me there is nothing a priori objectionable about either. We have seen malignant forms of both, benign forms of both. Resolving the tension between a locally culturally grounded worldview (which may form the basis of the resistance) and a benign view of other cultures with a respect for their own struggles, their own existence (in other words a benign enthocentrism), is a major challenge today. Unfortunately there is not much in the European experience to help us in this regard. All we find is a parochialism of universals (to use Immanuel Wallerstein's phrase) and an ethnocentrism in denial. An autonomous/open university must also be a local, non-parochial university. I stress the local as much as the non-parochial.

Eurocentrism, the University, and multiplicity of knowledge production sites

I am part of a international discussion list called "Edu-factory" which hosts discussions on the transformations currently ongoing in the university (corporatization etc) and on possibilities and avenues for creating non-hierarchical, autonomous universities. I had posted two scheduled contributions to that list. This is the first one, posted in April 2007. I am only positng a small excerpt below. For the entire post, click on the "more" link below. The second post, written in Jan 2008, is here.

The central theme on this discussion list is "Conflicts in the Production of Knowledge." There are of course many important conflicts to understand and many different ways to understand these conflicts. The one between market-oriented and non-market-oriented teaching and learning (or alternatively between liberal versus vocational/professional education) is one that has been alluded to many times. Similarly the conflicts over greater democratization of the learning process, over open access to research and so on are also important.

In my post I would like to take a somewhat different approach. The big questions that I am interested in are:
1. Can the European University (what I mean by this will become clear presently) show us a way forward out of the global socio-ecological crisis of late capitalism?

2. Further, in the context of post-colonial societies such as India, how can the modern university escape or transcend its Eurocentric origins and bounds and become more immediately relevant to society at large?

Needless to say, these are topics for entire research programs and here I can offer no more than discussion points (indeed I am not qualified to do much more). Instead of attempting to answer these directly I will raise related issues:
1. What are some of the contradictions/conflicts in the "European University" stand in the way of it being a force for radical change?
2. In the post-colonial context, how can we think of the University in relation to the other sites where knowledge is produced in society?

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