Opium Trade and the Making of Bombay

Bombay's impressive 19th Century public buildings: Read on for their connection with the Opium Trade. Click here for photo source.

I found a really eye-opening article on the connection between Bombay and the British Opium Trade with China (a most sordid chapter in the history of Empire) by Mahmood Farooqui recently on the SARAI listserv. I am pasting it below in its entirety. You can also read it here. It is a review of a book published by the Three Essays Collective. The books name is "Opium City: The Making of Early Vistorian Bombay" by Amar Farooqui.

MUMBAI'S OPIUM PAST
by Mahmood Farooqui
December 23, 2005

"This opium trade is a sin on England's head and a curse on India for her share in being the instrument."Dada Bhai Naoroji-1880.

It sometimes appears, from the nature of current historical debates, as if the British Empire in India was purely an Orientalising mission whose discourses generated a politics of identity but that it was little more than an ideological apparatus that hegemonised us. It is difficult therefore to connect back to the earliest Nationalists who decried the drain of wealth from India, who lamented India's deindustrialization and the economic exploitation of our people by foreign occupiers. It is easy, in the miasma of post-colonialisms emanating from American Universities, to forget that the Empire came into being and remained in force as an economic entity, that it was instituted by traders, that there was also something called economic Imperialism.

Amar Farooqui's "Opium City-The Making of Colonial Bombay," is welcome first of all because it reorients us to the fundamentals of how and why we were colonized by the East India Company. It is a new title by the Three Essays Press, a Delhi based outfit, which has been publishing tracts in the form, as its name implies, of three essays in slim volumes by renowned and radical academics in a style and on subjects that are of general interest. Opium City, like everything else published by it-ranging from Hindi film music to the search for an Indian Enlightenment-breaks new ground at the same time as reorienting the debate into a radical yet suitably indigenous direction.

In our school histories we have read about the opium triangle, the unholy trade nexus established by the East India Company wherein it forced Indian peasants to grow opium, under its own monopoly and control, smuggled it to China and sold it in return for Chinese tea and repatriated profits back home. They made entire generations of Chinese addicted to opium because it was the only way to solve the balance of payments problem. This opium trade, once the commonest polemic against Empire, has today virtually passed into oblivion.

Amar Farooqui's book returns it centre stage at the same time as showing us how important the opium trade was for the businessmen of Western India, particularly Bombay and how significant a role it played in generating the capital that later on built Bombay. The peculiar nature of British, piecemeal, conquest of India meant that they could control the monopoly of opium growth, sales and import far better in Bengal and Bihar than in western India.

Since large chunks of territory in western India was not directly under British rule until the 1850s-Portugese Daman to the North of Bombay and Goa to the South, numerous indigenously ruled states in western India, Sind- it was therefore possible for merchants to access opium grown in Malwa and smuggle it via Pali in Rajasthan, to Jaisalmer then to Karachi and from Karachi by sea to Daman.

By the 1820s a large number of Parsis, Marwaris, Gujarati Banias and Konkani Muslims had moved into the opium trade at Bombay. Of the 42 foreign firms operating in China at the end of the 1830s, 20 were fully owned by Parsis. Indigenous shipping and opium trade too were closely interlinked. For two decades the figure who dominated the opium trade at Bombay was Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy (1783-1859). He was the first Indian to be knighted (1842), the first to win a baronetcy (1857) who partnered Jardine and Matheson, the largest opium trading network in China. Apart from owning ships, agents and commercial clearing houses, he was also one of the six directors of the Bank of Bombay.

It was the capital accumulation of these years that allowed these same people to later on lay the foundation of the industrial Bombay as well as the grand public buildings that survive in South Bombay. From being an obscure port which could not even generate its own revenues Bombay's transformation into one of the leading cities of the Empire occurred fairly rapidly within the space of about half a century, between the 1790s and 1840s. The share of Bombay in 1820-40 for bullion inflow, especially for opium, was much larger than Calcutta. During this period, the Malwa opium was worth Rs 15-20 million annually to India and unlike Bengali opium which directly benefited the colonial state, earnings from Malwa opium largely represented private, mainly indigenous profits, giving it a great multiplier effect.

This effect was evident in the geographical make up of the city. It was the Parsis, many of them beneficiaries of opium's huge profits, who developed South Bombay. The bungalows of Malabar and Cumbala Hills, of Breach Candy and Walkeshwar were mostly Parsi-owned and unexceptionally lent out to Europeans. But in the 1830s and 40s they also owned and developed many of Bombay's quintessential suburbs. Cursetji Manockji owned Anik, Dhakji Dadaji owned Varasavy (present day Versova), Framji Cowasji (Poway estate), Jamestji Bomanji (Vila Parla, Jhu); Cursetji Cowasji (Goregaum); Ratanji Edulji (Gatkopar); Krushnarao Raghunath (Borvday); and Laxman Hurrichanderji (Chincholi).

Opium City, a distillation of the same writer's bigger treatise "Smuggling as Subversion-Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of Opium," (Lexington, 2005) also shows how this opium trade caused no pangs of conscience among community leaders in Bombay who engaged in numerous moral crusades on other issues while simultaneously shipping the drug to china. We know that the Indian nationalists too in the last quarter of the 19th c showed no inclination to oppose the opium trade, actually extending tacit support to it. These businessmen, remembered as great public figures by us, would not countenance paying taxes to improve the city's water supply (in 1850s) while ratifying stringent provisions, like some of our present day politicos, for sending aliens off the island-particularly those who live 'idle without work.' The biggest merit of the book, however, is to show us how it was "the poppy fields of Bihar that built Bombay." Biharis and Karachiites, therefore, have more than a natural right to live in Bombay.

The Lesser Known Ghalib(2): In praise of commoness

Continuing the series on Ghalib. I just rediscovered one of my favorite "anti- intellectual" verses by Ghalib. Ghalib is commonly acknowledged to be a "difficult poet" and revels in abstruse imagery and metaphors. And with his knowledge of Urdu, Persian and Arabic as well as poetics, can certainly be considered an intellectual, in the modern sense of the term. So its interesting to find such a direct comment on the ways of the intellectuals.

ہیں اہل خرد کس روش خاص پہ نازاں

پا بستگی رسم و راہ عام بہت ہے

haiñ ahl-e khirad kis ravish-e khās pah nāzāñ
pā-bastagī-e rasm-o-rah-e ʿām bahut hai

Loose, literal translation #1:
Of what special method are the intellectuals so proud?
The hold of common practice is strong enough in them
Loose, literal translation #2
Of what special method are the intellectual so proud?
Adherence to common custom is good enough for us.

Click here for the commentaries available for this verse on Frances Pritchett's site.

Most commentators seem to have preferred reading #1 for this verse and this was also the reading that was most obvious to me on the first pass. In this reading, Ghalib is lampooning the intellectuals (ahl-e-khirad) for being vainly proud of their special methods/customs (ravish-e-khaas), when in fact they are as grounded/caught (paa-bastagi, lit. foot-fixedness) in everyday mores and custom (rasm-o-rah-e-aam) as the rest of us common people. At one level, the verse immediately appealed to me because of the number of times I have witnessed intellectuals display the all too common (common in both senses of the term, frequent and vulgar) traits of petty behavior, jealousy etc. At a more philosophical/methodological level, the verse can be interpreted as saying that the claims made on behalf of special methods ("scientific method" comes to mind, though Ghalib might not have had that in mind) are suspect because the individuals who espouse these methods are very caught up in mundane, everyday prejudices and limitations to really produce any objective or special knowledge. Am I reading too much into the verse?

Reading #2 is suggested by Pritchett as a possible secondary reading. Here, Ghalib is asking what is so special about these methods on the intellectuals? Being grounded in good old common sense is good enough for us. Here, "bahut hai" is interpreted not as "there is a lot" but as "is enough", both interpretations are perfectly valid. The only problem, as Pritchett point out, is that "paa-bastagi" has the negative connotation of "being caught" rather than a more neutral or positive connotation of "being rooted" or "being grounded."

Once again Ghalib shows how much can be done by simply exploiting the ambiguities or multivalence inherent in Urdu/Hindi.

The Lesser Known Ghalib(1): Veil of openness

I thought of doing this series of blog entries on lesser known verses of Ghalib. As lovers of Ghalib know, some of his ghazals, and in particular some of the verses in those ghazals have been made really popular in recent times, mainly because they have been sung by popular artists such as Jagjit and Chitra Singh, Begum Akhtar, Sudhir Narain, and go a bit further back, K.L.Saigal (yes Saigal has excellent renditions of some of Ghalib's greatest, in his own inimitable style).

But Ghalib's Urdu divaan, though small by Mir's standards, is still much larger than the popular ghazal set. So I though I would more or less randomly select verses that appeal to me, either verses from lesser known ghazals or lesser known verses from famous ghazals. Here is the first of the lot, from a relatively lesser known ghazal (Ghazal #198, verse 2):

در پردہ انھیں غیر سے ہے ربط نہانی

ظاہر کا یہ پردہ ہے کہ پردہ نہیں کرتے

dar pardah unhe;N ;Gair se hai rab:t-e nihaanii
:zaahir kaa yih pardah hai kih pardaa nahii;N karte

dar pardah = behind the veil, rabt-e-nihaani = relationship of hiddenness (a hidden connection), zaahir kaa pardah = veil of openness
I have taken the Urdu and the Roman from Frances Pritchett's site. As usual, Prof. Pritchett collects the available commentaries on this verse and adds her own interpretation. I don't have a whole lot to add to the excellent interpretations, but my own two cents follow.

In the first line Ghalib informs us of the behavior of (who else?), the beloved. We are told she carries on a secret relationship with "the Other" behind the purdah. So far it is not too remarkable though a bit puzzling (see below), we might think, except for the usual Ghalibian tautness of phrasing. But then the second line delivers the basic paradox, the veil of openness. We are informed that her not keeping purdah (purdah nahi karte) is itself a type of purdah, a type of veil, a way of hiding something. Her affair with the Other is there, only it is hidden in plain view so to speak. By not keeping purdah from the Other, the Beloved seems to announce to the world, "Look there is nothing between us, he is 'like a brother' to me. If there were something going on then would I not keep purdah, to convey the appearance of normalcy and to allay any suspicion?" But our lover is smart. He has seen through the deception. He tells us, "Don't be fooled by this lack of purdah, it is merely the zaahir kaa purdah, the veil of openness in the guise of which all kinds of nefarious activities are going on."

Try reciting this verse as it might be recited in a mushairah. It is brilliant. Repeating the first line several times, builds up the tension, we are led to expect something fishy afoot. We think to ourselves, "How can some hidden relationship (rabt-e-nihaani) exist within the veil (dar purdah)? Something could be going on between two people (two strangers, remember we are talking about a relationship with "the Other"), if the Beloved meets him like she does everyone else, i.e. by keeping purdah from him. But if she is meeting him inside the purdah, he must be above suspicion (an older male relative, a brother etc)." And the second line does not disappoint. It tells us, "Aha! But thats exactly it. Zaahir ka yeh purdah hai...ke purdah nahi karte!"

Brilliant!

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.

Do The World’s Poor Countries Finance the Rich Ones?

The Center for Popular Economics which is housed in my department at the University of Massachusetts, runs a series of short popular articles on issues of political economy. These are called EconAtrocity or EconUtopia depending on whether the writer is writing about a problem or a solution. CPE also runs a great progressive economics blog. I have written a few of these in the past, one on water privatization and one on community-managed water as an alternative to both large corporations and large state-run bureaucracies. Here is the most recent one I wrote.

Econ-Atrocity: Do The World’s Poor Countries Finance the Rich Ones?

Friday, January 18, 2008 by Center for Popular Economics By Amit Basole
CPE Staff Economist

Global Charity
In the year 2000, the richest 10 per cent of the world’s population held 85 percent of its total income and wealth. The bottom half owned a mere 1 percent. Such glaring global asymmetries have long justified redistribution of wealth from the “Global North” to the “Global South” in the form of development aid and loans. So much so, that the stock image of a developing country that springs to mind (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa) is that of a heavily indebted economy which continually borrows simply to repay its old loans and receives food and other forms of aid to feed and clothe its “naked and hungry masses.” Persistent poverty is often blamed on inadequate aid, and rich countries are periodically exhorted to donate more generously. This form of global charity is visible to all. But there is another flow of wealth across national borders, greater in magnitude and more clandestine. This is the flow from poor countries to the rich. Yes, the world’s poorest countries are today financing the richest. Far from being heavily indebted, many developing countries are net creditors vis-à-vis the rest of the world. How is this possible?

Read more...

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?

Read more...

"Safar"ing and sacrifice or sugar-free romances?

By Shilpi Suneja

Of course I liked Cheeni Kum. The very understated treatment of a wholly original love story, requiring a very mature understanding. It definitely heralds a new age of Indian cinema–here we are, talking about a romance between two people miles apart in age. It is what you call unconventional. I would also call it modern. That yes, we can finally talk about such unconventional romances.

But on a more subtle level, the tradition-modernity debate is implicated once again. This movie in a way suggest that it is only now that we can talk about such love, which defies our conventional ideals of marriage, family, the love between (reasonably same aged) adults. It is only now because only now has there been a triumph of reason. A triumph of freedom. Gone are the bonds of tradition. Of dated ideals of sacrifice.

This becomes clear if you compare Cheeni Kum with a movie such as Safar. The male protagonists of both movies are arguably in similar predicaments. Both are apparently closer rather than farther away from death. One is 64 and has no more than anywhere from 20 to 6 years of sane, un-wheelchaired adulthood, and the other has barely a few months as he suffers from terminal cancer. And in both cases the woman has good reasons to choose another man who is likely to live a longer life. In Safar she chooses another man. In Cheeni Kum she doesn't.

What we know, what we feel is that we have come a long way. What has happened to us during this process? 20+ years of feminine lib, 10+ years of neoliberal capitalism (in India), loud Americanization (Hollywoodization, McDonaldization) and you have it. A short, shy, dimpled, sari-clad Sharmila (I did say shy) is replaced with a tall, broad, lankily independent Tabu. There are important similarities. Both have a strong sense of independence, although I find Sharmila's more convincing. She is a true working-girl (not like Tabu's character who merely says she is a software engineer, but all of her time in the movie is spent walking in the streets of London and the by-lanes of Delhi). Both are given the option of making their own decision. But what changes? I don't think it is the women so much as the culture around them. It is no longer necessary or possible for the Devdas-like hero to compel the heroine to sacrifice her and his love. In fact, the modern day and age cannot give us a Devdas. Are the very aesthetics of sentimentality, of rona-dhona a thing of the past?

The man wishes to choose in his interest, in her interest. And so does the woman. After all, it is the age of choices. That is the least capitalism can afford to us. It is the age of reason, of individualism. The age of choosing happiness for oneself. Compared to this the poignancy of self-sacrifice in Safar seems so pointless, so hopeless, so unnecessary. This, I think is a not altogether healthy loss. I think we have lost something of beauty.

Shyam Benegal's Ankur

My interest in cinema is only a few years old and I am admittedly a novice in understanding its grammar and its aesthetics. My attempts at making sense of film are mostly grounded in the social philosophy that they articulate to me. In this regard Shyam Benegal's early film Ankur is very interesting. I had seen the film in India one or twice when it aired on television. But the impact of a film (or for that matter anything else) is proportional to your capacity to absorb the material. As Ghalib says,

girni thi ham pe barq-e-tajalli na toor par
dete hain baadah zarf-e-qadah-khvaar dekh kar

The lightning of glory should have fallen on us not on Mount Toor
They only give wine after seeing the capacity of the wine drinker

[F.Pritchett's translation]

click here for Frances Pritchett's annotation and explication of this verse.
So the gist of it is that when I saw the film again several years later, my capacity for drinking the wine of social commentary was greater! I wrote the following after seeing the movie.

Ankur is the film that shot director Shyam Benegal to fame and in my opinion it is a beautifully nuanced portrayal of contemporary social dynamics in rural India. I say contemporary in the long-historical sense since 32 years have passed since the making of the film. I think that the most prominent conflict the story depicts still remains important. The two characters of central importance are the kumhar woman Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi) and the landlord’s son, Surya (Anant Nag). Lakshmi’s husband, Kishtaya (Sadhu Meher) is also an important part of the puzzle. I understand the kumhar couple (Lakshmi and Kishtaya) as articulating, through their acts more than their words, the central problematic of the twin evils of feudal-capitalism and industrial-capitalism. This is not the place to go into an elaboration of these two concepts but briefly, I construct these categories to capture, in very abstract terms, what has also been referred to variously as the Bharat-India or the bahishkrit-paschimikrit divide, the dual economy etc. “Feudal-capitalism” (a contradiction in terms for many Marxists and perhaps even for non-Marxists), but a concept well-developed by World-Systems Analysts, is meant to convey the idea that those social formations that are routinely labeled “feudal” in the Indian context (for e.g. the type of rural society depicted in Ankur) are themselves, in the form that we know them, a product of the development of the capitalist world-economy. Thus the “feudal” rural economy is a vital part of capitalism. “Industrial-capitalism” refers to social formations that are mostly labeled simply as “capitalist” or “industrial” or “modern”. In the film, this world enters the story via the character of Surya, the city-educated, feudal lord.

If Lakshmi and Kishtaya constitute a (feminist and subaltern) critique of the central problematic, then Surya epitomizes a “worst of both worlds” distillation of the same problematic. As noted in the film’s review on the Strictly Film School site, “Surya soon disrupts the dynamics of everyday life in the village by flouting tradition and local custom: asking the lower caste Lakshmi to brew his tea and cook his meals”। Thus, when Lakshmi expresses disbelief at Surya’s request to cook for him (“aap mere haath ka khana khayenge?”) Surya asserts that he does not believe in caste-prejudice (“main jaat-paat nahi manta”). So far Surya seems to behave as the stereotypical city-educated, modern young man over whom the “customs and traditions” (riti-rivaaz) hold little sway. However, Benegal makes the story a good deal more interesting by exploring the limits to Surya’s “progressive” qualities. Here I disagree with the analysis presented at the Strictly Film School site. It is stated there that “despite Surya's seemingly progressive ideas on the irrelevance of the caste system, his moral integrity proves suspect when he develops an irrepressible attraction towards his enigmatic and beautiful servant”. I think that blaming Surya’s crimes and misdemeanors on lack of “moral integrity” misses the other half of Benegal’s civilizational critique. Having shown us the evils of feudal-capitalism, through Surya’s vacillating nature, Benegal is showing us the sexism or patriarchy of modern-capitalism. To put it another way, if we can blame Surya’s failings on lack of moral integrity why not credit his “progressive ideas” to moments of high moral integrity? Or conversely, why not portray all the myriad crimes committed by agents in the feudal-capitalist social formation as resulting from individual moral failings? We do not do the later because we recognize the systemic nature of abuses such as caste exploitation. Well, the failings of industrial-capitalism are systemic as well. If we credit progressive ideas to it as a system (of values imparted via education etc) we must debit the failings of its product (Surya) as the system’s failings as well.

Thus through Surya’s blunderings and moral cowardice, Benegal, in my opinion, shows us the devil (feudal-capitalism) and the deep-blue sea (industrial-capitalism) between which women (Lakshmi) and the subaltern (unemployed, ex-artisan Kishtaya) are trapped. The deeply symbolic ending shows a little boy, who we have previously seen observing the film's climatic moment of violence (which itself symbolizes the clash between industrial capitalism and its hapless dispossed victims), hurl "the first stone" crashing the window of Surya's home. It is the innocence that we attribute to a child that makes this action something more than a venting of anger at the local tyrant and yet the film's ending leaves something to be desired. Of course I do not expect Benegal to "offer solutions". His job as a socially conscious artist is to hold a mirror (as in the shot above) which reflect his own understanding of social processes.

गांधीवादी इतिहासकार धरमपालजी की पांच किताबें ऑनलाइन उपलभ्द

कुछ दिनों पहले मुझे यह जान कर बेहद ख़ुशी हुयी कि मशहूर गांधीवादी धरमपालजी ने लिखी पांच किताबें, जो Other India Press, गोवा ने हालही में पुनः प्रकाशित की हैं, अब इंटरनेट पर पूरी तरह उपलब्ध हैं। वे मुल्तिवेर्सिटी लिब्ररी और समनवय वेबसाइट दो नो ही जगहों पर से डाउनलोड की जा सकती हैं। इन पांच किताबों, जो सारी अंग्रेजी में है, उनके के नाम हैं:
Vol 1: Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century
Vol 2: Civil Disobedience in the Indian Tradition
Vol 3: The Beautiful Tree Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century
Vol 4: Panchayat Raj and India’s polity
Vol 5: Essays on Tradition, Recovery and Freedom (which includes Bharatiya Chit, Manas and Kala)

धरमपालजी ने खुद अंग्रेजों द्वारा लिखित रपटों आदि में अनुसंधान कर गांधीजी के कुछ मूल सिद्धांतों और वक्ताय्वों के लिए ठोस ऐतिहासिक सबूत जमा किये हैं। अंग्रेजी हुकूमत से पहले कि (यानी सत्रवी अठार्वी सदी कि) भारतीय सामाजिक-आर्थिक व्यवस्था की जो छवि धरमपालजी प्रस्तुत करते हैं, वह आज भी वैश्वीकरण नामक साम्राज्यवाद से मोर्चा लेने में अत्यंत उपयुक्त साबित हो सकती है। और इन दिशाओं में कई लोग काम भी कर रहे हैं।

यह बहुत ही ख़ुशी कि बात है कि यह किताबें अब इंटरनेट पर मुफ्त उपलब्ध हैं। अपने पाठकों से मेरी दरख्वास्त है कि वे इन्हें ज़रूर पढे और औरों को भी बताएं।