HIGH ON RESEARCH

Homi Bhabha, Director of the Humanities Centre, Harvard University, on building a new education system

Homi Bhabha, Director of the Humanities Centre, Harvard University, on the rise of populous nationalism, and the need to counter it by building an education system that resists it

Homi Bhabha is one of the iconic intellectuals of our times, as at ease in a lecture room at Harvard University, where he is Director of the Humanities Centre, as an after-dinner speaker at Davos’s World Economic Forum (WEF). At the Rolex Arts Mentor and Protege Initiative in Berlin in February, he was a star speaker, holding forth on the great themes of our times. Here he is on the sidelines of the programme, speaking to KAVEREE BAMZAI on the paradoxes of the contemporary world. How does a society deal with the sort of barbaric nationalism which is taking over the world? One of the characteristics of populous nationalism—some people call it tribal nationalism—is that you portray yourself forever under threat. So what you are doing, however violent it is, however undemocratic it might be, it is justified on the ground that you are only defending yourself and that in defence of yourself, of your faith, of your beliefs, of your people, you can do anything. It’s a matter of protection, reservation, of tradition and it’s being done in the name of one’s self-preservation and self-respect. The problem is that it creates a national paranoia, fear and anxiety, which is very easy to manipulate. So the only way to effectively counter it is one (these are not short-term strategies, these are longterm strategies) is to be able to build an education system, to be able to build a civil society which has the power to resist this. Now we have in India a robust civil system, we have very sophisticated thinkers, analysts, public intellectuals, but they have to find the organs of social media or democratic media in order to able to disseminate a counter against this kind of populism. The second issue is that you need to have a party in opposition, that both protects and projects the values of Indian democratic cosmopolitanism. Ours is a country whose struggle for independence was made in the spirit of modern thought, of learning from all over the world. Our Constitution is in spirit a minoritarian Constitution. That too after a very detailed debate. The Constituent Assembly debates are the finest debates in history. Unfortunately now, there is a major confusion, where secularism is always seen as in some way opposed to religious faith. Secularism is not. It is a philosophy that suggests that you have to have an area or space within public discourse; a platform to discuss the various competing ideologies and beliefs that happen in our society. So secularism is a framework for discussion and deliberation. It is not the imposition of scepticism in relation to religious belief. Our Constitution is both protective and productive of minority views, deeply tolerant and deeply cosmopolitan. After all it was drafted by the Chairman of the drafting committee Dr B R Ambedkar, who was not only a Dalit but had been educated at Columbia, London School of Economics, was a great follower of the philosopher John Dewey, and a man of remarkable intelligence and broad and deep views. So if you take a Constitution such as ours and then violate it by fore-grounding one strand of the culture, you are distorting the history of the country. I think this is problematic but there is no quick fix. You know media has to be there, civil society has to speak up, the education system has to pick up. Unfortunately, if you start rewriting textbooks and have an HRD minister who says theory of Darwin is wrong, then we are in a difficult place. We are living in an age where not just history textbooks are being rewritten or sought to be rewritten, we are living in an age where WhatsApp forwards are the new history.

“WE CAN ONLY TRY AND TRANSFORM THE DISCOURSE ON SOCIAL MEDIA”

There is no mystery here. In the social media sphere these views that we now see, not only in India but in Turkey , in Venezuela, in the US, also in England. They are all part of a trend and there is no way that you can resist it. You can’t give people an instrument like WhatsApp and then you can’t do anything other than regulate it legally. The real issue is that those who raise opposing voices are under threat. So this is not a social media problem, it’s a real problem; it’s a problem of the nature of the society in which we are living. That’s the real issue and if that’s the case then we need better policing and of course we have in India very problematic policing. We need involvement of the local government that is willing to protect the rights of people who are misrepresented. We can’t push social media back. We can only try and transform the discourse on social media. And that is very difficult at the moment because those who are free thinkers or open thinkers are under threat.

You talked of a new political party. Is that possible? Because the Congress’ soft Hindutva in Gujarat is just an excuse, an acceptance of the BJP’s point of view, which is really a dangerous thing.

I can’t talk about a new political party, I don’t know personally where that would come from. But the point is that I think you can’t really begin to think about this without the Congress party and the Congress party is what it is. It is weak in every respect, weak in leadership, in structure, in its dissemination of ideas, and in its outreach to the people.

Whereas you see the other side becoming more loutish, better organised, and more resourceful.

One of the really interesting issues at the moment is that a huge value is placed on technology and at the same time a value is placed on mythology. So technology and mythology are in a kind of ruinous complicity. And the point about that is that people are using the past, are using mythologies whether it is natural mythologies or mythologies of racial, religious or cultural origin, to articulate the problems of contemporary life. Padmavat is a clear example. So this is what we have to somehow fully understand—this link between technology and mythology. This fact that one is defending the honour of the cow, the honour of the nation, the honour of Padmavati,

“WE NEED TO BUILD GOOD PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES IN PRIVATE-PUBLIC COLLABORATIONS”

the honour of the woman; the tragic contradiction is that you are supporting the honour of women and then you burn schools and there are girls who are sold, raped and forced into marriage. If they don’t comply, then they are killed. The police have not been able to deal with this.

If you were made the HRD minister tomorrow, what you would like to do for the education system?

It is very important to resource the education system better. But resources themselves don’t hold the key. There has to be thorough infrastructural revision for the whole sector. I think we cannot even begin to think that re-structuring till you improve the large public universities in India. I studied at Elphinstone College, Mumbai. When I see the college today, I feel great despair. We have to create a kind of educational revolution and realise that the position we hold in the world now comes very much from how well our educational system served at least the upper and middle classes, despite the poverty of the country. Now I am saying that the decline been precipitous and that until we build good public universities which are public–private collaborations, are able to reinvent the curriculum and reinvent the syllabus, it will be very difficult to resolve the issue.