How homogenisation can flatten knowledge systems

The Indians is an attempt to trace the poetics of diversity in India especially as it traverses through several pasts.

Two of four human skeletons of the Harappan era that were found at a burial mound at Rakhigarhi village in Haryana in March 2015. | Photo Credit: Manoj Dhaka/AP

The idea of the public intellectual has of late suffered from benign neglect. Few manage to reach this elevated position, which frequently attracts labels like “anti-national” and “urban naxal”. In a society where dissent is seen as dispensable, Ganesh N. Devy, the literary critic, is among the few who have survived. He has an ability to convert key issues into public debates that strike deep into society.

The Indians: Histories of a Civilization

Edited by Ganesh Devy Tony Joseph and Ravi Korisettar

Aleph Book Company

Pages: 648

Price: Rs.1299

Devy did it the first time when he showed that the government has a poor sense of the idea of language. It defined language as a form of life with a script—a classificatory act that eliminated 2,000 oral languages from the list. It was an act of linguicide from which we may never recover.

Devy became a champion of orality as a form of memory and epistemology. In a second incarnation, he floated the “People’s Linguistic Survey”, a 100-volume study where he played the linguist Grierson. In the third incarnation, he challenged the narrowing of the nation state as a standard choreographic entity, arguing that Gandhi and Tagore, in fact the national movement, were opposed to the nation state as a project for homogeneity. He set up a head-on confrontation with the regime, showing it to be both parochial and racist, keen on panopticising as a mode of thought.

Devy’s book, edited in collaboration with Tony Joseph and Ravi Korisettar, is a literal beehive of scholarship. It is an attempt to trace the poetics of diversity in India especially as it traverses through several pasts. He acknowledges that no single version of the past can claim authenticity and adds that scientific discourse, if it is to survive, must not become an extension of fantasy, hallucination, and wishful nostalgia. Devy is open to myth but not to reductionism of ideology. It is here he links the intellectual and the political, the openness, the playfulness of history, becomes a temptation to authoritarian regimes to replace historical narrative with untenable claims. Here the academic has to confront the officially political, especially when it decides to concoct a past. This is the basic genesis of the book.

Devy warns that the regime has been hatching expert committees to back its political diktats. It wants to claim that today’s Hindus have descended from the first inhabitants, arguing also that Hindu scriptures are not myths. Instead of unfolding a kaleidoscopic view of religions, the government seeks to reduce India to a narrow slice of culture where a majoritarian nation state contends that India is a nation for Hindus. It is a Hindutva view of reality. Restoration for this group is not repair or healing but rewriting in its full finality. Official holism becomes a mask for reductive activity. In fact, it is ironic that holism has been used twice in science to describe racism. Jan Smuts, the inventor of the word, used it to promote apartheid. The current regime seems to attempt a similar exercise.

Genetics and archaeology

The battle centres around genetics and archaeology where the government has been circulating outdated data and papers. Devy realises that specialised academic response is inadequate. One needs a multidisciplinary exercise to capture a multifaceted India. One’s response has to be strategic, professional, and political. In Devy’s view, school curricula have to be plural entities with multiple voices. They cannot speak the monolithic catechism of cadres.

He outlines a strategy, an academic survey in seven sections dealing with topics from climate to migration to the domestication of plants. It covers the gradients of time with care, eliciting professional essays where academics focus on the diversity of India. He criticises the regime’s attempt to predate the Aryans as an anticipation of Indian civilisation. This work is a strategic unravelling of RSS imaginaries. Ordinary language would dub them as lies. Devy argues that when lies are ritualised into the school curriculum they become lethal. For him the school curriculum is sacrosanct and should be tacitly as scholarly as the Constitution.

The book shows that the RSS is wrong about both genetics and migration. Devy cites the David Reich paper in science to show that Indian officialdom got the consequences of migration wrong: in tracing cultural ancestry, Reich demonstrates that transformation of pastoralism and farming were accompanied by shifts in population. He creates a DNA map of migratory movements. Massive population movements from the Steppes created the original diversity. In fact, India’s genetic diversity stems from seven divergent populations.

Highlights

• Ganesh Devy acknowledges that no single version of the past can claim authenticity and adds that scientific discourse, if it is to survive, must not become an extension of fantasy, hallucination, and wishful nostalgia
• Devy warns that the current regime has been hatching expert committees to back its political diktats; it wants to claim that today’s Hindus have descended from the first inhabitants, arguing also that Hindu scriptures are not myths. 
• The battle centres around genetics and archaeology where the government has been circulating outdated data and papers.

‘Pure communities’

The Ministry of Culture has funded the Anthropological Survey of India to carry out the genomic verification of “pure communities”. This directive is reminiscent of Nazi diktats obsessed with racial purity. Devy argues that it is only scholarship that can stem this epidemic spread of mischievous facts. He suggests that in the context of diversity, purity becomes a meaningless term. He assembled 150 academics to literally set up an academic panchayat to evaluate these ideas. In that sense, the book for its scholarship is a quiet choreography of courage and competence.

Devy argues that the search for origins cannot be reduced to the simplistic competitiveness of who was first but would involve an attempt “to bring together as many accounts of numerous beginnings as possible”. The past is, as Devy suggests, a canvas of gestalts, comprising various groups that went into the making of India. This book is an act of craftsmanship in mapping the continuities and discontinuities of India’s long history of 12,000 to 18,000 years. The text is monumentally compact in covering population movements, agriculture, religious debates, and also the languages and philosophies that went into the making of the diversity we call India. Most authors would leave diversity as an unexplained work. Devy spells it out as a creative manifesto.

Vinay Lal’s essay on diversity is a critique of the nation state in operation. Lal demonstrates that the nation state through the 19th century was coercive, even genocidal. He cites the example of the geographical concept terra nullius: European powers pursuing a scramble for Africa portrayed Africa as unclaimed land so that they could carve out the territory among themselves. Lal shows that this is the trend. Peace for Europe became an unmitigated disaster for everyone else. Lal demonstrates this with examples from Korea and Vietnam. The nation state as a genocidal entity was a motor for homogeneity, erasing diversity brutally.

The onset of homogenisation also produced the flattening of the knowledge system. Colonisation implied a destruction of knowledge systems. The classic works of Aime Cesaire, Ashis Nandy, and Edward Said have demonstrated this. Lal warns that social sciences have been in deep epistemological servitude to research in the US. Even democratic politics becomes a mimicry of Western ideas, where Indians sadly become strangers to themselves. Lal and Devy argue that democracy will survive as a creative form only if the politics of diversity becomes a key agenda. This will be a process of ethical healing where categories like the refugee, the alien, the stranger become part of the body politic. Only then will the currently impoverished idea of citizenship stop being a way of excluding large parts of the population from public life.

Shiv Visvanathan is a sociologist associated with the Compost Heap, a network of academics exploring alternative imaginations.