“How have the humanities helped researchers, activists, thinkers, and interrogators understand the contradictions, conundrums, and possibilities of our contemporary time?” Shedding light on the diverse and crucial contributions of the humanities across South Asia, particularly in India, a new report tries to answer this question, and more. The World Humanities Report, focussing on South Asia, brings together 13 critical essays and 12 video conversations with scholars and practitioners. It aims to demonstrate how the humanities enable critical examination of social practices in the region.
“In an environment where a great deal of prestige is attached to engineering /technology/management education in India, the humanities education confronts several constraints. Yet, humanities-anchored reflections occur, and the report highlights this fact...this report focusses on the enabling side of the humanities and their capacity to interrogate our society and the larger world,” Bishnu N. Mohapatra, anchor of the report for India and South Asia, tells Frontline. Mohapatra is a social theorist, poet, and Professor and Director of Moturi Satyanarayana Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Krea University.
The report highlights how humanities thrive in multiple locations—universities, classrooms, social movements, and collective solidarities. It also notes their survival in the spaces between academic disciplines and collaborative conversations. Key findings include: humanities in South Asia remain intertwined with various methodologies, pedagogies, and forms of expression. While focussing on contemporary issues, the report acknowledges the humanities’ movement through a long historical context. The humanities play a vital role in addressing current challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental issues, inequality, and digitalisation. There is a need to defend the humanities “from below,” considering regional specificities and the broader political-cultural milieu.
The report stresses that without understanding how the humanities function in the region, policies to improve their standing will not be effective.
Multidisciplinary approach
Several contributors stress the importance of breaking down disciplinary boundaries. Uma Chakravarti, a historian and feminist scholar, argues for a multidisciplinary framework to better understand Indian realities. “Hierarchies and categorisation of academic disciplines in universities obstruct the multiple ways to investigate human existence and the issues around it,” Chakravarti stated.
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She added that her own research methodology does not strictly fall under history. In accessing different texts that deal with various themes across multiple points in time, she “breaks away the formal notions of ‘this is history, this is politics, and this is literature’ and brings all of them under the same framework”.
Language and literature
The report underscores the significance of Indian languages in humanistic inquiry. A.R. Venkatachalapathy, a historian and writer, stressed the need to “reaffirm the role of Indian languages as a mode of thinking disrupted due to the long experience of colonialism in India”.
Mohapatra highlights the need for regional context by pointing to J. Devika’s essay in the report titled “Beyond Aesthetic Education: The Malayali Engagement with the Humanities”. She traces the journey of sociocultural movements in both politics and literature in Kerala to understand how humanities came to be in the State. She writes: “A focus on academia [alone] prevents us from seeing how the Malayalam literary-cultural public acted as an important space for the production and circulation of the humanities.”
Bishnu. N. Mohapatra, the anchor of the report for India and South Asia explains how the report “focusses on the enabling side of the humanities and their capacity to interrogate our society and the larger world”. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement
Literature emerges as a powerful tool for transformation, one that binds academic and cultural spaces together. The late Franson Manjali, a linguist, notes that “language is at the centre of humanities” and in particular, “literature plays a significant role in transforming our world”.
Marginalised voices
Several essays and conversations highlight the humanities’ role in amplifying marginalised voices. The report includes sections on Dalit resistance culture, Muslim experiences, and feminist perspectives.
According to Mohapatra, a society can be understood most from marginalised voices, and he elaborated on this via the spaces they occupy: “We [the team] realised that in India and many other places in South Asia, the Humanities is larger than academic life. It is not just found in universities and research institutions, but also in the margins. It was important for us to focus on the production of knowledge outside the university as much as from within.”
He added that this was a common strand in most essays, from Safwan Amir, who looks at independent publishing houses such as Panther Paw Publication and Zubaan, which function outside academia but are “symptomatic of how the humanities circulate in India and South Asia”, to V. Geetha, V. Senthilselvan, and Senthalir Sivalingam, who are independent scholars and co-authored an essay on Dalit resistance in Tamil Nadu through “embodied acts of musical and artistic expression”.
Brahma Prakash’s essay, “Performers Meet the Humanities: Underground Activists Shaping the Overground Humanities in India”, explores how marginalised performers contribute to shaping humanities discourse by analysing the interdependence of academics and activists. He writes: “...where the two—print and orality, text and body, theory and practice, study and struggle—are intertwined.”
Environmental humanities
The report dedicates attention to the growing field of environmental humanities. Mahesh Rangarajan, an environmental historian, discussed how the humanities have engaged with environmental justice issues since the 1980s. “The enormous challenge for humanistic sciences is to create a just society with ethical means through social movements and transformations,” Rangarajan stated.
A. R. Venkatachalapathy at Madras Institute of Development Studies. In his video interview, A. R. Venkatachalapathy describes how he sees the fundamental task of the humanities in India. | Photo Credit: Raghunathan SR
In his essay titled “The Ecohumanities in India, 1980–2020”, Nirmal Selvamony studies “nature writing and the imaginative treatment of entities other than human in literature” and explores in depth the question of tinai (in Tamil, it refers to a kind of home of humans and other beings, including ancestral spirits in a biome-like land division) which straddles the space between ecology and humanities, simultaneously being a part of both and neither.
Digital humanities
The impact of digital technology on humanities research and activism is another key theme. Partha Chatterjee, a political theorist, suggested that “the expansion of digital technology can take the humanities research to new groups of scholars in India, including those with little access to the old archives and libraries”.
Conversely, Sujatha Subramaniam’s essay, which examines the role of digital technology in feminist and anti-caste activism on social media, notes that the engagement of marginalised communities with social media has “created archives of their everyday lives, struggles, and protests, challenging the idea that they are the ‘dead/silent’ objects of the archive”.
Ultimately, the research concludes: “If humanities research is indeed ‘about values, the meaning of existence, and of our life,’ then to not recognise social media as a site of the humanities is to miss out on understanding the many possible worlds that are being built every day on these sites.”
Challenges and opportunities
The report acknowledges several challenges the humanities face in South Asia. They include a lack of public policies and institutional commitments; a dearth of economic resources; low social status; pressure from market-driven forces; and narrow ideas of specialisation in academia.
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Despite these obstacles, the contributors express optimism about the future of humanities in the region. The report suggests that the humanities’ dispersed locations and varied applications by individuals, groups, institutions, and movements provide hope for their continued relevance and growth.
Call to action
The World Humanities Report calls for a nuanced understanding of how the humanities operate in South Asia to develop effective policies for strengthening the field. “What gives us hope is not that there is a ready-made solution to strengthen the humanistic practices in the region but their dispersed locations and their varied use,” Mohapatra stated. “And given half a chance, they are ready to cross boundaries, depict new horizons, and imagine novel futures.”
The report is part of a larger global effort by the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), in collaboration with the International Council for Philosophy and the Human Sciences (CIPSH), aiming to demonstrate the contributions of humanities to knowledge and society worldwide.
As global challenges continue to evolve, the report argues that the humanities in South Asia are well-positioned to summon the creative energy required to critically engage with myriad modes of thinking and action in our complex world.
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