Because of the over-riding and suffocating influence of the Western academic world, the teaching of the humanities in Iran, India, Malaysia and other countries now largely mimics or copies such courses in structure and content from their Western counterparts. Their Eurocentric bias or orientation is undoubted. This paper argues that the continued dependence on Eurocentric conceptions or methodologies for such Humanities is no longer to be tolerated.

Humanism is itself in decline in the Western world where it is being universally challenged by a consumerist self-image of human beings. A strong conflict has emerged between such consumerist values and the aspirations that have hitherto driven humanist discourse.

The humanist discourse has also been negatively impacted by the strong positivist thrust behind the physical and social sciences.

This conference is an excellent occasion to take a critical overall review of the “Humanities” as presently constituted.

The argument is not that the Humanities – as components of valid knowledge  – are not meaningful for the welfare of human beings, but that the framework within which the Humanities are taught cannot be implicitly or explicitly Eurocentric or positivist. It cannot be rooted in concepts and perceptions that owe their existence to a specific phase of European civilisation which is now past.

We must therefore reject humanities traditions that are narrowly focussed on Western perceptions. But we have the more challenging task of rehabilitating the discussions on the humanities within the cultural frameworks that move and stir us today. This means in practice moving the humanities discourse completely outside the Eurocentric framework.

****************************

I still remember that particular day in Amsterdam in 1976 when I first discovered Dharampal. I walked down one of those canal streets and then into the library of the Institute for South Asian Studies. Doing a Ph.D in Eindhoven, I was desperately looking for sources (in Holland!) which would provide me material on the scientific and technical history of India. I had established my theory, but while this could with reasonable conviction be applied to the experience of China (since Joseph Needham had already done considerable work on Chinese science), I was finding great difficulty as far as the Indian experience was concerned.

And then there, in the library, I found a spanking new copy of Dharampal’s Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century, thanks to the efforts of the enterprising librarian who had seen it listed somewhere and ordered it.(1) The impact of that publication on my mind is difficult to describe. Hitherto, I had had to grapple with a gaping hole in my empirical framework. Dharampal’s book, over the next few months, gradually closed that hole, completing in the process my own recovery of the Indian self from the cobwebs of European  indoctrination in which it had lain helpless and forlorn.

The problem that bothered Dharampal – and which drove him relentlessly – was why did everything go wrong when it could have mostly gone right. When he died, he died in a rage, railing against a ludicrous political system that was mindlessly and labouriously attempting to immobilise India under a view of human experience that had very little links or emotional context with its own unique history or experience. The disparagement of India, its culture, its capacities and the effort to make way for something that is entirely out of character with its living genius is the concern of liberalisation and globalisation, with cohorts even now in the PMO and the upper echelons of government including the judiciary. Academics is part and parcel of the problem.

The Europeans see their history cloaked in ten centuries of the Dark Ages commencing around the 5^th century AD, but Dharampal had a distinct vision of India’s Dark Ages unfolding under the colonial government of her Majesty the Queen of England and zealously pursued by successive Indian governments.

What are the characteristics of a Dark Age? The decline of creativity is surely the primary feature. From the time of Wilberforce and Macaulay, we can see the relentless assault on our identity, its worth, a mantle adopted zealously and with great determination later by Americans, who in 1949 decided they were developed and all others “developing”. From that period, all our work has been derivative, imitative, suppressive, self-destructive. We have engaged for the past two hundred years in uprooting, ploughing down under and then replacing India’s unique character, bit by bit, under a firm conviction that our knowledge of the past thousands of years is now declared invalid. Even today, we are unable to dress freely in our own costumes. We disparage the entire output of India which is expressed in its languages. Nothing is considered valuable unless it appears in English.

Indian Science and Technology in the 18^th century is about that twilight century when the ways in which we did things were still respected by everyone (across the planet) and these were still not in conflict with the new perceptions of the natural world that would be installed under Biblical science.

After the damage done by English education, most if not all of us still deal with this period (500-800) within the “discovery” framework associated with the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco-da-Gama. I am not denying that the voyages were significant events for the Europeans and for the perceptions undergirding their provincial history. There is no need, however, to continue to retain the European framework for a global perspective on these issues and events sixty years after they have gone. In this sense, as academics, scholars, historians, by not setting aside those perspectives, we have simply let our people down.

The discovery framework has give way to a different framework that looks at Indian society from the 15^th-18^th century as a functioning society operating within its own terms of reference and its own preoccupations. This necessarily means a more comprehensive understanding of its various features than we have today and which would include the technical capacity of the society, its knowledge base, its readiness and capacity to response to market demands and several other related aspects which would include systems of medicine and education, theories of language and aesthetics, etc.

Nowadays we talk glibly of the “knowledge economy” even when we know that none of the societies under discussion functioned without knowledge and without technical capacity over several hundreds of years. They were true “knowledge economies,” not pre-knowledge economies. Present-day knowledge economies would be hard pressed to function without the fundamentals that they laid down.

I would therefore like to spend time in this presentation on demonstrating the remarkable complexity of this society and to show that it would indeed be difficult, indeed foolhardy, to compare it with activities including technical developments that followed some other chronology – if they indeed did –elsewhere.

I will discuss (briefly) mathematics, agriculture, astronomy, industry, etc., within the context of a society that had evolved competent, in most cases, optimal solutions to problems it faced and then show how all these features indicated this society could not be labelled as unmistakeably “traditional” or “early modern” or even “modern” because none of these categories would be able to describe it in all its complexity in those three centuries.

Prof. C.K. Raju has shown that much of the basic algorithms that began to be understood in Europe only in the 16^th century were already mastered by the Indians over the ten centuries prior.(2) In India, the precise trigonometric values provided by the calculus were required for an agriculture dependent on accurately predicting the monsoon and also for navigation. Prof. Raju has pointed out that the very term “algorithm” is sourced to Al Khawarizmi who translated the basic mathematical texts from India into Arabic, from where they were translated into Latin and Greek.

But besides obvious competence displayed in inventing the calculus, there are other fairly impressive but little known skills that passed from India to Europe within the same period. The many-volume work of Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe is often referred to in the discussions on this theme. But even Lach is not comprehensive enough since he could not conceivably access all available sources. Certainly he had no access to the materials painstakingly accumulated by Dharampal.

One of the most outstanding of these, for example, is the medical skill of plastic surgeons. The art of plastic surgery was a routine medical procedure in the Pune region and fairly detailed reports of the operations were noted by British surgeons before they were copied, adopted and adapted in Europe. The technique is quite ancient, having been first described by Sushruta. The transmission of the know-how of plastic surgery from India to Europe is very clearly documented and is without any doubt whatsoever. The art of plastic surgery developed in India due to a peculiar social custom.  Men found guilty of marital infidelity were subject to the punishment of having their nose cut off. Indian surgeons met the resultant demand for rehabilitation by developing the skill of rhinoplasty which when literally translated means “the art of reconstructing noses.”(3)

Besides the skill of plastic surgery, Dharampal has shown that the understanding and practice of inoculation against small pox was also well established in India before the technique associated with Jenner (vaccination) was first invented and then imported to displace it. The various techniques found in Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century are not isolated elements. They only provided a window to a huge basket of scientifically sound techniques that were completely outside the awareness and conscious experience of scholars trained to see the world through fundamentally European eyes.

Let us take the case of biodiversity: one example here alone will suffice and it deals with biodiversity in rice. Adivasis and peasant farmers were admittedly responsible for the creation and maintenance of some of 300,000 varieties of rice. This is a phenomenal figure and does indicate a very high level of understanding of seed selection and breeding techniques. I confirmed on a visit to IRRI several decades ago that 72,000 rice accessions in their possession were collected from India. Seeds are not the kind of dead artefacts one sees stored in museums. They crystallise knowledge of living processes. There are likewise several thousand of these varieties at the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack. The late Dr. R.H. Richharia maintained 19,000 varieties in situ at the Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute at Jabalpur in MP in the late 1990s.

The art of breeding rice varieties is a dynamic process. Dr. Richharia – himself a leading rice breeder – found he had to revise his opinion about adivasis’ knowledge of science when he tried out certain seeds which he got from these farmers but which he was unable to reproduce. He discovered that these were male sterile lines. He had no idea of how the adivasis had come to know about the existence of these varieties (which modern breeders are still struggling with) but they knew what these varieties were meant for and how they ought to be used in their rice fields to create new varieties. Likewise, none of the so-called “saline” varieties of rice were created by modern science; they were bred by farmers in coastal belts. In fact, the International Rice Research Institute has produced after 50 years of research only two major successes, IR8 and IR36.  This can be compared with the hundreds of varieties generated by India’s peasant and tribal communities, and they served hundreds of different uses.

The ability to work with seeds was matched by other competencies. There are several reports of English agricultural specialists – from Alexander Walker to Albert Howard – who came to teach Indian farmers how to do agriculture but retired after conceding that they had very little to teach and had mostly to learn. Dharampal’s Chingleput data taken from British records of the time indicates that output of field crops in that region was higher than that associated with the most successful of the so-called green revolution practices used today.

Large-scale, meticulously planned irrigation systems not only enabled people to transport and store water in very large quantities (examples: Rajasthan, Pune) but the system of tank irrigation (for example, in Karnataka) was so well designed that when engineers proposed to increase the number of tanks they found there were no more locations available since the existing ones had adequate arrangements to effectively collect all the rainfall that fell on the ground in the areas. Indian water havesting systems were designed to deal with the monsoon, that is, to collect rain where it fell, precisely like the Mumbai housewife who finds she must collect as much water from her tap within 30 minutes every morning when the public water supply starts and then shuts. Modern irrigation systems built on the technology of dams are never sustainable, since they foolishly dam the run-off instead of harvesting it. In fact, the forests that harvest and store the water are slaughtered and drowned in modern day dam reservoirs. Since catchment areas are denuded, the life of the dam is considerably reduced by the higher siltation rates. In the tank system, the silt accumulated was removed and used to fertilise agricultural lands: sustainability was in-built in the practice.

There are many other indicators which I will not discuss in too much detail but those working in botany and plants know that Garcia de Orta faithfully recorded local knowledge of a huge variety of plants that were being used in India for medicinal purposes and which was thereafter transmitted by him to Europe. The knowledge he collected was circulated in the form of the Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia (“Conversations on the simples, drugs and medicinal substances of India”), published at Goa in 1563. His understanding and systematic collection of this vast indigenous knowledge of plants is sometimes misunderstood to claim he discovered the various medical uses of these plants himself!

What about more basic things like food? In fact, from the point of view of nutritious food and a wide variety of recipes available especially the widespread expertise with the making of breads and fermented foods, one could only advance the argument that as far as food and preparation of food was (and is) concerned India and China were indeed both advanced civilizations which Europe would take several centuries to match and which it still shows no signs of catching up with. It is an indisputed fact that the variety of Chinese and Indian cuisine still excites and dominates the palates of the planet.

Several skills like the manufacture of textiles could not have developed in Europe without close study and import of Indian textile making procedures by English and European traders. In fact, English colonial masters in some areas had to cut off the thumbs of local weavers in order to kill the local industry. We know that the knowledge of natural dyes was widespread. Today after a relatively short and disastrous courtship with chemical dyes, natural dyes have returned under the garb of promoting sustainable industry which shows very clearly that some features of the Indian economy ought never to have been changed in the first place.

Another clear distortion or ignorance affecting European thinking about India about this period would be architecture which is not generally highlighted. Pavan Varma summed up the European perception of India’s architecture in his remarkable Penang lecture (4), based on his book, Becoming Indian. He observed:

Perhaps the most well known art critic of his time, George Birdwood, while talking about Indian sculpture, art and painting (a tradition which literally goes back 5000 years) once compared an exquisite Gupta period image of the Buddha ‘to a boiled sweet pudding’ and came to the conclusion that in seventy-eight years of the study of art he had not come across anything in India that gave the expression ‘to the good, the beautiful and the true.’ In fact, Birdwood wrote as late as 1910 that ‘sculpture and painting are unknown as fine arts in India.’

And then of course there is the example of Mr. Edwin Lutyens who built New Delhi and before whom all of New Delhi and Indians in general genuflect.  Lutyens was a complete racist in his personal views about Indians and specially their abilities in the field of architecture and he said (after doing a complete survey of India, after having seen the exquisite pieces of architecture,  many of them a product of that unimaginably creative synthesis of Indo-Muslim  architecture) that there is no architecture worth its name in India, only ‘veneered joinery in stone concrete and marble on a gigantic scale but no real architecture and nothing is built to last, not even the Taj Mahal.’

Juxtapose these comments against the findings displayed in the recent volume by Takeo Kamiya, A Guide to the Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent.(5) This Japanese scholar came to India without any preconceived notions. He began his travels in 1976 and moved around for 20 years. He closely photographed and documented some 560 monuments across the country (excluding the north-east). He found that architects from both the Hindu and Islamic traditions interacted closely during the Mughal period, and one can see mutual adoption and adaptation of each others’ skills and styles in both the temples and monuments of the period. Overall, he found evidence of three major styles (sculptural, membraneous and framework) which forced him to concluded that no country displayed the diversity in architectural styles that he had found in India.

(This brings me to a report that some people had criticised Dharampal for being happy about the Babri Masjid demolition. I was with him a short while thereafter and discussed the issue with him. From what Dharampal told me, they only partly and only dimly understood his response to that act of demolition. He said he was happy that people were actually showing some courage after decades of passivity, timidity and lack of initiative. But what needed to be demolished were not dead monuments like the Babri Masjid, but Lutyen’s Rastrapati Bhavan in New Delhi which had, unlike the Masjid, been set up to intimidate the people of India. Pavan Varma, in fact, reproduces the text on the plaque that one can still find affixed to Rashtrapati Bhavan several decades after those who needed to intimidate the people of India had left its shores. It reads: “LIBERTY WILL NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE, A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY. IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST BE EARNED BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED.”)

The intellectual traditions that were still very vibrant at this time were intensely preoccupied with the theories of aesthetics, architecture and grammar. For example, the cultural arts and their gharanas (including the various classical schools of dance) maintained their ability to reproduce the expertise, innovating when circumstances required. There are no Dark Ages here. Psychological theories and therapies, still in use today because of their obvious therapeutic worth, were passed on without much damage. One of the most important demonstrations of dynamism is the maintenance of the system of commentaries on various scriptural texts by eminent teachers and spiritual men and women which sought to re-interpret them in the light of contemporary experience. The Bhakti movement is not the sole instance of social vitality. All these are not signs of what is generally (and perjoratively) referred to as a “traditional” society. (6)

Those who think that the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries 15^th-18^th centuries was largely passive or stagnant – whatever image this may conjure – will have a difficult time explaining the speed with which Indian society accepted a whole series of new crops including potatoes, chili, tomatoes and cashew that came from South America. The ready adoption does not indicate the presence of a moribund or static society stuck to its civilisational habits from which it was not inclined to move.

There is little doubt then that we are dealing with a civilization that can hardly be dubbed as traditional, early modern or modern and that several of its features in fact reflected an economy of permanence which could be pursued as long as human beings survive on the planet. This may not be obvious to those infected with the linear view of history.

The point of this presentation is not simply to highlight the various competencies that people in India continued to display from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries (considered as the pre-modern era), though I find knowledge of these facts very elememtary especially among educated folk. There is no doubt that because our academic life has been submerged and soaked in Eurocentric perceptions of social history, and because most of our historians have come from arts faculties with little or no engineering or scientific or technical backgrounds, the general impression that has gained disproportionate credence is that whatever good has come to this country in the form of serviceable ideas has come exclusively from the West. This has had a severe impact on the self-esteem of the public at large because of the impression created that the modern tradition is borrowed and not their own whereas in actual fact it is quite apparent that much of modernity would not exist but for the fact that India (and China, Egypt, Arabia and Persia) existed and provided the intellectual foundations.

I have been informed that there are western writers like Jack Goody and Martin Bernal who have been working on similar themes. My grouse remains that this work has to be done and acknowledged first by Indian scholars who have for far too long continued to blindly accept the western view of modernity and who continue to work uncritically within its categories. This presentation is an invitation to this august audience to re-think the frame-works that rule and burden our intellectual work. Certainly we did not have a vast period like the Dark Ages in Europe and in almost other country (outside the West), ideas and innovation moved people with relentless force. In fact, it may actually be hazarded that our “dark ages” are only just beginning, ever since our intellectual elites including our planners decided to ignore history and instead place this huge billion plus civilisation under the self-destructive development path scripted almost exclusively by the West.

Notes:

1) Dharampal’s work is to be found at www.dharampal.net. His Collected Writings were published by Other India Press, Goa, in 5 volumes. The Defamation of India was also published under OIP’s imprint, though it is now out of print.

2) C.K. Raju, Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: the Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to Europe in the 16^th c. CE, Pearson Longman, 2007.

3) Some of the important technical innovations that arose from India are discussed in Claude Alvares, “Technology and Culture” in Helaine Selin (ed), Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, Springer, London (1997) and in Decolonising History, Other India Press, Goa.

4) Claude Alvares and Shad Faruqi (eds), Decolonising the University, 2012, p.23. Penang, Malaysia. See also, Pavan K Varma, Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity, 2010.

5) Takeo Kamiya, The Guide to the Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent, Architecture Autonomous, Goa, India (2003).

6) For a stunning introduction to a functioning society today, see the recent article by Uzramma, “Learning from the Grassroots”, in which she introduces the work of Ravindra Sharma, founder of the Kala Ashram, Adilabad. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6179856/Uzramma%20on%20Learning%20from%20the%20Grassroots.pdf

(40th International Institute of Sociology World Congress, New Delhi: February 16-19, 2012

In the Panel Session on 19.2.2012: “Provincialising History: A reappraisal of Shri Dharampal’s work and its implications for contemporary and future research.”)

One of the major issues raised in the note that was circulated on this international conference concerns the causes that gave rise to the different trajectories which European and Asian societies followed especially from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The query that is raised is this: Why did Europe embark on the course it did and why didn’t countries like India and China also follow a similar trajectory?

This is a question that is repeatedly raised in various fora. The answers have been prolific but have not shed any great illumination on the subject. At the most one could say they have generated some income for academic scholars and for printers. The question raised, in my view, is methodologically unsound for reasons that are generally subsumed under what is known as the “fire argument.” Now what does the fire argument say?

Briefly, it proposes that when a fire breaks out – say in a building or a forest – one can fairly reasonably investigate the causes of the fire and isolate such causes even if some are proximate and others less so and at least one can develop a cogent theory, even if it may ultimately not be the actual truth: for example, somebody lit a cigarette or the gas cylinder burst or a hostile neighbour tried to get even and so on.

If, however, a fire does not take place, then one does not normally go around enumerating the reasons for the non-occurrence since the reasons in that event could be infinite and could also all be true. The spurious nature of the query is one issue. There is another: in what sense can one assess by straitjacketing several profoundly complex societies with diverse preoccupations within the parameters of one development model when one knows that the very word “development” was first used in its present meaning only around 1950 and the word “scientist” first appeared in circulation in 1833 and became well-established only in the twentieth century? Is it necessary to subject the histories of non-Western societies to what appears to be a second inquisition, viz., why did they not conduct themselves or reorganize themselves like the Europeans did?

Today, with the planet grappling for a way out of a major environmental crisis caused principally by the ill-effects associated with the scientific and industrial “revolution,” would it be sound to even place a nation “in which a fire took place” as the “end of history” model which others ought to have also followed in their trajectories, but failed? Can one, in other words, flunk an examination without even having sat for it?

Furthermore, the discussion on these issues has remained largely Eurocentric and has been mostly led and dominated by European scholars though it is has also drawn academics from outside Europe to put in their own hypothesis.I have, therefore, tried to take a different angle in this presentation and to persuade you to look at the matter in a different way in order to avoid the methodological fault.

The problem with most of the words that we use nowadays in these discussions – “traditional,” “early modern,” “modern,” etc., is that these are all loaded terms or what you may do today call, “branded” labels. I have tried to side-step them by using the word “post-modern” not to be used in the way the term is used by academics, but merely to argue that we should go beyond these categories altogether. All human history cannot be squeezed into neat Eurocentric boxes like primitive, ancient, dark ages, medieval, modern, etc. These are not universal or inevitable categories.

Take for example the calculus: it appears in the 16^th century in Europe as part of the Newtonian “revolution” but as Prof. C.K. Raju has shown, it was perfected in India from the 5^th to the 15^th century.¹ Or take the example of moveable type which was invented and already in use in Korea 200 years before Gutenburg. How do we place the so-called “Copernican revolution” in the history of world science when we know that the heliocentric hypothesis was already proposed by Aryabhata several centuries earlier and that the flat earth theory had been discussed by Lalla, Bhaskara and others and rejected much before the Europeans came to propose them as new and revolutionary hypotheses? Now I am not saying that these classifications of traditional or modern may not be useful as analytical tools, but we will make grave errors by giving them unwarranted ontological status.

The problem with dealing with this period (500-800) is that almost all its events continue to be seen within the “discovery” framework associated with the voyages of Christopher Columbus and Vasco-da-Gama. I am not denying that the Europeans are entitled to a European perspective on their events. There is no need, however, to continue to retain the European framework for a global perspective on these issues and events. For example, how do we evaluate the voyages of Cheng Ho in 1422 and how do we assess the Indian Ocean trade in the fifteenth (and earlier) centuries compared to which the trade inaugurated by Vasco-da-Gama was in fact insignificant?

The discovery framework has to be displaced by a different framework that looks at Indian society from the 15^th-18^th century as a functioning society operating within its own terms of reference, its own preoccupations. This necessarily means a more comprehensive understanding of its various features than we have today and which would include the technical capacity of the society, its knowledge base, its readiness and capacity to response to market demands and several other related features which would include systems of medicine and education, theories of language and aesthetics, etc.

Nowadays we talk glibly of the “knowledge economy” even when we know that none of the societies under discussion functioned without knowledge and without technical capacity over several hundreds of years. They were true “knowledge economies,” not pre-knowledge economies.

I would therefore like to spend time in this presentation on demonstrating the remarkable complexity of this society and to show that it would indeed be difficult, indeed foolhardy, to compare it with activities including technical developments that followed some other chronology – if they indeed did –elsewhere.

I will discuss (briefly) mathematics, agriculture, astronomy, industry, etc., within the context of a society that had evolved competent, in most cases, optimal solutions to problems it faced and then show how all these features indicated this society could not be labelled as unmistakeably “traditional” or “early modern” or even “modern” because none of these categories would be able to describe it in all its complexity in those three centuries. The traditionalist might argue that the tradition was modern since it has not been jettisoned in modern times; the early modern might argue that some of these ideas were nothing but prototypes of modern ideas. So where does that lead us except to caution us that looking at non-European societies through the frame work of Europe’s experience would do great violence to our understanding of this societal or civilisational experience.

I have already made a reference to the calculus. Prof. Raju has shown that much of the basic algorithms that began to be understood in Europe only in the 16^th century were already mastered by the Indians over the ten centuries prior. In India, the precise trigonometric values provided by the calculus were required for an agriculture dependent on accurately predicting the monsoon and also for navigation. Prof. Raju has pointed out that the very term “algorithm” is sourced to Al Khawarizmi who translated the basic mathematical texts from India into Arabic, from where they were translated into Latin and Greek.

But besides obvious competence displayed in inventing the calculus, there are other fairly impressive but little known skills that passed from India to Europe within the same period. The work of Donald Lach, “Asia in the Making of Europe” is often referred to in the discussions on this theme. But even Lach is not comprehensive enough since he could not conceivably access all available sources. Certainly he had no access to the materials painstakingly accumulated by Dharampal.²

One of the most outstanding of these, for example, is the medical skill of plastic surgeons. The art of plastic surgery was a routine medical procedure in the Pune region and fairly detailed reports of the operations were noted by British surgeons before they were copied, adopted and adapted in Europe. The transmission of knowledge is very clearly documented and is without any doubt whatsoever.The art of plastic surgery developed in India due to a peculiar social custom.Men found guilty of marital infidelity were subject to the punishment of having their nose cut off. Indian surgeons met the resultant demand for rehabilitation by developing the skill of rhinoplasty which when literally translated means “the art of reconstructing noses.”³

Besides the skill of plastic surgery, Dharampal has shown that the understanding and practice of inoculation against small pox was also well established in India before the technique associated with Jenner (vaccination) was first invented and then imported to displace it.

However, let us take the case of biodiversity: one example here alone will suffice and it deals with biodiversity in rice. Adivasis and peasant farmers were admittedly responsible for the creation and maintenance of some of 300,000 varieties of rice. This is a phenomenal figure and does indicate a very high level of understanding of seed selection and breeding techniques. I confirmed on a visit to IRRI several decades ago that 72,000 rice accessions in their possession were collected from India. There are likewise several thousand of these varieties at the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack. The late Dr. R.H. Richharia maintained 19,000 varieties in situ at the Madhya Pradesh Rice Research Institute at Jabalpur in MP.

The art of breeding rice varieties is a dynamic process. Dr. Richharia – himself a leading rice breeder – found he had to revise his opinion about adivasis’ knowledge of science when he tried out certain seeds which he got from these farmers but which he was unable to reproduce. He discovered that these were male sterile lines. He had no idea of how the adivasis had come to know about the existence of these varieties (which modern breeders are still struggling with) but they knew what these varieties were meant for and how they ought to be used in their rice fields to create new varieties. None of the so called “saline” varieties of rice were created by modern science; they were bred by farmers in coastal belts. In fact, the International Rice Research Institute has produced after 50 years of research only two major successes, IR8 and IR36.This can be compared with the hundreds of varieties generated by India’s peasant and tribal communities, and they served hundreds of different uses.

The ability to work with seeds was matched by other competencies. There are several reports of agricultural specialists – from Alexander Walker to Albert Howard – who came to teach Indian farmers how to do agriculture but retired after conceding that they had very little to teach and mostly to learn. Dharampal’s Chingleput data taken from British records indicates that output of field crops in that region was higher than that associated with the best of the so-called green revolution practices used today.

Large-scale, meticulously planned irrigation systems not only enabled people to transport and store water in very large quantities (examples: Rajasthan, Pune) but the system of tank irrigation (for example, in Karnataka) was so well designed that when engineers proposed to increase the number of tanks they found there were no more locations available since the existing ones had adequate arrangements to collect all the rainfall that fell on the ground in the areas. Indian water havesting systems were designed to deal with the monsoon, that is, to collect rain where it fell, precisely like the Mumbai housewife who finds she must collect as much water from her tap within an hour every morning when the public water supply starts and then shuts. Modern irrigation systems built on the technology of dams are never sustainable, since they dam the run off instead of harvesting it. In fact, the forests that harvest and store the water are slaughtered and drowned in dam reservoirs. Since catchment areas are denuded, the life of the dam is considerably reduced. In the tank system, the silt accumulated in tanks was removed and used to fertilise agricultural lands.

There are many other indicators which I will not discuss in too much detail but those working in botany and plants know that Garcia de Orta faithfully recorded local knowledge of a huge variety of plants that were being used in India for medicinal purposes and which was thereafter transmitted by him to Europe. The knowledge he collected was circulated in the form of the Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia(“Conversations on the simples, drugs and medicinal substances of India”), published at Goa in 1563. His understanding and systematic collection of this vast indigenous knowledge of plants is sometimes misunderstood to claim he discovered the various medical uses of these plants himself!

What about more basic things like food? In fact, from the point of view of nutritious food and a wide variety of recipes available especially the widespread expertise with the making of breads and fermented foods, one could only advance the argument that as far as food and preparation of food was (and is) concerned India and China were indeed both advanced civilizations which Europe would take several centuries to match and which it still shows no signs of catching up with. It is an indisputed fact that the variety of Chinese and Indian cuisine still excites and dominates the palates of the planet.

Several skills like the manufacture of textiles could not have developed in Europe without close study and import of Indian textile making procedures by English and European traders. In fact, English colonial masters in some areas had to cut off the thumbs of local weavers in order to kill the local industry. We know that the knowledge of natural dyes was widespread. Today after a relatively short and disastrous courtship with chemical dyes, natural dyes have returned under the garb of promoting sustainable industry which shows very clearly that some features of the Indian economy ought never to have been changed in the first place.

The intellectual traditions that were still very vibrant at this time were intensely preoccupied with the theories of aesthetics, architecture and grammar. For example, the cultural arts and their gharanas (including the various classical schools of dance) maintained their ability to reproduce the expertise, innovating when circumstances required. Psychological theories and therapies, still in use today because of their obvious therapeutic worth, were passed on without much damage. One of the most important demonstrations of dynamism is the maintenance of the system of commentaries on various scriptural texts by eminent teachers and spiritual men and women which sought to re-interpret them in the light of contemporary experience. The Bhakti movement is not the sole instance of vitality. All these are not signs of what is generally dubbed a “traditional” society.⁴

Those who think that the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries 15^th-18^th centuries was largely passive or stagnant – whatever image this may conjure – will have a difficult time explaining the speed with which India accepted a whole series of new crops including potatoes, chili, tomatoes and cashew that came from South America. The ready adoption does not indicate the presence of a moribund or static society stuck to its civilisational habits from which it was not inclined to move.

There is little doubt then that we are dealing with a civilization that can hardly be dubbed as traditional, early modern or modern simply because several of its features in fact reflected an economy of permanence which could be pursued as long as human beings survive on the planet.

Much of this work of discovery was triggered by the research of the late Dharampal who though not an historian eventually forced historians to take stock of his findings.

The point of this presentation is not simply to highlight the various competencies that people in India continued to display from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries (considered as the pre-modern era), though I find even very elementary knowledge of these facts especially among educated folk. There is no doubt that because our academic life has been submerged and soaked in Eurocentric perceptions of social history, and because most of our historians have come from arts faculties with little or no engineering or scientific or technical backgrounds, the general impression that has gained disproportionate credence is that whatever good has come to this country in the form of serviceable ideas has come exclusively from the West. This has had a severe impact on the self-esteem of the public at large because of the impression created that the modern tradition is borrowed and not their own whereas in actual fact it is quite apparent that much of modernity would not exist but for the fact that India (and China, Egypt, Arabia and Persia) existed and provided the foundations.

I am glad to hear at this conference that there are western writers like Jack Goody and Martin Bernal who have been working on similar themes. My grouse remains that this work has to be done and acknowledged first by Indian scholars who have for far too long continued to blindly accept the western view of modernity and work within its categories. This presentation is an invitation to this august audience to re-think the frame-works that rule and burden our intellectual work. Certainly we did not have a vast period like the dark ages in Europe and in almost other country (outside the west), ideas and innovation moved people with relentless force. In fact, it may actually be hazarded that our “dark ages” are only just beginning, ever since our intellectual elites including our planners decided to ignore history and instead place this huge billion plus civilisation under the self-destructive development path chosen by the West.

Notes:

1) C.K. Raju, Cultural Foundations of Mathematics: the Nature of Mathematical Proof and the Transmission of the Calculus from India to Europe in the 16^th c. CE, Pearson Longman, 2007.

2) Dharampal’s work is to be found at www.dharampal.net. His Collected Writings were published by Other India Press, Goa, in 5 volumes.

3) Some of the important technical innovations that arose from India are discussed in Claude Alvares, “Technology and Culture” in Helaine Selin (ed), Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, Springer, London (1997) and in Decolonising History, Other India Press, Goa.

4) For a stunning introduction to a functioning society today, see the recent article by Uzramma, “Learning from the Grassroots [PDF]”, in which she introduces the work of Ravindra Sharma, founder of the Kala Ashram, Adilabad.

(Paper presented at the Conference on Multiple Trajectories of Early Asian Modernities, 16-17 December 2011 Varanasi)

Abstract: One reason for dehumanised institutions – to which students are unable to relate – is because too many policies, regulations and rules are decided for the convenience of the institution and its administrators and the smooth running of both. Rarely are the interests of either the student or genuine learning or the creation of new knowledge taken into serious consideration.

We are therefore forced to compare learning in higher educational institutions today to a factory model because what matters most is achieving mass certification efficiently.

Students do not attend university to fail. They attend because they want their learning of subjects or proficiency in skills to be recognised or certified. Once the student pays her fees, it is upto the university to ensure that the proper environment is created for learning that will ensure that the learning sought (and promised) is effectively, painlessly, joyfully achieved and that students feel at home.

My presentation at this conference will focus on the dehumanisation process within institutions of higher education but from a largely Indian and Asian perspective. It is more in the nature of a self-reflection. Over the past several sessions we have discussed many significant issues affecting higher education including the future nature of universities, funding problems and other pressing matters. However, one aspect on which we have not spent adequate time is on some self-reflection and some self-criticism. It is incumbent upon us to examine how deeply we ourselves – teachers and administrators – are implicated in the degeneration of the present system.

The students attending this conference were provided a regular session to air their concerns.  I attended the session yesterday and was surprised to find that few non-students or seniors attended the session. In my humble opinion, the students ought to have been given a plenary. After all, besides research, students comprise the major focus of the university.  Some would say they are its primary focus.

Therefore in this presentation I would like to examine the dehumanisation of university environments from the perspective of the student community. One of the student speakers yesterday – Mohammad Shafiq Bin Abdul Aziz from USM – was of the firm opinion that the relationship existing between the university and students is similar to the one obtaining between a master and his slaves.  He was very clear about this. He described the features of masters: people who know everything; people who must be obeyed; people who cannot be wrong. To this, he counter posed the qualities of slaves (students) – they are weak, they have no civilisation and no knowledge and their sole role is to obey orders and regulations which have been set up by their master. In fact, it appears that universities have been set up to take care of the well-being of professors and lecturers and that students exist only to serve the master.

In our 2010 Multiversity Conference held here in Penang, Saifuddin Abdullah, the Deputy Minister for Higher Education, made a frank admission that universities today lack soul. He said that only having grand buildings and labs did not make a university, universities must have soul. I would go further and say that soulless universities very naturally assume that students lack soul as well. In other words, universities assume students have neither personality nor desire and everything is to be laid down for them, like where they should get into the bus, the route the bus would take to its final destination and when they could get off. There is no scope for modifications. This was the position described by another USM student from India, Mohammad Zubair.

Zubair in fact went on to declare that higher education had been reduced to a “laundry process” – students are presumably seen as dirty, rural, stinky, uncivilised, barbaric individuals that must be taken, for their own good (and after they have paid for the service) through a mental cleansing process that would make them suitable for life in the modern world. Both Shafiq and Zubair were anxiously attempting to draw attention to university environments which have become profoundly dehumanised and from which learning has long since fled.

We should be frank enough to admit that very little of “learning” takes place in universities today. There are a number of activities that do take place within these institutions and appear to have some connection with learning. But in fact one could even argue that universities specialise in putting up mindless road blocks to learning.  Let me refer to India here which is a very good example of this.

By simply insisting on higher school certificates as a basic requirement or a bar for entering higher education, all universities have solved the problem of numbers by very adroitly keeping more than 90% of the adult population outside their walls. In this context, endless discussions about enabling greater access of unprivileged people to universities are quite hypocritical since the rules are designed to prevent entry. This to my mind is the first large-scale slaughter of human beings that takes place every academic year and it is done mindlessly by higher educational institutions. I know of only one instance – that of Annamalai University in the Tamil Nadu state of India – which permits adults, whether qualified by school or not, to register for its undergraduate courses.

The second mass slaughter of individuals – this time of youngsters – takes place with those who do procure school passing certificates.  In Delhi, for example, the admission to three of the most prestigious colleges in the city is now restricted to those with marks above 95%. Not going into the terrible tension this creates for youngsters and their families in the city, one can well imagine the psychological impact of not being able to make the grade on the thousands of students who have marks below 95%.  However, the institutions do not care. In fact the three prestigious institutions lead the pack not due to anything inherently excellent in their make-up but because they are able to harvest the crème-de-la-crème of the student class every year.

The third large-scale slaughter of individuals takes place once the students enter the class room and within weeks the teachers who address them have already in their mind divided them into two categories: low performers and high performers. The low performers are noisy, sit in the back benches, are not interested in academics and generally include all those young people who display the behaviour that any normal person would display when kept within sterile and barren institutions faced daily with largely boring lecturers who have themselves (with a few exceptions) stopped learning ever since they got their degrees and positions.

Ironically, the classification of low and high performers habitually applied to students has now come to haunt the professors and lecturers as well in the form of the ranking circus. During our last Multiversity conference at Penang in June 2011, Prof. Zhou Li from Renmin University in Beijing told us about what Yi Zhongtian, a popular member of the Chinese intelligentsia had observed about the ranking disease in 2009:

“Since the Education Ministry launched the reform in the form of quantitative management, all China’s universities have become chicken farms. If you want to be promoted from an instructor to an associate professor, you have to lay so many eggs; if you want to be promoted from an associate professor to professor, you have to lay so many more eggs. And the places to lay the eggs, i.e., authoritative publications and core journals, are also prescribed. Teachers are so busy laying eggs that they have no time to teach students or do research. Just recently, they said, ‘Hey, you should lay more “innovative” eggs!’”¹

So now universities are reduced to the status of chicken farms and students see the system as a laundry in which they are sent rolling and tumbling and nicely educated to remove the stench of their ignorance and the dirt of their rural personalities. Well, to that imagery, we can now safely add the circus as well.

The modern university discounts intellectual freedom which is a prerequisite for producing creative individuals. This is manifest directly in the procedures involving compulsion, especially compulsory attendance. There is very little doubt in my mind that if the requirement of compulsory attendance were removed, university professors would largely be bereft of audiences. Compulsory attendance is no more than a means to keep unwilling learners tied to classrooms and has absolutely no pedagogical value. You can see good examples of compulsory learning when you go to a circus where you can see elephants and monkeys performing mindless acrobatics, in fact doing things in which they would normally never engage.

This brings me to the actual learning process which allegedly is underway in our institutions of higher education. Filling students with information and ensuring that they have compulsorily acquired certain knowledge is considered “successful learning”! In fact, the common approach now of the pedagogical project is to see students as an empty bucket and the predominant role of the teachers, lecturers and professors to ensure that this bucket is steadily filled with large volumes of pointless information till it is flowing at the brim. When it begins to overflow, the student is declared “educated,” and certified accordingly. Psychologists may rave about the “joy of learning,” but most university campuses are in fact joyless learning environments where students face the prospect of unrelenting boredom added to the tension of examinations and making grades.

The other feature of the university system – which was strongly critiqued by professor Tan Sri Dzulkifli Razak in his presentation – is its close imitation of the factory model of production. One major aspect here is the reliance on uniforms.  Uniforms are a useful technique of ensuring that students know that they are students and belong to a special subordinate category without power. Factory workers are made to sport uniforms for the same reason. At no time should students with a yellow uniform pretend that they have the knowledge that is reserved only for blue colour uniforms. Only when they are certified can they give up the uniforms. But not for long.  There is only a short interlude after which the student, post graduation, joins a company only to find that she has to adopt the dress code of the company or the uniforms that identify them with the company as its property in exchange for a modest wage.

I am amazed to discover that there is no legal responsibility fixed on university administrations and the teaching community to guarantee effective or successful learning. The right of institutions to “fail” students is difficult to accept in view of the fact that students pay tuition. The right has been unilaterally appropriated because universities have power whereas students don’t. Actually, the “failure” of a student is an admission that the system has failed in delivery. Under consumer law, the student would be entitled to reimbursement of her fees at the very least.

To add to all this, we have the pervasive disease of Eurocentric studies: the learning schedule includes compulsory ingestion of volumes of material that have mostly originated with western academics studying western societies.

At Multiversity, we have been trying under a “decolonisation project” to focus attention on the construction and use of non-Eurocentric curricula. Though almost every teacher in the university admits to the need for a wholly decolonised (non-European) curriculum of studies, the actual shift towards decolonised academic frameworks has been rather slow.  Practically all the social sciences, their theories, their analytical categories have been simply and uncritically inherited or borrowed from western academia. Now this creates a problem: university lecturers are unable to make such material interesting or relevant to the students since the fact of the matter is that it is not relevant to situations in their own countries and, in addition, it is almost always old or outdated. Lecturers teach it because they have to teach it. But students find it impossible to relate to it and so it becomes compulsory learning which is used only to pass examinations and get certified and then rejected or forgotten. Final result is there is no real learning which is useful to students in later life once they leave university and attempt to fit into society.

This is where the academic community in our part of the world should be severely castigated and criticised. They could not have continued so uncritically for more than half a century with ideas and theories inherited during the colonial period from the West. There is simply no justification for such conduct. Eurocentric academics are therefore largely responsible for the meaninglessness of most studies offered in institutions of  higher education today.

Here, as an aside, I would like to draw the attention of this learned audience to the marked difference in approaches to learning between the Indian and Western systems. While I have characterised the present approach of Western, Malaysian or Indian universities as the “empty bucket” model of learning, it is important to at least to know that in earlier periods such a method of learning was considered inferior and unacceptable. In fact, in the traditional guru-disciple relationship of learning prevalent in India, the guru never provided the final answers to the student. The student in fact was made to spend several years to discover her truth on the grounds that the guru’s knowledge, if passed on to the disciple, would not be the disciple’s knowledge but the guru’s. In fact, here is something that will startle many: there is no word for the verb “to teach” in any of the Indian languages. The emphasis was on learning on the basis of self-discovery. Due to lack of time, I am not going into further details of this fascinating difference in approaches.

But this brings me to a related issue which I will also highlight only very briefly: the role of universities in the destruction of non-Western cultures and the elimination of communities.  Universities have functioned as mere extension centres of western cultural ideas, promoting them in inappropriate contexts, thereby causing much harm to the careful assessment of the intellectual traditions of many societies, India and Malaysia included. This is another huge slaughter basket and much of it has been permitted and encouraged on the grounds that traditional knowledge is no longer valid or no longer of use.  Both the latter statements are now universally admitted to be incorrect.  By being unabashedly and uncritically hitched to the global economy and by providing sum and substance to the legitimacy and expansion of the global corporate economy, the universities have in fact strengthened corporate rule and state-sponsored development programmes which have led to large scale displacement of local communities and their knowledge systems from their inherited spaces and niches.

Having been extremely critical of the dehumanisation process, I know I will be expected to provide specific proposals relating to how we might get out of this totally undesireable environment. Here are some ideas.

1.Firstly, the student/learner has to be a part of the decision-making process in institutions of higher education. After all, it is because someone wishes to learn that a learning institution is set up – and not because someone wants to teach! I think that if one had to ruthlessly examine or justify why certain subjects or study areas need to be made part of the curriculum, one could cut out much of the “irrelevant” aspects of education and replace them with others. Hence student input is vital. What do they want to get out of university? What use do they want to make out of education? For these obvious reasons, students cannot be excluded from the business of education and therefore there has to be a serious involvement of the student community, student bodies and students individually in the discussions and debates surrounding policies, directions and rules relating to university administration, education and research. Present systems do not permit such involvement and most students are kept to student bodies which are given a marginal role in university functioning safely dubbed “extra-curricular.”

2.The second important principle that needs to be emphasized and supported if we wish to make a radical departure from the present situation is that our university should involve students in the creation of knowledge and not focus exclusively, as at present, on the dissemination of available knowledge. It is undisputed that creativity and assembly line production stand at the extreme ends of the learning spectrum. If the university knowledge production is modelled on assembly line production, then the possibilities of creating new knowledge rapidly diminish. Certainly there would be no facilitating environment, creativity would be generally discouraged and in any case since so much of time is required for the purpose of preparing for examinations linked to certification, it would always be at a discount. Examinations have no means of  recognising or rewarding creative endeavour in any significant manner.  So this issue needs to be examined in a fundamental way if we have to slice through the stagnancy of university culture today. (Creative learning is not to be confused with research which is another conventional task in which universities are involved.)

3.Universities should consider embedding themselves within horizontal frameworks of power rather than vertical hierarchies. There are any number of eminent educators who have taught and practised a co-learning model in which both teachers and students collaborate as equals.  The teacher may bring her experience and knowledge of the literature, but the students would provide the creativity, the energy, the aspirations, the needs and the new technological skills that are available including smart phones, social networking sites, internet universities and the like.  A good model of a non-hierarchical model is the Islamic School of Arts in Iran which encourages practices that enable the institution to function as a family. The students do not come into the building with their shoes, and faculty and students eat and play games together, all discussions take place in circular settings and both teachers and learners locate themselves together on the learning curve.

4.One way of demolishing the present structure of university teaching is to reduce dependence on text books. All text books by definition convey second-hand knowledge and inhibit creative thinking.  I have recommended that text books, if still required, can be generated together by students and faculty and would make much better sense if available instead at the culmination of a course. They would then comprise, for instance, of the theoretical and analytical insights developed pursuant to activities planned during the course. They would also indicate whether the students have mastered the subject and whether they agree with the conventional academic wisdom associated with the discipline.

5.It is not important at all that learning activities take place within buildings or campuses. Taking students out of learning environments and putting them in unlearning situations like sterile class rooms is probably one of the most foolish principles on which modern education is based. Learning cannot be reduced to mere cerebral activity out of context, that too with almost exclusive reliance on rote learning and textbooks. Most impactful learning invariably comes from experience and personal experience is paramount. Universities and schools consider mistakes and errors as a sign of inadequacy, personal deficiency or poor academic inclination or capacity. This is completely contrary to our understanding of evolutionary processes, all of which have unfolded through trial and error. In other words, trial and error and the perception of having made mistakes or come to wrong conclusions are actually an admission that learning has been attempted whereas correct answers will never allow us to conclude directly whether the answer is due to correct thinking or has been made available by rote learning.

6.Finally, several issues have been raised at earlier sessions of this conference in connection with the funding of universities and the rebellion against enhanced university charges particularly tuition. I think that the period in which students could necessarily demand free or low cost higher education should be a feature of the past. It is a fact that all higher education is grossly subsidized (in some countries more, some less) and mostly the better off in most countries are able to access it. Free access or low cost access for persons from the privileged classes to university is not at all justified. Mahatma Gandhi, one of India’s greatest educationists, has written extensively on students earning while learning and had linked learning specifically to training for specific skills which would enable the students during the period of schooling itself to earn a decent wage. If that principle were to be extended to university education, costs would no longer become a nightmare since universities would themselves be able to earn through their students a significant proportion of the tuition that is now being levied on the students instead. Since students would be outside the classroom for these exercises in practical learning, the learning process itself would no longer be seen as a boring and meaningless task. These ideas need to be pursued.

References:

1. Zhou Li, “Colonising and Decolonising Works in Chinese Universities,” Fourth Multiversity Conference, Penang, 2011. Copy of the paper can be downloaded from www.multiworldindia.org.

Why parents and educators should consider a “gap year” for their children

One of the emotions we experienced as (“highly educated”) parents was the overall negative impact of the schooling system on our three boys. We found they were happiest when out of school. If it had not been for the compulsion, they would rarely have gone to school. At some stage, youngsters placed in such a situation – not just for a year but for an almost never ending decade – can experience a need to be set free from it all, for some time at least.

We discovered that the school never provided our kids with the opportunities to do the things they wanted to do or which gave them greatest pleasure. The school did not concern itself with their need to uncover and develop their own identity or personality. If any activity – whether or not desireable – was unrelated to the textbooks prescribed for them, according to the school it had no learning potential and for this reason was to be firmly set aside.

So when each of our kids completed school (either at the 10^th or 12^th), we set them free from all bonds for a full year. They would use the time to discover themselves, their likes and dislikes, with absolutely no compulsion or driving from our side. Basically, we wanted to ensure they got time – without the pressure of another year of study, or another examination around the corner – to come to terms with their own existence, what it meant to live in a society or country, explore its environment, interact with people of all ages, experience and expertise, and to consciously understand the idea that self-imposed discipline (swa-raj) is an inherent part of being creative and free.

All three experiments worked out satisfactorily. Each boy bounded out of the cage that school had become to explore total freedom. In the process, they slowly but unmistakably discovered their innate capabilities and developed these to use them as the basis for good, creative and satisfying work.

After the gap year, they found they had developed an ambivalent attitude towards the idea of going to college. They registered for graduation, but with our support kept to their own work and learning schedules. They discovered for themselves that the stuff they teach you in school and college may perhaps help you get a conventional job, but may not necessarily provide you with the vast resources that life makes available to human beings who have tasted freedom.

When the principal of the college called us for discussions because our sons could not be found in class or were located more frequently in the college canteen, we reassured him that our sons were disinterested in superior grades because they had their own schemes and were working those. Once the principal found the parents had no tension on this issue, they were much relieved and felt a burden had been lifted off their shoulders. We were never called by the principal again.

As parents, we do recognise that there are reasons why adults feel compelled to send their kids to school. We did so ourselves. But having done so, we say give the children a break – at least for a year – from the punishing and depressing schedules of these institutions. During that break, their “learning” from textbooks might decline. However, their conscious experiencing of life’s processes, social activity, personal sense of worth, capacity and responsibility will expand to its limits. The joy they will experience will be boundless. They will never be the same again.

In the case of our three sons, all chose independent careers which they created out of thin air. The first became a self-trained herpetologist, wrote a book at 16 called Free from School and followed it up with another book, The Call of the Snake. Free from School has inspired hundreds of other parents to take it easy on their kids as well.

The second son turned out to be a self-trained musician, while the third self-trained himself into an apple-computer expert by the age of 18.

In all three cases, it is the gap year which gave them the time they needed to think and decide wisely. Compare them before that to kids drowning under a regime of academic studies poured relentlessly down their throats, almost choking them. After the gap year, they were no longer gasping for air and had learnt in addition to fly, on their own, with marginal assistance from their parents. In fact, compared to other parents in similar circumstances, we emerged undebted to any banks or money-lenders for this manner of encouraging the children to grow needed only the very modest means available to ordinary middle class families in this country.

(Written for Manish Jain)

(A foreword to the Indian edition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring)

One of the astonishing features of life that you notice in Europe or in the United States of America is the general absence of birds and their lively music in residential areas. You can awaken in the morning, in Frankfurt, Amsterdam or even Woods Hole, and it is deathly still. There is no chatter of birds, no chirruping of crickets and no croaking of frogs. It is not that these creatures do not exist any longer in Europe or the U.S., but you will find them largely in well-demarcated, protected nature reserves or wilderness areas.

This is to be contrasted with the experience of countries like Malaysia or India. Be it in the city or the village, daylight arrives with birdsong, twittering, whistling and cooing. The monsoon brings with it its own special sound: the chorus of frogs in the fields. Despite the imposition of ‘development’, nature continues to be alive and prolific in our part of the world. For this, we should count our blessings. If you want to understand and appreciate the true significance and value of these blessings, then you should read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

The spring season, signalling the end of winter in the United States of America or in Europe, was always heralded by the arrival of birds and birdsong. Silent Spring tells the story of how the use of poisonous chemicals, particularly DDT, to eliminate insect pests, so thoroughly decimated wildlife over the years that by the sixties – when Carson sat down to write the book – spring had already begun to arrive unaccompanied by birds.

Carson’s book was the first study of its kind to indicate that there was an acute problem with the use of chemical insecticides. The need to protect the products of modern agricultural science (high yielding varieties of crops, grown as monocultures) from pests led scientists to create a wide range of deadly poisons which they hoped would make large agricultural areas sterile and free from insects of every description and size, so that food and other agricultural commodities required for humans could grow undisturbed. From the nature and quantities generated and stocked in the pesticide arsenal, it appeared as though scientists wanted farmers to get rid of the insect world altogether.

Silent Spring questioned the morality – and the scientific rationale – of using broad-spectrum pesticides that killed thousands of beneficial, or neutral insects, in their action of killing the few that were actually troublesome. (With the same mentality, similar strategies were introduced in the field of public health and modern medicine. DDT and BHC were produced in vast quantities to deal with mosquitoes. Similarly, modern medicine came up with new tools or drugs which are actually called anti-biotics.)

The result of unleashing a wide array of lethal chemicals in agricultural fields led to a chain of ecological imbalances in natural populations. Sprayed in fields, the chemical brews eliminated spiders, butterflies, frogs, snakes, birds and several other members of a complex living community, most of whom were incapable of doing any harm to the crop and some of whom in fact actually preyed on the insects that destroyed crops. Pesticides eliminated whole species of bees, which played the vital role of cross-pollinating plants. Having found their way into freshwater streams and rivers, they killed the fish and tadpoles there.

(Below the soil, the use of man-made chemicals for fertilizing crops drove away the earthworm, once dubbed by Charles Darwin as the ‘builder of civilisation’.)

Probably no other book on the environment in the twentieth century had as much impact on public consciousness as Silent Spring. It inaugurated the environment movement in the United States of America. Today the use of DDT and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) has been almost completely outlawed in the U.S., and some of the species most at risk from those pesticides, such as eagles and peregrine falcons, are no longer facing extinction, but have in fact staged a remarkable come-back after the use of these substances was banned.

In one important matter, however, there has been no change at all. The production of a variety of deadly chemicals has continued unabated. The chemical industry continues to have a simple slogan: produce first, think later. In fact, for years after the publication of Silent Spring, the chemical industry refused to acknowledge the validity of Carson’s work and ganged up against her; it even tried to malign her and to ridicule her data.

Today, the number of man-made chemicals in use in the US alone is over 100,000, most of them either untested or inadequately tested for their impact on the environment and on living beings. DDT and PCBs, while not used in the U.S., are still routinely produced there and cynically sold to other countries. In the U.S., they have been replaced by narrow-spectrum pesticides of even higher toxicity, which have also not been adequately tested and pose equal or even greater risks. Since Silent Spring hit the market, pesticide use in the U.S. on farms alone has doubled (to 900,000 tonnes a year) and pesticide production has increased by 400%.

Today’s scenario is therefore, if anything, even grimmer. In 1996, Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers published Our Stolen Future (a book which is widely seen as a worthy successor to Silent Spring). Our Stolen Future traces birth defects, sexual abnormalities and reproductive failures in wildlife to their source: man-made chemicals that mimic the action of natural hormones in the human body, thereby upsetting normal reproductive and developmental processes. It documents a wide range of strange behaviours: eagles that lost their natural instinct to mate and raise young; disappearing otters; the inability of minks around the Great Lakes to produce pups; alligators with tiny penises; a plague among seals near Denmark.

The damage documented in the book is not limited to the animal kingdom. Human beings are affected as well. Sperm counts have dropped by as much as 50 percent in recent decades. Women have begun to suffer a dramatic rise in hormone-related cancers, endometriosis and other disorders.

The chemicals responsible for these deadly effects are now to be found all over the planet. The most significant aspect of these chemicals is that they produce impacts when they are present in the human body in extremely minute doses. Worse, such substances – also known as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) – are not biodegradable and can be around for decades.

Counterpose the attitudes behind the production and use of such toxic chemicals with that of simpler folk of an era not too far into the past. I was told this story by a young Jain monk, Hitruchi Maharaj, to demonstrate the care which an older society took of other species, among them lowly kidas (insects). He said that till about 40-50 years ago in Gujarat, society patronized an elaborate system for the protection of even the lowliest of prani (living beings). In India rice, wheat or wheat flour is hand-cleaned before it is processed further or cooked. This is not only to remove fine stones that have got into the grain, but to remove prani: small worms and insects. In Gujarat, after the prani were picked out, they were never killed. They would be placed in a cup on a handful of wheat flour. Weekly, a man with a cart would travel around the city or village, shouting ‘prani! prani!’ The women would hand over the cups of wheat flour with the prani to the man who would then take the entire lot away to the panjrapole (animal shelter). In the panjrapole, all the prani would be placed in a special protected enclosure, safely out of the reach of lizards and other predators, where they lived out their natural lives.

The use of toxic chemicals to kill prani is a fairly recent phenomenon in India, associated almost wholly with the green revolution. Since the technology of the green revolution was imported from Western countries lock, stock and barrel, it came equipped with its own philosophical baggage of justifiable biocide. Predictably, its extension in India has had similar devastating and senseless consequences.

Here too, however, we may still be able to count some blessings. First, despite our best efforts and intentions, India remains one of the lowest users of pesticides in the world. In the year 2000, we produced 90,000 tonnes of pesticides (up from 26,000) tones in 1966). Compare this with the 900,000 tonnes produced by the United States in the same year! 60% of pesticides used on Indian farms are limited to cotton growing areas. Contrast this with the use of pesticides in the United States, where it is extended to almost all crops.

Second, the intensive use of even this relatively smaller quantity of poisons – smaller, when measured against the quantities used in the U.S. – has already reached a dead end. As the recent tragic suicides of Indian farmers show, we are already reaching the outer limits of usefulness of these lethal chemicals. Farmers in the State of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have committed suicide when even the latest and most potent of pesticide brews available to them have failed to stem insect invasions which have devastated their crops. In fact, such suicides have now become an almost regular feature in the Indian countryside.

Once every potent chemical has been used and found wanting, there is simply no alternative but to return to traditional – and less toxic – means of controlling the insects that modern farming methods have turned into pests.

Other India Press is committed to exposing this deadly mirage of a green revolution that has ended up turning the planet blue. Though Silent Spring is a classic, it has never been available in India, even though it was first published in the U.S. way back in 1962 (and where it has gone into more than 30 editions). OIP is happy to bring out the first Indian edition, and hopes to publish in the near future an Indian edition of Our Stolen Future as well.

The use of lethal pesticides has forced us to submit ourselves and other living beings (prani) to forms of distress and suffering that makes those associated with our ordinary karma appear positively beneficent. The point is that the world cannot be caring of life and still love chemicals. It may appear difficult and trying to get out of our dependence on chemicals, but for those who love the planet, their children and the future, nature has given us the clearest of messages, documented in vivid detail in the pages of Silent Spring.

Go Organic! A Rough Guide to Clean Foods

http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/16663.pdf

Happy reading!

Claude Alvares talked to “See Goa” magazine (Vol.3 No.1, July 2008) on a host of issues. Excerpts:

Goa is in the throes of activism. This seems a very crucial stage – a fight between those who are all for unbridled development and those who want Goa to retain its idyllic charm.  Is anyone winning the battle, how does it go from here?

I think at the moment the public is winning the battle, one can say this with confidence because on major issues like the Regional Plan, SEZ (Special Economic Zone), many large housing projects, even the opposition that is developing against the mining industry, all these are unprecedented. In terms of the mining industry, there has really been no great protest against it because of the industry’s policy of dividing villages and giving some benefits to some people in a village so that they will become a force in favour of the mining industry. But that’s also gone right now, and many of them are approaching courts. In the case of the Regional Plan, it was the first time in the country that a statutory plan had to be withdrawn by the government, it is unprecedented. Even in the case of SEZ, in many places like Nandigram (West Bengal) people have had to die for the cancellation of a single SEZ whereas in the case of Goa, 18 SEZs have been denotified.

There are several factors why activism is succeeding in Goa. Goa is first of all a very small place; you can’t have these types of agitations in, say, Maharashtra because you can’t get the people of Maharashtra all together on a particular issue. But in the case of Goa, we can get activists to move around, people from the south to attend meetings in the north and people from the north to attend meetings in the south, and people from the coast to attend meetings in the interior, and all this perhaps within one and a half hour of travel. The other thing is the political process itself; most of these things are done with some sort of approval from the government itself. The whole business of democratic politics in India today is that the government has to respond to the public, the government can’t say that it has been elected by the public and it will do what it wants. The government has to be sensitive to public opinion. For example, the Congress party would lose the whole of South Goa if it were nasty on SEZ because the entire church has been very much a part of the agitation against SEZ and against the Regional Plan.

You have long been a vehement opponent of the educational system in the country.  What are your problems with this system, and how does your concept of “Multiversity” provide an alternative?

It’s rather foolish for me to even think in terms of doing anything about the organized schooling or college system. It has sort of run into a rut, and it is not going to recover, and it is going to get only worse for the kids. And my interest is the kids, how do we get kids to learn again. Right now, kids are being taken out of learning situations, they should be interacting with their parents, their Goan grandparents, their uncles, their aunties – all of them great learning institutions. There are various colleges, you can learn from the book there but you can’t learn from life, you can’t learn how to interact in a bank by staying in a class, you have got to go to a bank… you have got to go to a factory to see how things work; if a river is being polluted, you have got to go there, you have got to study that river, you have got to find out what is wrong with it. These are the millions of practical situations that are available, unfortunately the entire educational system has wrapped itself around in trying to follow this view that eventually if the children are taken out of this learning situation and brought into these rooms, they will be able to engage in the business of learning… that is not learning at all.

As for Multiversity, it is an Internet-based learning centre, it is to enable people to reduce their dependence on formal learning institutions. We have no objection if somebody wants to go to school or college, we are not interested in spending our time and energy trying to prevent them from doing so, some students enjoy school, I don’t know what type of a person enjoys school (laughs). But by and large, most people find school a bore or they find it terrifying or they find it very difficult to cope with. There are so many pressures now, and the educationists have ended up putting more and more burdens on the child, because they think that as so much more information is there, all of it must be into the mind of the child. The whole approach is the classic bucket approach that the child is an empty bucket, so you keep on filling the bucket with all the stuff that you want and in so far as the bucket is filled up, the child is educated. This is nonsense! Information is not learning, information is not education, but we have got into that trap and we can’t seem to get out of it. So the best thing is to encourage children to reduce their dependence on school or college, and for them not to give studies very much importance. The learning pattern followed in schools is not going to be useful for the students either in life or even in getting a job. What we would like the kids to do is to spend more time in actual learning situations.

Now if somebody wants to be a mechanic, why does he have to wait for 12 to 14 years, why does he have to wait for certification – certification is only text-book knowledge, it has got no practical experience. If you want to be a good mechanic, start at the age of six, no problem, work in your uncle’s garage because you have got nimble fingers, and by the time you are 10 or 12, you will already be a good mechanic, and by the time you are a little bit older, you will be absorbed by all these factory garages. If the kids get to do things that give them some joy, which matches their curiosity, expertise take place. Why is it that we have got a class of people who are parasites and a class of people who keep this country going? For example, the people who produce your rice are people who are not necessarily educated or have gone to school, but they know how to work ploughs, they know how to work oxen, they know the fertility of fields, how to put in plants, how to raise plants, which something even the agriculture department may not know – if you take the director of agriculture and tell him to please go to the field today and plant, he will not know how to do it, he may be able to give instructions for somebody else to do it, but he will not be able to do it.

How successful have you been with the organic farming movement? What have been the stumbling blocks to its success?

The only stumbling blocks is the government’s commitment. But we have now reached a stage where organic farming is accepted as a method of farming. The government of Goa in many of its meetings with us has said that it is so convinced about organic farming that it is now committed to supply information to farmers about organic farming – the same way that it used to cater to the needs of farmers doing chemical farming.

For the last 40 years, the government has been setting up a system for the promotion of chemical farming. In those years, if you wanted to farm organically, no bank would give you a loan, this was a bias. Now the government says that it is going to remove that bias and will make it equal, so we will have two parallel tracks – one for organic farming and another for chemical farming. The government won’t give up chemicals at all because it is convinced that chemicals are required. This is because the people who make the policies in agriculture are not farmers themselves, they are bureaucrats, they think in terms of very large numbers, they think that we have to get so many chemical fertilizers every year and this must be dumped into the soil some way or the other. And how do we make that possible, it is made possible by the business of subsidy. That’s the business of agriculture – how to find a subsidy; today there’s a subsidy of 100,000 crore rupees only on chemical fertilizers! This is complete nonsense, this has got no future. If you have an agriculture system devoted to this type of subsidy, there really is no future because ultimately, we don’t have that kind of money, we are not producing that kind of money, we are just printing more notes, that in itself is having an inflationary impact.

Our disappointment is that the government is not really putting in the urgent effort that’s required to promote organic farming, which it has been doing for chemical farming. So it’s an absurd situation today that people who produce food chemically, who produce food using pesticides – very toxic pesticides – and who are harming the soil and its communities, these people are being subsidized. As for the organic farmers who are farming by maintaining the integrity of their soil and producing good, nutritious food, they are not being helped; they are not being supported in any way. On the contrary, the organic farmers are being asked to go in for certification. So the paradoxical thing is that a fellow who is producing contaminated food doesn’t have to get his food certified, but the fellow who is producing good food, natural food, as nature produces it, they tell them to please certify so that it is proved that it’s been grown naturally. That’s an absurd situation!

One very good case is that the India Today magazine is starting a medical insert for awareness on public health issues, and they have asked me to do a column for them on how food items are being produced by farmers today, and what the impacts are on health because of the heavy dependence on chemicals, and how one can identify organically grown food and where one can get it if one want to. And the first piece that I submitted to them, they were shocked, they said that if this is the situation, it is going to shake people up altogether. As a person who has been in the organic farming movement for the last 20-25 years, I know that most things that are produced in the field today is being done with the use of the most toxic chemicals.

Does Goa completely do away with mining, or is there any way whereby both the economy and the ecology don’t suffer?

Let me put it in a very graphic way. The only illustration I can give you is of a poor person in a good state of health who wants some money, so what does he do, he sells his kidney, that is the classic method today in India for people to get 50,000 to one lakh in ready cash; it’s not something he will do in normal circumstances, it looks as though there are some people who are benefiting, somebody gets a kidney, there’s a hospital, there are doctors, there’s infrastructure, there are medicines sold so that the kidney operation can go through and the person who is getting the kidney can be levied a hefty fee of three to five lakh rupees, mostly he will be a foreigner or a Gulf person. All of this looks as though the economy is benefiting, because from a simple kidney, which was only operating in somebody’s body, doing nothing, now a lot of money has been created, and some people have been employed.

That’s what I tell people when I try to explain mining to them, I ask them to look at it from this point of view. There’s an ore in the ground, now this is not something that has been put there by Goa or by nature because they did’nt know what to do with it. An ore is a very valuable filter of water, and the tribals in Goa know this because they have situated their paddy fields very close to many of these places, which are now going in for mining. So that’s the kind of ore that’s being exported, it is as if Goa’s body is donating this purificatory element to somebody else. And that too to a country like China, who is India’s rival and competitor. We are selling ore to them so that they make weapons out of it, which at the end of the day, may be trained on India.

Goan politics has always been unstable.  Is the problem with Goan politicians? Do you think there’s any silver lining there?

No, not at all. But then, we are not interested in that kind of politics. That’s why we are on the outside. When the villagers seek justice and get together, their power is such that no politician or even the Supreme Court can do anything against them. Without public sanction, nothing will move, and the politician has to understand that.

There’s this popular opinion that environmentalists are always there to oppose, they are never constructive, and all these NGOs are finally there for the money.  What’s your take on that?

Goan NGOs are not funded, all of them work free of cost. It’s all voluntary. We have no air-conditioned offices unlike what some people allege; these people themselves can’t do without air conditioners. These are all wild comments. We are involved in positive work. Like in the case of the garbage dumping site in Sonsoddo. For an amount of 17 lakhs rupees spread over one and a half years, the Goa Foundation clearned up the 40-year old site, detoxified it, erected a wall, brought water to the site, created a composting yard, prevented the entry of stray animals and finally eliminated the fires. But today, even with 7.84 crore rupees of public money actually approved by the government for Sonsoddo project, the site remains as it is, with some superficial work carried out by the contractor. Again, it was due to the efforts of the NGOs that Panjim city got 80 composting pits. We only oppose destruction, we do not oppose development.

You have ruffled many big feathers in your battles to save the environment and preserve ecology. What’s your experience with intimidation?

In my 25 years of activism, there has been really no intimidation, instead they – the people who flout norms – get intimidated. Yes, there have been one or two threatening phone calls from desperate individuals. See, when it comes to facing judicial proceedings – as per the right that the Constitution has given us – all become equal. All our opponents know that the Goa Foundation has done considerable work in the last 25 years, and it’s been work without any blemish. No one has ever accused us that we approached them for money. Actually, our opponents give us grudging respect.

What are your thoughts on Goan tourism?

Goan tourism is in a bad shape. Some norms should have been put in place in the first instance itself. There’s too much of ripping off, from the taxi drivers to the cops. Then there’s the garbage situation, the noise pollution, the drug racket … The cops are still harassing tourists, sometimes even by planting drugs on them. This is not what the tourists come here for, one of the things they come here is because the Goans are always ready for a talk; to strike up a conversation comes naturally to the Goans. I want Goan tourism to be a convivial industry. So a time will come when things hit real rock-bottom, then the industry will get together and take some positive steps. That’s always what happens here, we will wait for a crisis and then take steps for a better situation.

Any message to the younger generation…

They will have to act soon, otherwise there will be no next generation because of the sea-level rise (in some 10 years, 10 percent of Goa will be under water) and global warming. The young will have to get into action fast, instead of having Bacardi breezers!