At the heart of humanities education lies empathy, a capacity to understand others in their own terms and contexts. To this end, disciplines in humanities — including history, literature, philosophy, and psychology — rely on the art of interpretation. An interpretative mind can not only take cognisance of life situations, near and far, but also instil thought processes that can transform one’s ideas about them from within.
So the ‘impact factor’ of humanities, so to speak, is categorised in terms of capacity to transform imagination, reasoning, and thought itself, albeit through somewhat intangible means. Influences on the mind are difficult to quantify, so are their outcomes. This renders humanities scholarship vulnerable to ridicule, neglect, and outright discrimination. This is not all: a conflicting relationship with the science establishment and a confusion concerning the appropriate medium of learning burden Indian system of education in humanities.
Science-humanities divide
Thinking about humanities’s discordant relationship with the science establishment, I cannot resist a bit of a flashback. As it happens now, we high school students herded ourselves into first, second, third, and fourth groups just after our high school board exams. With a shocking sense of artificially created hierarchy among us on the basis of our choice of groups, we began branching out, pursuing courses in material sciences, biological sciences, commerce, and, last of the lot, humanities. Trapped in our shells by a rigid sense of specialisation, we started on our individual journeys from where we were expected to speak in mutually unintelligible languages, chase divergent job markets and organise our inner lives and rate our knowledge systems in sync with the realities inherent in our disciplines. This mentality persists till date, bewitching technologists and humanities experts alike. Consequently, both fail to appreciate the idea that the efforts of a social scientist and a scientist can actually complement each other.
Scientists and technologists work on problems using mathematical and experimental methods. Their vocation is based on the premise that all problems are amenable to scientific solutions. Scientists even aspire to devise grand frameworks — like the M-Theory — that can potentially explain everything about the universe and the humanity’s evanescent place in it.
In pursuing such grand chases and technological feats, scientists work closely with the industrial and military complexes as much as the ruling dispensation. Naturally, they approach existing power structures and controversial debates surrounding them with caution. Also, they tend to stay away from politics, often reasoning that it does not come within the ambit of their vocation.
Social scientists brand such a withdrawal as ‘Rightist leaning’. This is clearly incorrect since a typical Indian scientist’s formative period is anything but politically inclined. If humanities scholars desire a more imaginative learning world for scientists, they should, by all means, push for the same. After all, it is disciplines such as Medical Humanities that have prompted Western medical science establishment into thinking about the patients’ inner worlds, looking beyond their illnesses. Similar feats can be replicated in India too where humanities are gaining visibility in institutions devoted to engineering and technology such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).
Of course, mere visibility cannot provide humanities with the capacity it needs to become a transformative endeavour. Perhaps, change will arrive when humanities and sciences are in a position to interrogate each other’s assumptions and predilections. This is unlikely to happen if both the domains merely coexist in our centres of higher learning as two disparate groups.
Is English the most appropriate medium of learning when it comes to social sciences?Yes indeed, say most social scientists. As a global language, English comes with a plethora of means to access knowledge which is not normally available through an Indian language. Millions of Indians, including those from the lower castes, now have a chance to gain entry into elite Indian institutions that were earlier the preserve of a handful of those who had embraced English education much earlier. Humanities scholars, though sympathetic to such liberating shifts, do rightfully mourn the fatal neglect of non-English knowledge systems. They apprehend a wipeout of local linguistic heritage because of English.
Education in English certainly has the capability to instil a sense of complacency, an assumption that that critical opinion in English is an end in itself. For example, Indian social scientists and humanities scholars tend to have a slavish devotion to Western thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. For the most part, they invoke these philosophers as a shortcut and to compensate for their lack of grounding in knowledge systems of regional languages. However, those who favour a pedagogy in humanities that is based on Indian languages naturally brand English education as an attractive pact with the devil.
That said, privileging English over the regional languages, and vice versa, is not going to work any longer. We need both modes of dissemination to handle the students’ capacity to absorb all modalities of learning. To cite an example, as a teacher in an English classroom, I find it hard to talk of romantic love without invoking Shakespeare, Kamban as well as Kalidasa. Though my audience primarily comprises students of English Studies, they inhabit a world where they get to learn about love, and other such fine expressions, through different media. It is impossible to get to the heart of such a diverse learning environment without seeking as much recourse to classics in English as much as those in the regional languages.
In a globalised context like ours, ideas commingle in complex ways irrespective of their linguistic roots. To disentangle such knowledge admixtures, we need humanities education that is rooted both in the regional and the global. With firm roots both in English and the regional languages, humanities education in India will cease to be a field where Western frameworks are merely recycled. Having one foot here, and another there, in fact can enable humanities to have a firmly rooted empowering agenda.
Reinforcing uniqueness of identities
Finally, politics, which sciences ignore and social sciences espouse, is not all that a burden-free exercise. In pursuing identity politics, for example, communities develop a tendency to reassert their uniqueness at all expense. Earlier, the discipline was open to only an elite few with upper-caste affinities. Some of them outside did manage to hook on, but only from the peripheries. With an expansion in identity politics, humanities began opening up to different identities, inadvertently creating exclusive slots for identities such as those of Dalits, religious minorities, disabled, and many more.
Notwithstanding the dynamic nature of these slots, communities with diverse identity markers, at times, subscribe to the position that a right for representation rests solely with them. And they believe that outsiders, no matter how much their willingness and capacity to reach out, will not be in a position to understand them.
Such a worldview is restrictive since it underestimates one’s ability to get into others’ shoes. Human propensity for cruelty is as boundless as that for kindness. And as vast for empathy. Esoteric knowledge, uniquely possessed by one community or one individual, can therefore differ from other strands of knowledge only in kind, and not in degree. However, a trained social scientist may be able to reach out to understand the inner worlds of a Dalit or a disabled person, and yet fall short in accessing something that is completely esoteric and experiential about them. Hence, we need to evolve learning environments that encourage a re-creation of esoteric forms of knowledge in some tangible shape. Fiction, poetry, music, and other forms of human expression can come handy in this regard.
Empathy, therefore, is not necessarily an inherent human trait and needs to be cultivated. Neither an identity slot nor political assertiveness can automatically lead humanities scholars to a mission of empathy. This requires carefully orchestrated pedagogical systems. Without imagination and empathy, politics will become a burdensome and a straight-jacketed exercise.
Twenty-first century humanities establishment in India will have to integrate subaltern or marginalised communities in a conversational environment that is both empowering and soulfully enriching. A symbiotic relationship with the sciences, a rich linguistic heritage, and a pedagogy rich in empathy will help it achieve the goal.
