From this November, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, or CSDS, in Delhi, where I work, entered its 50th year. That a research centre has actually survived and done reasonably well in the fraught conditions of Indian academia is nothing short of a miracle. Celebrating successful survivors is a wonderful thing, but a larger challenge is to reflect on the changing nature of the social science research centre.
In the early years, research centres were seen as places where academics would be shielded from the strains of university life. The primary focus in the 1960s and the 1970s was on the classic social sciences: economics, sociology and politics. State support was routed through the Indian Council of Social Science Research. Research centres mainly specialised in one discipline — economics, sociology or politics. The CSDS itself was a centre for politics in the 1960s, influenced by American models of political science. In media and governmental discourse the single discipline research centre has a continuing attraction; it makes core competence easy to identify, communicate and fund. This approach misses out important transformations that have taken place in the past few decades.
Specialisation?
A social science research centre based on a dominant discipline makes little sense today. Institutions named as social science institutions, such as the CSDS and the Kolkata-based Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSS) are often as well known for outstanding research in the humanities. In the CSDS, initially conceived as a centre for politics, currently half the faculty has a humanities background, and the director is a philosopher. New areas include history, anthropology, cultural studies, urbanism, media and film studies, non-western and Indic philosophies, Indian languages, political and social theory. Like all changes that emerge from within, these shifts have taken time, in fact over 30 years. From the 1980s, Sudhir Kakkar’s Shamans, Mystics and Doctors , Shiv Visvanathan’s Organising for Science and Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy opened new domains of research in India. All this was done quietly, without any of the noisy quarrels that periodically overtake mainstream disciplines. It also made possible innovations in existing fields, so that by the late 1990s the new Lokniti programme could bring fresh questions to the field of survey analysis and political study. By 2000, a film historian colleague, three filmmaker-artists and I set up a new CSDS programme called Sarai, focusing on media and urban life: a huge step for a classically modelled research centre, and perhaps only possible because of the experimental outlook that the CSDS had nurtured over the years.
Interventions – visible, invisible
Today, live television powerfully and continuously produces a permanent audience, and an incessant demand for academic expertise. Along with political life, Indian academic life has been fundamentally transformed by television. Of course, there are less visible publics, and their impact is arguably more durable and fundamental to the transformations of ideas. For example, in the CSDS, the Emergency and the post-1977 movements upset older models of research by interacting with people’s movements and popular perception, Rajni Kothari and D.L. Sheth’s writings quickly responded to this public. After 2000, the Centre’s Sarai programme gave generous seed grants for topics such as Dalit histories, graphic novels, pulp fiction, Bhojpuri cinema, surveillance, free software, non-fiction writings of working class lives, Dastangoi performance traditions. Many of these ideas would have been entirely stifled by our infamous educational and cultural bureaucracies. A staggering 400 projects were funded by this fellowship programme, all with modest sums of money that in total would struggle to equal a large government research project. The grant programme supported some well known names in our recent academic and cultural life: Sharmila Rege, Sarnath Banerjee, Basharat Peer, Aman Sethi, Mahmood Farooqui, to name a few. In recent years, the CSDS initiated a unique summer teaching programme for postgraduate students called “Researching the Contemporary” that cut across disciplines and themes. In February 2013, the CSDS Indian Languages programme is launching a research journal in Hindi, the first of its kind. None of these initiatives, including Sarai’s widely circulated fellowship programme, generated a single media story; all of them have existed as vibrant public secrets in online communities, and amongst researchers, practitioners and students of diverse backgrounds.
These interventions raise questions about the public life of research. Instead of being hubs of disciplinary expertise, research centres can be re-imagined as seeding and hosting experimental thought. The public emerges through a more dynamic interactive process, connecting the academy to knowledge formations outside, and disturbing the complacency of disciplines. There has been a great expansion of creative publics in the past decade. Artists, writers, filmmakers, independent thinkers, software programmers have no place to go for critical reflection, the only residencies and fellowships for this new public are outside the country. Research centres and universities must have the imagination to engage these new formations; this will not come from Indian private enterprise.
Archival initiatives
The final point is about the public archive of research. The CSSS Kolkata has built a pioneering visual culture archive, Bangalore’s Centre for the Study of Culture and Society’s media archive is widely used by students and researchers. Archival initiatives in research centres have grown in the last decade. The Sarai fellowship programme encouraged researchers to share their research material in a public archive, an ethical imperative in the ever-expanding and expropriating proprietary environment of our time. Intellectual property regimes pose a serious challenge to research and education, dramatised by the recent private publisher-initiated case in Delhi University. A commitment to sharing and making publicly funded research freely available must enter academic discourse in all fields.
We need a radical re-imagination of the design of research centres today. They must be based on located experiments and address the creativity and intellectual drive of contemporary publics, rather than proclaim grand designs through media hyperbole. The former path is slow, less visible, but more durable.
(Ravi Sundaram is a Senior Fellow at CSDS. His views are personal.)
