Taking
democracy to the
world of knowledge
Sunil
Sahasrabudhey - Vidya
Ashram
Looking at some of my colleagues in IIT here, reminds me of how old I have become. And at the age of 50, Internet really came to India in a big way. It was in the year 2000 when Internet went on local lines. The changes that have been taking place have speeded up. The www ( world wide web protocol) comes in 1990, and the first splash of the dotcom companies comes in 1995. While five years is not a long time for a twenty year old, it is very short time for people of our age group. So my first premise is that events have been taking place at a very quick succession for us, making it very very difficult for us to keep pace with what is happening.
I have also tried to focus my attention in this presentation, through an idea and an assumption that the logic of society and logic of knowledge are not different. They can forcibly be different, for short intervals of time, but they would gravitate, and move on in a manner such that the logic of knowledge and logic of society, and if one might add, the logic of human consciousness, are the same.. We cannot have one type of governing principles, values, structure of institutions, relationship between forces in society along with another type in the world of knowledge. It has not happened before.
For a long period now, through the previous century and the century before that ie since the institutionalization of science beginning early 19th century, all other sources, types, forms, logic of knowledge have been kept out of the dominant discourse of knowledge, as if that is not knowledge proper, at all. Only Science is proper, legitimate knowledge, and all other types like that which our friends talk about naemly knowledge in civil society are not proper..
These other traditions of knowledge, types of knowledge, forms of knowledge were not considered knowledge at all, for this very long period in the industrial world – I don’t mean industrial world as opposed to non-industrial world, but industrial world in the sense of the historical period, the epoch of industry, the era of industry. These other knowledge traditions were seen as as community practices, as tradition, experiential knowledge, ethnic science, which need qualification. To explain: in 1850, the british writers felt that India was not fit to govern itself. It politically cannot do what it should be doing, when it governs itself. This logic applied to knowledge too-- namely most people who have not gone to the University, who have not gone through the higher education rigour, are not fit to deal with “knowledge”. They must undergo a certain of training and so on, to be able to become those individuals who can deal with knowledge.
The acknowledgment of the other type of knowledges is a relatively recent phenomenon. They can now be talked about in institutions and places, which can claim to be public places. These are part of the quick succession of changes since the 1990s and the growth of the Internet. The situation has been fast changing and a hugh destabilization of knowledge that has been taking place.
It is here that we try to connect with political conceptions or what happens in the political arena. Whether we agreed with them on what they did and how they did or not, people with very opposite views, like Lenin in 1917 and Gandhi in 1942, did not see such destabilizations as a problem for society, as they were working for a major change in society. Not that they don’t think that such destabilization is dangerous. They are dangerous, but they don’t want to see that aspect primarily. They want to see that as an opportunity, for their goals or society’s goals or the goals of the movements that they led..
I want to pose this major question before this scholarly assembly - Is this period of major de-stabilisation of the world of knowledge, where hierarchies are changing, where the criterion of legitimacy is changing, where new paradigms are coming into existence.
Even within the dominant knowledge system, science is taking a back seat compared to technology and so on.
If you look at the educational system, the main recommendation of the knowledge commission is that India needs fifty apex universities. There is the reform of the university in Europe and the trend in India of private education which is far beyond the means of most. If we look at basic theoretical indicators, it is not just a destabilization of education. This destabilization has led to a crisis in the world of knowledge and education.
The main question: Is this crisis an opportunity?. What kind of opportunity does this crisis constitute? Further concretizing this question - Does this give us a new opportunity to resurrect those values through and on which values, democracies came into existence and has to be re-built? It was when the values of liberty, equality, freedom fraternity, became popular values that the conditions for democracy took shape as political systems and not before that. So the question is does this fast pace of changes, this destablisation, after a long time, provide a fresh and a unique opportunity? I am not saying that opportunities were not there in earlier centuries. But the opportunities created by the de-stabilisation of knowledge is an opportunity of a type which we have not known before. What kind of opportunity is this? And what kind of social forces need to be mobilized for the resurrection of those values on which democracies are built? What kind of social forces need to be mobilized? What kind of force of ideas, what kind of philosophies need to acquired in the public domain, for us to be able to address this opportunity squarely?. This is the main question that I want to put before you.
And from my side, We at Vidya ashram look at this as opportunity, because we relate to one signal event of recognition of popular knowledge systems, what we call Lok Vidya, peoples’ knowledge. In a certain sense, a condition has been created through this destabilisation, through the breaking of the old hierarchy, through the challenge to the old command system in the world of knowledge, through a change in the legitimacy criterion. The legitimization criterion in the earlier, pre-information world, pre-what we are going through, in the world of Science and Industry was broadly speaking the scientific method.
Is this being replaced, by a new concept of organization of knowledge where knowledge, which is organisable by the new technology, is given the status of knowledge. That piece of knowledge may have been produced in some outlying remote corner by a tribal community, in some village, in a household activity, in an acitivty suited to the local market or in an activity suited for the global market. This means that anybody, anywhere, producing knowledge which is what I call “software-able”, can claim it to be knowledge, whether it is right or wrong. Whether this is going to last or not can be a subject of discussion, but it is being called knowledge, and the sum of activities around the new technology is being termed as knowledge society.
From the point of view of the people, a new system is coming into existence, where Lok Vidya - peoples knowledge is subjected to new forms of exploitation. As competition increases, there is a rush for value addition, which shifts the command to someone else in the private domain. This is happening in various ways. The major areas that come to mind are the health sector, the world of design which is not really being noticed but is being attacked in a sweeping manner. The ideas of the people, the practices of the people, the understanding of the people, their methods of communications, their ideas about art, their practice of art are being appropriated by this new world of entertainment and the new global market. They exploit this store of ideas and value which should appropriately be called knowledge. So this new recognition for Lok Vidya, which should empower those who have this Vidya, may not be empowering them economically, as the old economy which was more a system of local exchange is totally destroyed. Yet it can be said that the new recognition is empowering the people in a certain epistemic sense, in a very politically valuable sense. So it is leading to a certain political empowerment, or creating the conditions of political empowerment, which do not necessarily stem from economic empowerment.
Now this is a different kind of unfolding that is taking place. How effectively can we look into this process – of change where lok vidya is moving into the realm of knowledge from being outside it, along with the fact that the news recognition is being dwarfed or truncated in the process of being “softwared” – the price that being paid for the recognition. Does this constitute a new source of empowerment of the people to intervene in the development process and resurrect the value , in society, values which constitute the ethical and the general ideational basis of democracy? Thank you.