The problem

‘The life of the mind in which I keep myself company may be soundless; it is never silent and it can never be altogether oblivious of itself, because of the reflexive nature of all its activities.’

Hannah Arendt¹

AT the heart of the question of pedagogy is the spirit of rational conversation, the freedom to think and speak, and the idea of collective exploration, without fearing a curbing of the voices of dissent and disputation. The process of sharing knowledge is tenuously linked to the idea of both showing and leading, which makes all pedagogic realms intimate and political at the same time. But no such sharing happens in a vacuum as a variety of social, political and moral orientations are brought into play by the actors involved in this exchange. While on the one hand, in its modern clichéd sense, pedagogy invokes the function and organization of educational institutions and their curricula, in a deeper way most of our modern life is subject to a series of pedagogic regimes. While the educational realm, defined by the master and pupil relationship, remains the main template, equally the modern state, society, family, civic organizations and political parties play such roles in myriad ways.

How would one then think of the stock terms like democracy, freedom and rights in relation to the larger ‘pedagogic field’ and thus the place of ‘dissent’ in contemporary India? What are the challenges of ensuring, or at least minimally achieving, the promises behind these terms for an average citizen? We need to have a view of our pedagogic worlds in relation to the life of the mind in post-colonial India. This is important because in the long historical evolution, our minds have been radically transformed, during both the colonial encounter and the democratic experience since independence.

This symposium on the cultures of freedom and dissent in the world of learning in contemporary India attempts to revisit such questions from a variety of intellectual perspectives. At the heart of this conundrum lie deeper issues, which have to do with social class, caste, intellectual tradition and language as they speak to the ideas of nation, religion, region and democratic politics. These determine the ways in which one speaks in contemporary India – be it on the soiled mats of an elementary school or the wooden benches of our universities.

In the last decade there has been much talk of an expanding wealthy middle class, a shrinking welfare state, and the glaring ironies of the developmental regimes in the rest of the world. This phenomenon has given rise to a series of new social and political collectives both on the urban street and in the hinterland foregrounding the voice of dissidence as people declare the arrival of a new spring with marches, placards and slogans. The response across the globe by increasingly fearful neo-liberal states has been to take resort to illegal detention and a promulgation of draconian laws in an effort to ‘discipline and civilize’ people. However, when the present acquires such shock value, one may legitimately wonder whether or not there is an enduring script beneath this turmoil. Shall one then call this the moment of the ‘pedagogy of dissent’ rather than of failed revolutions!

A cluster of words such as democracy, freedom, accommodation, community and rights have become an integral part of modern liberal and democratic imagination in the last two centuries. But inhabiting their meanings has both been, and remains, a tortuous exercise, for these ‘words’ have not merely been the concepts in the treatises and textbooks of political philosophy but, as history informs us, also been shaped by life on the streets and public spaces, mills and factories and the fields and forests. Another cluster of terms such as conflict, dissent, revolution and protest have been linked to the way the values behind these terms have acquired resonance. We utter these terms such as svatantrata, kranti, azadi, inkalab, vidroh and pratirodh in our own lived and acquired languages. This says something about the ways in which we learn and share these words with others, as much as the ways in which we enact or raise them publicly or murmur them quietly in our own hearts and minds. In the process, we invest them with newer forms and meanings.

This vocabulary becomes stark when it happens in the putative realm of pedagogy. Pedagogy, despite its vastly enlarged and vigorously contested democratic value in our times is, in its essence, still about the speaker and the listener, the giver and the receiver, the master and the pupil. While its various structured spheres – that is the schools, colleges, seminar halls and classrooms – are an integral part of the process of growing up as an educated modern citizen, pedagogy happens at all levels – in the town halls, places of worships, religious seminaries and public gatherings. But most of the time, what is taking place is not only a sharing of ideas but also the playing out of varied and exquisite mechanisms of control, surveillance and policing.

In many ways the terms ‘pedagogy’ and ‘dissent’ are not opposites but complementary. Pedagogy, based on the Greek word paideia, reflected the process by which society structured the transformation of a youth into an adult, one who could then be virtuous and honourable. It was a way to initiate one into the civic and public life. In this sense, pedagogy, unlike its more common usage as a training of the mind, has deep ethical and civic aims. And indeed, pedagogy is an ordeal, a rite of passage, to acquire such virtues. Dissent, coming from the Latin root dissentire, is primarily about the difference in sentiments, perception and thinking. Following the trails of their root meanings, all pedagogies, that is the acts of imparting education and learning, need to be dissenting, since they thrive on the difference in human feeling, thought and perception.

Out of the three fundamental components of pedagogy – the human self, community, and mind – it is the mind and its prowess, which has gradually come to acquire the prime status in modern times. In this mentalist scheme of modern pedagogy, it is the structures of institutions and the content of knowledge which become prominent. But while learning is mostly seen as quiet and passive, dissent, that is the difference in perceiving and understanding, is the active component and endows agency to the learner. Dissent thus is the beginning of the communicative act on the part of the learner in the pedagogical realm. Hence speech, even when it is mute and unspoken, reflects an affirmation of the learner’s identity. Equally, when a learner poses his difference, and more so his distinct identity, he is seeking a role in determining the very idea of pedagogy.

Dissent is thus an act of creating a new communion by initiating a speech act. In many ways, contemporary India is witnessing a renewed demand for a new communion by addressing its differences with the received wisdom and traditions of pedagogy. Dissent is not the surplus of speech; it is a plea to articulate difference, the way freedom speaks. But what is freedom if not addressed to the other, and what is an address if it is not ethical! The ethical seeks its resources either in tradition or alternatively in claims of a radical departure from the existing conditions. Neither route is easy and can either create enabling paths or tie us down into new myths.

But more than being torn into the mentalist and ethical achievements, the processes of both learning and dissent in our times are maintained by an institutional regimen which is sustained by the large bureaucratic structures of modern state and society. The practice of pedagogy is not solely sustained by the teacher and the taught; but more likely by impersonal institutional structures. That makes modern pedagogic life driven with the intent to create an army of achievers alienated and its systems of knowledge petrified. Even as it is the impersonal settings of institutions such as the school, university and training academies which act as the purveyors of desirable thought, far too often the process fails to touch the sentiments of the learners and sometimes even quietly shores up their feelings of difference.

What the pedagogic exercise in this impersonal setting misses on the part of a new learner is not simply the ‘capacities of mind’ but the communicative and expressive intelligence it treasures as a different and unique social being. The modern pedagogic set-up addresses difference through measurable and identified markers, where it is the nation and religion which become the main sites of addressing social difference. The social is no longer seen as a category of its own; rather it is more glaringly tied to the statist definitions of an enumerated citizen.

And yet, in a country like India, the pedagogic exercise also holds out the promise of acquiring a new intellectual self for diverse sections of society. This process, however, has to face the challenges thrown up by the many living languages of India and the demand for a new conceptual architecture. In short, Indian pedagogy needs to renew itself in the face of the triad of the new social selves, languages, and systems of knowledge. But what is often forgotten is that Indian pedagogy has an equal, or at times primary, role in shaping lives. To face these challenges our pedagogic system has to go beyond the sole task of training the mind. It should instead become the place for nurturing a new bildung, that is, a scheme for the cultivation of the human self in its fullness. Alongside the usual social and political factors, our current conflict in the world of learning is as much between the two pursuits of the pedagogy – one focusing on the mind and the knowledge content, and the other which requires an accentuated understanding of the self and society.

The alternative schools of thought on pedagogy have a long tradition of reminding us about the banality of the distinction between what one learns through the mind and what one acquires through overall sensory capacities. While this tradition has routinely faced the charge of being regressive and utopian, in a different way, most modern pedagogy has in turn been clouded by the national and liberal myths which attempt to domesticate several communitarian categories. The moot point is to understand the different sources from where the pedagogic sphere is facing a challenge in contemporary India. Central to this conflict is the incessant demand of instituting plurality and difference as core values. Such values, despite the liberal democratic claims of the Indian nation, cannot be instituted without fulfilling the demands of the redistribution of social wealth and the resolve to create a society based on dignity and equality.

While institutional mechanisms, modes and content of pedagogy, and actors have been extremely varied and, at times, in a rather skewed and contested relationship, one key aspect of modern Indian pedagogy and its dissenting traditions has been the nurturing of cultures of criticism and creative freedom. Critical imagination is about honing the art of reason and speech in a pluralist and democratic spirit. One success of modern pedagogy is the projection of the figure of the intellectual as a custodian of the critical and dissenting spirit.

The intellectual as the dissenting critic introduces many more shades of defiance into the existing meanings, since more than the hardened arguments it is the bends and folds in the received meanings which the intellectual interrogates. Various subtle and challenging grounds of dissent have been evident in ancient counter-traditions, medieval devotional cults, and also modern revolutionary movements. These have ranged from high scholasticism and polemics to the everyday forms of labour, artisanal skills and the uses of language usually aimed at situating the dissenting spirit at the lowest ladder of human social existence. These dissenting traditions show us how the world we live in is asymmetric and unjust for most. These traditions are not just based on contrarianism, but espouse a creative reconfiguration of the elements of the world. At the same time, they tell us that one dissents through defiance, negation and appropriation of some existing tradition, and not from without. One speaks best from the ground beneath one’s feet.

Freedom is never given to us. It is achieved in a set of relations between things and human conditions in the world. It places us in a reflective relationship to the structures of life and society. Dissent is most often an enactment, a performance which overturns the given scheme of things around us. Far less noticed is that most human dissent is unheard, since it is a silent, mute act of defiance. A dissent registered out in the world is a declaration of one’s power to differ. And the simplest of freedoms, to be different, is not easily available to all. The might of the powerful, either of the state, the community, the party, or a family head, teacher, and a policeman can seep to the lowest depths of the society, almost to the level at which its hegemonic forms can subsume social and cultural consciousness.

Speech as a natural gift is not naturally free. Denying the power of speech is not the failure of language. In some ways it reinvents the creative imagination. Such muting of speech can be forced but when chosen can take imagination to its limits. Most such acts are extreme steps and augur the birth of a new language. Silence is not only hidden speech, it is bare too. Silence is the speech of difference and hence dissenting, expressed through language, body, gesture, a thing, or a natural object. It strikes us with its claim to be, its claim to denied speech. Silent dissent is a spectacle of its own variety; it is seen in extremely bare and muted but powerful uses of signs. It tells us that when speech withdraws or goes silent, it speaks differently.

The goal here is more in the spirit of creating a map of dissenting thought in the pedagogic realm in our own present. There is a lurking sense that we don’t quite know what is at stake in the current transformation. A suicide note, detained students, teachers on the streets, a feared state, and demagogues all around force one to think about the world we live in. Our pedagogic field also appears stretched to its limits as the university, school, curriculum are connected to a series of institutions, public and intimate, from the market to the family and community. The freedom and promise of a new life which a first generation learner brings into any pedagogic system is equally exhibited in the type of institutions we have nurtured so far.

The art of dissent, we hope, is the initiation of a different, possibly a new conversation. The ‘pedagogy of dissent’ is the nurturing of that very art. This is freedom’s imagination and is the ground of imaginative freedom. But would pedagogy of dissent also make the conversation a moral and political act? This is what we need to explore collectively.

RAKESH PANDEY

 

1. The Life of the Mind. A Harvest Book, New York, 1977, p. 75.