- Prabhat Patnaik
India is one of the few countries in the third world which has a vigorous domestic intellectual discourse. This is partly because of its scale: a distinguished economist friend from Bangladesh often laments that his country lacks the scale for such a discourse and envies India on this count. But it also has to do with the intellectual institutions, including journals, that were set up in India during the anti-colonial struggle and the years of dirigiste development that followed, whose objective was precisely to develop a discourse that was autonomous, both intellectually and institutionally, from the hegemony of the West. Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis’s founding not just of the Indian Statistical Institute, but also of a journal, Sankhya, associated with that institute, which was supposed to maintain the highest intellectual standards while presenting the results of its research, was an example of such an endeavour. The publication of research from India in standard foreign journals, even in the natural sciences where ideological considerations were supposed to be secondary, often ran into barriers of prejudice, of which scientists like J.C. Bose to Mahalanobis himself had personal experience. Starting India’s own journals was seen as a way out. And this built up the domestic discourse.
In the social sciences, where such general prejudice was refurbished by ideology, the need for developing domestic institutions was even greater. Ideology entered into the question of what was considered a worthwhile subject of research; and it entered substantially into the question of what were considered ‘acceptable conclusions’. In the realm of the social sciences, Sachin Chaudhury started that remarkable institution Economic Weekly, later to become Economic and Political Weekly, which contributed immensely to the development of a domestic intellectual discourse, and still does.
The autonomy of such a discourse, however, is anathema in the era of ‘globalization’ when the intellectual ideas of the metropolis, especially in the social sciences, are required to have the same degree not just of global currency, but of global acceptability as, say, Macdonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken. But while the metropolitan powers and their domestic allies would like such a denouement, its realization faces hurdles. Establishing hegemony over the autonomous discourse that has flourished hitherto, and driving it underground, into the “dim underworld of heretics”, is not an easy task intellectually. The means adopted, therefore, typically involve coercion.
The favourite ploy is to raise the question of ‘excellence’. There can be no two opinions about the pathetic state of most institutions of higher learning in the country; but the remedy for it is sought not through ensuring adequate faculty strength, not through eliminating the practice of running academic programmes on the strength of ‘temporary’ or ‘guest’ lecturers who are paid a pittance, not through creating a democratic atmosphere in colleges and universities where students and teachers can discuss and contest opinions fearlessly, and not through the creation of an ambience where higher education is not seen as a mere commodity. It is sought in the introduction of a concept of ‘quality’, where our institutions are to be judged on the basis of how closely they imitate Western institutions. ‘Quality’ is seen as a homogeneous substance of which ‘they’ have more and ‘we’ have less; ergo, ‘we’ must be like ‘them’.
Implicit in this perspective is a denial of any need for an autonomous domestic intellectual discourse; not surprisingly, the ‘quality’ of a faculty is explicitly judged by the proponents of this view by the number of its publications in ‘refereed journals of repute’, which essentially means, in a world characterized by hegemony, Western metropolitan journals. These proponents, alas, are increasingly occupying key positions of power in the higher education establishment of the country, which is hardly surprising given our government’s embrace of neo-liberalism.
All this would not matter if the content of these hegemonic ideas was free from prejudice and crass ideological bias. But such is not the case. In economics for instance, the hegemonic view, which permeates not just metropolitan university curricula but also publications in the so-called ‘refereed journals of repute’, states that the spontaneous result of the functioning of markets is the elimination of ‘involuntary unemployment’ caused by inadequate demand. The labour market always ‘clears’ as long as it is allowed to function freely. The close to 10 per cent unemployment in the advanced capitalist countries, where labour markets can scarcely be accused of becoming suddenly ‘unfree’, is therefore either voluntary, or because people are moving from one set of jobs to another which is waiting for them. There is no unemployment, as the term is commonly understood.
Joseph Stiglitz, the well-known economist, narrates an interesting story. When he was the chairman of economic advisory council of the former president of the United States of America, Bill Clinton, he had the task of suggesting policies for reducing unemployment in the US, which had been Clinton’s campaign promise. Stiglitz wanted to hire some macroeconomists to help him craft such policies, and interviewed several candidates for this purpose. To his surprise, all those interviewed invariably said that there was no problem of unemployment in the US. This is what they had been taught in their Ivy League universities. Such crass ideological positions characterize the so-called ‘frontiers’ of economics, and are frequently rewarded with Nobel prizes.
One can multiply such examples. What is called ‘growth theory’ in economics, for instance, that is supposed to explain the phenomenon of economic growth under capitalism, never makes any reference to the colonial empire and its role in the dynamics of capitalism. And if one thinks that it is only the theorists who are to blame and that economic historians are more conscious of the role of colonies, then one is in for a shock: they too make it a point to turn their gaze away from colonies; and this includes even ‘progressive’ historians in the West, who are coerced for career reasons into submitting to the hegemonic view.
To insist that publication in ‘refereed journals of repute’ should be the criterion for judging the creativity of the faculty in Indian universities is to widen that domain of submission, to extinguish our autonomous national intellectual discourse, and to silence all critical voices within the Indian academia against the ideological hegemony of what in effect is an apologetics for ‘neo-liberal’ capitalism.
Support for a policy of privileging publication in ‘refereed journals of repute’ comes these days, however, from a somewhat unexpected quarter, namely the diaspora of non-resident Indian academics who have emigrated from the country and who occupy important positions in reputed foreign universities. If this support was confined only to the votaries of neo-liberalism one would be scarcely surprised; but what is intriguing is that several NRI academics who profess themselves to be ‘progressive’ and who are careful to distance themselves from neo-liberalism, make common cause with its votaries in privileging publication in ‘refereed journals of repute’, thereby implicitly debunking the autonomous national intellectual discourse. How does one explain this?
One has to fall back here upon a sociological, as distinct from an ideological, explanation. An autonomous national discourse is an implicit denial of any overarching importance to foreign centres of academic ‘excellence’, an unconscious cocking-a-snook at the concept of a global hierarchical order among academic institutions and academic journals. It is an exercise in narcissism, but a narcissism which constitutes a democratic assertion because it is ipso facto non-submissive to any global hierarchy among institutions.
Precisely for this reason, however, it is an implicit denial of any exalted status to NRI academics who occupy prestigious positions in reputed foreign universities. If you occupy a prestigious chair at Harvard or Oxbridge or Stanford and publish from time to time in the Econometrica, or the American Economic Review, then you will be understandably peeved if in Pune or Nasik or Satara the academics are discussing not your latest offering but what a Jadhav or a Bapat has to say in the latest issue of the Economic and Political Weekly. Your pique will be greater if you yourself were once a major academic in India and your work was known in Pune and Satara and Nasik. You thought you had moved up in life by migrating, say, from Mumbai to Boston; but in fact you find you have simply dropped out of the local academics’ ken.
A person who invests much effort in climbing up the caste hierarchy has a stake in upholding the caste-system. Barring a few exceptions, the NRI academics’ stake in upholding a global academic hierarchy is of a similar kind. But that is no reason for us to accept hierarchies as indicative of merit.
(The author is a former professor, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
Here this article is republished. It was originally published in The Telegraph.
this article is copy paste
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