Presidency
University Bicentennial Global Education Summit, ‘200 years ahead’, 17 January
2017 Lecture
Little
Languages, Big Futures
Probal
Dasgupta
Today
is the 17th of January. Exactly one year ago, Rohith Vemula committed suicide
on the campus of the University of Hyderabad, a campus with which I am still in
contact, as I worked there for seventeen critical years, from 1989 to 2006. My
son, who from 2012 to 2014 was a contemporary of his in the science wing of the university, knew Rohith
personally and was devastated when he took his life. Please permit me to
dedicate this talk to Rohith’s memory, and to the concerns of Dalits, Adivasis
and other Bahujans in our society, focusing on education.
As Gayatridi noted yesterday, success in higher
education depends on transforming the dismal scene of rural Indian schooling
(especially dismal in Bahujan-majority regions) into an area of new hope, and
this is an extremely steep mountain to climb. Unless many participants in our
processes of higher education devote some of their theoretical attention and
practical energy to the task of transforming school education, the obstacle
will remain intractable, and we need to understand, on the anniversary of
Rohith’s death, that for us to bow before this intractability is unacceptable
behaviour. Before I start reading my paper, permit me to present one piece of
concrete evidence that the perpetuation of social injustice makes the content
of higher education, as it now stands, in its socially neutral garb,
unteachable in contemporary India.
In the year 1990, the year that the
Mandal debate split Indian society into two, I was teaching an M.Phil. course
in linguistics at the University of Hyderabad. One student in that batch was a
particularly stellar Dalit student of mine, Rekha Abel. I had been teaching her
since the mid-eighties, in Pune, and she moved to Hyderabad to do research with
me. She was a gold medallist and I had always assumed that she was a living
embodiment of the fact that caste didn’t matter, that formal linguistics was
socially neutral and had to be taught uniformly to all social categories. But I
sat up and paid attention when I read Rekha’s answer script. She turned a
routine question about speech acts like promising and threatening into an
opportunity to place social injustice on the intellectual agenda of
linguistics. In her answer, Rekha spoke of ‘those who are in a position to
carry out their promises or threats’ and distinguished them from ‘those who are
at the receiving end of whatever they choose to promise or to threaten’. I had
always thought that speech acts were neutral and symmetric. After reading
Rekha’s comments I realized that I would have to think again. One of the
overwhelming social facts, writ large, so large on the map that I had failed to
notice it as I belong to the privileged echelons, is the actual asymmetry
between those endowed with the power to promise or to threaten and those who
have to suffer the consequences of the way these dominant individuals choose to
use their power.
I realize that some of my colleagues
who believe in classical class analysis and who think it is a mistake to take
caste seriously in socio-political theory and strategy are going to retort that
a similar observation could just as easily have come from a class-conscious
member of a lower social class. Indeed, nothing in Rekha’s text directly
referred to caste per se. However, it is of some empirical importance that
students from lower classes have in my experience never come up with such
insights – and I have taught students from socio-economically deprived strata
for many years; there was no reason why my Greek students in Australia, for
instance, should not have produced such insights in their conversations with me
in 1979. My point is that Rekha did, and that this owes a great deal to her
self-articulation specifically as a Dalit student. Furthermore, while doing her
Ph.D., a few years after that M.Phil. answer script of hers, it was she who
spotted David Bleich’s 1988 book in the library. After one has read Bleich’s
book, there is no turning back: one’s older default ‘neutral’ take on the study
of language, literature, discourse and education irreversibly gives way to an
approach that takes social injustice on board and insistently asks, at every
step, what counts as most important from the standpoint of the most severely
disadvantaged participants in the processes one is trying to conceptualize and
implement.
My paper, which I am about to start
reading, articulates this focus on social justice goals in the slightly ironic
style that has been mandatory for some time in certain demographically indexed
regions of the humanities. This choice of style is meant to be in keeping with
the festive mood in which we are quite naturally conducting most of these
sessions, and I do wish to take part in the celebrations. I too was part of the
Presidency College community from 1970 to 73, albeit as a student of Sanskrit
College who would cross the street for my Bangla and my English, whereas my
immediate junior Arindam Chakrabarti, for instance, used to cross the street in
other direction for his Sanskrit, which is how he ran into me when he joined
our ranks in 1971. That was a time when I did not realize the importance of
taking the difficulties of Dalits and Adivasis on board, not to speak of
Bahujans: we were all concentrating on questions framed in socialist terms. But
some of us were Naxalites and thus did have a take on certain Adivasis. It is
fitting, then, that my paper today focuses specifically on Adivasi languages,
if only as a metonym for the larger question of the future of our languages, of
all our languages in this part of the world. I am going to look at some
linguistic and cultural presuppositions of educational systems. If our
languages wither and perish, then our education – higher, lower or otherwise –
will die a painful and protracted death. This important fact has not yet
engaged the attention of those who have the power to promise an
abundance of resources, who therefore also have the power to threaten to
dismantle the few resources that we have precariously put in place, and who don’t
know which of their powers they should use and why.
Preamble
You begin with a problem that is hiding in
plain sight, pretending to be a solution. This solution is a two-part package.
Part one is a translation programme. It involves mega-translating texts of
literature or orature from neglected ‘minority’ languages into ‘major’
languages like Kannada or English. The point of this programme is to reverse
the pattern of neglect that has culturally disenfranchised members of those
minorities. Part two of the package is a celebration programme. It involves
turning such translated texts into an object of business as usual in literary studies,
the business of rigorous celebration usually called criticism. Since the core
of the project involves mega-scale textual translation from mini-languages,
you propose to call this package the mega-mini programme.
Staging as you are a circumspect form of
resistance, you carefully avoid directly confronting the mega-mini programme.
You duly express agreement with other stakeholders that, as far as it goes,
mega-mini is truly wonderful. Its implementers are unsung heroes whose praises
you happily agree to sing. At the same time, you try to help these stakeholders
to outgrow the belief that this assimilationist mega-mini package can reverse
marginalization. The package has in fact been giving the old marginalization
dangerously benign-looking new clothes to wear.
You need to be gentle with your
interlocutors, for otherwise you will be perceived as shrill and fail to make
headway. But you need to nurture uncompromising ideas in your own thinking. If
you don’t, you leave yourself at the mercy of your improvised tactics, buffeted
by the winds of this or that random conversation. Your best bet is to develop
your core proposals first, and only later to ask how best to convince a
particular audience, with the parameters of that audience in mind.
The
core proposals
When you ask what kind of future our
languages face, it is natural to think about the fact that many languages and
their associated literary and cultural traditions are dying out. This
phenomenon prompts many of us to focus our attention on ‘little’ languages.
Suppose you make this choice, either because you speak such a language or
because your pursuit of justice has turned you into an advocate for some
particular language of this kind. From that viewpoint, you soon realize that the
dangers of assimilationism loom especially large if ‘your little tradition’ –
the one that you belong to or have become an advocate for – is locked into an exclusive
dyadic relation with one and only one adjacent major language such as Kannada,
Bangla, Odia, Hindi or Marathi. Through and around such a major language, of
course, the impact of English makes itself felt, slightly complicating the
geometry of the assimilationist pressure; but virtually no indigenous people of
India ever faces English directly; at least one major Indian language, often
several languages, come into play and mediate their geometry with English.
To leave the toxic relationship with this
mediating middle-sized language undisturbed is to accept the status quo.
Your first core proposal is to unsettle
the intercultural geometry. Introduce a wild card. Find suitable partner
communities to hook your indigenous people up with. Push the possibility, say,
of the Khasi community forging a cultural-political triadic bond with the Zulus
in South Africa and with the Navajo nation in the United States. Such a
long-distance partnership will reconfigure the local games that the Navajo,
Khasi and Zulu peoples have been forced to play with their geographical neighbours.
You insist on the three-way partnership model because only this version of the
idea features both the horizontal south-south element – as in Khasis making
friends with Zulus – and the vertical dynamics between the Navajo nation and
its white American neighbours.
Of course you will face questions. Why
this long-distance model? Surely natural coalitions must be with immediate
neighbours? But neighbours have a history of conflict. Distance helps. There is
no history of Khasi-Zulu conflicts, or of Zulu-Navajo antagonisms.
What can this have to do with the business
of language and literature studies? The exact answer will depend on the
distance your implementation manages to traverse. Perhaps all you can do is
juxtapose English translations from Zulu, from Khasi, from Navajo, enabling
elite members of the three communities to at least savour each other’s
culturally significant stories and chants in English. If you get that far, that
will certainly be an improvement on the status quo, and a certain genre of discursive
and literary reflection will take off. However, suppose you are able to go
beyond that minimum and pull off a few token translations from one indigenous
language into another. If, through these texts, some non-elite readers in each
community are able to gain direct cultural exposure to people they are
beginning to view as long-distance soul-mates, then a much bigger breakthrough
becomes possible, both in the academic study of language and literature and in
cultural politics.
How do you stop such a project from
lapsing into personality-driven, careeristic opportunism for a few? You offer a
minimalist conceptualization that takes a few broad-brush strokes as your point
of departure. Culture hero narratives and sacred grove narratives – with some
mutatis mutandis about the groves – are crucial to every indigenous culture.
Disseminating their iconization is not a task that members of majority cultures
have proved good at. Surely inter-indigenous cultural exchange will help celebrate
the iconization of specific places and persons as a generalizable practice.
Inter-community exchange has the advantage of freeing the primary stakeholders
from the condescending gaze of tyrannical majority populations.
You find yourself unable, however, to
believe fully in such a conceptualization. You are worried that such a starting
point runs the risk of romanticizing the ‘primitive’, of reinforcing
asymmetries, of freezing irrationality perceptions at their current level.
These worries of yours, you will notice, are based on the western mainstream’s
social evolutionism. Once you begin to take seriously the intrinsic value of
the natural surround that frames human culture – once you take on board the
perennial beliefs in the capacity of rivers to renew human purity, for instance
– those misconceived worries recede. The question that remains is how to
integrate your project for the indigenous peoples with your project in
translation studies, to which you then turn. You cannot make core proposals in the
theory of language or of literature if you have nothing to offer in translation
studies.
Your bicontextual enterprise
in translation studies, which you have been proposing and reproposing for
decades, pits the perennial logic of the classical hieratic context
– which stresses the intrinsic value of classics worthy of translation and
dissemination – against the logic of the foundationist context.
This modern logic enjoins all knowledge workers to pool their resources and
build the universal foundation for the brave new city. The point is not to
connect knowledge texts to each other by translation. There are no permanently
valuable originals or renderings. Every set of texts and translations accepted
as provisionally valid is an imperfect, continually revisable version of the
brave new city’s intellectual foundation. The ‘real’ foundation keeps
retreating into the future as one revises these successive drafts.
The hieratic and foundationist logics pull
translation in contradictory directions. The hieratic emphasis on numinous
source languages associated with religion and the arts generates one type of
asymmetry. The foundationist telos of a perfectly enlightened future –
universal in principle, led of course by upper-class Caucasian hetero-normative
males in practice – stresses science, mathematics and the species of business that
has come to be called ‘development’; this emphasis gives rise to a different
set of asymmetries. The two sets of asymmetries do not cancel out as a matter
of course if both the logics are allowed free play; these are not equal and
opposite forces in physics; desired outcomes have to be brought about by
appropriate strategic preparation. If one wants foundationist forces to
undermine hieratic asymmetries, and vice versa, one will have to astutely play
them off against each other – a point you have been making for quite some time
now, whenever you repeat this litany about the interplay of the hieratic logic
with the foundationist logic in our intercultural configuration.
How exactly does this package that you
have been proposing in translation studies align with your suggestion that
inter-indigenous partnerships of the Khasi-Zulu-Navajo type should redirect
some of the translation traffic?
Obviously, you are hitching a ride on the
international community’s development bus – your strategy is to tweak their
foundationist logic in a hieratic direction. You are appealing, of course, to the
standard arguments in favour of preserving local knowledge encoded in
indigenous languages (urgently but not exclusively the ones that are
endangered). You are also making the additional point that your
inter-indigenous partnership proposal, if implemented, will increase the number
and diversity of the stakeholders investing in each particular body of
indigenous knowledge, and will thus reinforce the survival chances of
indigenous knowledge in general. On this basis, you are pushing an apparatus of
modern rationality into a decision to invest in hieratic translation
priorities. Whether you can pull this off will depend on your public relations
skills. But before you face your actual interlocutors and test these skills,
you have to unpack the logic of your package with full clarity in the privacy
of your own thinking, as utopian as you need it to be.
Anchoring
the Proposals
You
know from experience that, having produced translations, you seldom find
readers who enthusiastically read the texts or who, if they do read them,
actually grow as a result of this exposure. You are aware that all that has
been said so far can be dismissed as a couple of project ideas designed to prop
up some protégé’s career. If you want people to find an authentic, politically
sustainable enterprise here, you need to associate these ideas with a richer
background programme.
Such a programme, as you see it,
starts out by construing the cultural environment of each community – not just
each indigenous community, but more generally – in terms of intrinsic values. If
a grove is sacred for this Bhil community, you read their narratives in order
to learn that it is appropriate to be in awe of the fact that they are in awe
of the grove. Once you genuinely learn that this attitude is appropriate, you
begin to vicariously regard it as sacred as well, even if your non-membership
of the relevant community prevents you from taking direct part in worship. When
you speak to alienated or former members of the Bhil community, who have been
led by a deracinating education to dissociate themselves from the perception
that the grove is sacred, you do not deride their derision, but you are able to
inform them why you, even without being a Bhil of any sort, take the sacredness
of sacred groves or the heroic iconicity of culture heroes seriously. The basic
principle is that, when you see serious respect, you respect it, and through
those devotees you learn to construe sacred sites as sacred, heroic figures as
heroic.
How does this enterprise not collapse into
an acceptance of all fundamentalisms? And what about contested territories,
which different communities construe in contradictory ways?
Of course you cannot put answers, should
not even try to thrust your answers, into every fellow resister’s mouth, but
you do need to point out that some moderately satisfying answers are already
available, and to encourage everybody to tweak these in their favourite
directions. One stops endorsing fundamentalisms when one insists that the
dialogue is permanent and that it is not ruled by any referees, any umpires,
any adjudicators. Of course fundamentalisms have to be addressed; but
fundamentalists who agree, however grudgingly, to participate in a process of
dialogue are unlikely to be able to retain their intransigence. The current
fierceness is a response to the west having grabbed an orchestra conductor’s
role and having managed to propagate the belief that the west is an acceptable
referee. It isn’t, not because there is some other more acceptable referee, but
because the orchestra is not a viable dialogical format. We need to switch over
to the gamelan format, where one instrument segues into another without any
conductor telling each player what to do.
In a gamelan format, with no single
archilanguage, one faces the challenge of a multisemiotic interplay, whose
stakeholders keep trying to find points of least dissonance and create styles
of mutuality. If your public needs a fully explicit unpacking of this
visualization to understand more clearly what all this is about, you point them
to the work on science and language by Sundar Sarukkai that you are borrowing
the multisemiotic format from. If even this does not suffice, try appealing to
the way the young, or at least young men and women who appear on Page Three,
have been moving away from the prestige of massive monolingual identities in
any case. This is where the intersection of the ‘future of our languages’ theme
with translation studies begins to make sense at last, as you are about to see.
Why
Permanent Bicontextuality Matters
Playing the hieratic and
foundationist logics against each other in the theory and practice of
translation is all very well as a strategy. However, when you offer bicontextuality
with a straight face in the context of projections for the future, the public
will inquire whether you are trying to turn the bicontextual strategy into an
actual balancing act that you would like all stakeholders to take seriously on
a permanent basis. They will be surprised to hear that you are indeed making
such a proposal, which you therefore have to unpack.
The hieratic logic focuses on the
intrinsic cultural value of the spaces and events that a community or
subcommunity specially cherishes and would like others to respect. The
foundationist logic looks to a shared, intercommunal future that will be built
together, on shared scientific and moral foundations, keeping panhuman goals in
mind (goals that must be compatible also with the interest of other flora and
fauna and the long-term sustainability of this planet as a living space). To be
bicontextual does not mean that we put in place some third, simultaneously
epistemic and axiological scripture that everybody is required to jointly
sanctify because some prophet or prophets have propounded it. What you are
proposing is that we take seriously both principled pan-human concerns and the
situated concerns visible at particular community-to-community interfaces. It
is at those encounters – staged by what is sometimes called ‘cultural’
translation, and is perhaps better seen as the cultural dimension of all
translation – that it becomes important for each community to persuade other
communities to cherish everybody’s sanctities as sacred.
Now that communities are clearly
known to harbour heterogeneities and internal tensions, now that it is clear
that the fragments of communities are bound to make common cause across
community boundaries on the basis of horizontal affiliations like ‘women’ or
‘queers’ or ‘vegan’, you are obviously not about to allow the orthodox high
priests who claim ownership of any community to carve their sanctity lists in
stone. For certain specific purposes where historical practices of longue durée
make a practical difference – like establishing the antiquity of the medical
use of some particular herb, for instance, and thus claiming ownership of that
piece of knowledge and that herb by some indigenous community – you find
yourself taking seriously the community per se, defined in terms of some
ethnonym and setting aside the internal rifts that any community is bound to
harbour. The point is not that the literary gaze or the linguistic gaze can
tranquilize or ignore all internal disputes within each community. On the
contrary, literature frequently thematizes such conflicts. The point is that,
when survival is at stake, we have to cut a great deal of red tape, old and
new. And translators quickly learn which kind of tape is worth cutting in which
context.
Why bicontextuality, then, rather
than deka- or even hectocontextuality? Well, we are obsessed with the
knowledge-feeling binary, which looms large over the hundreds of passions that
move us. As we improve our multisemiotic translation skills, it is permanently
bicontextual thinking that is going to keep us balanced, as we lurch into our
futures, partly together, partly at the end of our tether, as messily as in any
other human journey.
References
Bleich,
David. 1988. The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social
Relations. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Sarukkai,
Sundar. 2002. Translating the world: science and language. New York:
University Press of America.
Abstract
The
power-focused profiling of communities and their assets, including their
linguistic resources, compares all communities with the powerful, especially
colonizers, and asks how heavy a particular community’s historical archive is.
We have been trained to cheer for heavy archives; to feel compassion for
lightweight archives; and to make projections for the future on the basis of
these habits.
This method of viewing is
collapsing, however, and will soon be obsolete. A community with a little tradition
attached to it can easily leverage this transformation in such a way as to come
out with a wonderfully lithe, supple, agile self-image, leaving the lumbering,
deadwood-laden, slow-moving heavies behind in the new race that is now taking
off.
My point is that there is in fact
no English archive, or French archive, or German archive. The national
archiving systems in those powerful languages are giving way to a yet to be
worked out new regime of preservation and circulation that takes into account
the impossibility of any possessing institutions like libraries actually owning
unique archives of their own and deciding how much to lend these resources to
others. In other words, it is becoming clear that there are no national
histories, and that only historiographies with a far wider and deeper mode of
coverage have any hope of being taken seriously in a future that will find
nation-states quaint and meaningless. While the institutions and informalities
that root for post-national realities are not yet in place, the Eurozone and
other supra-national arrangements have already been eroding the authority of
the nation-state from without, while the fragments of the classical nation have
been doing so from within.
Thanks to these processes we all
begin to see that the heavy archive that the nation-state used to own with
pride is going to be associated, not with a particularizable nation-state, but
much more fluidly, with a universal history for which alone it makes sense to
be weighty and deep the way the ocean is weighty and deep. The actual archive
of a particular community is supposed to be light, portable, and easily
surveyable. Even if someone belongs to a huge community, e.g. the one known as
‘American’, it will soon stop making sense to identify oneself as an American
and take pride in a general American literary archive. Individuals will root
for far more textured identities based on the tapestry of their physical or
cultural ancestors, leaving nobody willing to claim the ‘American’ identity, a
logic that easily extends to the French or English or Russian identity as this
process sweeps the larger communities.
Thus, the current belief that
orality or a lightweight archive is a disadvantage and that small communities
have some catching up to do is at odds with the actual logic of the
post-national imaginary, and the actual content of the pride of younger
scholars, who long ago stopped emulating the classical book-memorizing
scholars, the type that used to show off how they knew hundreds of books by
heart. The young are proud of the way they know how to shed that kind of burden
from their brains and how to direct their agility in the fast moving new
directions in which it makes sense to use an individual brain. And the
directions in which this process is moving uncannily resemble the kinds of
agility that used to be required in so-called primitive social life. Extremes
meet. To think of a little tradition as deserving compassion and assistance is
to miss the point of our present, and to misproject the future of our
languages.
These considerations – and other
thoughts pertaining to do with social justice not just for indigenous peoples
with well-defined separate languages like Khasi, Zulu or Navajo, but also for
dalits and other bahujans marginalized in hierarchy-laden India – make it
appropriate to try to put in place innovative coalitions of little communities,
and to associate this enterprise with relevant initiatives in translation studies.
