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  • The Humanities in South Asia Today
  • Sheldon Pollock (bio)

In his wide-ranging and ambitious essay, Sundar Sarukkai, a philosopher of science, addresses a range of issues impinging on the fate of the humanities in India, including the theoretical dominance of the West, the related problem of English as the default language of scholarship, and the very notion of research. Less familiar is the tension he perceives between the forms of the practice of the humanities in the public domain—among writers, musicians, artists, religious thinkers—which are relatively vital, and the forms of academic study of the humanities in universities, which are relatively moribund. Similar to this is the tension between traditional (Indian) humanistic practices and contemporary (Western) academic practices. In fact, the tensions between the two sets are such that, according to Sarukkai, "the nature of universities and the nature of the disciplines are themselves under silent interrogation."

Were the universities themselves to respond to this predicament with strong education the tensions might be addressed, to the benefit of all concerned. But this is far from being the case. Intensifying these tensions is the commitment on the part of the state to science and technology, and the implicit belief that where science and technology could help rid India of the superstition and social inequality that ensure its backwardness, it is precisely the objects of study in the humanities—in literature, philosophy, religion—that supposedly provided the conceptual materials for superstition and its evils to begin with. That a way of making sense of the past other than through celebrating and reproducing it is not only possible but crucial has been remarkably slow to be conceptualized and incorporated into critical humanities education. What exactly does such an education consist in? For Sarukkai it has to do with learning "to use the humanities without being caught up in debates on how useful they are."

Even more worrisome than the problem of humanities studies in India—vast numbers of students learning precious little—is the situation in Pakistan. If the long-term conceptual and social tensions around the humanities are powerful in India, the situation in Pakistan, as described in Syed Nomanul Haq's essay, is shocking. The humanities—and the definition of the category seems especially conflicted in Pakistan, including at times clinical psychology and "business studies" (a problem of asymmetrical traditions of knowledge and of translation found elsewhere, as for example in Egypt)—seem to have virtually no institutional status whatever.

Even more worrisome however is the argument in Nomanul Haq's essay that the elimination of the humanities may not be so to speak a historical accident but instead a policy decision on the part of the state. Whatever the intellectual problems of these fields of study—challenges of theory and method, for [End Page 149] example, especially in a postcolonial society—they pale in the face of the political problems the humanities are confronted with. For these are the fields that produce not just knowledge in general, but knowledge we live by. They thus become the site of threat for any state power that wants to control the way we are to live.

And that includes most of the states in the world. [End Page 150]

Sheldon Pollock

Sheldon Pollock is a professor of South Asian studies at Columbia University and a member of the editorial collective of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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