Equal opportunity in higher education By Kalpana Kannabiran

August 17,2013, 08.51 AM  IST

There has been a rumbling in the belly of social science habitations in India in the past year; a deep unease which squirts to the surface, sludge-like, in casual conversations between co-travellers, as if there is a sudden malfunction in a vital safety valve in the academic research industry.  Having been soaked with this sludge more than a couple of times, I think the issue merits some serious and open reflection. 

Since last year, the ICSSR has rolled out a series of programmes that support research on social marginality and vulnerability, to be carried out by scholars belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.  There has been a systematic move to identify Dalit and adivasi/tribal scholars in every State, in State universities, research institutes and Central universities, and invite them to submit proposals, and even help them write proposals and conceptualise research projects.  

This has gone hand in hand with an increasing activity in screening proposals and making grants to scholars who do not belong to these categories, where, likewise, scholars across the range (very senior and very young and upcoming ones) are invited to think through projects that will lead to significant outcomes – theoretically and empirically.  There is all of a sudden a rush of activity in an institution otherwise known to be rather placid.  

The rumbling, however, is not about the increased activity and opportunity to scholars in the general category; that has been a birthright.  It is the former that draws ire.  I will cite two comments I was subjected to – one by a scholar affronted at criticism of his views by a reputed senior scholar who stated quite simply at a gathering, “I understand his position.  He has after all used caste as a vehicle of his personal mobility”.  The second comment by a senior academic was that the current fashion in the social sciences is the racialization of research.  These are otherwise enlightened scholars known for good work.  But that is the trouble, really.  

Inter-generational access within families and within castes not just to higher education but also to secure employment and unlimited research funding is not seen as resulting from social privilege, even when the numbers might be screaming this simple fact.  The critical lens remains a window to view the outside; it is not a mirror that details the marks of privilege on the self.  This naiveté in the comprehension of the far-reaching consequences of discrimination is pervasive in the academia in independent India, which has endowed privileged access in perpetuity to those belonging to groups not marked by the Constitution. 

The presumption of merit where caste/tribe is not stated, and the deafening silence on hegemonic social privilege that folds into academic privilege is left completely uninvestigated by the most critical of social science scholars and, by extension, by most institutions in their governance structures.  With all this opening of doors, it must be said the volume of research being carried out by SC/ST scholars is nowhere near overtaking the rest.  It is an opportunity being created by a public body in the hope that it might result in a redistribution of academic opportunities and capabilities, and the sludge of encrusted academic privilege is spewing over because the guarantee and monopoly of unmediated access is called into question.  

Let us look at just three aspects that open up by forcing the social science academy to be thoroughly representative.  First, as an example we may take the radical difference in standpoint, method, theory and politics that Professor MN Srinivas and Dr. BR Ambedkar represent.  We have in the contemporary history of social science in India few examples of such juxtapositions that are so essential to the development of a robust, critical academy.   How will we even begin to weave in diverse perspectives without diversity of social location of researchers?  It has been all too easily argued that the focus should be on the research subject and not on the researcher.    

Second, the lament on unjustifiable access to scholars belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.  All the scholars being given research grants have obtained their doctorates, like other scholars, from different universities in the country – so their academic qualifications are about as good or as bad as those of their colleagues.  
Several of them hold positions in universities and research institutions, and have, therefore, made it through selection procedures that have formal standards. (That these standards are periodically “tweaked” to ensure claims in perpetuity and entrench exclusions in perpetuity is a widely acknowledged fact in the open academy, in the making of which these scholars and their forbears did not play a part).  

So these are all people who satisfy the minimum requirements for holding a research grant.  Notably, a significant number of these scholars belong to the first generation in their families to access higher education, a precious fact we cannot afford to lose sight of. Third, the charge that incompetence is being fostered and the bar lowered in the academy.  It is true that the social sciences in India have come in for rather serious criticism in the past for being of very poor quality barring a few noteworthy exceptions.  Again, this is not the making of scholars from disadvantaged groups.  The trend towards nepotism and formation of academic cartels that have all but destroyed critical social science has it origin at the opposite end.  

This is one side to the story.  On the other side, the training that is available to Dalit/ adivasi/ tribal scholars, as well as the opportunities they can access are often dependent on the good offices of decision makers, making such exposure halting and sporadic, if at all.  Justifiably, there is animosity and suspicion from these quarters of any measures for “inclusion” that are not driven from within – disconcerting as this may be for those that are committed to shifting the terms of engagement. 

In irrationally dismissing the claims to scholarship and research grants by Dalit/ adivasi/ tribal scholars we are denying them the right to equal opportunity to participate in shaping the agendas of research and influencing its outcomes – which can be fully ensured only through affirmative action.  Hostility and indifference to this important dimension of academic engagement results in practices of segregation and prejudice that reproduce themselves in perpetuity in institutions of higher education and research, defeating any concerted articulation of social justice that must form the basis of a new common sense in India today and for the future. 

Kalpana Kannabiran 

(The author is Professor & Director, Council for Social Development,Rajendranagar, Hyderabad )  Source Link : The Hans India English News Paper Dated : 17/ August 2013 

Regulating cultures through food policing KALPANA KANNABIRAN

Organising a food festival can hardly be described as an act promoting hatred between students or communities.

The controversy over the Beef Festival recently organised on the campus of Osmania University in Hyderabad and the threat of professors being investigated by the police for “instigating” the organisers needs to be understood in the context of the larger politics of food and policing of food practices.

Across the country, different communities in different regions have widely varying food habits. It is also well known that food is closely linked to ideas of the sacred and the profane — and must vary along the scale of social diversity. The dense nesting of beliefs related to food extends from what vegetables may be consumed, whether meat may be consumed or not, which kinds of meats are food and which not, which kinds of meat are deemed vegetarian, and whether animal products come within the definition of meat or not.

IDEAS ABOUT EATING

Ideas about food also extend to who can eat together; within a family, who consumes which parts of an animal's body; what is the sequence in which people in a family eat, depending on gender, generation and social status; whether vice chancellors, judges and peons can partake of the same feast at the same time — or in earlier times or even today in more self declaredly caste ridden locales whether the “chuhri” can even dare to ask for fresh cooked food from “chowdhriji” — to recall Omprakash Valmiki's Joothan. And further in the caste context, who must not be sighted by a Brahmin man while he is in the vulnerable state of ingesting food — the shudra, a menstruating woman, pigs, dogs — all to be equally banished from sight.

Because food is surrounded by thick religiosity, there are days and times of the year and cycles in a month or in a reproductive lifetime when certain foods are proscribed and others mandatory. There are also rigid rules around the slaughter of animals and the preparation of meat for consumption — meat consumers do not eat all meats and do not eat the same meat at any place. The acceptance of meat as food is determined by whether the slaughter of the animal has been appropriate. And there are castes who were condemned to eat only carrion, not animals freshly slaughtered for consumption. There are communities in Andhra that share the hunt with the tiger — they believe the tiger leaves enough of its prey for its human kin — with a delicate balance in mutual food security in the deep forests. When religions proscribe the killing of animals, communities of believers who live in hostile and difficult mountainous terrain may drive a herd off a cliff and strip and dry the meat to meet a year's supply of meat. Even with people and communities that eat meat, there are places and times when meat may be eaten — and these vary widely as well. While a religious occasion for some may be marked by the abstinence from meat, for others it is marked by the sacrifice of an animal, its ceremonial preparation and its distribution in a prescribed manner among kin.

ATTITUDE

Ideas of purity, danger, potency, malevolence, uncleanness, tastes (not individual but social) and aesthetics thickly overlay our attitude to food. Faint hearted but brahmanical consumers of meat can swoon or get terribly sick at the sight of a butcher at work, or the sight of “unclean” parts of the animal body — entrails, head, hooves and so on. The same could be the case with lovers of fish when they see a beach overlaid with dry, pungent fish or the baskets of fish vendors on the train on their way to the market. Similarly too, it is not uncommon to find strong negative reactions to snake gourd, bitter gourd, and several other vegetables, not to speak of cooking oils from vegetarians. There are of course caste hierarchies in vegetables and oils too.

Its life giving and life sustaining quality also makes food the medium through which faith is expressed, through sharing on particular auspicious, festive occasions. Whom food is shared with and how is determined by status and social location ranging from “poor feeding” to mutual exchanges of festive food. There is then the renunciation of certain foods as acts of faith (temporarily or permanently) or as an acknowledgement of loss and mourning. It is not uncommon to hear of people giving up their favourite food on the death of a loved one. And of course giving up food is a way of renouncing life itself.

CHANGE IN HABITS

There are also histories of food habits that show that they change over time: the beef eating Vedic brahmin is a well known example.

Among the meats that are consumed in India are chicken, goat, fish and other aquatic creatures, frog, dog, pork, monkey, beef, buffalo, a variety of insects, field rats, deer, a range of birds, some reptiles and many, many more. Across this entire range of food, there are some we might love and relish, and others we might recoil at the mention of. What we relish and what we find unthinkable depends on religion, caste, tribe, and social location, after which individual taste plays a role. The diversity in food habits is part of the plurality of cultures and the right to consume, accept and share food, privately and in festivity, is part of cultural expression.

To the extent that culture is a matter of politics, food becomes the mobilising point for politics. The ubiquitous blessed food that believers partake in at places of worship now gets distributed in street-corners to believers and non-believers alike in every neighbourhood. This is part of an aggressive proclamation of religiosity demanding acceptance as an act of faith from all — often spreading tension that has the police in full force out on the streets for days.

We have sizeable communities in India who eat beef and pork — and these are the two meats on the Indian subcontinent that are used to stoke collective emotions in ways that present polarised stereotypes. Yet we know that the realities of beef and pork consumption defy these stereotypes. There is, however, a distinction between the two: beef is traditionally consumed not just by non-Hindus but by subaltern castes as well, a reality that is denied by the dominant castes.

In this context, if there is a hegemonic cultural formation across or within a religious group that proscribes or stigmatises the consumption of certain kinds of foods, a central part of resistance and of cultural assertion is to share that food publicly. Acquiescing to one proscription will pave the way for another, and the intolerance to diversity in food habits and through food to plural cultures will spiral upwards.

The choice of whether or not to partake of the feast is one an individual makes. In the recent beef festival organised on the campus of Osmania University, there were no reports of any coercion or force-feeding of beef to unwilling people. The people who were there went because they wanted to be there and were people for whom beef was not taboo. The argument on the need to take action against spreading hatred can scarcely be sustained. Even more irrelevant is the suggestion that professors were instigating students — it was a gathering of consenting, free thinking adults.

The organising of a food festival is not a matter for courts to interfere with or order an investigation into. There are more pressing matters related to life and liberty that wait endlessly to get a hearing.

(The author is Professor and Director, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad. Email: kalpana.kannabiran@gmail.com)

Keywords: Beef festival, food policing, Osmania University incident, beef eating

The Hindu News Paper Dated : 02/05/2012