Opinion Angavastram in DU: The real challenge for a worthy university graduate

The change from the cloak to the angavastram is not the point here. How the purpose of education is imagined, and what direction scholarship is given by those in a position to set the limits of what is to be sought — that is the real issue. To have power is to be able to shape things. And that power can be exercised to determine a range of social and cultural imperatives. The university system and its imperatives do not parse well with the idea of setting limits. The word “viswavidyalaya” itself clearly envisions knowledge seeking as a global endeavour. This is obvious, is it not? From vaccines to vehicles, from anthropological theories to architecture, from literary theory to linguistics, ideas travel across nations and boundaries and enrich each other, working in tandem (or even through attrition) to produce richer ideas. To retreat inward to resurrect an identity that is independent of history and influence is impossible within the domain of knowledge seeking, and indeed can be counterproductive.

What is productive, academically speaking, is to be critical and questioning. The university space must always welcome resistance to, and questioning of, any singular way of thinking. This ought to be the norm within the classroom. Totalitarian and bigoted authorities have often not allowed this. In Soviet Russia, only Pavlovian psychiatry was permitted during communist rule (because it foregrounded social conditioning over individual psychosis, etc). In many American states, teaching evolution has been controversial; it is also proscribed in a progressive Muslim nation like Turkey. The university space must never be co-opted as experimental ground for the cultural and political reorientation of the state. To restrict its freedom is to restrict the possibilities that remain unexplored in the cultural, political, social, economic and scientific landscapes of a nation’s life.

Two examples will help establish the beauty inherent in the journey ideas can undertake. Thiruvalluvar was a legendary Tamil poet who lived sometime between the fourth and first century BCE. His work, Thirukkural, is an unparalleled treatise on ethics, communicated in verse.

Latin was the first European language into which Thirukkural was translated. Constanzo Beschi, a Jesuit missionary, translated the work to Latin in 1730. Beschi himself was a Tamil scholar and poet, known as Viramamunivar. Tolstoy is said to have read a German translation of the work. Leo Tolstoy’s famous “A Letter to a Hindoo” (1908), addressed to the erudite Tarak Nath Das, a Bengal revolutionary, in seeking to extol him for eschewing violence as a method to gain freedom, foregrounded Thiruvalluvar’s ideas on ahimsa (as also Vivekananda’s thoughts). Gandhi read the letter, and published it in Free Hindustan with Tolstoy’s permission. Gandhi’s subsequent correspondence with Tolstoy cemented the latter’s influence on the Mahatma. Ahimsa, therefore, travelled from the south of India to Europe and came back via Gandhi to shape our struggle for freedom — and then, travelled back to South Africa and settled into the nurturing hands of Nelson Mandela.

On the other hand, and across the seas, civil disobedience as a moral-cum-political concept was developed by Henry David Thoreau. He was a 19th-century political dissident and thinker in the US who was part of a movement called transcendentalism — which was heavily influenced by ancient Indian wisdom. His ideas of civil disobedience were developed from Hindu scripture. Gandhi read Walden Pond (wherein Thoreau developed his ideas, writing while living in exile as an ascetic) and subsequently acknowledged his debt to Thoreau for introducing him to the idea of satyagraha. We all know how Martin Luther King Jr used Gandhi’s ideas of ahimsa and satyagraha to shape the civil rights’ movement in the US.

U R Ananthamurthy, the redoubtable littérateur, once bemoaned the absence of “critical insiders” in India. To live within tradition and be critical of it is to be like Gandhi, he averred. Today, those who are critical of traditions are often seen to exist on the “outside”, and those who are seen to be “inside” often refuse to be critical. The challenge is to not only wear the angavastram with pride, but to never cease to question, and be critical of, even the traditions embodied in that garment, should they need to be improved. That ought to be the path of a worthy university graduate.

The writer is Associate Professor, Ramjas college, University of Delhi