Opinion Sumana Roy writes: The Sonipat school of history – universities without context

The university where I teach is in Rajiv Gandhi Education City. On the way to its campus, from the shuttle, my colleagues and I see fields of mustard, yelling yellow. A few traces of an older way of living remain: The remainder of an archway in a house, cowsheds, the snoring of buffaloes. Once inside the premises, it is not only the architecture that changes. It’s the vegetation. They have grown elsewhere, been incubated in plant nurseries, and then ferried from there to become an integer of what would be called the “landscape”. Dislocated, they are metaphorically rootless. I mention the plants because they help me to understand the relation between history and its unavailability. The same species of plant is variously priced, depending on its age, which is measured in height. History here is not a function of time but of money. One can buy the oldest trees depending on the strength of one’s purse to create the illusion of an older residency. Pedigree and cultural capital, once available through incestuous familial and institutional lineage, have been replaced by the cunning of new capital — reputations are erected overnight, much like these buildings themselves. The immediate casualty to living in such an environment is the loss of context — we have to remind ourselves of where we are, of the postal code, for this architecture and its manicured habitat of plant life could be a capitalist globalised everywhere, Dubai airport or a nursing home, such is the awareness of being in an antiseptic setting.

The colonisation of Sonipat is not completely unlike European colonisation — except that it is almost impossible to find any trace of Sonipat’s history, or its mention in the Mahabharata, for instance, in daily living here. The purposive forgetfulness, a characteristic shared by Sonipat and other small towns where history seems to be a useless burden, where everything must be turned new, is oppressive. It messes up our sense of time and history and leads us to think of the world as a supermarket where everything can be bought and curated. Perhaps that explains why I feel disoriented by the sense of Sonipat having no “outside”.

Sonipat is only a metaphor for an ethic where everyone feels Adam-like, though it is not creation but curation that is being done — furniture can be bought, faculty can be accumulated, plants can be asked to grow up on steroids. What does this imply in art, in aesthetics, in politics, in emotional health? It implies the loss of the “Found” aesthetic from art and literary culture, which holds in it the idea of both continuity and divergence, and which is essential to our sense of history. Often, in creative writing classes, I encounter this lack of affiliation to history or literary ancestry, of those who have written or created before us — students feel that they can be writers without reading, as if they are the first writers writing.

Who can blame them when they hear of “Founders” and “Founding faculty” so often? This Sonipat school of history, a phrase I use, quite obviously, as shorthand, is being re-created and practised in other parts of India — by changing names of towns and neighbourhoods, by truncating syllabi, and by an unequivocal lubricating of both the phrase and the idea of a “New India”.

Sumana Roy, a poet and writer, is associate professor of Creative Writing, Ashoka University. Views are personal