Part I of this article can be read here.
Ethics of Receptivity:
A
friend of my friend Vikrant says there is a general condition that
prevails over young people today. He calls it “dead eyes”. I interpret
this in two ways: the first one is simple, I see it as a conscious
ignorance out of apathy; the other is slightly complicated, it is
a view so deeply and stubbornly biased as to render one effectively
blind. For me, both these ways of seeing are the result of dead eyes.
It
is the people with open eyes that I admire and am inspired by. But I
agree with that friend of a friend of mine - it certainly is a general
condition to have dead eyes. I feel it too and though it shames me
everytime to realize how dead-eyed I've been about something, I feel
that “eye-opening” experiences are humbling. I really think that
the attitude proper to learning is one of humility and open-ness. Learning and engagement are better words than knowledge and action.
I
used the term dead-eyes simply for its poetic appeal. I definitely do
not mean to suggest that seeing is the only mode of receptivity. We know that various schools of thought have exposed
the violence of the gaze, where the legitimate power to represent is
attributed to the “knowledgeable” gaze. I say various because I'm
not only referring to Foucault's work here, but also the critique of
the participant-observer position that emerged in ethnography, and many other
post-colonial critiques. There is definitely a deep bias when it
comes to how we define authority in knowledge. There is a serious
tendency to undervalue situated knowledge. I argued earlier for
recognizing emergence in social phenomena at different levels. Shutting any sense to information from a particular level is surely
disingenuous. Also, it is not simply a matter of different levels, we
must respect the differences of particular spaces or contexts.
Now,
in some sense talking like a pragmatist, I would say this whole
dispute over the relative importance of theory and practice is a
pseudo-problem. Practice cannot be divorced from theory and there is
no final theory that can resist challenges from experience. This
pseudo-problem distracts from the dire need for a simultaneous
reconstruction of both learning and engagement.
Intellectual
Parachuting:
Another
friend (Abhinav Tyagi), this time my own, whom I met during my
internship in Palamau, Jharkhand coined this witty term “intellectual
parachuting”. This is the phenomenon wherein an intellectual with
the best intentions and much knowledge is figuratively air-dropped
into the field, only to find his intentions and knowledge fit
awkwardly with the reality of the field. Of course, this friend of mine graduated from TISS and he's telling me, another grad student
presently in TISS! So certainly we ourselves could be called
intellectual parachuters. I think this idea is somewhat justifiable
but it's not an end-point. It should facilitate the recognition of
one's awkwardness vis-a-vis the field of engagement, that is
essential. Although the power relations between the “learned” and
the “unlearned” cannot be undone by simply recognizing them, it
can be a starting-point from where we can begin addressing the
problems.
The
NGO, where I and two others were interning, had a sizeable work-force
consisting of locals (mostly male members of local tribes) and a
couple of ex-students of TISS. We were participating in the Supreme
Court Commissioner's Office's Pilot Project to "enable government
to deliver to the poorest". 3 districts in India had
been selected for the pilot, one of them being Palamau. The project was
conceptualized by the aforementioned Office. Partner NGOs in each of
the districts are funded by Action Aid. However, the project is
intended to be an experiment in participatory development. The main
objective is to enable a target group selected for being the
“worst-off” in the district to conduct PRAs (participatory rural
appraisal) and to formulate a comprehensive plan for their
tola(neighbourhood).
The larger objective was to get Panchayati Raj institutions
functioning and to enable people to participate in them freely.
I
shan't use this space to elaborate on further details of the project,
but I wish to put forth certain aspects of the project that I found
striking. It must be mentioned that the NGO we were working with is
an activist organization which is in the early stages of transforming
into a more professional NGO-like setup. This explains their
employing TISS graduates for one, but also has telling effects on the
local “cadre”. This cadre isn't paid much and work in dangerous
parts, remote villages deep in the forest in the “Naxal belt”.
Some of them have been with the NGO for a long time and have led
activist lives. Now with a laptop in tow and many spread-sheets to be
drafted, they find themselves under-motivated and alienated. They're all immensely confident of their knowledge of
the areas assigned to them, most of them have also mastered several
computer skills. They've all worked to establish strong networks in
those areas so that their work there can be carried out smoothly.
Despite this they are the least heard voice in the pilot
project.
When
a decisive meeting regarding the project took place it was between
the state, the NGO and the funding agency. The poorest did not
actually get a chance to say whether the government had infact
reached out to them.
This
NGO is headed by a man I came to greatly admire. He was extremely
perceptive and insightful, he could hold his ground in the face of
the biggest local goons and also the supreme court commissioner. He
was also rather suspicious of us elite students. All in all, he was totally committed
to working for the oppressed and was steadfast in his conviction that
what matters to him most are their voices. Yet, I would be lying if I said that I was wholeheartedly inspired. He's only one man
in a large organization (that is getting linked into a large,
international industry), he heads over a team of alienated workers whom he is now able to
inspire only partially.
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| Photo: The NGO Office at Palamau |
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| Photo: Intellectual Parachuting? |
In Conclusion:
The
point I've been trying to drive at is that this model of theory being
handed down from the planners to the practitioners at the grassroot
level is prone to great distortions. We should rather strive for a
model where learning and engagement can proliferate at every level.
This is not a critique of the very idea of policy, but as I've
already mentioned there is certainly a lack of an ethics of
receptivity which can mute the virtues of apparently flexible
decentralized policies. In the dispute over the relative importance
of theory and practice, both the extreme positions are unwarrantably
self-gratifying. It is definitely true that today theory is
privileged in various respects and this needs to be deconstructed,
but the reconstruction cannot simply be a reversal of this structure.
It must rather be a recognition of the contiguities between theory
and practice, of the emergent nature of social phenomena across
levels, of the differences across contexts, and of the value of
situated knowledge.
Indivar is a second year student of the MA in Development Studies programme at TISS, Mumbai.
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