3 fables & a moral

Education is a social drama that expresses many of the tensions in our society. Unfortunately, it polarises many of these battles into either-or situations without realising that many of these oppositions are invitations for negotiation. The system turns the battles between excellence-relevance, mobility-justice, growth-diversity, centralisation-decentralisation

into do or die battles where diversity gets destroyed. Polarisation is hardly the way of syncretic cultures that combine and mix ideas in creative ways.
The minister for education reveals the illiteracy of such linear thinking. His ministry has enforced the ruling that a BEd degree is essential for teachers. Virtually all those who lack this qualification are being forced to acquire one or drop out of teaching.
I admit standards are important. They help assure basic minimum quality but a standardisation that becomes a fetish destroys diversity, threatens alternatives, fetters the imagination. Some of the best experiments in education have been conducted by alternative schools and social movements, by creative people who had no claim to a BEd degree. These experiments in education have ranged across the social spectrum. The presence of experimental schools for the rich and poor conveys a plurality of perspectives. A stupid standardisation order will strangle this innovation, destroy the eccentricity of these movements. Our bureaucrats, drunk on the magic of growth and numbers, may not even recognise the tragedy they have created. But this is a tragedy that governance and development are creating repeatedly. Development that eliminates diversity is lethal. I want to generalise this point by considering three conversations.
The first story is about Ela Bhatt, a remarkable activist, who founded Self Employed Women’s Association (Sewa), the world’s largest trade union for women. It has strength of 1.2 million people. Ms Bhatt also works for the Council of Elders, a peace group with Carter, Bishop Tutu and Mary Robinson as members.
For Ms Bhatt, a critique of development demands a theory of peace. She argued that the current notion of peace is based on dichotomies that make no sense, where the whole is less than the sum of the parts. A peace of nation states is a peace hatched by men. Recurrent peace is a policeman’s model of security and stability. It is a policing operation where you police not just dissent but the categories at the centre of the world.
A housewife thinks differently. A poor housewife cooks, cleans and lives on waste work with recipes, not formulas. It is a pragmatic act of living. Her collective models of coping present a critique of development. To break development, you have to de-economise economics, think of the market in a different way, give to subsistence a dignity that economics is indifferent to. A rag-picking woman moving across the city collecting waste and fuel is an economic life world that development does not understand.
Ms Bhatt added that our economists are sweet, good boys but their manners, their mathematics and their models are an insult to the world of the housewife.
My next fable is around my encounters with C.V. Seshadri, one of India’s great chemists and engineers. He asked me one day to think of the forest. Why is it that when we apply modern science, modern economics, the tribal loses to the paper industry? Think of the notions of time that are lost in the decision. Once a forest is considered as that many logs of wood, that many tonnes of timber, the forest and the tribal and the worlds they embody disappear.
For Mr Seshadri, to break development, you have to break the epistemologies of development, the notions of efficiency, economy, the sense of science stemming from a Judeo-Christian world view.
Development was a Trojan horse that colonialism left behind, where Mountbatten yielded to the softer tyranny of Truman. For Mr Seshadri, to critique development as a mode of knowledge one must recreate the anthropology of innovation chains, the alphabet of development. One has to ask what is the genocidal quotient of development as obsolescence, displacement, of erasure as violence destroying diversity of worlds we may not recover.
My third fable comes from my old friend U.R. Ananthamurthy, one of India’s greatest storytellers.
For Mr Ananthamurthy, development as discourse is a failed literary text, a bowdlerised discourse, where Charles Lamb erases Shakespeare, or makes Blake irrelevant. Development is bowdlerised history. It invokes creativity but all it offers is a theory of innovation, a guided managerialism. It has no epiphany. The banality of development is but part of a class of wider banalities and it needs to be unravelled.
He used a word from a Kannada poem. Development, he claimed, has no bhoota. Bhoota implies a ghost, it evokes a living point, suggests the life in a seed. Development has no language of diversity. Once you accept development and globalisation, then with Bruno Latour you can claim that “diversity is a left-over gathered together in a museum, a reserve or a hospital. Then anthropology becomes a theory of left-overs; the more exotic the better”. Diversity in a development model has no prior claim to being.
Development has no dialects. It creates language as a stencil, imposing its reality on other worlds. Development for him is like catechism, a written text. Instead of reciting its civics, one has to challenge the language of salvation behind it.
Three different stories. Three different perspectives of development. How do we use them as lenses to break into the development discourse? The three voices I spoke about are ethical voices, marginal voices, each of whom felt that the 9/11 at the heart of America has become 9/11 as the soul of the world.
This is the tragedy one has to battle. It needs not an obsession with numbers and pie charts but a sense of the story. When these alternative experiments are destroyed, a story dies, a way of life disappears. This is the ultimate sadness we have to contend with in our obsession with development. The knowledge of development has no sense of her as citizen, an economist, as survivor who thrives on diversity.

The author is a social scientist