Month: February 2014

1. How How did you get to write these essays? What motivated you?

I believe I am also responsible for the world in which we find ourselves. I have tried to respond to this world from time to time. As a person who teaches – and who can read and write – I think I have an obligation to make some sense of it and to share the resulting attempts with others, and so contribute to the dialogues that are the motors of civilization.

2. Rajesh, why in/disciplines for a title?

Though the title is explained in the Introduction towards the end, let me add (and repeat) that education, culture and politics are ‘in/disciplines’. That they nevertheless require a disciplined effort to study them. That they demand that the disciplinary boundaries between them be challenged in order to reveal how none of them is self-constituted and self-limited/limiting. The slash is an enabling line that divides and bridges at the same time.

3. There is so much of Punjab in it. What is your take on the search for a Punjabi identity? What do you think of its (Punjab’s) multiple divisions and existing fissures? By the way I notice there is a painting on the cover by the great Punjabi abstractionist Rajinder Singh Dhawan.

Punjab today badly needs critical reflexivity. The discourse of Punjabiyat has progressively regressed over the decades. It has been turning on ethnocentrism, sectarianism, jatt-centred casteism, linguistic fanaticism, religious fundamentalism. Also, the actual Punjab is transforming ‘terribly’, but songs continue to be sung of a stereotyped, mythical Punjab of unmatched glory. These might be signs of a nascent fascism.

Punjabi identity, even after the partition, remains Punj–abi, where the fifth ab/river/current is the principle of dynamism as against stasis. Punjabi identity, to me, is essentially anti-essentialist. Freedom, love, quest – these define the adventure called Punjabiyat. And this Punjabiyat needs voices more than ever today.

4. At what angle the Punjabi intellectual stand in relation to the power structure?

The Punjabi intellectual, in Punjab particularly, has been largely (not wholly) coopted by the dominant power structures. Dissent has been reduced to a bargaining tool for profit and self-promotion.

5. As an intellectual on the campus, how do you you see yourself and the role you play?

I am a student and teacher, not an intellectual. I believe we have the task of building critical capabilities, of creating and guarding over spaces for criticism and critique, of linking our expertise with the lay person’s discourse. We must believe in a better world and write and speak for making it possible. The young are amazingly receptive to the challenge of thinking; we must not fail them ‘any more’.

6. What next (after this book)?

I am working on Blood Flowers, a translation of Harbhajan Singh Hundal’s selected poetry. The translation of Sohan Qadri-Amarjit Chandan conversatiions – The Now Moment – is in press. Another book of essays – on literature and theory – should be ready before the end of this year.

Penguin, in agreeing to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: an alternative history, has signaled its willingness to do business with the ultra right in India. The venerable Oxford University Press has already been doing this for some time: the fate of the book on Shivaji by James Laine and the anthology of essays by AK Ramanujan is still fresh in memory. The trend is not confined to just the big boys of multinational publishing: even the organisers of India Art Fair, year after year, cowered at the thought of displaying the work of MF Husain, whose art had become anathema to Hindutva camp, resulting in his long exile before his death in London.

In Mumbai Shiv Sena decides what plays are to be performed, which films to be shown, and, of course, whether artists from Pakistan are to be allowed in at all. In Maharashtra and Gujarat, and quite a few other places as well, the Hindutva outfits are able to impress, even overwhelm, the intelligentsia and the media to leave the task of critical interpretation and analysis to them. For all one knows Ambanis may even consider taking over Bertelsmann, the infamous corporation with a Nazi past, that now owns Penguin Random House.

At the same time, the state with its key institutions, ‘recuses’ itself at will from the matters of freedom of expression, regulation and censorship; it is happy to outsource the responsibility to all and sundry as part of the ongoing privatisation drive – as it is with regard to defense of secularism, pluralism and other constitutional imperatives.