Amitava Kumar on Reading, and Graduate School

This is a post born of exasperation and hope. Only one semester in, the rhythm of the graduate school seminar has settled, and it chugs forward on its well-worn tracks. The sheer intellectual excitement of opening a new syllabus, my eyes rapidly scanning for the texts I know I will enjoy, the smell of an open book, all haven't gone away. It's too soon for that. But occasionally a sense of futility sets in, especially the realization that reading is a mechanical, solitary act, carried out inside a mind that is never stable and never dependable. At what point will I lose it, will the jumbled letters no longer make words, sentences, and of course soundbites for my professional advancement? The historian has much in common with the accountant - poring over minuscule ephemera and producing reports that few read and of those, many ignore. But it's not the monotony or the self-consciousness about social importance that gets to me. It's the discussions. Young, full of facts and ideas, the graduate student spews out an endless stream of jabs, asides, musings, mumblings - his or her favourite thing, slicing and dicing the book lying passively on the desk. "Well I think that Subaltern Studies has gone too far this or the other way..." "So and so essentialises and totalises..." "Not contingent enough..." "Why doesn't this book start fifty years earlier or end twenty years later..." "Where are the voices of the women (men, if about women)..." Reading back over my blog, this poisonous habit of self-importance seems to have taken me over as well.

Let me pause. I am not saying that honest, robust critique should be banished from the academy. The spectre of scholarly fraud and/or misuse is always at the door, so we must keep it tightly shut. But we have also lost a sense of humility and wonder toward the academic text. The graduate student reads an article or book with violence in mind. Like a nosy badger smelling blood, we are trained to burrow for the "holes" in the argument and eviscerate everything in our path. It is little wonder so many grow up to be nasty, vindictive academics sneaking in cowardly jabs in footnotes and pompously battling over the molehill.

In a wonderful recent piece in Tehelka, Amitava Kumar asks us to rethink how we read the literary text. It's also a great blueprint for the nascent academic. He says, too many readers wish to be pundits, who "nurse a secret ambition to be described as someone who has read everything." Graduate students will surely recognize themselves. Also, underneath the ostensible spirit of impartial critique hides a deadness of thought: this "kind of reader will always try to sound knowledgeable, moral, balanced, and always, very reasonable."
Academic writers are as guilty of this sin as fiction writers: "I like that writer who doesn’t address the world from a position of Olympian superiority. It is even better when a piece of writing reveals how its writer’s admittedly partial or flawed vision offers special insight into the world. A reader who reciprocates in the same spirit, reading with empathy or hurt or imagination, produces what may well be a new text."
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=Ne300110essay2_the_reader.asp
The best discussions I've had in the classroom have been the free ones, when mouths run off from the script, when the student earnestly tries to engage the text, to see if it makes sense or strikes a chord, even to passionately denounce it (from a position of vulnerability, of course). Reading is work, but it is also productive and a joy. It need not lead to a great additive insight or building block for a field examination or paper. What is important is that some idea from the page has been turned over in the mind, has occupied if only a few minutes of one's day. This process requires above all the qualities of humility, openness and patience.

The rewards of an academic life are perhaps small, but none is more exhilarating than the discovery of previously unsuspected complexities. If this discovery makes academic life so antithetical to practical life, or what is nowadays interestingly called "the real world," it also renders academics themselves impatient. We're eager to broadcast our jadedness. This one's "over" Foucault, this one's "had enough" of this or that historiographical turn. The greatest violence we can do is hasty categorisation and the filing away of ideas. It's a surefire road to a closing mind, but even more importantly, to an unhappy mind.

Chandigarh and the Experience of Urban Planning

In James Scott's influential and oft-quoted Seeing Like a State, the city of Chandigarh makes a brief cameo to support his point that the experience of living in a master-planned capital (like Brasilia) is basically miserable. Scott's condemnation of Le Corbusier, the "high modernist" architect whose rigid, perfectionist, and absurdly ordered designs exemplify the monstrosity of state vision, here comes to its logical end: after all, Le Corbusier himself designed Chandigarh, the only city to have been actually built according to his plans. Scott shows how the wide avenues and plazas, as well as the imposing government buildings, contrast with and replace the busy Indian street and bazaar. Chandigarh seems to fit neatly into a general theory of the "messiness" of everyday life being mercilessly subdued by modernism's blind uniformity. Scott's critique is essentially an experiential one: the city feels unfriendly, austere, segregating; the plazas are empty because people cannot, and do not wish, to congregate in such spaces. One imagines a drab, concrete life whose minute details are governed by the unforgiving design.

In a recent Outlook piece, politician M.S. Gill paints a different picture altogether. He views Nehru's enterprise as a bold, revolutionary one, conceived in the ruins of a divided Punjab with a view to a better future. The plan worked; indeed, it is unplanned growth that poses a problem: "The new necklace of the builders squeezes and strangles Corbu’s ambitious dream. Entry from any side into the town is an adventure. The green belt, specifically kept between Chandigarh and Mani Majra, has gone..." In Gill's view, Le Corbusier's Chandigarh (as well as Lutyens' Delhi) are admirable because of the services they provide to residents. The experience of living in this kind of city is clearly preferable to the chaos of Delhi today, a "collection of crowded colonies, hungry for plots with narrow roads, no parks and ancient monuments hemmed in by houses," where "children have no place to play and the new rich find that while they can build marble palaces, their BMWs rot in narrow lanes." The residents of Chandigarh tend to agree that it's an oasis among Indian cities:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262010
So if Scott's point was that Chandigarh is not a workable model of urban planning because people don't like living there, it would seem that he stands contradicted.

Part of the problem consists of two different modes of inequality at work. Chandigarh is clearly not for everybody: only a few can live "on the grid," and restrictive zoning laws ensure further population growth and commercial development can occur only outside the city. The exclusionary character inherent in the design is qualitatively different from the more "natural" ghettoizations of Delhi and Bombay that Gill is referring to. But the end result is similar: if Chandigarh works in ensuring a clean, pleasant urban experience for some, it does not make it a scalable or transferable model of planning that can solve India's current problems. Chandigarh is certainly an interesting experiment and an emblem of its time, but is its promise merely nostalgic? Can it teach us anything about the limits of providing services to residents that can be used by other rapidly developing cities with "modernizing" aspirations (i.e. Bangalore, Hyderabad)?
If any readers have themselves experienced Chandigarh, by either living or visiting there, do share your thoughts.