The Crisis Within: On Knowledge and Education in India by G. N. Devy

Author:G. N. Devy [Devy, G. N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mobilism
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

POST-MEMORY EDUCATION

The historical trajectory of knowledge in India has had, despite its numerous glorious moments of arriving at truth with far-reaching consequences, three major setbacks:

First, Indian thinkers chose to keep the collective and objective memory that I described as knowledge institution, confined strictly within an ethnic ‘varna-fold’. This made Indian knowledge traditions less comprehensive than they could have been.

Second, the knowledge traditions of India decided to think of intuition as their measure for the significance of the insights gained by thinkers; but in the process producing any non-subjective ‘universal knowledge’ remained outside the Indian knowledge spectrum.

And, finally the colonial experience brought into the Indian self-perception an effect of ‘cultural amnesia’ rendering impossible any meaningful and organic relation with the past.

Higher education in India has to carry on its back the heavy burden of these three historical legacies. While its stated mission is to create modern knowledge, compatible with the larger fund of universal knowledge, it suffers from the mortal wounds of casteism and colonialism. Besides, given the difference in the genealogies of Western knowledge and indigenous knowledge, it is not able to decide if a synthesis between the two can at all be attempted and how, and has become hugely diffident in the process. All three have been the most crucial elements in the history of knowledge in India over a century now. They have been our challenges without any easy ways of redeeming the millions of young persons aspiring to make India into a knowledge society. I would like to point out that certain radical transformations unfolding before humanity as a whole indeed offer India an unprecedented opportunity of gaining freedom from past blunders. One of these transformational phenomena is the decline in the idea of knowledge as universal. The other is the decline of memory in the scheme of things human. The third is the imminent possibility of finding an objective domain for intuition in image-based non-verbal language towards which humanity is moving irreversibly. I shall discuss the grounds for these three changes in the following sections.

Memory Transmutation in Our Time

The historical juncture at which India started internalizing a pervasive cultural amnesia was also the moment in Europe’s history of ideas when memory started being seen as secondary or inferior to imagination. First Immanuel Kant in Germany and then Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England postulated memory as the ‘agency which plays with mere tokens of fancy’ while imagination, in this view, was the ‘regenerative’ power of the mind. In the words of M. H. Abrams, an able commentator on this Romantic epistemology, memory performed the function of ‘a mirror’, imagination that of ‘a lamp’. Prior to this, the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes had spoken of imagination as a demonic force, born of melancholia, inducing in the mind ‘fancy’ of ‘ghosts, goblins, witches, where they exist none’. He had, in turn, derived the idea of imagination as a dangerous mental process from the ancient Greeks, particularly Plato. But the German and British Romantic poets of the nineteenth century started questioning the idea, using Plato again and Plotinus.

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