Knowledge And Power: A Discourse for Transformation
Book Review By Cynthia Stephen
19 January, 2014
Countercurrents.org
"Reinventing Humanity: A Discourse for Justice and Transformation" in India By Braj Ranjan Mani
(Manohar, New Delhi 2014, 424 pp., Rs.1250 hardbound)
ISBN 978-93-5098-030-9
There could be many ways to read this new book by Braj Ranjan Mani. Coming 8 years after his earlier, path-breaking book “Debrahmanising History”( which became a best-seller in its category, went into three reprints in five years, and has just been revised) this book is another one-of-a-kind by this self-confessed maverick scholar that cannot be easily slotted or labelled. The author attempts to probe the age-old but little discussed role of the elites in appropriating not just power and wealth, but also knowledge, its appropriation and the means of its dissemination, thus not only ensuring their dominance in the areas of governance, economics, religion and the academy, but also perpetuating the masses in poverty and powerlessness.
His interrogation takes the reader ‘towards a criticism of everything existing’. He begins with the earliest treatises on state and political power and economic thinking, goes on to religion, media, history, philosophy, globalisation, marginalisation, caste, gender, and sexual politics, food security, governance, technology and digitisation. He marshals a lifetime of critical reading and analysis to ‘probe the formation of a world with a million millionaires and a billion hungry people…..the objective is not solely oppostional, it is also reconstructive, blended with empathy for the downtrodden. Searching the seedbed of old and new dominance as well as the ideas and movements of social justice,[ it]….recognises the terrible odds in political, economic and in intellectual-ethical realism, but carries the hope that the excluded and the insulted will…[q]uestion the nature of existing power and social relationships, and will unite and break their shackles, and by freeing themselves will reinvent humanity’(Introduction, pp12).
The book abounds in pithy aphorisms which sum up truths in a felicitous manner. “Civil society in India is a platform of the connected, by the connected and for the connected”. “[T]he powerful in India are not connected with the suffering Indians but with the powerful from other parts of the world” (p.143). “For the change we want to see in the world, empathy is more important than reason. Justice comes from character, not competence” (p.76). On the role played by religion on humankind, and on Indian society in particular: “[a]s in Science, so in the case of religion, we have to evolve a nuanced and critical perspective. Just as we oppose the inhuman application of science for making nuclear weapons, e oppose the religious establishment for its dogmatism, sectarian violence, and nexus w ith right-wing forces.”(p.77). Discussing Marx’s oft, but partially quoted remark: “Religious suffering is at[one and] the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”, he says “the important point is that Marx is not only unmasking the illusion of religion but (also unmasks) ‘human self-alienation in its secular form now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form’.”
Far from being another effort by progressive/liberal scholars articulating from safe and privileged social locations within the cosy confines of the academy or research institution, Mani’s work emerges from a long-standing personal engagement with the underprivileged and marginalised based on his own non-elite social location - and is thus possibly one of the first works published on the subject of Knowledge-building and its links to Power for an international audience by an Indian writer from the (relative) margins.
Mani’s succinct 28-page Introduction covers the scope of the rest of the book and sets the tone for an in-depth and wide-ranging exploration of the issues of the key institutions in today’s world – Development, Market, Technology, (oppressive) Tradition, alternative “ways of seeing” and the struggles of “People-over-profit.” Thus this work stands firmly in the tradition of Gramsci and Friere in its pro-people stance. It lucidly articulates a viewpoint from a marginalised position, seldom seen in the Indian context, and lays bare the issues which prevented the articulation and circulation of these alternative visions of the underdog and the non-dominant sections of Indian, and indeed, modern societies.
The first four chapters uncover the core issues with sharp, often contrarian insights. Chapter one deals with the Fundamentals – early human civilisation and its intellectual corruption. Mani discusses how unequal power relations caused deprivations ranging from the most basic needs such as food, to a deprivation of dignity, agency and security to large sections of the unequal population, including women, children, and other marginalised sections in the society who were discriminated against in the unequal allocation of household, social, economic and political resources. The succeeding chapter, Understanding the Modernisation of Oppressive Tradition, notes how oppressive systems continuously morph to adjust to social change and progress, to maintain the interests of the dominants.
In Chapter 3, Media, Publicity and Pop Culture are put under a relentless gaze, exposing how the media which should be a bulwark of the powerless against the powerful are instead tamed to serve the interests of the powerful and the Establishment. In a section titled “Supersexualised Market and The New Body Politic”, he trains the spotlight on the objectification of people – especially women – as possessions, as trophies, as commodities in a capitalist paradise to which everyone is schooled to aspire. Success is presented as sexual conquest and vice versa; sex and its expression is offered up for consumption to the masses as the most ‘desirable’ aspects of human existence, as ‘liberation’, to the extent that even the bodies of children are used to maximise eyeballs and profits, selling ephemeral desirables to give ‘fulfilment’ to people’s lives drained of meaning except as consumers of products and services.
Chapter 4: the core of the book - focusses on the Politics of Knowledge. It covers vast swathes of human society – from the early pre-modern world when social institutions were still developing, right down to the present day, and clearly shows how the valuations of the basics of human existence – from land then to knowledge in the present-day market society – have been mediated by the “elitist control of knowledge that has become the master key to the empire of capital, not just one of the fundamentals of power”. It explores “the production and politics of knowledge to grasp its duality and complicity in the design of dominance, and goes on to promote “[a] subversive understanding of knowledge” to this end. Mani takes the reader through a journey through the thoughts of philosophers John Locke and David Hume to explore the development of the idea of knowledge and its relation with reason and experience; the weak link between the sources of knowledge and the means of verifying it: experience, reason, testimony and memory. Hence the need for the widest base of all these factors to get closest to the reality. Therefore, the collective wisdom and knowledge - also the most prized common possession of humankind - is both its common heritage and its best insurance against falsehood . However, over the centuries the selective – and privileged - nature of transmission of the knowledge of the ages, and its dissemination, has coloured the lives of succeeding and even future generations. This is most evident in the Indian context where tradition has placed structural impediments in the access, control, ownership and transmission of knowledge.
Tracing this transmission down the ages, from Plato and Aristotle to Darwin to Nietzsche and supremacist ideologies, including brahmanism (also known as Varnasharma Dharma and Sanatana Dharma) , Platonism and Social Darwinism, Mani lays bare the systematic building of elitist knowledge systems to buttress pseudo sciences which eventually unleased fascist forces and political systems which continue to play an influential role in society and politics today. He points out that Dr. B R Ambedkar, eminent scholar, lawyer and economist and one of the first to critically analyse the role of brahmanism in Indian society, had observed, with regard to Nietszche’s famous work Thus Spake Zarathustra, that Zarathustra was a new name for Manu, (circa 2 BCE) whose treatise on law, the Manusmriti, continues to resonate in present-day Indian society, as a byword for socially entrenched discrimination on the basis of gender and caste.
Nothing escapes the spotlight – psychoanalysis, Gandhism, Neo-brahmanism, Marxism, mythological texts, Hinduism, the works of Amartya Sen, S. Radhakrishnan, and other notable elite Indian thinkers and writers. He contrasts their approach with the people’s leaders, thinkers and social revolutionaries whose ideas brought positive change and transformation in the lives of India’s oppressed millions ranging from Buddha and Kabir in the past to Ayothee Thass, Savitribai and Jotirao Phule, Ambedkar, Pandita Ramabai, Narayana Guru, Periyar, Birsa Munda. The notable common denominator of all these exemplars - whose admirers and followers run into hundreds of millions in India - is their critical discourse, insistence on social democracy and oppositional stance to brahmanic philosophies and tradition, and the “dalit-subaltern dream of a society free of the ‘annihilation of caste’”.
Hence this treatise, while a valuable contribution to the world literature on the subject, has special resonance and relevance in today’s India, where inequality and inequity live cheek-by-jowl with almost unparalleled wealth and privilege, creating large islands of darkness contrasted with the glitter of diamonds and fairy lights.
Despite the bleak scenario painted in the first four chapters, the author does not end on a note of despondency. On the contrary, in the last chapter he builds a solid case for a brighter future through the emancipation of the Mind. He quotes Savitribai Phule (1831-1897), the first Indian woman teacher and poet: “Arise, awake, educate – smash traditions, liberate!” and asserts, “Freedom comes from a mental fight, an intense personal struggle as well as a collective one for transformational change. An ignited consciousness – and a freedom struggle based on it – is known by many names. Emancipatory education is one of them…[s]uch education opens our eyes, enables us to understand the world as it is and dream about the one we want to live and work in. It enables us with voice and choice, and paves the way for freedom and reconstruction. A movement from darkness to light, the promise of education is nothing less than remaking the world where justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an overflowing stream”.
He locates this vision in the lives and work of people’s poets and philosophers – including Kabir, Tuka, Phule, Tarabai Shinde, whose work he contrasts with that of the “closed pedagogy of brahmanism”, as expounded by the brahmanic intelligentsia like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Dayananda Saraswathi, Vivekananda and Bal Gangadhar Tilak and of course M K Gandhi – who was a contemporary of both Periyar and Ambedkar, necessitating their engagement with this powerful ally of brahmanism and the caste system at the height of his popularity. Invoking Marx and Phule as the earliest of the moderns who saw the connection between ideological domination and the actual subjugation of the oppressed, he goes on to discuss the ideas of Gramsci, whose theory of hegemony – the soft power – of culture, religion, media, art, etc., to promote the class interests of the dominant. He links cultural capital and the maintenance of power through the politics of education, which effectively “ reproduces culture and education to reinforce the structures of hierarchy”. For instance, caste elites present caste division of labour as a unique indigenous way of life which enables the resolving of social and ethnic differences, not as a system that discriminates against a great number and privileges a very few.
His solution is to “rethink and democratise education”, which would “bring about an improvement for the whole society, without reducing everyone to the same identity or stifling the special talents of anyone….fair and equal treatment of other people…a level playing field.”He recommends a holistic, critical and constructive approach, which “has to adhere to core democratic values and thematics that express its concerns and priorities,” and help develop a critical perspective on major problems; that would include the realities of the various forms of discrimination, recognise and value the diversity of individual and community experiences, and together forge a collective struggle which will be based on collective aspirations. He proposes a critical approach which subverts stereotypes and preconceptions and promotes an understanding of nuance and complexity. He advocates engagement with literatures and narratives from the perspectives of the oppressed, noting scholars such as Gail Omvedt, G. Aloysius, Kancha Ilaiah, Uma Chakravarty, Meera Nanda, and Christophe Jaffrelot, among others, have produced works which can form a basis for such a new education. “Hope has the power to transform reality. …real hope is doing something with and for the hopeless…[b]ut if suffering people decide to change the course of their life, and if the wider community lends them love and support in their struggle, things will change. If the seemingly powerless people persist in their creative struggle, things will change.”
The Appendix, ‘Resources for Transformation’ is a unique 80-page compendium of important books on subjects covered in this work, featuring some of the key themes or which takes further some of the themes highlighted in the book itself. The writer-activist’s passion for justice and his wide-ranging and inter-disciplinary reading on the subject becomes obvious in this section. This valuable section adds immensely to the utility and value of the work, both for the serious and committed scholar as well as one just starting one’s intellectual quest in the world of ideas and concepts.
Cynthia Stephen is an Independent Writer and Researcher based in Bangalore
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