Anniversaries tend to get repetitive and nagging in their emptiness. Independence Day, in particular, becomes problematic as both past and future look ambiguous. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru look like distant figures, creatures at the wrong end of a telescope. The immediacy of events like Covid-19 and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act seems starker, creating a general sense of helplessness. One looks around for the regime’s thinking on critical issues, like education, environment, security and what one discovers is a variety of reports. I was reading about the government’s ‘gift’ to the nation on this anniversary, the National Education Policy, based on the Kasturirangan Report.

One of the saddest things about our policy reports is that they become outdated in thought by the time of publication. The outdatedness is disguised by the presentation of ideas in the form of an intellectual salad. There is a little bit for everyone, each one picks his/her favourite hobby-horse of morsel, then speaks of it with relish. One realizes that there is no rethinking of fundamental issues, even in the most touted of reforms. The Kasturirangan Report has to be read at three levels.

First, K. Kasturirangan is a major policy-maker, having chaired both the reports on the Western Ghats and the National Education Policy. The connectivity between the two is critical. Unlike Madhav Gadgil, Kasturirangan wanted development over diversity. In doing so, he stated two norms in general — the forest was a resource open to mining by industry rather than a commons of trusteeship. Second, the inhabitants living in it have little to say about the future. Kasturirangan’s marginalization of the forest and the tribe is lethal. The education report merely follows the logic of development. Here, he again pretends to be concerned about education, but his real concern is industry and the workforce for industry. It represents the Human Relations School of education, which has little to say about Taylorism or the invidiousness of class conflict. It creates a domain of social work where students play as NGOs, dabbling with the informal and the obsolescent as bits of nostalgia before they acquire corporate positions. Philanthropy plays happily, indifferent to the damage its corporate arm creates. The second point one has to emphasize is that the Kasturirangan Report on the NEP echoes a liberal arts view of education, stressing key words like ‘options’, ‘fluidity’ and ‘freedom’. The liberal arts schools are homes for elite children, but offer little else. They claim to be interdisciplinary, but are merely a goulash of subjects. The menu card of subjects is picked randomly. There is no sense of concept or cohesion. There is even less an idea of the debates that took place around the national movement or the great dialogue of religions that made India a syncretic society. Liberal arts is supposed to create a sense of civilization and memory, but the syllabus has little sense of both. It encourages dilettantes, but has little sense of rigour or scholarship.

I was reminded of the liberal arts experiment while reading the Kasturirangan Report. It is amazing how accolades flow, from the elite, from IIT directors to management gurus. The elite likes the report, because it does not threaten their position. They love a report with a few key terms that they can bandy about like skill, multidisciplinarity, fluidity, and is garrulous on policy. Third-rate acclaims cushion second-rate thought, and we are content with the happy mediocrity it offers. Meanwhile, India is a nation which is being outthought and outfought on every front; creative originality is a discomfort we would rather be without.

The third aspect I wish to emphasize is that we have missed out on the great intellectual revolutions. We keep talking about the industrial revolution but have little sense of the later intellectual revolutions that followed. We have, despite our linguistic diversity, little sense of the linguistic revolution and, therefore, are blind to the brilliance of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or to the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure was an originator of structural linguistics and a professor of Sanskrit in Geneva. Sapir-Whorf felt that original ideas could only be worked by innovative groups like the theosophists in India, but we played deaf to them. Idiotically, we still define language as a form of life, which needs a script and, thereby, we have destroyed over 2000 oral languages with an illiterate callousness. Strangely we have paid little attention to epistemology and the knowledge revolution, to the ecological revolution, or even to the debates on the Anthropocene. The elite feel content with the Linus blanket of mediocrity, callous about their own great innovators, from C.V. Seshadri to Amulya Reddy. India was home to so many diversities. Yet diversity in an epistemic or a cultural and linguistic sense is not part of our policy or the intellectual frameworks of our universities. India is not bothered whether it is home to 150,000 varieties of rice or over 2000 languages. Where do we have an education policy that says every school and every educational institution is to save at least one dying language, one obsolescent craft, or one near-extinct species? We talk pompously about skill, but never about competence as plurality. We tout skill as a poor man’s solution to livelihood, without linking skill and livelihood in any systematic way to the knowledge revolutions.

Sadly, we have missed out on the epistemic debates that have involved scientists, from Michael Polanyi and James Lovelock to Isabelle Stengers. Our scientists miss the excitement of the quantum revolution; we still treat science as a corset of Victorian methods we call the scientific temper. The science of complexity, risk and uncertainty eludes our policy-makers. We have destroyed the sense of play and childhood to create IITs, which add little to the research imagination. We have created an elite, which is instrumental about science, fetishizing technology. As a result, we have devalued science as a sense of play, as a cultural system, and overvalued technology. Now Indians prefer to be imitative by choice. As a leading scientist from Bangalore put it, “We have no original thoughts, but we can summarize other people brilliantly.” The kunji is in our genes. We are the greatest bowdlerizers of the West, from Nehru to Modi, but unlike the national movement we have no sense of the other West, of the defeated West. We swallowed the hegemonic West in vitaminized quantities and thought we would survive. It has created an insidious mediocrity.

Yet, while we by-hearted the West, we ignored the dialogues of our own civilization. India could have been a great Islamic society, but we destroyed the possibility, thinking only of the minoritarianism of Islam or Christianity. Our civilizational syncretism would have challenged the Judeo-Christian idea of nature as commodity, and saved the tribal and the forest. We museumized living tradition, while the West museumized debt cultures. We were taxidermists of living cultures, which help create our fundamentalism. Our dialogue of civilizations with the West, as one option, would have created the new Santiniketans of the future. The loss of memory, the devaluation of morality as an epistemology of communication and community, is something we have to rethink. Democratic India has to rethink the contract among orality, textuality, and digitality.

Modern India seems to have little sense of the future as a possibility. Our illiteracy about technology makes us technologize every future, reducing it to a unilinear, monotheistic, monolithic exercise. Our sense of modernity, which is part Victorian, ties us down. We cannot think of the future in the plural. As a society, our policy-makers as pedagogues have no sense of alternatives. As a result, our tribes, our crafts, our forests are fading before us. Our tragedy is that we have no dream of alternatives to challenge fundamentalism, or the empty secularism of modernity. This autism of the future goes back to our thinking in straitjackets, confusing options as choices, and restricting freedom to picking choices in a fixed choice questionnaire. As a society, we no longer dream of alternatives and we treat dissent and alternatives as unpatriotic. The depth of our mediocrity adds to the depth of our emerging authoritarianism. The uniqueness of this era is in the mediocrity of authoritarianism. India needs to dream and think differently, reinvent all its basic concepts — from democracy to development. If democracy cannot restore dream-time, it is doomed to the banality of authoritarianism. This was the message of Gandhi’s concepts of swadeshi and swaraj, which we need to revive today. This is the challenge of independence anniversaries, to recover memory so we can reinvent the future.

The author is an academic associated with Compost Heap, a network pursuing alternative imaginations