The two poems which every high school student in the vast British colonial spread had to study during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth and “The Village Schoolmaster” by Oliver Goldsmith. Wordsworth’s lyrical stanzas were all about the excitement at the sudden discovery of nature’s bounty. Goldsmith’s couplets were about tragi-comic nostalgia for an old world that had been lost altogether. His schoolmaster was a paradoxical, self-proclaimed scholar in the midst of village idiots, an argumentative and adamant intellectual. “‘Twas certain he could write, and cipher too:/ Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage,/ And e’en the story ran that he could gauge./ In arguing too, the parson own’d his skill,/ For e’en though vanquish’d he could argue still.” Since Goldsmith penned the poem about the schoolmaster, every high school student who read it has found in his or her own teachers a shadow of the idiosyncratic teacher from old pastoral England. In my mid-twentieth century small-town school, I too had such teachers who were full of intellectual views and unwilling to accept any contrary opinions. One of them was extremely proud of the great glory of the ancient Bharatvarsha. There was another who passionately believed that all that was Western was unquestionably superior. Frequent arguments and predictable disagreements between the two formed a large part of the school’s folklore. Subjected to their absolute adherence to their own views, I grew up wondering if questioning has any place in schools.
For the last six decades, having studied and taught in Indian schools, colleges and universities, I have noticed that learning and teaching in India do not feel comfortable with the desire to question. Quite ironically, assessment and grading of students’ intellects are based on their ability to answer a set of ‘questions’ given in examinations. I have never quite understood how the minds that are not taught to formulate and raise questions can be assessed by asking them to confront questions and tackle them in the silence and loneliness of an examination hall. When an entire system of knowledge transaction is built upon the intellectual bankruptcy caused by students’ inability to formulate questions, it is not surprising that knowledge institutions, too, are intolerant to questioning. Over the decades, I have often been frowned upon by scholars of chemistry for asking “why is sea water salty?” — a question not yet conclusively answered — and by Indologists for asking “If Sanskrit held such a sway on Indian languages in the past, why are most of the fish names and many bird names in India non-Sanskrit?”
It is not as if questioning was not used as a method for developing knowledge in the past. In fact, many of the important Jain, Buddhist and other ancient Indian texts were written in the form of questions and their answers. The Bhagavad Gita is a good example. The Yaksha Prashnas in the Mahabharata is another. The most illustrious example is the principal Upanishad known as the Prashn Upanishad or Prashnopanishad. Composed in the Pippalada line of Vedic textual tradition, it raises questions related to the origin of life. The three primary chapters of its current body of six chapters asked, “How were living beings created? Which is the central divine being (deva), the spring of life? From where does life come, how it enters bodies, how it exits from them, and how does it interact with the ‘self’, chitta?” Those were excellent questions, indeed, and answered in detail by the examples depicted in that Upanishad. They point to how similar the ancient knowledge transactions in India were to their contemporary Greek knowledge traditions of Socrates and Plato. It must be added, however, that later, through the deification of the guru and the infantilisation of the shishyas in Indian history, questioning became a casualty. Over the last thousand years, the pan-India process of sect formation was, in essence, a process of questioning established dogma and orthodoxy; yet, in their turn, each of the philosophical splinters emerging as sects turned to self-ossification and debarred questioning. Sadly, the ability to raise questions and, more importantly, the ability to examine them and answer them dispassionately, have been systematically suppressed by most social institutions we espoused. Our universities and schools are no exception.
Ever since I entered a university as a lecturer, I have come across instances of institutional reluctance of facing questions. Raising a question, even a legitimate question, is normally seen as impudence and disobedience. At Baroda University, where my wife and I used to teach, performing satyanarayan-katha in the university office was introduced as a ritual when the Bharatiya Janata Party started ruling Gujarat. When my wife, a scientist, questioned its propriety, the administration decided to block her from becoming the dean of the science faculty. That was by no means a singular instance. In hundreds of universities, many hundreds of academics have faced institutional wrath for raising simple questions. Several universities in the country have also been painted as ‘anti-national’ by the media and the official agencies when students’ bodies or professors have raised questions on public policies or national issues.
A few days ago, I received a communication from a professor of anthropology at the South Asian University in Delhi. He wrote that four professors — Snehashish Bhattacharya, Srinivas Burra, Irfanullah Farooqi, and Ravi Kumar — have been suspended for expressing support towards a students’ protest. The students were protesting against the absence of fair representation in sexual harassment and gender sensitisation committees and a decrease in student stipends. Instead of curing the problems, the administration curbed the message. Just a few days before the faculty suspension in Delhi, Professor Tejaswini Desai was punished in Kolhapur for entering into a discussion on the recent communal disturbances in Kolhapur in a class. She had done so as some students asked her questions on the issue and she was helping them understand the complete context of the rising communalism.
If such an atmosphere continues to prevail in universities and institutions meant for learning, India will have succeeded in annihilating the spirit of enquiry, which is what should be at the heart of education and which is what helps humans advance knowledge. But in a regime headed by an individual who disdains questions, can educational institutions have the spine to think differently? The question of questioning needs a serious rethink by all of us in order to bring our democracy back to where it should be. Authoritarian educational institutions may be the cheapest software for undemocratic regimes, but they come at a great cost to the future of the nation.
G.N. Devy is the Obaid Siddiqui Chair Professor, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
