In times of civil war: On being a schizophrenic (public) sociologist

The shape of professional sociology in India

Michael Burawoy’s distinction between professional, critical, policy and public sociology assumes a university structure where professional sociology is well established and in which sociology needs to reach out to a public domain to revitalize itself with issues and concerns drawn from ‘life’ rather than from texts or professional debates (Burawoy, 2005). With 651 departments of sociology in the United States, ¹ it is not difficult for a sociologist to find a ‘public’ within the North American profession itself.

In India, according to a University Grants Commission (UGC) report on the status of sociology, as of 2000 there were some 100 departments and 77 ‘specialized research institutions’, with an estimated 10,000 teachers of sociology. ² There were at the same time 33 departments of anthropology (Srivastava, 2000). In the Indian context, the choice of identifying with the disciplinary nomenclature ‘sociology’ versus ‘anthropology’ is itself a dilemma. Labelling ourselves involves determining whom we call our ancestors, what and whom we teach and how we do research. Should we insist on the uniqueness and value of our own twinned discipline or give in to the divisions of the international system and attempt to find our own individual place within it? ³

Across departments of sociology the quality is uneven, and overall, as the UGC report says, ‘There does not appear to be an adequate correspondence between the changing social reality and the content and orientation of existing courses in sociology. As a consequence, the subject seems to have lost its practical value for state policy, employment market and the wider society’ (p. 3). Even as there is a small core group of sociologists familiar with each other’s work, the profession as a whole does not constitute a sufficiently large audience. Academic press print runs are small, many colleges in the mofussils have no access to good libraries, teaching is limited by unchanging syllabi and students rely on class notes or ‘guides’ (see also Shah, 2000: 48). As is the case globally with audit systems, efforts by the UGC to incentivize publishing through a points system have also resulted in much work that should never have been put to paper.

Problems of differentiation within a university system are common to many countries, though the particular form of this differentiation varies (in France, between the grandes écoles and universities; in the US between Ivy League and state schools; and in India between metropolitan centrally funded and mofussil state-funded universities), as does the relative position of professional (medical/law school) versus general degrees (see Wacquant, 1996: xiv).

What makes the Indian situation particularly problematic is the colonial context in which university disciplines were instituted and in which they continue to function, where English is the language of learning and knowledge, and everything else is secondary. For the pioneers of Indian sociology/anthropology, many of whom wrote in both English and their own vernaculars, sociology was what they did in English with ‘scientific tools’. In fact, what they wrote in their own languages, which they themselves regarded as popular literary writing, would be more readily accepted as ethnography by today’s standards (Bose, 2007; Sundar, 2007). On the other hand, much that is relevant and contemporary in society and that should be incorporated by sociology/anthropology is written in other forms, notably literature or journalistic essays. Thus for example the essayist Anil Awachat writing about ecological problems in Marathi, dalit writers on their experience as ‘untouchables’, Maoist guerrillas debating with the government, or activists engaged in dealing with questions of environmental and nuclear safety often bring out contemporary social issues more sharply than scholarly debates about caste, class or ecology, especially when the latter are framed in the language that grand theory demands. One answer is that Indian sociologists – and scholars from other disciplines as well – should train themselves to write in vernacular languages and incorporate this range of materials into their teaching and research. Equally importantly, we need many more scholars from adivasi, dalit and other communities to validate their work within the academy, in much the same way as the growing numbers of women from the 1960s onwards put feminist theory on the academic map.

The question of language becomes especially acute when teaching. In Delhi University, for instance, students in the MA History and Political Science streams have rebelled because of the lack of Hindi texts. The sociology department has thus far evaded the problem by adopting an ‘English only’ policy, on the grounds that students who want to be professional sociologists must learn English. While Hindi textbooks and classes in Hindi would help a large number of students, it does not solve the problem of lack of intelligibility for students from the south or the northeast; furthermore, many of the faculty are not native Hindi speakers. Public universities like Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University have students ranging from the most elite to those from very poor rural backgrounds, of hugely varying castes, linguistic backgrounds and high school marks; it is like Harvard and community college rolled into one. (Indeed, one source from which the feeling of academic colonialism stems is that several of our best students go abroad for graduate studies.) Remedial English language courses and translation programmes are, of course, one solution, but these are seen as stigmatizing. Also, because it is not a need that elites have faced it has never been a priority for university administrations. In the meantime, individual teachers are faced with dilemmas over how and what to teach.

If language is a dilemma we face on an everyday basis, the choice of citations and academic reference points is another. A study of Cambridge theses revealed that 70% of the footnotes were to books published by Cambridge scholars (Vincent, 1990). A randomly selected but quite representative recently published volume, Companion to the Anthropology of India (Clark-Deces, 2011), does not have a single author located in India. By contrast, if Indian scholars were to only cite other Indian scholars located in India, their work would be seen as provincial. As editors of Contributions to Indian Sociology, one of our major concerns was to have articles by scholars from different parts of the world in order to capture different academic traditions. But this, it often seemed to many, was at the expense of native scholars, with CIS cast as elitist. And it truly hurt me – as I know it hurt previous editors – to reject articles from some small town Indian scholar who had a brilliant idea but neither the linguistic nor the theoretical skills to frame it (and for which affirmative action editing could not compensate), in favour of a competent, heavily referenced article written by a recent PhD from the US or UK, for whom publication in CIS was just a routine step to tenure and not a particular engagement with Indian sociology. How do we avoid simply recreating structures of class or national privilege in the name of maintaining ‘standards’ in scholarship (cf. Bourdieu, 1996)? Unlike in the French context with its self-confident academic traditions, here ‘standards’ are not just a means of reproducing internal hierarchies but also of battling with external condescension.

Sociological engagements with the public

In India, sociology/anthropology has long existed in arenas outside the university, particularly the government, and continue to be at home in the Anthropological Survey of India. Several early anthropologists like Patrick Geddes, SC Roy and Verrier Elwin came to their studies through their involvement with urgent social issues. Geddes, for instance, who set up the Bombay department, was a town planner; SC Roy, who started Man in India, became interested in adivasi issues by fighting legal cases for them, and his work is still used by courts in Jharkhand as the primary text for accessing customary law; and Elwin, who wrote numerous monographs on different adivasi communities, started off as a missionary, Gandhian and social worker. These were self-trained scholars who believed that their research could make a difference to the way that society, and particularly a society struggling for independence, could constitute itself. What was missing in this early period was not the engagement with the wider world, much beyond a narrow applied sense, but the professionalism of a university discipline.

It is in this context that sociology/anthropology as a ‘discipline’ itself became a ‘cause’. For instance, Irawati Karve (1905–1970), India’s first woman sociologist, decided early on that her best contribution to society was through the practice and institutionalization of her discipline: ‘I will pay my debt to society through research in my subject. And beyond this, I owe no other debt to society’ (cited in Pundalik, 1970). Married to the son of one of India’s most famous social reformers at a time when independence and social change were in the air, this was by no means as easy a decision as it seems. For scholars like Karve, who were self-conscious pioneers in the establishment of the disciplines in university departments in India, the question of what ‘public scholarship’ might mean revolved centrally around the contributions that ‘science’ could make to Indian society and the emergent Indian nation. This did not necessarily mean promoting policy relevant research, though they did some of that, but promoting basic research as an activity of social value. Over the 31 years she taught at the University of Pune, Karve published some 100 papers on a variety of different topics, most notably kinship and the family, but also caste, urbanization and displacement. Of course, Karve did not confine herself to academic writing, and her literary account of women in the Mahabharata, which won her the national Sahitya Akademi Prize, was hugely influential in her native Maharashtra as were her radio talk shows and other public writings (on Karve, see Sundar, 2007).

In terms of their impact on the wider public (at least on the English-speaking middle classes), contemporary sociologists have not done too badly either. MN Srinivas’s concepts like Sanskritization, westernization or the vote bank have become common currency. Andre Beteille’s writings on equality and inequality have been influential in promoting a particular public image of sociology, and Ramachandra Guha, sociologist-historian, has done pioneering work in several fields – particularly the environment, the sociological understanding of cricket and post-1947 history. In C Wright Mills’s words, they all use a style that eschews both ‘grand theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’ in favour of an active intellectual intervention in the public issues of the day (Mills, 2000 [1959]; see also Gitlin, 2006).

The problem in India is not the lack of ‘public sociology’ – in terms of public engagement – as much as how we define professional sociology in the face of pressures from above (international – read: US/European sociology) and below (vernacular access and acceptability). The practice of professional sociology – addressing questions of funding, libraries, availability of literature in the vernacular, outdated syllabi, recruitment practices, historically inherited nomenclatures, disciplinary traditions and the imbalances of academic power between the Global North and South – is itself a form of public engagement, which brings one into contact with diverse publics. These include disadvantaged students looking to the university system for social mobility; different caste/ethnic/religious groups, some worthy and some not but each of which wants to censor university or school syllabi in the name of hurt community feelings; ⁴ and patriarchal/casteist structures which need to be challenged as much within the university as outside. To be a conscientious practitioner as well as a conscientious objector within the university system may itself be a full-time form of public sociology.

The demands of the public moment: Time, location and ‘publics’

While everyday involvement in the life of the university can be politically taxing enough, there are also times when sociologists seem required to go beyond. I return in this section to the question I raised at the beginning of the article. What is the sociologist’s responsibility in times of war – whether external or internal/civil war?

In 2005, the Indian government sponsored a vigilante movement called Salwa Judum (‘Purification Hunt’) in the southern portion of the state of Chhattisgarh in order to defeat Maoist guerrillas who had been active there since the early 1980s. It was described as a self-initiated ‘peaceful people’s’ movement’ but involved hundreds of people being forced to go on processions, accompanied by security forces, to ‘persuade’ recalcitrant Maoist supporters to join. Hundreds of villages were burned, sometimes more than once; thousands of people were killed; and some 50,000 were forced into roadside camps controlled by the vigilantes, while others fled into the forest or across the border into neighbouring states. Many young men who participated in the Salwa Judum were then absorbed as special police officers (SPOs), and – armed with guns and official authority – became a law unto themselves, terrorizing the villages.

In November 2005 I accompanied a fact-finding team of civil liberties groups to investigate what was happening. This was an area with which I was familiar. Some 20 years earlier while doing research for my PhD I had spent a year and a half living in a village just north of the affected area, albeit in a community speaking a different language. What I saw in 2005 caused me sleepless nights: the people who had always exploited the adivasis – like traders and local elites, whom they were now resisting – had been armed by the state to attack them. (The state is constitutionally mandated to protect the adivasis.) The report of this visit came out only four months later (PUCL-PUDR et ., 2006) and – because these groups are often seen as fronts of the Maoists – was easily dismissed. It became prominent only much later when Binayak Sen, the secretary of the Chhattisgarh People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), which had anchored the fact-finding, was arrested, and his release became a cause celebre.

In the meantime, I initiated another fact-finding effort by eminent citizens, whose views would have to be taken more seriously by the establishment: two newspaper editors (one retired and one serving), a retired civil servant, a well-known sociologist/historian and a feminist journalist. This report, which was published in July 2006 (ICI, 2006), was important in several ways, not just because of the respectability of those who endorsed it but also because their contacts enabled us to meet people in power: the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the National Security Advisor, a full bench of the National Human Rights Commission, the Planning Commission, editors and Members of Parliament. If the establishment did nothing about it, by the end of 2006, no one responsible could use the excuse that they did not know. Subsequently, three of us – the historian Ramachandra Guha, the former civil servant EAS Sarma and I – filed public interest litigation in the Supreme Court. A companion petition was filed on behalf of three residents of Dantewada; Manish Kunjam, the local leader of the parliamentary Communist Party; and two local government councillors, Kartam Joga and Dudhi Joga. In July 2011, we got a spectacular judgement, which directed the state to stop supporting vigilantism and disband and disarm the SPOs. However, the state promptly responded by regularizing them all under a different name. The litigation is still going on, including contempt charges we have filed against the state.

For years I was obsessed with Salwa Judum. My family and friends were sympathetic and supportive, but their patience had its limits. Apart from these large fact-finding efforts and several subsequent field trips on my own or with a couple of others at the most, I helped to organize conferences to bring both sides together (such as a seminar at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, in January 2007); co-founded a campaign group called Campaign for Peace and Justice in Chhattisgarh, which held public meetings on the issue; wrote for the newspapers; appeared on TV debates whenever I could; met politicians, civil servants and newspaper editors; spoke to the staff of humanitarian organizations like the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Medécin Sans Frontières (MSF); wrote briefs to send to international organizations; and so on. In the first year of its existence, virtually no one in the wider public knew about Salwa Judum. One could count the newspaper articles about it on the fingers of one hand. Part of the horror I felt was also simply that such a war could be happening in the heart of the country and yet be off the media’s radar.

By 2012, however – after the civil war escalated with some spectacular Maoist counterattacks and the government’s Operation Green Hunt spread the war across several states; the Supreme Court case; the attention brought to the issue by the Binayak Sen campaign; and writer Arundhati Roy’s (2010) travelogue with the Maoists – it is now de rigueur for young journalists to cover the Maoist issue. While the situation continues to be grim for ordinary villagers, I no longer feel so necessary. In particular, I can afford to turn down requests to appear on TV; since the format of these shows is aimed at having either a pro- or anti-Maoist stand, there is little room for nuanced debates.

Consequences for research

What did this all mean for my teaching and research? Since these were years when I was also editing Contributions to Indian Sociology (2007–2011) and chairing my department (2010–2012), time was always short. While I never missed classes, I did not do justice to teaching. I also resigned as chair half way through my term. I did even less justice to research, turning down conference requests and reneging on deadlines. Court appearances and the work they require (drafting the briefs under guidance from the lawyers) are simply unpredictable. The matter has been scheduled for hearings more than 40 times in the last six years, but when hearings actually take place is a matter of chance. Many hearings have been delayed by requests for adjournments from the opposing counsels, who have used every strategy possible to tire us out. The case has been sustained only because our lawyers have been arguing pro bono, bringing considerable dedication and legal acumen to the case. The other litigants – like Ramachandra Guha and EAS Sarma – are based outside Delhi, and while they readily provide moral, monetary and intellectual support when asked, are not expected to be intimately involved in running the case.

In general, combining research with litigation and activism poses a long-term ethical dilemma. Activism often jeopardizes research; it also makes other academics take you less seriously. Personally, I value both choices: the choice to do silent research in difficult conflict situations and the choice to speak out. In 2002 after the Gujarat genocide, while I felt terrible for a while, I eventually went back to normal life. Here, my ‘normal life’ included frequent visits to Chhattisgarh and meetings with former informants turned friends. I had, therefore, almost no choice but to get involved – no more than one does if a member of one’s family is attacked.

While I have been threatened and surrounded by police personnel and vigilantes on a couple of visits, this is nothing compared to what my co-petitioners from Dantewada have had to face: Kartam Joga was in jail for more than two years on trumped up charges before being acquitted. Likewise, Manish Kunjam, who has led a remarkable fight against Salwa Judum on the ground, has received death threats and in 2010 the court had to order protection for him. My main angst has been feeling silenced as a sociologist. Various avenues of information have been closed off by my activist engagement, and the book I have long wanted to write on Salwa Judum has been put on hold because of the sensitivity of whatever I might say.

I cannot interview government perpetrators and travel as freely as I might wish in my ‘field area’. Long-term relationships with locals have been disrupted by the fear that my presence might be a danger to them. Conversely, I have not been able to do fieldwork with the Maoists either. The state’s only defence in court has been to call us Maoist fronts, for instance: ‘The tribal felt that the Petitioner No. 1 was keen sympathizer of Naxalite movements [sic]’ (State of Chhattisgarh, 2007); or ‘It is reiterated that the petition is to eulogize the Naxalite activity and not to combat Naxalite violence or to alleviate sufferings of people [sic]’ (State of Chhattisgarh, 2009). Our strategic response has been to establish our liberal bonafides by repeatedly distancing ourselves from the Naxalites, condemning them both in the writ petitions and in public statements whenever they carried out a major attack. ⁵ This has not endeared us to the Maoists, who accuse us of equating state and Maoist violence.

If the pressure of proving that I was not a ‘Maoist’ has dictated a particular public voice ⁶ that speaks ‘as if’ the state can be reformed by reason, conversely, the sharply drawn battle lines between the government and the victims has silenced my ability to critique activist campaigns with which I was not entirely comfortable. Speaking truth to the powerless or the ‘counterpowers’ is often much harder than shouting to the powerful, because it alienates us from people who are otherwise our allies (see also Gitlin, 2006: 152; Habib, 2008).

Institutional context

In India, being an activist academic is not unusual, just as within anthropology there is a long tradition of ‘engaged anthropology’ (see Current Anthropology, 1968; Huizer and Mannheim, 1979; Sanford and Angel-Ajani, 2006). Thus by both discipline and location, I am merely following tradition. In the first hearing of our litigation, Mukul Rohatgi, Chhattisgarh’s lawyer, shouted (he always shouts), ‘Why is a Delhi University professor taking up this case?’ When our counsel Ashok Desai pointed out that the well-known public interest litigation (PIL) in the Agra Asylum case was also taken up by a Delhi University professor, the famous legal scholar Upendra Baxi, there was an understanding laugh from the bench.

The university and my colleagues have never hindered my activism or public writing, for which I am grateful. Through the horror of the period in which I counted the number of dead by night, the everyday routines of teaching and endless faculty meetings felt like a safe haven. However, the Delhi University Sociology Department is known for its institutional conservatism; there, activism has traditionally been looked down upon and high theory exalted (creating a class system among students, between the theorists and the empiricists, quite apart from all those that already exist). A case like this was treated as strictly personal, not to be mentioned in any departmental setting, which is perhaps as it should be.

As Michael Burawoy has repeatedly pointed out (see Burawoy, 2005), public sociology requires more than individual will; it needs a professional setting in which its legitimacy can be recognized on the same terms as professional or policy sociology. How this is to be done in today’s fraught political times is a difficult question. The Institute of Economic Growth in Delhi, where I worked for a few years and which was set up in the ‘socialistic’ 1950s, states in its memorandum of association that one of the objects of the institution is to ‘conduct ad-hoc investigation at the request of governments, organizations of employers, workers and peasants or of other bodies or persons interested in promoting a study of economic questions’ (IEG, 1952). Fifty years on, no one seems to remember this clause, and most research is done at the behest of the government, the World Bank or other funding organizations. While it would be legitimate to mention a Bank-funded report advocating large dams or structural adjustment as part of one’s work in annual reports, bringing out a research pamphlet for an anti-dam peasant’s group or a worker’s union showing the problems of retrenchment would be dismissed as ‘mere activism’, showing how much academic respectability follows the pockets of the funder. But it is not clear that either type of contracted research should be a substitute for peer-reviewed academic research or professional sociology.

It is important to stop assuming, first, that the default political position of university scholars is left or liberal and, second, that the communities they engage with are always worthy and needy subaltern groups rather than right-wing, racist or xenophobic organizations. If public sociology involves using the prestige of professional sociology to make public interventions, this can work for people of all political persuasions. For instance, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was ruling at the centre between 1999 and 2004, they positioned their own ideologues in national educational bodies, such as the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), the University Grants Commission (UGC), the Indian Council for Social Science Research and the Indian Council for Historical Research. And even as I write this article, The New York Times has an article about the economist Glen Hubbard’s deployment of his professional standing as Dean of Columbia Business School for the Republican campaign and for the mutual fund industry, which has paid him honoraria in the hundreds of thousands (Segal, 2012).

To summarize, academics have often been overtaken – if temporarily – by the demands of citizenship. Yet, how do we decide when ‘emergency duty’ is required that would involve giving up research and what a suitable response is, as a citizen and as a sociologist? Does external involvement limit our ability to give time to students and address issues of class and affirmative action inside the classroom? Unlike scientists, the issues that we engage in as activists are also the issues that we research, and vice versa. If speaking to a wider public inhibits our ability to write and think as sociologists, is it still worth attempting to be ‘public’ sociologists? And if we do not want to end up as simply schizophrenic sociologists, one foot in either camp, how do we fashion a new sociological self?