Moreover, we all now know that it did not go well for Chicago – contributing to significant financial losses that are now being paid for by redundancies and admissions freezes in – where else? – its humanities and languages programmes.
Assumptions of relevance and utility have always had close connections to funding in Asia. As Hong-Kong based academics Rui Yang and Yujie Lin have revealed, support for humanities and social sciences in China is often trapped between the vertical (government-led) and horizontal (stakeholder-driven) tracks of research funding. With the vertical track prioritising national technical development goals and the horizontal track favouring immediate, practical solutions to real-world problems, many fields of the humanities and the social sciences fall through the cracks.
Nevertheless, the political restrictions on social science research are more deeply structural, as Jørgen Delman, a professor of China studies at the University of Copenhagen, has pointed out, “Article 39 of China’s Higher Education Law from 1998 stipulates unmistakably that the Presidents of Chinese universities are subject to the leadership of ‘grass-roots committees of the Chinese Communist Party’ in their institution.” A party secretary’s role in determining teaching and research programmes, therefore, is often seen as more influential than that of the presidents themselves.
The dissemination of Chinese research is also under political control, with various restrictions on publishing in – or even reading – some Western social science journals. This prevents Chinese scholars both from accessing controversial research and from publishing on politically sensitive subjects.
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India is similar to China in that here too the word research almost exclusively signifies developments in the natural sciences and technology. But the current lopsidedness in scholarship’s valuation goes far beyond the traditional hierarchy of economic importance between the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and technology.
The key difference now is political. It is possible to celebrate science and tech research as universal progress: the obvious accelerators of a modernity that is benevolent for all humanity. But in a country like India, even the most superficial attempt at honest research in the humanities and the social sciences must reveal inconvenient disparities in the benefits conveyed by technological progress: the violent historical inequalities, inequities and discrimination that still shape current realities and threaten to define the nation’s future.
That contemporary India is one of the most staggeringly unequal societies is immediately obvious even to the casual observer. To a social scientist of any methodological conscience, such inequities – most notably in caste, class, gender, and the entanglement of religion with all of those – come across as deep-seated and widespread across time and space, both territorially and through India’s global diaspora. Almost all spaces beyond the Hindi heartland – the separatist regions in the north and the north-east, and even oppressed tribal groups and castes in the prosperous south – strain both the idea of the nation and its sovereignty.
Of course, highlighting this huge diversity also underlines the miracle of this country’s existence as a nation in the first place, a miracle in which Indians can take just pride. But that pride is healthy and sustainable only in tandem with the recognition of the forces that disrupt it, and the deep histories of grievances, violations and discriminations from which they do so. But research into those issues cannot be flattering to rhetoricians of a nation eager to champion its image as the great spiritual leader and preacher to the world. It is also, incidentally, inconvenient to the current corporate stakeholders in STEM research, who are economically and politically invested in a rosily optimistic vision of India.
It wasn’t always this way. Independent India set out on its developmental trajectory with a keen focus on the production of research and pedagogy in technology and natural sciences, yes, but also in social sciences, as articulated in the pioneering vision of prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his cohort of like-minded policymakers.
This focus on knowledge and institution-building played a key role in the making of the new nation. Hence, alongside centres of research in the quantitative and natural sciences – such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the Indian Statistical Institute and the Indian Institute of Science – a range of institutions focusing primarily on the social sciences came to thrive. Examples include the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies; the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; the Centre for Policy Research; the Tata Institute of Social Sciences; and the Institute for Social and Economic Change. Key institutions of advanced postgraduate training and research also grew along similar trajectories, notably Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Delhi School of Economics.
Together, history and social sciences such as economics and political science – as well as, perhaps to a lesser degree, anthropology and sociology – came to build a vision of the nation, both domestically and internationally. Along the way, they trained multiple generations of academics, politicians and policymakers, while also preparing millions of graduates for the various public services examinations in which they figure prominently.
How fast all of this has changed since the BJP came to power in 2014! How quickly history became colonised by propaganda and ethno-religious ideologies, not only by trolls and politicians of questionable education but also by certain public intellectuals, is also disturbingly familiar to conscientious historians and citizens alike.
The malignant pedagogic and curricular consequences of this colonialism (a particularly ironic term in this context) are also well known. But all ironies renew in unprecedented ways. It is quite something to hear private and corporate stakeholders in higher education join eulogists of initiatives such as the government’s “Make in India” manufacturing-boosting initiative in celebrating narratives of research excellence (even though they are mostly that, narratives) that are identified exclusively with science and technology – even as research in the contemporary social sciences is defunded and promptly disowned by the very institutions that produce it the moment it reveals unpleasant truths about the shining nation.
It is difficult for honest research initiative to survive in a political climate that refuses to hear difficult truths. No centre for political data, no centre for policy research, no critical colloquium on resource and rights can exist in an ecosystem that shrieks the glory of research as synonymous with the glory of the nation.
It would be stupid and self-destructive for any university researcher to question the celebration of science and technology research, especially in a developing postcolonial nation. But what is troubling is how this aspiration for research excellence in the STEM fields now works in tandem with the active suppression of genuine research in the academic humanities and particularly the social sciences. That is what bends us towards this scepticism.
In the end, the most damaging consequence of the polarisation of support for the hard and the social sciences may lie in the socio-political entanglements of technology itself. Damaging enough has been the celebration of mass smartphone empowerment in India without caveats about data-colonialism by cloud-capitalists – or the government’s violation of data privacy. And that is to say nothing of the communal destruction wreaked by uninformed “WhatsApp wisdom” and doctored videos.
That wealth generated by AI will deepen inequalities even in the post-industrial West has been pointed out by leading scientists such as Geoffrey Hinton. What havoc will it wreak in India’s nightmarishly segregated society? Bot-bias stands to magnify many times over the endless hierarchies and discriminations that define it. But only a well-supported tradition of conscientious social science research will be able to track and highlight this.
Can the nation really be expected to celebrate a research culture that glorifies research in science and technology while suppressing the unpleasant but vital-to-hear home truths brought to light by the social sciences?
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Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony.
