Globalisation and new technology have changed the ways that knowledge is made, disseminated and consumed. At the push of a button, one can find articles or sources from all over the world. Yet the global knowledge economy is still marked by its history.

A process of making knowledge in the South is underway. klerik78/Shutterstock

The former colonial nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the rich countries of Europe and North America which are collectively called the global North (normally considered to include the West and the first world, the North contains a quarter of the world’s population but controls 80% of income earned) – are still central in the knowledge economy. But the story is not one simply of Northern dominance. A process of making knowledge in the South is underway.

European colonisers encountered many sophisticated and complex knowledge systems among the colonised. These had their own intellectual workforces, their own environmental, geographical, historical and medical sciences. They also had their own means of developing knowledge. Sometimes the colonisers tried to obliterate these knowledges.

In other instances colonisers appropriated local knowledge, for instance in agriculture, fisheries and mining. Sometimes they recognised and even honoured other knowledge systems and intellectuals. This was the case among some of the British in India, and was the early form of “Orientalism”, the study of people and cultures from the East.

In the past few decades, there’s been more critique of global knowledge inequalities and the global North’s dominance. There have also been shifts in knowledge production patterns; some newer disciplines have stepped away from old patterns of inequality.

These issues are examined in a new book, Knowledge and Global Power: Making new sciences in the South (published by Wits University Press), which I co-authored with Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell and Joao Maia. The focus is especially on those areas where old patterns are not being replicated, so the study chooses climate change, gender and HIV and AIDS as three new areas of knowledge production in which new voices from the South might be prominent.

Local knowledge for local purposes

The critique levelled against inequalities in global knowledge production takes several forms. One is “post-colonial theory” – theories inspired from India and the Arab world that analyse unequal power relations in the period after the formal end of colonialism, focusing on the subordination or marginalisation of populations formerly living in colonial contexts.

The “de-colonial” movement is another example. It explores ways of exposing modernist assumptions and developing new ways of thinking that cut loose from knowledge inequalities. It draws its lessons from the colonisation of Latin America.

Wits University Press

There has also been a call from some for a return to indigenous knowledge. But here the consequences have not always been happy, as seen in South Africa’s attempt to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic by using local healing practices. Former president Thabo Mbeki saw traditional medicine as the antithesis of an exploitative Western pharmaceutical industry. He rejected the use of antiretroviral drugs rather than making these approaches mutually supporting. It was a devastating mistake that cost as many as 330 000 people their lives.

Scholars like Paulin Hountondji from Benin emphasise the active processes of knowledge production that arise in colonised societies and which have a capacity to speak beyond them. The emphasis in this concept is on communication between and within knowledge systems, rather than on separation.

Producing knowledge for local purposes, rather than for export into a global knowledge economy, has long been part of the work of intellectuals in colonial and post-colonial societies. This may be for activist purposes, such as the nationalist histories written to support the struggles for independence. Or it may respond to problems that hardly exist in the global North, such as the social issues in post-colonial mega-cities. Recognising local agendas for knowledge formation is important even in the mainstream knowledge economy.

And yet, arguably, the authority of Northern-centred knowledge formations is growing.

Knowledge production

This is where the idea of Southern theory emerges. Coined by one of the book’s authors, Professor Raewyn Connell, this refers to social thought from the societies of the global South.

Alternative approaches to knowledge exist and are being produced. A wealth of new knowledge has emerged from colonised peoples, from settler populations, and from post-colonial societies grappling with dependence, violence and new forms of exploitation.

The demonstrated existence of Northern dominance and influence does not imply Southern passivity, nor uncontested domination. Knowledge production is now negotiated, and creative ways of participating are devised.

Southern knowledge workers still have to work within a global knowledge labour system which endorses, for example, the power of publishing houses, top-ranked universities and highly cited researchers. But they are also able to exercise control over their own labours. They do this by creating local research programmes, founding research centres, and linking research to public policy that addresses local problems in distinctive ways.

Among knowledge workers in the South, Southern Tier work forces, there is evidence of change and contestation, the development of local knowledges, and complex interweaving of Northern paradigms and Southern Tier experiences. The global North’s share of scientific publications has declined recently, and the Southern Tier has participated in the changing balance. These changes show that the structure of the global economy of knowledge is not static.

The value of connection

The research for this book found that many of respondents value connections around the global periphery. Brazilians seek links with researchers across Latin America and in Africa; South Africans connect across their continent; Australians develop links in the Asia-Pacific region.

The connections that have already been made show a practical basis for the logic of connecting knowledge projects between North and South and between South and South. In a neoliberal context marked by increasing cutbacks in research funding, it will have to be intellectual workers themselves, and social movements in the global South, who push for new forms of solidarity in global knowledge production that contribute to development and freedom, peace and democracy.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Image: Ashoke Chakrabarty

The formal adoption of the neoliberal reforms programme by the government of India (GOI) in 1991 had a far more pervasive impact on the education system and policy than is usually recognised. The commercialisation and marketisation of education put it outside the grasp of the majority of India’s population, 78% of whom were living on less than twenty rupees per day (Arjun Sengupta Committee report), and altered the concepts of knowledge, education and its curricular content.

The democratic deficit was the most obvious feature of the National Policy of Education (NPE 86-92).It introduced non-formal education (NFE), as a low-cost alternative to be treated as `equivalent to schooling’ for the working poor, the marginalized and children in “difficult circumstances”. When the Supreme Court in its 1993 judgement (Unnikrishnan vs the State of Andhra Pradesh) stated that the constitutional Directive Principle 45 should be read in conjunction with Article 21, it established that the right to education flowed from the fundamental right to life thereby converting “the obligation created by the article (45) into an enforceable right”. This required the 86^th Constitutional amendment in 2002, which was tailor-made to coincide with neoliberal dictates to reduce public spending on education. Two significant limitations to the “enforceable right” restricted it to children between 6 to 14 years of age and provided for education only “as the State may, by law, determine”. The limitations allowed a retreat from the original constitutional responsibility and denied millions of children access to quality education. The RTE Act 2009 legalised the inequity.

A genuine right to education law would have encompassed completely free and compulsory Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) and, following the adoption of the 10+2 system, extended up to Class XII thus covering all children from 0 to 18 years.

A genuine right to education law would have encompassed completely free and compulsory Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) and, following the adoption of the 10+2 system, extended up to Class XII thus covering all children from 0 to 18 years.

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It must be emphasised that this is no left-wing revolutionary demand. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, in industrialising nations the responsibility for providing education had been taken up by modern states that arose with the rise and consolidation of capitalism to fulfill the productive and `democratic’ needs of Capital for a better educated and `free’ labour force. Engels had upheld the rationale of the demand during a speech delivered at Elberfeld in February 1845: The “general education of all children without exception at the expense of the state – an education which is equal for all and continues until the individual is capable of emerging as an independent member of society. . . would be only an act of justice. . . for clearly, every man has the right to the fullest development of his abilities and society wrongs individuals twice over when it makes ignorance a necessary consequence of poverty.” (Marx–Engels Collected Works Vol. 4. P 253).

Modern states regard education as a legal duty, not merely as a right: “parents are required to send their children to school, children are required to attend school and the state is required to enforce compulsory education.”

Emphasising that no country had successfully ended child labour without first making education compulsory, American political theorist Myron Weiner also noted that Asian states which made education compulsory – Japan in 1872, the two Koreas, Taiwan and China after WWII – were all poor when they undertook the task. Their development was founded on successfully taking up “the legal obligation of the state to provide an adequate number of schools, appropriately situated and to ensure that no child fails to attend school.” Modern states regard education as a legal duty, not merely as a right: “parents are required to send their children to school, children are required to attend school and the state is required to enforce compulsory education.” The state is bound to protect children from the compulsions on impoverished parents and from would-be exploiters. (“India’s Case Against Compulsory Education”, Seminar, 413 (January). P 83-86)

Independent India’s first Education Commission (1964-66), the DS Kothari Commission, examined the failure to achieve the Constitutional goal of education for all up to the age of 14 years by 1960. It recommended far-reaching structural changes for setting up a national system of free and compulsory education through schools of comparable quality. This could not be left to private institutions like the elite schools “transplanted in India by British administrators and we have clung to it so long because it happened to be in tune with the traditional hierarchical structure of our society. Whatever its place in past history maybe, such a system has no valid place in the new democratic and socialistic society we desire to create.” (1.38)
 
The report strongly advocated the establishment of state-funded common neighbourhood schools with a socially, culturally and economically diverse student body as the authentic institution of a pedagogically sound and egalitarian national system of education which would “provide `good’ education to all children because sharing life with the common people is, in our opinion, an essential ingredient of good education.” (10.19). Echoing its logic, The Report of the Committee of Members of Parliament on Education (1967) asserted that “the unhealthy social segregation that now takes place between the schools for the rich and those for the poor should be ended; and the primary schools should be the common schools of the nation by making it obligatory on all children, irrespective of caste, creed, community, religion, economic conditions or social status, to attend the primary school in their neighbourhood. This sharing of life among the children of all social strata will strengthen the sense of being one nation which is an essential ingredient of good education.”(Government of India 1967: p 2).  This principle has recently been reiterated in a landmark judgement of the Allahabad High Court (August 18, 2015).

Achieving universal access to education was recognised as not just a question of reaching a numerical target. It could not be divorced from its democratic content and purpose.
 
Achieving universal access to education was recognised as not just a question of reaching a numerical target. It could not be divorced from its democratic content and purpose. However, Indian capital had aligned with sections of the feudal landowning elite and accommodated with Brahmanical ideology which sanctioned harshly exploitative caste divisions among the toiling masses. This allowed both classes to gain economically and politically but it was at the expense of the ruin of the majority of peasants, artisans, tribals, and working people. Having failed to break out of the vicious cycle of inequality the goal of universalising school education could never be achieved. The education system inevitably sank into deep crisis which was aggravated each time a policy decision further narrowed access with multi-track discriminatory arrangements (alternate schools, multi-grade teaching, education guarantee centres, use of contractual and para-teachers, the RTE Act 2009).

The present regime’s proposed National Policy of Education 2016 (NEP 2016) promises to accelerate this process. Amendments to the already flawed RTE 2009 will allow for `alternate’ schools which do not `require’ the basic infrastructural and pedagogical norms laid down in the Act, limit the no-detention policy to lower primary (class V) and vocationalise the elementary curriculum in targeted areas. Dove-tailed into the Skill Development program and the amended child labour law which now permits under14 year-olds to work in `family enterprises’, this `education’ policy will reinforce caste distinctions and ensure that the majority of India’s children from oppressed and marginalised sections will be condemned to a childhood of labour.

This outcome is not accidental. It follows from the neoliberal policies of marketisation of education as a ‘private good’, and of knowledge as a tradable `commodity’ or `service’, that have been pursued by successive governments for more than two decades. Since the 1970’s `neo-liberalism’ has emerged as the `solution’ favoured by international finance capital to recover from the severity of its recurring economic crises. Public funds are diverted through Public Private Partnerships (PPP) to allow “opening up” of the entire range of human activities to penetration by private capital. This imposes a heavy burden on the most vulnerable sections of society and has a very negative impact on education, health, employment and job security, food security, housing and provision of public utilities. Production and consumption by the masses are kept under tight control through “austerity measures” and the modern `welfare’ state of the 20^th Century is transformed. Peoples control over their own lives shrinks as corporations take-over decision-making in the name of “efficiency” and “professional management”.

However, unlike knowledge, commodities are produced primarily for exchange for profit rather than for any intrinsic value. In highly developed systems of commodity production like capitalism all market exchanges are affected by scarcities, monopolies, manipulated tastes and more or less accidental variations in supply and demand. Thus the `commodification of knowledge’ would appear to be a contradiction in terms unless knowledge is degraded to the `acquisition of skills’ required for `services’ that are available in the market.

The entire terminology of the NEP 2016 is devised within the framework of skill acquisition. “Competencies” and “outcomes” are units to be monitored, measured, graded and readied for the market. The purpose of education is the grooming of ‘human resource’ to create a work-force that will enter the market-place as and when supply and demand movements are favourable. When they are unfavourable, during periods of recession and slow growth as they are now, this work-force will become capital’s essential buffer, the “reserve army of labour” that keeps wages low, jobs contractual, and workers afraid to unionize and fight for their legitimate democratic rights.

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The failure to universalise elementary and secondary education was used to propagate the idea of higher education as an `elite’ privilege and a `non-merit good’ undeserving of public subsidies. From 1998 institutions of higher education (IHE) were advised to “raise their own resources by raising the fee levels, encouraging private donations and by generating revenues through consultancy and other activities.”The millennium year 2000 was a water-shed year for the higher education sector in India. The Ambani-Birla Report, entitled A Policy Framework for Reforms in Education, was authored by prominent industrialists and produced by then Prime Minister Vajpayee’s council on trade and industry! It explicitly stated that privatisation and commercialisation were the chief instruments for reform in higher education and that the `user-pays’ principle would ensure profits for investors. With its companion Model Act (2003) prepared by UGC, it demanded restructuring of higher education on the model of market-oriented enterprises promoting corporate values. Shelved because of strong opposition from academicians and teachers and students unions, its basic features continue to provide the framework within which higher education policies are conceived and sought to be legislated today.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) made their entry into the arena of higher education. Prof. Nigvekar, then UGC chairperson, articulated GOI’s position that education had become “a tradeable product and knowledge has become commodified”. In countries like India, GATS regulations will negatively impact educational access, impose one model of private, commercial and import-oriented education, weaken national systems due to foreign competition and effect domestic regulation and authority. Yet, despite growing opposition, an offer made in 2005 to put higher education on the WTO-GATS table as a tradable service was not withdrawn at the recent Tenth Ministerial Conference held in December 2015 at Nairobi.

Commercialisation of education provides autonomy to capital by opening up a market for investment as knowledge is now a key component in economic development but its impact on the academic community is decidedly anti-democratic and has grave consequences for the very conception of education as a public good. The privately-borne high cost of education shrinks the range and influence of subjects and courses that are not directly linked to the demands of national and international capital markets which generate the maximum jobs and the biggest salaries. Neoliberalism has altered the focus of syllabi from values of critical-thinking to “skills” such as “teamwork,” “communication” and “leadership”. The language and ethic of the corporate world sends out the wrong message that education must equip individuals with marketable skills, and that the ultimate goal is “productivity”. Unfortunately, influenced by policy makers and the media, even students, parents, and society at large have begun to accept education as a “private good” so that both `providers’ and `consumers’ adopt a market perspective by viewing education as a means to recoup investments made either in providing or in acquiring it.

All over the world disciplines and areas of research that are foundational to innovative systems of knowledge depend significantly on state funding and philanthropic support. Replacing this with profit-oriented enterprise means that these disciplines suffer deterioration and the critical and transformational purpose of educational institutions declines. As they become more financially autonomous but less socially accountable `producers of graduates and research outputs’, the most important objective of these `entrepreneurial institutions’ is to generate profits.

Education serves a broad public purpose as it critically conceptualises values and goals for national development and for strengthening civil society. Both are necessary components of Indian society’s unfinished agenda of democratic transformation.

Education serves a broad public purpose as it critically conceptualises values and goals for national development and for strengthening civil society. Both are necessary components of Indian society’s unfinished agenda of democratic transformation. The impact of neoliberal policy on educational institutions in general, but particularly on IHEs, threatens their very existence as environments fostering the process of “educating oneself”. The `excellence’ of education is measured by exorbitant fees because market logic dictates that those who pay more, get more; those who pay less, should expect less and those who lack resources should simply be brushed aside.

“To limit knowledge to what will actually be put into practice . . . is the deliberate reduction of one’s being to the condition of a cog in the techno-economic machine.” (Michel Henry, Barbarism, 2012. P 121). Market orientation encourages certain qualities in individuals but may be indifferent, or even opposed to the general development and articulation of critical faculties. With today’s `common-sense’ reflecting the neoliberal redefinition of the individual, no longer a productive social being or citizen but an economically autonomous fiction, the `consumer’, this obvious truth can become blurred.

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On campuses across the country, protests against privatisation, curbing democratic rights of students and faculty, and in support of social justice have been called “anti-national” by the present regime. But here we are confronted with opposing concepts of nation and nationhood. The first, generated through collective struggle, finds expression in the civil liberties and equal rights protected by the Constitution. These liberties and rights are enabling conditions for an on-going politics of democratically negotiated nationalism.

The opposing Hindutva concept is a communal-patriarchal construct, an ideological imposition that seeks to discipline the `other’ by communalization, marginalisation, dispossession. Symbolized as ‘Bharat Mata’, the nation is identified as a woman in need of defense. Her Hindu `sons’ have the `duty’ to defend her. Within this Hindu majoritarian conception, `others’ are second class citizens restricted by the Will of a self-appointed governing class, the `Hindus’. But `Hindus’ themselves are defined as those who exemplify the ideology of the Sangh Parivar! The `nationalism’ of the Sangh Parivar is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-constitutional.

Conformism and a slavish mentality bred by indoctrination in a particular ideology is sought to be cultivated through the curriculum with no space for critical reasoning and rigorous examination to arrive at truths or search for alternate avenues of knowledge.

On July 27, 2016 HRD minister Javadekar held a closed-door six-hour long meeting with the RSS and its affiliates including ABVP to discuss how NEP 2016 could “instill nationalism, pride and ancient Indian values in modern education.” Conformism and a slavish mentality bred by indoctrination in a particular ideology is sought to be cultivated through the curriculum with no space for critical reasoning and rigorous examination to arrive at truths or search for alternate avenues of knowledge. This is exactly the conception of knowledge promoted by votaries of the instrumentalist view of commercialised education. The degree holder has to be packaged in a way that conforms to the requirements of the market. The training which is `valued’ makes workers fiercely competitive in relation to fellow workers, but docile in dealings with superiors.

The communalisation of education, like the commercialisation and commodification of education generates an anti-democratic socio-political environment in which neoliberal capitalism flourishes. Strong fascistic tendencies surface in governments that aggressively advocate neoliberal economic policies.

(Madhu Prasad is an activist and founder member of the All India Forum for Right to Education (AIFRTE). This article was written for the Independence Day issue of People's Democracy and is being reproduced with permission from the author)
 
 

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The issue of hijab, its various implications and the politics sur-rounding it, has become a globally polarising issue. Whether in France or in Turkey, between Muslims and others and between liberal Muslims and traditional Muslims, the hijab has become a site for the cultural struggle between Islam and modernity and between contemporary and traditional interpretations of Islam.

The hijab is to some a symbol of Islam’s ascendance in the world while for others it is a reminder of the intransigent Muslim resistance to things that first emerge in the West – modernity, secularism, feminism, liberalism and globalism. For some Muslims in France it is a symbol of their resistance to French cultural occupation over Arabs and Muslims in France. For Islamists in Turkey it is an important means to preserving the Islamic heritage of Turkey from secular fundamentalism. For non-Muslim observers it is often an introduction to an Islam that has misogynistic proclivities.

No matter what the perspective one employs, the fact remains that the hijab is an instrument of segregation and containment.

The hijab in its philosophical sense marks the Muslim woman for separation and for "different" treatment in all aspects of life; the most egregious being the moral differentiation it engenders. Muslims who claim that the hijab is an instrument that compels society to treat women in a special, even exalted way (in terms of security and respect) do not work to ensure that the society has special affirmative laws in place that will guarantee equal outcomes for women, since the hijab ultimately undermines equal opportunity.

But the sartorial hijab and its attendant social practices of segregation, disenfranchisement and marginalisation of women is but a symptom of a more profound and civilisationally debilitating form of hijab that is practised by contemporary Muslim society. What is significant and must be confronted with vigour is the ‘epistemological hijab’ that "good" Muslims insist on imposing on "good" Muslim women. The epistemological hijab is the traditional barrier that exists between women and Islamic sources. Women have played a marginal role in the interpretation of Islam and articulation of the laws and rules that are forced upon them. The epistemological hijab – the barrier between women and Islamic sources – has fundamentally rendered the articulation and enforcement of Islamic laws undemocratic. This undemocratic tradition privileges men and exploits women. Its reconstitution is important and more so now than before.

In the post-colonial era, a strange paradox has captivated the global Muslim community. The nearly 100-year-old Islamic revivalist movement that is singularly responsible for the global significance of Islam has been driven by lay intellectuals. Consider the following key figures of Islamic revival, Jamaluddin Afghani, Hassan Al Banna, Syed Qutb, Ali Shariata, Muhammad Iqbal, Abul A’la Maududi, Khurshid Ahmed, Malik Bin Nabi, Rachid Ghannouchi, were all lay intellectuals, many educated in the West. Many of them were of course exposed to traditional Islamic sciences but none of them was an Islamic jurist.

But for some inexplicable reason, the ascendant Islam today is highly legalistic and Shariah-obsessed. Islam in the mind of many Muslims is nothing but Shariah – what it really means in operational terms is that the beauty, the virtues and the meaning of Islam is confined to the rather mundane domain of medieval Islamic legalist discourse – fiqh – which lacks the intellectual depth of falsafa (Islamic philosophy), the aesthetics and the mystery of kalam (Islamic theology) and the spirituality and charisma of tasawwuf (Islamic mysticism).

We live today in an era of Islamic banking – Shariah-compliant transactions – and halal hamburgers; we ponder over the legality of eating marshmallows and deliberate over the propriety of women shaking hands with men. Mind you, all serious legal matters such as, for example, state-military relations, international transactions, have very little input from Islam or Muslim jurists since the Muslim world merely follows the conventions of western/international laws. Islamic legalism is itself confined primarily to issues of personal matters only.

This peculiar legalism, which has colonised Islam and the Muslim conscience, is a product of the vulnerabilities of the Muslim man who has tried to cope with his own insecurities in a world dominated by other men. Muslim men today are not sovereign beings. Other men dominate their world. The only area where they exercise absolute sovereignty is over the tiny domain called Islamic law. Here they realise their manhood. They glorify themselves, grant themselves exotic privileges and assure themselves of their power by exercising it on their women. This exercise of power is realised by complete exclusion of women from participating in the process of deriving and interpreting Islamic rulings from the sources.

There is perhaps no other legal tradition extant today where one has no say in the articulation of laws that govern one’s entire life. Muslim women have very little if no role in the process of developing Islamic fiqh. Even historically, men and men alone have developed all the madhahib – schools of jurisprudence, and legal principles, even those that deal with the most private aspects of female existence. Thus Islamic legalism has descended as a shroud on the Muslim woman, covering her very essence from the world, disconnecting her from her own reality, depriving her of the right to understand and interpret her own being and disabling her from being able to navigate her own life. Islamic legalism fundamentally veils the Muslim woman’s consciousness. Frankly, it dehumanises women.

Muslims scholars and philosophers of every tradition maintain that the essence of humanity is either our moral compass or our reason or both. By preventing Muslim women from exercising their reason to derive the moral laws by which they live, Islamic legalism denies them the most human of all exercises, using our reason to become capable of making moral judgements. In a way, Islamic legalism steals women’s god given humanity from them.

Islamists are fond of repeating that in Islam god is sovereign since he and he alone has the right to make laws. Unfortunately, this is a very superficial understanding of Islam and fails to recognise the distinction between revealed principles (wahy) and human product (fiqh). They obfuscate the distinctions between the two and call it law (Shariah). By insisting that the opinions and arguments of long dead medieval jurists are actually divine law, Islamists make jurists the god of Muslim women and introduce a new and oppressive partition/veil between the women and their real god. In some cultures this divine status of men over women is recognised since men are sometimes referred to as the "majazi khuda" (manifest god) of women.

If Muslim women wish to regain their humanity and gain an equal moral status with men, which is not denied to them in principle but only in practice (within Islamic society), they must tear the partition that separates them from their right to understand and interpret Islamic sources and act upon their own understanding.

They must tear asunder this epistemological hijab imposed by Islamic legalism that stands between them and their god. Until then all discussions about the cultural and physical will remain superficial and contained within the context of the masculine logic that currently exercises such supreme sovereignty over Islamic principles and its derivative laws. 

www.ijtihad.org

Archived from Communalism Combat, November-December 2007 Year 14    No.126, Gender Jihad, Cover Story 4

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