It has now been more than three years since I plunged headlong into that ‘cesspool’ where all of our country’s ‘wastage’ is to be found floating – I mean its English literature programs. Occasionally, you see the flotsam of a once-vaunted and esteemed ambition – the desire to be a poet, say, thwarted by life’s little practicalities – and nod at it in a manner befitting a sacrificial soldier. But three years is not a short span – long enough to make you doubt your predilections, and then circle back to them stronger than ever – so I have developed something of a thick skin by now against any possible diatribes against the humanities (to take a slightly broader sweep). Still, there are times when a nasty comment comes your way, and upends the whole foundation of ‘lies’ on which you have based your life. The silence and sighs that then follow are testimony to the neglect in which the humanities today wallow.
My own little time bomb was ticked off one evening at a friend’s house during the vacations. The occasion was this: he had just landed a big-ticket job at a tech software giant, and in the aftermath of the orgy of self-congratulation, he had had some of us over for tea and snacks. During the course of the evening, several little grenades were hurled at the humanities, one of which came in the form of a question why I (the only representative of the humanities there) hadn’t applied for a job as an English teacher at a middle school – the pay, my friends assured me, wouldn’t be that good, but what the heck – at least I’d have a job! Another said to me, with a snide smile, whether I was still learning elementary grammar during my postgraduation in English. A third concluded, with an all-knowing grin, that it was my dream to be a poet and wander through the Indian streets begging for alms. At that, the whole company burst into guffaws, and even I had to admit that it didn’t sound half so bad – after all, if you leave the part about begging for alms, it sounds like the very definition of a flâneur! Which is quite a prepossessing thought.
Nevertheless, the temperature had risen, and it didn’t help that the rest of the evening wore away with everybody lathering my friend with tokens of praise and envy. There was nothing new in all this, but I kept feeling a strange sense of exclusion: why was I being hounded just for following my inclinations? Was there anything inherently wrong with it? I felt a kind of desperate shame, bordering on hostility, in laying claim to what was mine by right – my choice of vocation. Is that what the Samsa family must have felt when they thought they were ‘intruding’ upon their three boarders in The Metamorphosis? A recurrent feeling of insecurity in a space that is meant to be comfortable? I could only stand back and watch as my friends erected the familiar binary around me – the binary between the sciences and the humanities – and I fell into it, like a hunted animal. It was strange; I felt like I’d just witnessed a horrid event that I would have been better off reading in the newspapers the next day. For a long time after that, I couldn’t bear to see my friend. When he left the city a few days later, I was more than glad to be rid of him.
As often happens, the whole episode left a disagreeable soup-stain on my mind, yanking me back from my ‘comfort zone’ as an English literature student. Yes, the onslaught weathered by a literature student may be of a very particular kind, but those suffered by other humanities students aren’t any less jarring. Three years ago, I had asked myself the Prufrockian question, ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ and the answer had been an unequivocal yes. I wasn’t sure I had the same certainty now. My idealism was fast evaporating, like tablets of camphor dissolving into air. It wasn’t just that practical considerations (like ‘employability’) were gnawing away at me; it was the more dismal realization that even after years of dedication and a relatively good amount of success, I, as a humanities student, would never be able to command the same degree of respect that a STEM graduate would. There is something eerily disturbing about the way humanities students are looked down upon today, as if they had committed a peccadillo deserving special punishment. Of course, in many ways, taking up the humanities is itself a minor crime: you are deliberately straying from the path supposedly destined for you (maybe a career in IT?), and consigning yourself to a ‘useless vocation’ that supposedly holds ‘thought’ above ‘practice’. In doing so, you inevitably become a burden on the system – a system which recognizes terms like ‘employability’ and ‘vocational-training’ as superior to ‘abstract thinking’ and ‘self-reflexivity’.
In short, in the eyes of the system, you are leading yourself to slaughter.
Which is not a very happy thought. But then again, this is the same system that force-feeds the binary down your gullet. It is like the police officer in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) who says to Deckard at the beginning of the movie: “If you’re not a cop, you’re little people.” Zero sum game: the long-distinguished policy tool of every systemic oppression. It either browbeats you into servility, or tries to push you to the boundaries, where it expects you to subsist ‘civilly’ without raking up a brand-new fracas. Yet it is a curious phenomenon that we in the humanities always have a way of stirring up a hornet’s nest wherever we go. We just tend to ask a lot of questions – and this somehow miffs a lot of people. This propensity to keep questioning is sometimes (mis)construed as mischief, or worse still, branded as conspiracy – which is ironic, considering that we are the ones who have, systematically, been edged away to the margins of mainstream discourse. And while scholars all over the world may keep talking of the ‘death-knell of the humanities,’ this ominous tolling may actually be hastened in the wake of the right-wing ripples that are seething everywhere around the globe, from Donald Trump’s fund-cuts for major universities to the all-too-Indian tussle between embittered arts universities and the State. More than anything, it is the humanities that take the biggest hit when oppressive governments take control. Engaging in critical enquiry and self-reflection – which are the mainstay of humanist thought – suddenly make you liable to persecution. And today, this constant persecution is faced by not merely ‘students’ of the humanities, but also by artists, scholars, writers, and any votaries of free expression belonging to whichever field. De gestibus non est disputandum has been cut short to non est disputandum.
And once again, the binary reveals itself – but this time, in a different avatar. It comes up as a sort of weighing scale in which the humanities and the sciences can coexist, but only at the expense of each other. When the one is lifted, the other inevitably sinks.
Latterly, only one of them has been rising meteorically.
This uncanny little weighing-scale becomes yet another instrument of coercion used by the system. And the rifts thereby created are so deep-seated that they emerge at uncommon points of time – such as childhood or adolescence – in wildly disparate, but still recognizable, forms. I still recall the extraordinary pleasure with which I perused my undergraduate English syllabus a few years ago, before I was about to embark on my bachelor’s degree. Back then, my naïve (though not unconditioned) brain was in the habit of equating study with unwillingness. I was also a ferocious reader (as against that ubiquitous species, the voracious reader), and seeing some of my favourite works of fiction featured in that syllabus was, to put it mildly, unbelievable. It was like a lightning bolt from up above in the heavens where God lived, sanctioning (and sanctifying) my choice of career. It was what social media pundits would call ‘peak validation’.
Yet the interesting thing is, I couldn’t get my mind around it for a long time. Reared in the belief that one’s hobbies and one’s vocation must always remain separate, I was bewildered to find that I could pursue a career mixing the two. This meant that: (a) I had had a liberal upbringing, the results of which were fast becoming evident, and (b) I was no longer part of the ‘herd.’ Not surprisingly, my behaviour began to alter because of this. I had, in a way I still marvel at, been able to play fast and loose with the system. I had evaded its barbed-wire-declarations enjoining me to take up the sciences, and was revelling in the coconut-tree-shade of the humanities. But the I-study-what-I-love-and-I-love-what-I-study braggadocio became such a hallmark of my personality that, at one point, I had to discard it – people were beginning to call me insolent! And so, I gulped down my glee, and adopted a more modest posture. Which is as it should be.
But I’m afraid this unsolicited confession opens up a rather rotten can of worms. We are a generation that has grown up believing that what one likes and what one studies must inevitably be at odds with each other, that what is ‘practical’ is employable (and therefore ‘superior’), and what is pleasurable must always remain a hobby, a distraction, a sort of divertissement for when you’re ‘taking a break’. No doubt the constant refrain ‘work-play-eat-repeat’ goads us into believing it; but in doing so, it makes us embrace a binary that never really existed – that ‘work’ and ‘play’ are opposites. Of course, successive waves of capitalism have so thoroughly convinced us of the truth of this binary that we tend to take it for granted today, but a little looking-over-the-shoulder-at-history can show us that there have, indeed, been challenges to do this, too.
More than a hundred years ago, the British poet and socialist William Morris had a similar idea. Why did a particular kind of work always produce alienation for the worker? Why were some forms of work more pleasurable than others? In his 1884 lecture ‘Useful Work vs. Useless Toil’, Morris makes a rather interesting claim: ‘But a man at work making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.’ He goes on to say: ‘Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates.’
That is visionary.
Morris would go on to found his own design and wallpaper firm, the famous Morris, Marshal, Faulkner & Co. that sought to create a distinct new aesthetic in England through its hand-drawn printing techniques. Perhaps something of that visionary attitude is visible in this enterprise, where hand-made textiles designs could come to symbolize a commingling of work and pleasure (as envisioned above). ‘Creation’ could, somehow, be commercialized. Yet it is an entirely different story that, in doing so, Morris came up with one of the most exclusive art decoration companies in the world, whose numerous products were all but unaffordable to the common man, and that despite his exertions to unite work and pleasure, all he could do was hand us over a vision, not a solution. [Which takes us back to the oft-voiced criticism of the humanities: that they are good at generating ideas, but seriously lacking in practice. A case in point is the Internet’s reaction to Dr. Ally Louks, of Cambridge, whose work on the politics of smell in English literature was lambasted as being ‘useless’ and ‘impractical’. Not surprisingly, the discourse also took a swipe at the humanities for their tendency to engage with topics like these. For those curious, Dr. Louks’s PhD dissertation was titled Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.] The concrete reality of mass production – that it was popular because it was accessible, and accessible because it was cheap – couldn’t be tided over. It remained dominant, and it has remained dominant ever since.
Yet the important thing is, he had recognized a gap in his society which very few were willing to acknowledge or ponder over. The same fallacy guides us today. We work in order to earn in order to enjoy. The same, laborious chain continues up to the very top of the hierarchy, and keeps getting replicated in our choice of culture, our entertainment, and our products. This creates a situation of huis clos – no exit – and blow-by-blow, our minds start hitting roadblocks whenever they try to escape, or come up with a new idea. This utilitarian dystopia is what the system has largely envisaged for us – a world of infinite replication, of obedience and conformity, where behavioural trends are sharply monitored and any signs of uniqueness promptly snipped. In this world, everybody’s choice of entertainment starts appearing identical – until you realize that it is so by design. This kind of dissolution of the self is partly what Kierkegaard warned against when he wrote, in The Sickness Unto Death, that ‘the greatest danger, that of losing one’s own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc., is sure to be noticed’ (in Walter Lowrie’s translation).
What follows? Fatalistic resignation? Or cantankerous revolt? The probability is, neither – or a combination of both. As the collective conscience solidifies itself into a hard, procrustean, STEM-driven mentality, it is important for us in the humanities to remember why, exactly, we are engaged in this battle – and to do so with grit and ardour. After all, as Nietzsche said in his preface to The Twilight of the Idols: ‘To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than cheerfulness?’
What, indeed? I sometimes think we humanities folks are like the grave-digger in Hamlet. We are the nameless many, digging through the bones of the (often) high and mighty; and in the process, we may often stumble upon an unpleasant discovery or two. Yet we go on, heedless of the danger, because we know that we have a rather solemn duty to discharge. We may be tempted to step back from it – because it is an excursion into the dark – but we still ‘undertake’ it with the most chilling nonchalance. We try to tell the truth and we try to make sure it’s not slanted.
In the end, it is all about recovery.
Aditya Shiledar is a writer and researcher currently pursuing his postgraduate degree in English Literature from the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad. Perennially hopscotching between books and cities, Aditya is attracted by the mundane and the interstitial, and likes to call himself a ‘journalist of lost aims.’ His writings have appeared in The Hitavada and NCPA’s ON Stage, among others.