How a university stint in Nehruvian India helped a young Somalian writer imagine alternative futures

This is a good time to think about the consistent attacks on a university system that, under the most constrained circumstances, has rivalled the best in the world. One, whose graduates have contributed to a wide variety of knowledge systems both within India and beyond it. Its modern history has something to tell us about what we stand to lose.

It is 1901 and Rabindranath Tagore is addressing a group of young boys on the model of education he favours. He would not like them, he says, to be soldiers, bank clerks or businesspeople. Rather that they should be “the makers of their own world and their own destiny”.

The Tagore family’s fortune derived from a combination of zamindari, money-lending and commercial activities and the privileged scion of a prominent landholding clan had a peculiar take on the educational needs of critical modernity. The latter requires something other than Tagore’s self-satisfied views on world-making.

Coming to Punjab

It is 1966 and 19-year-old Somalian Nuruddin Farah – employed as a clerk in the Ministry of Education in the national capital of Mogadishu – is about to make a decision about his university studies.

Local universities are in a state of intellectual and infrastructural disrepair and Farah has been offered scholarships at two institutions outside Somalia. One is at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the other, the University of Panjab, Chandigarh. Farah is an aspiring writer and an American mentor tells him. “If you don’t go to the United States, you will never become a writer.” Farah chose to study literature and philosophy at the University of Panjab.

Born in 1945, Nuruddin Farah published his first novel, From a Crooked Rib (1970), at the age of 24. He is widely regarded as one of the key figures of African and global literature. In September this year, he – along with lawyer Rebecca John and historian Ramachandra Guha – was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

When I heard him tell of his choice of Chandigarh over Madison – and their respective universities – I was taken aback. On the one hand, there was the apparently infinite promise that – within Africans and Asian imaginations of the 1960s – marked the idea of an American education. And, on the other, the instant disadvantage that might come from an enrolling at an Indian university, one that might have ranked quite a few stages below even others within India, such as those in Calcutta and Delhi. Why the University of Panjab, I wondered.

Some part of the answer lies in the Nehruvian promise of educating bank clerks, merchants, soldiers and engineers to be both clerks, merchants, soldiers and engineers as well as poets and philosophers.

In a recent conversation, I asked Farah if, when making the choice of Panjab over Wisconsin, he did not fear that he was condemning himself to a future life of disadvantage. Others, I suggested, would have jumped at the opportunity of taking up a fully funded place at a major American university. His responses tell me that my line of questioning was out of time, unable to capture the spirit of an age.

For, though by the time Farah arrived in India, Jawaharlal Nehru had been dead for two years, the Nehruvian promise of the possibility of a non-western modernity – nurtured by local educational and cultural institutions – was still alive. “I thought,” Farah said to me, “that India and Africa could become closer to each other and that is one of the reasons I went to study in India.”

The Nehruvian promise

Nuruddin Farah came to India, he says, as he “had faith in India and the goodness of its intellectual class”. The Nehruvian promise emerged, to borrow the words of the great Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, through pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. It was premised on the hard work of understanding and undoing the negative effects of the past – pre-colonial and colonial – without ever being overwhelmed by the task.

What attracted Farah to Panjab University was a fundamental promise of decolonising the mind through the pessimism-optimism framework. Pessimism is a condition of the mind that reflects its capacity to analyse and optimism is a condition of thought that seeks solutions to the problems that pessimism identifies. This Nehruvian model of decolonisation – the belief in the capacity of all people to think, reflect and act – was fundamental to the attraction that was India.

Nuruddin Farah’s much-celebrated From a Crooked Rib was written during his Indian sojourn and is frequently regarded as a parable of Somalian modernity: a story about its structures of colonial and gendered oppression and possible ways beyond them. Of this novel and of the time in which it was written, Farah has written that his literary skills were developed “in the iron words of a fiery truth that was given shape to and etched on the skin of lived history”.

While it would be both simplistic and unfair to entirely attribute the young Farah’s literary and political sensibilities to his time in India, it is reasonable to say that he found himself in an environment of debate and discussion that nurtured them. He was thrown into the middle of a bracing storm where “lived history” emerged out of a questioning of the past – rather than romanticising it – and directed him to imagine alternative futures. That was the Nehruvian promise.

As we conclude our discussion about his time in India, I ask Farah if he experienced personal anxiety as he prepared for his Indian stay. No, he says: “Even at that young age, I had the belief that Somalians were special and that I would be able to make my way in the world.”

At an Indian university in the mid-1960s, the young Somalian government clerk found himself in the crucible of a time and a promise where the “specialness” of non-western identities could be nurtured through the pessimism of critical thinking and the optimism of analytical thought. The clerk continued his journey to other worlds of possibilities.

Now, when university education seeks to promote the obedience that is inherent in clerical thinking, this is the world that we are in the process of losing. The problem, notwithstanding Tagore, isn’t to do with producing clerks and merchants. Rather, it concerns the making of an educational system that valorises clerical thinking as the ideal of national character.

Sanjay Srivastava is a Distinguished Research Professor in the department of anthropology and sociology, SOAS University of London.