Why should we pay any attention at all to the recent developments at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras in a country where real heat waves have real consequences? What has derecognition of the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle produced other than hot air and media attention, or so the thinking goes.
It has been educative to look at some of the reactions to the issue, on social media and elsewhere. One common thread running through them is: Why do these IIT-ians need to do all this when the taxpayer is more interested in clean air and better technology? The question is illustrative of what we might call the polytechnic compass, a restrictive, stick-to-syllabus approach that defines how the IITs and engineering education are officially imagined in this country.
The first time I went to IIT-Madras was in the early 1990s as a curious participant in their five-day culture fest Mardi Gras. I came away dazzled. In those five days I encountered something that years of college-going had never given me: a campus in ferment. It had idiosyncratic interests, including cyberpunk, the history and philosophy of science, irreverent journalism, and one far-out guitarist who periodically declared that Carnatic music and hard rock were not very different.
I remember this random snatch of conversation from that time – a student secretary ranting and raving about some “bastard CM” because he threatened to cut off their water supply if they launched an anti-Mandal agitation on campus.
Reflections in literature
While the fest has now been safely Indianised in name and much else, it still retains, decades later, some of that original voltage. What I had witnessed was the culmination of a series of everyday insurrections against what I’m calling the polytechnic compass. If there is anything that defines the IITs, apart from a tight Brahminical consensus controlling entry and life thereafter, it is that successive generations of students, chafing at the demands that restrict an institute, have tried to bring into being a simulacrum of a university, something with its breadth and character. The Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle seems to be separate from that Brahminical consensus, but very definitely a piece of this history of longing.
For engineers to be good engineers, in other words, they have to find education in more than just engineering. What happens at IIT-Madras, APSC and beyond, is important because the institute is a bellwether. This confrontation is going to play out more than once. If the scandal that is technical education in the rest of India is to be reformed in any way, it is not going to happen by official design, but by slow surrender to the ways in which students find ways of asking for more, like that character from a Dickens novel.
Any number of literary analogies suggest themselves when we examine the hasty servility with which the Dean of Students acted in response to the query of the Ministry of Human Resource Development. There’s Uriah Heep, from another Dickens novel. There’s also Osric, of whom Hamlet remarks, “Methinks he complied with his dug, before he sucked it”. The one I will settle for is stolen from my Tamizh teacher in school, Mehrunnisa Begum, who once said, referring to Dushasana’s attempt at disrobing Draupadi, “Here is a man who would bring you butter if you asked for milk.”
Nobody did nothing
The Dean could have been more circumspect in his reaction, for he had no shortage of choices. He could have called APSC for a meeting and investigated the matter thoroughly before writing back. Or he could have simply got back to the ministry with the incendiary request that they provide in writing detailed instructions on how to deal with campus groups whose politics are not in line with the thinking of the present minister. Some of the flak directed against a minister who seems intent on rejigging education to fit a party line must necessarily be redirected at the bureaucratic imagination that loses its backbone with such speed, and professors who are happy to turn into minions without protest.
It’s been entertaining to watch the ministry and the administration retreat into evasive language over the last few days as the issue snowballed into a free speech conundrum. The ministry’s move now is just a way of asking for clarification, not a gesture of threat. The Dean’s response is not a ban, just a temporary de-recognition. The ministry did not ask for the action, and the institute did not take the alleged action. Even the guidelines that the Dean is now falling back on seem open to dispute. Nobody did anything, and yet the APSC finds itself hamstrung and forced into guerrilla mode because they were critical of the current government and the local administration’s policies.
It perhaps takes a fine sense of the absurd to deal with situations like this. A resolutely "anti-commie" Facebook friend turned on the crowd that was hyperventilating in the opposite direction and said that they should stop whining and respond more creatively: all they needed to do was set up a Reagan Thatcher Study Circle and issue pamphlets calling for the eradication of communism. Since the Dean’s problem was a “guideline issue” – that banners and flyers saying APSC, IIT-Madras had been circulated without prior permission, some Facebook commenter offered the APSC the via media of quoting latitude and longitude every time. Dheeraj Sanghi, who is a professor at another IIT, chuckled away on his blog while suggesting to the APSC that they “should have announced that the event will happen in this national institute beside Adyar Cancer Institute, Opposite to C.L.R.I, Sardar Patel Rd, between Guindy and Adyar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600036”.
Anger games begin
The most artistic WTFs have come from a self-professed right-wing media platform. They first did some mega hand-waving about hypocrisy among free-speech advocates in fussing over IIT-Madras and ignoring the Aligarh Muslim University. Googling revealed that some AMU professor had WhatsApped messages claiming that madrasas should be shut down because they are dens of homosexual vice and then denied sending them himself: his account, he said, had been hacked by persons unknown. Later, they carried the beguiling headline “The looming JNU-ization of the IITs” next to an image of the writer Rukmini Bhaya Nair. Clicking on this led only to Prof Nair’s stout defence of the idea of dissent as the basis for campus life – but for some people that first headline is now the argument.
Right-wing interests have perfected the art of energetic placard-waving as a way of forcing a consensus and ending debate in such matters. The APSC used a characteristically hard-hitting quote from Ambedkar in one of their flyers, and that is now being used to brand them as anti-Hindu, and to raise the bogey of offended sentiments. There are sane responses one can make to this – such as asking if ever anyone who has questioned orthodoxy can escape the charge of being anti-Hindu, starting with the Buddha.
At this point it also seems worthwhile to ask why the right-wingers should have all the fun when it comes to getting offended. Let’s all go home and subject ourselves to this thought experiment. How will we prove that X or Y is anti-Hindu or hurtful to Hindu sentiments? If you screw your nose up often enough, you can prove that anything is anti-Hindu. Salvador Dali (Named after Jesus Christ). Science (Says we come from apes, says being gay may be natural, so many reasons!). Aeronautics (Idiots don’t acknowledge that Ravana flew in the first airplane). Porn (Swacch a waste of time). Pirate Bay (God pictures and porn pictures in the same container). Dogs (Eat beef if given a chance). Cats (Don’t observe grihasthashrama properly).
Let the Anger Games begin. If they still have competition postcards, we can send one every day (anonymously, since that is the operative requirement) to the happy folks at the HRD ministry and hope that poetry will one day enter their collective souls.
It has been educative to look at some of the reactions to the issue, on social media and elsewhere. One common thread running through them is: Why do these IIT-ians need to do all this when the taxpayer is more interested in clean air and better technology? The question is illustrative of what we might call the polytechnic compass, a restrictive, stick-to-syllabus approach that defines how the IITs and engineering education are officially imagined in this country.
The first time I went to IIT-Madras was in the early 1990s as a curious participant in their five-day culture fest Mardi Gras. I came away dazzled. In those five days I encountered something that years of college-going had never given me: a campus in ferment. It had idiosyncratic interests, including cyberpunk, the history and philosophy of science, irreverent journalism, and one far-out guitarist who periodically declared that Carnatic music and hard rock were not very different.
I remember this random snatch of conversation from that time – a student secretary ranting and raving about some “bastard CM” because he threatened to cut off their water supply if they launched an anti-Mandal agitation on campus.
Reflections in literature
While the fest has now been safely Indianised in name and much else, it still retains, decades later, some of that original voltage. What I had witnessed was the culmination of a series of everyday insurrections against what I’m calling the polytechnic compass. If there is anything that defines the IITs, apart from a tight Brahminical consensus controlling entry and life thereafter, it is that successive generations of students, chafing at the demands that restrict an institute, have tried to bring into being a simulacrum of a university, something with its breadth and character. The Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle seems to be separate from that Brahminical consensus, but very definitely a piece of this history of longing.
For engineers to be good engineers, in other words, they have to find education in more than just engineering. What happens at IIT-Madras, APSC and beyond, is important because the institute is a bellwether. This confrontation is going to play out more than once. If the scandal that is technical education in the rest of India is to be reformed in any way, it is not going to happen by official design, but by slow surrender to the ways in which students find ways of asking for more, like that character from a Dickens novel.
Any number of literary analogies suggest themselves when we examine the hasty servility with which the Dean of Students acted in response to the query of the Ministry of Human Resource Development. There’s Uriah Heep, from another Dickens novel. There’s also Osric, of whom Hamlet remarks, “Methinks he complied with his dug, before he sucked it”. The one I will settle for is stolen from my Tamizh teacher in school, Mehrunnisa Begum, who once said, referring to Dushasana’s attempt at disrobing Draupadi, “Here is a man who would bring you butter if you asked for milk.”
Nobody did nothing
The Dean could have been more circumspect in his reaction, for he had no shortage of choices. He could have called APSC for a meeting and investigated the matter thoroughly before writing back. Or he could have simply got back to the ministry with the incendiary request that they provide in writing detailed instructions on how to deal with campus groups whose politics are not in line with the thinking of the present minister. Some of the flak directed against a minister who seems intent on rejigging education to fit a party line must necessarily be redirected at the bureaucratic imagination that loses its backbone with such speed, and professors who are happy to turn into minions without protest.
It’s been entertaining to watch the ministry and the administration retreat into evasive language over the last few days as the issue snowballed into a free speech conundrum. The ministry’s move now is just a way of asking for clarification, not a gesture of threat. The Dean’s response is not a ban, just a temporary de-recognition. The ministry did not ask for the action, and the institute did not take the alleged action. Even the guidelines that the Dean is now falling back on seem open to dispute. Nobody did anything, and yet the APSC finds itself hamstrung and forced into guerrilla mode because they were critical of the current government and the local administration’s policies.
It perhaps takes a fine sense of the absurd to deal with situations like this. A resolutely "anti-commie" Facebook friend turned on the crowd that was hyperventilating in the opposite direction and said that they should stop whining and respond more creatively: all they needed to do was set up a Reagan Thatcher Study Circle and issue pamphlets calling for the eradication of communism. Since the Dean’s problem was a “guideline issue” – that banners and flyers saying APSC, IIT-Madras had been circulated without prior permission, some Facebook commenter offered the APSC the via media of quoting latitude and longitude every time. Dheeraj Sanghi, who is a professor at another IIT, chuckled away on his blog while suggesting to the APSC that they “should have announced that the event will happen in this national institute beside Adyar Cancer Institute, Opposite to C.L.R.I, Sardar Patel Rd, between Guindy and Adyar, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600036”.
Anger games begin
The most artistic WTFs have come from a self-professed right-wing media platform. They first did some mega hand-waving about hypocrisy among free-speech advocates in fussing over IIT-Madras and ignoring the Aligarh Muslim University. Googling revealed that some AMU professor had WhatsApped messages claiming that madrasas should be shut down because they are dens of homosexual vice and then denied sending them himself: his account, he said, had been hacked by persons unknown. Later, they carried the beguiling headline “The looming JNU-ization of the IITs” next to an image of the writer Rukmini Bhaya Nair. Clicking on this led only to Prof Nair’s stout defence of the idea of dissent as the basis for campus life – but for some people that first headline is now the argument.
Right-wing interests have perfected the art of energetic placard-waving as a way of forcing a consensus and ending debate in such matters. The APSC used a characteristically hard-hitting quote from Ambedkar in one of their flyers, and that is now being used to brand them as anti-Hindu, and to raise the bogey of offended sentiments. There are sane responses one can make to this – such as asking if ever anyone who has questioned orthodoxy can escape the charge of being anti-Hindu, starting with the Buddha.
At this point it also seems worthwhile to ask why the right-wingers should have all the fun when it comes to getting offended. Let’s all go home and subject ourselves to this thought experiment. How will we prove that X or Y is anti-Hindu or hurtful to Hindu sentiments? If you screw your nose up often enough, you can prove that anything is anti-Hindu. Salvador Dali (Named after Jesus Christ). Science (Says we come from apes, says being gay may be natural, so many reasons!). Aeronautics (Idiots don’t acknowledge that Ravana flew in the first airplane). Porn (Swacch a waste of time). Pirate Bay (God pictures and porn pictures in the same container). Dogs (Eat beef if given a chance). Cats (Don’t observe grihasthashrama properly).
Let the Anger Games begin. If they still have competition postcards, we can send one every day (anonymously, since that is the operative requirement) to the happy folks at the HRD ministry and hope that poetry will one day enter their collective souls.
Buy an annual Scroll Membership to support independent journalism and get special benefits.
Our journalism is for everyone. But you can get special privileges by buying an annual Scroll Membership. Sign up today!