On Decolonization: Scattered Speculations on the Indian University

type

Essay

source publication

Lokniti Blog

Abstract

Universities are like good headphones, the noise-cancelling ones that consistently drown out the turbulent world outside its boundary walls. Universities have taught me to read, think, argue, imagine, and most importantly, write. Universities have also been sites of disappointment, disillusionment, and agony. Universities have also consistently generated employment, horizons of aspiration, a growing collection of books and bookshelves, varied range of intellectual friends and collaborators and nemeses among the dead and the living, and finally, an entry point to a cosmopolitan, bourgeois life for me. The university is now a space that I consider home. In this essay, I will address the university as a site of knowledge production and dissemination, especially the university that grows out of the Indian context. Relatedly, I will address my remarks on the decolonization question and the agenda of resurrecting the knowledge project afresh, this time outside of Euro-America. I ask in this talk: What kind of life of the mind does the university engender in the current Indian milieu? In keeping with the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe’s coinage “Thinking the world from Africa”, I further ask: How may we think the world from the Indian university?

Year

10-23-2022

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