Refusing Use
what use, what relevance
“What is the use of world history?” “Teach them something that is relevant” my friends say at the breakfast table when I tell them I am preparing for a class on the French Revolution. I get defensive immediately. I hate those words: “use” and “relevance.” There was a time I used to ask those questions too, and still do sometimes, but I try to actively resist them. All learning, indeed most of learning, is not—should not—be reducible to use. Did Newton think he was doing something useful when he discovered the laws of gravity? Did Shakespeare think he was doing something relevant when he wrote play after play of human tragedy? Perhaps they did. How does it matter?
This tying of the imagination and of the capacities of the human intellect to what is of use to the current day defies me. The current moment is structured by long and complicated histories that do not lend themselves to neat and clear lines of connection. Why should we assume that India’s colonial history is more relevant than the French Revolution to understand the current moment? If we are all children of the erstwhile colonised, we are all also children of the Enlightenment. Our Constitution, born out of anti-colonial struggle, begins with the proclamation of liberty, equality, and fraternity, first made in 1789 in France.
More fundamentally, why should we study only what is relevant to us? The learned of the West never shied away from travelling to its colonies, our homelands, and digging the earth up to discover our civilizations, or to learn our languages and translate strange texts into their own, or writing poems and stories about our customs and peculiarities. Why should we, the postcolonial elite who get the opportunity to read, think, and write, not turn our gaze back? Why should we not study transatlantic slavery and puncture the West’s clean narrative of modernity? And to do that, why should we not study the so-called clean narrative of modernity – Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, Rousseau’s Confessions, Robespierre’s Speeches? Why should we limit ourselves to “India” – the modern boundaries of which are also drawn by the West?
Our ancestors, long before the West arrived with its knowledge system, dared to dream other worlds. They nourished their faculty of kalpana, that translates roughly as imagination, to ask fundamental questions of our place in the universe. The Vedas and the Upanishads, in whatever way they are “ours,” dared to do more than use or relevance. What poor job of “Indianness” do we do then, by limiting ourselves, to what is “Indian”?
The training of the mind is not simply a matter of learning about ourselves. It is an exercise in encountering strangeness and making sense of the strangeness. It is travelling to far away worlds of space and time and contemplating the possibilities of humanity (and if we are lucky, divinity). It is the willingness to let go of our current pretensions and assumptions and nourish the curiosity to learn something that is new, something that is outside of us, that does not apply to our current moment in the manner of a formula. The training of the mind is the generation of a possibility that we, too, might inaugurate something new, that we may, like Newton, discover a law of nature that seems abstruse but that will take us to the moon, or like Shakespeare, write a sentence such as this: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Unless, of course, all we desire from our places of learning is an army of doctors and lawyers who can readily rise to the demands of use. To that, I plead no answer.