Colombo Institute’s Position on Knowledge Production in
South Asia: Excerpts from the ‘Preface’, South Asia Journal for Culture, Volume 2, 2008.
We are reproducing the ‘Preface’ to volume two of South Asia Journal for Culture published annually by Colombo Institute because we believe that through the thinking that went into making our journal a reality, CI’s position on knowledge production, cultural dynamics and politics of culture and knowledge in the region is made clear. The conference is also located in the general areas of concern outlined here.
South Asia Journal for Culture, Volume 2 (2008) comes out amidst numerous delays. Even though as the publishers we would have ideally liked to avoid this state of affairs, it seems these are unavoidable aspects of birth pangs associated with a venture of this nature. We are hopeful that by the time Volume 3 comes out, we will be on track. Nevertheless, we are very sure from the comments we have received so far that SAJC is in the region to stay at least for some time.
In Volume 1, we briefly outlined the technical and logistical concerns of the journal, which remain in place. At this point, let us ponder over some of the ideological positions and thoughts that played a crucial role in making the journal a reality as we believe that the journal’s trajectory from now on would have much to do with the contexts and conditions of its location. Some of these issues were also articulated during its launch in Delhi and Karachi. Needless to say, we often find ourselves living and working today imprisoned within the ramparts of the impenetrable language of social theory and the clutter of writing that supposedly usher in enlightenment. At least, in the contexts where we work in Colombo, this experience forms part of our overall experience. We certainly do not want our journal to be a space for mere clutter in the region; we would like to see it emerging as a forum for discussion and a plurality of ideas, a space where we would discover and rediscover ourselves. Volumes 1 and 2 have indicated that we have reached this expectation to a reasonable extent.
In this context, we would like to make some observations about the politics of marginality, partly because in many ways, this journal is an idea that came into existence from within the politics and experiences of marginality. For us, as a journal coming out of Colombo though with a very conscious South Asian outlook, marginality is a fact of life even though it is not something we have ever considered a domain within which we would be forever imprisoned. What I mean by marginality for us worked at two levels: due to the political changes that took place in Sri Lanka since the 1960s and the resultant brain drain to the former colonial centers, much of the work in the social sciences and humanities produced in Sri Lanka, particularly in the local languages tended to lose its methodological and theoretical rigor. Most local journals of quality folded up or their work was severely restricted and downgraded. This was one marginality within which we had to work. The second marginality was far more encompassing. We found it difficult to access regional and global journals and publishers due to the restrictive work of intellectual gate-keepers who seem to take pride in thinking, experiencing and feeling on our behalf. In this same context, it was not unusual to have conferences in the region itself that were supposedly South Asian in focus but politically marginal entities such as Sri Lanka often had to face critical issues of represention in more ways than one. But these marginalities did not necessarily translate into mediocrity for those few who were perhaps mad enough to create alternate structures and processes. In effect, SAJC is one such outcome.
Therefore, very clearly, this journal is the result of felt needs and anticipated political and ideological expectations and the logical culmination of a specific history. Talking of history, make no mistake -- this is a Sri Lankan effort given that we are responding to locally felt marginalities and frustrations. But at the same time, it is also a South Asian initiative because we are very keen and conscious that the knowledge produced within South Asia and on South Asia should also be known widely in South Asia as well as globally. This is not a mere simplistic yearning for a collective South Asian cultural and intellectual identity. More broadly, this is a matter of taking stock of what we think, what we critique, what we question and what we learn about ourselves and the world and finding means to make this knowledge part of the global academic discourse as well.
As we know quite well, South Asia is an area that has been perpetually in a state of flux from mythic times right up to the more chaotic present, where most countries share overlapping histories and experiences of culture, coloniality, grappling with post colonial pains and political chaos, and are constantly negotiating the global economic and cultural agendas within their own ‘national’ perspectives. Unfortunately however, and despite the emergence of political structures such as SAARC, we do not have regular and serious forums for South Asian scholarship to showcase our own research and our own thinking. Even now, nearly half a century after the process of official decolonization began in the region, much of the analyses and pontifications on our problems, situations, histories and dynamics emanate from Euro American academia; this is certainly the case when it comes conceptual formulations and theoretical approaches from the Euro-American zone that are being employed in exploring the region’s social and cultural complexities often without much self-reflection. Most things from cultural theorizing to formulating development strategies percolate from these usual centers of knowledge often based on experiences exterior to our own and these are later circulated everywhere via journals and books as authoritative texts that also come from the same centers. In many ways, it appears that ‘Provincializing Europe’ as Dipesh Chakrabarty famously argued, and we might add ‘provincializing North America’ too has not really taken root despite the rhetoric. We have to constantly ask the kind of basic questions that Chakrabarty raised in his book and many others have elaborated since: can European thought be dislodged or decentered from the center of historical practice in non European places and what are the consequences we have to anticipate when cultural practices from our part of the world are translated into categories of social science which derives its own power from a completely different historical and political lineage?
Of course, this is not a matter of promoting a sense of naively simplistic nativism. This is also not a simple matter of shunning significant thought from these established centers of knowledge be they in Europe, North America or elsewhere. But a robust engagement with these issues is needed in South Asia on a consistent and larger scale. After all, South Asia has its own cultural dynamics, its own triumphs and failures or alternatives for democracy, their own versions of modernity, multiculturalism, chaos and order sitting side by side.
We have a lot to say. We have a lot to offer in terms of critical knowledge on the production and reproduction of culture and its multiple domains in South Asia, and we ourselves need to be familiar with the knowledge that is produced in the region and beyond. But for us from a Sri Lankan perspective, despite our shared cultural and political histories what we know about our neighbors does not often extend beyond cricket and Bollywood. So this journal is about providing a critical forum for the challenging and imaginative knowledge on the politics of culture in South Asia. It is about offering a conduit for that knowledge to enter into more accessible and global domains while allowing opinion exchanges and debates to emerge in the region. More precisely, seen from the specific historical perspective I just outlined, the journal was designed as a possible vehicle to explore, expose and interpret the dynamics of culture that had been excluded and made invisible within dominant structures of power locally, regionally and globally.
A number of things have happened in South Asia by the time this Volume comes which we should be mindful of because they deal with issues that are of central importance to us in the region. One was the terrifying terrorist attack on Mumbai on 26th November 2008. At one level, we were distant viewers from Colombo. At the same time we were quite used to the spectrum of terrorism in our own backyard. In this context, some of us of were concerned at the speed in which battle lines were drawn and enemies and enmities were recreated on television where sensible voices, while there were some, seem to be expelled to the wilderness. In such a scenario, the importance in having reasonable forums for the discussion and debate of ideas became much clearer. It is unlikely that forums such as SAARC, with their inbuilt political biases and cleavages could undertake this task. It is precisely in the same context that the proposed South Asia University, which is such an excellent idea that has received considerable support from the government of India as well as other governments in the region have to be reassessed. The issue is not with the idea itself, but its mode of implementation. Like most state level initiatives in the region, if this university project also becomes an enterprise that is implemented at the levels of foreign offices of South Asian countries, it can easily become a parking space for retired political worthies rather than a center of excellence for knowledge. We flagged these issues not to embark upon a detailed analysis at this juncture, but with the hope that we can explore them more extensively as SAJC progresses as an intellectual forum in the region.
If the journal can be sustained over the next few years with the help of our friends in both South Asia and beyond, we are confident that it would help create an essential and conscious shift away from the dominant centers of knowledge production to the peripheries in order to more critically explore the centers themselves as well as the peripheries. However, this shift, as a deliberate strategy in our view does not indicate something that is fixed; on the contrary, this is a shift whose distance can always be reassessed, reversed, adjusted as we explore what we want to on our own terms. It is our belief that Volumes 1 and 2 have allowed us some space to realize these collective dreams up to a point.
The future of course remains to be seen, grappled with and fashioned as we wish. Whether we opt to be bystanders in the fashioning of our future or whether we want to be its undisputed authors is a choice we will have to make.
The Editor
South Asia Journal for Culture
Colombo Institute
