I want to begin with a story—a story I have repeated again and again. It is a classic anecdote, almost a textbook example. It has been used even by media ecologists Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan. It is about the Kitty Genovese incident.
The story begins on a late evening in 1964 in a New York suburb. A young girl is walking home as the shadows are lengthening. She is confident in her gait, but suddenly feels that there is someone behind her. There is a stalker. She screams to scare him off. The lights come on in the flats above and people rush to the window. But nothing happens. The stalker senses an indifference, then rushes and stabs her several times to death. Following the attack, he walks away quietly.
The next day, there is a furore in the newspapers. Sociologists rush to investigate the incident and find something strange. Most of the people who had witnessed the incident felt they were watching TV—spectatorship that almost became a form of immobility.
The story raises a whole series of questions. Is violence a part of culture? Can culture be a zero-sum game? Further, one has to ask whether culture can be hegemonic. Can culture be owned and patented? Is culture a domain of experts?
One of the fascinating answers to these questions was given by Ziauddin Sardar, the Pakistani scientist and migrant who reflected on migration. He showed that Western books had reduced migration to a simple act of civics and administration. But migration, Sardar said, went beyond refuge and residency. The migrant did not simply adapt to the culture but interpreted it.
It is in this context that Sardar goes back to history. The migrant, he said, is both a storyteller, an interpreter and a translator. His example was Ibn Khaldun. Sardar showed that when Western civilisation was declining in the 12th century, it was the Muslims who kept Greek science intact. He cited George Sarton, the historian of science, to show that Greek philosophy is often a fiction to hide the achievement of Islamic scholars, travellers and storytellers.
Sardar added that citizenship is not a simple civic affair, unless civics involves epistemology. The citizen does not receive culture blankly. He interprets it. He reworks it cognitively to show the modes of thought behind a culture. For Sardar, democracy becomes a cognitive experiment. To him, democracy is a demand on cognitive interpretation. There has to be a democracy between cognitive systems and modes of interpretation that create a dialogue between cognitive systems.
An even more fascinating example came from the distinguished scientist, C V Seshadri. He used to narrate the story of cricket in the Trobriand Islands east of Papua New Guinea. It’s the story of how cricket was introduced into the islands by the British, who had hoped that the sport would teach the locals teamwork and competition. But the tribal inhabitants of the islands interpreted cricket differently. They saw it as a challenge to their sense of competition. The islanders sought to force a draw. The draw, they felt, was the ultimate answer to competition.
Seshadri added that the draw was a metaphysical challenge to the idea of equality and competition. It was a search for plurality and co-existence. The draw, he said, was a metaphysical challenge to the enlightenment idea of standardisation and number. It showed that diversity, difference, debate, dissent and dialogue were not easily available in the West, which emphasised the game. The game needed a victor, but for the islanders, play was more essential. Play was something more tentative, with unexpected possibilities. It created a sense of diversity. Culture, in that sense, can never be a zero-sum game.
Now we should move from concepts to institutions. One has to discuss the role of civil society in creating culture. It does not fragment society but creates a network of diversities. Multiplicity, diversity, dialogue, debate, dissent are all a part of the democratic imagination. Democracy in its theory has little place for these concepts. What one wants to emphasise is that we need to experiment in a different way. We need new modes of pedagogy, an openness to oral memory, a different way of looking at knowledge. We need to revise the idea of institutions like the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which look at translation in a standardised way. We have to understand that the verses of the Ramayana, according to A K Ramanujan, have 300 kinds of interpretations—the ethics can be different, the languages can be vernacular.
In a similar manner, democracy has to learn to celebrate diversity, electoral systems, the centre as well as the periphery, minority and majority. It operates today according to the logical number it prefers, what monocloth is to variety. It sees diversity as anarchy. An India with a hundred thousand varieties of rice and ten thousand varieties of bamboo is an anarchy. But for the same reason, we should see India as a dialogue of cultures. And for this, we need a different theory of democracy.
Zia Sardar's idea of epistemology becomes critical. Different ways of thinking need different ways of life, giving rise to different kinds of storytelling. Philosophy should be as varied as music or storytelling. Diversity is a second anchor for democracy, if freedom is the first. It is a time when we have to realise that democracy in the Greek sense is inadequate and incomplete.
We need a theory of diversity and dialogue. We need modes of storytelling to create different versions of the same society. We need a new ethical centre that allows for diversity as a way of life. A democracy that becomes standardised loses its sense of subtlety. Social science then becomes a dismal science devoted to discipline and the panopticon. One needs diversity at the very centre of epistemology.
Democracy has been read too deeply as a competitive system. It cannot think of minority and marginality as positive parts of a system. It needs to experiment. And for that, we need to exorcise the current languages, concepts and fetishes of democracy. We need to let a million democracies bloom and realise that diversity is a life-giving proposition. Neither culture nor democracy can be a zero-sum game.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)