The election of 2024 has been reported with great fanfare. There is a conclusiveness and finality about it. In terms of numbers, if not conviction, the current regime is here to stay for the next five years. Yet, once the obviousness of the result is internalised, there is little left to say. The obviousness is fixed by the predictability of the conversation. Once the election is over, the idea of normalcy and the sense of everydayness seems empty. There is little left from the contestation of civil society and everyday politics. What is bleakest is the missingness of civil society.
The idea of civil society must go beyond formal definitions. Civil society refers not just to the organisations established by citizens; it is also a label of the ecology of interactions and fecundity of politics, as an agnostic style. It needs a polysemy of words to describe it. One is looking forward to an ecology of anecdotes, dialogues, interrogations and contestations. One is expecting a certain power of performativity, adding drama to politics. One senses a plurality, a diversity of engagements, predicting a sense of surprise. All this is missing today.
Civil society is read as noise. As communications expert Colin Cherry claims, noise is unwelcome music. It is a composite of all the ideas you do not want to hear. Noise adds to the music of everyday civics. What one misses most is the inventiveness of civil society, a talkativeness, creating spaces for politics. Memory becomes critical here, because civil society is an archive of duets, decisions and discussions. Civil society creates a diversity of plots, instructions and expectations. Some of these suggestions need further explanation.
A few years ago, Kannada author U R Ananthamurthy suggested that our ‘official’ culture needs a reinvention of UNESCO in the vernacular sense. One needs a festival of languages and their translations. Civil society sustains diversity through translations and interpretations. In fact, translation beyond the formal and the official becomes an act of trusteeship that civil society, given its sense of Babel, can perform. A multiplicity of languages sustains the diversity of oases that hardly appear in formal debates.
What Ananthamurthy emphasised is what one can call the happy celebration of the vernacular. It transcends dissent and succession to add to an idea of a cultural home. Ananthamurthy waves the question of the 300 versions of the Ramayana. A federal view that sees the Ramayana as only that of Tulsi Das will abandon the rituals of interpretation and controversy. A more playful approach to these texts creates possibilities that are mind-boggling.
I was intrigued by another suggestion made originally by Russian artist Nicholas Roerich. He suggested a Red Cross equivalent for culture called the Green Cross. The fight is to protect culture from the threat of war and violence. This becomes even more crucial when we realise that war, peace and security have become official concerns. A proliferation of green crosses must be in its ecology of culture. It becomes a vision of trusteeship.
Another beautiful suggestion made was even more domestic in nature. It is a response to the disappearance of languages and crafts. It was proposed that every school becomes responsible for one dying language, one threatened craft, and one disappearing species. Our civil society, then, becomes a market of life-giving possibilities, not just a banal market. The above three suggestions become a manifesto for the idea of civil society today.
Yet, one has the more immediate task of theorising in a way that such activities become possible. Today, civil society is often seen as residual. It is a depleted idea that leaves all critical activity to the state. One sees the problem even in the idea of the definition of ‘opposition’ as a formal party affair. Civil society must be seen in its own anarchic relation to the state. It must produce difference. Therefore, it exists. Civil society makes the everydayness of dialogues possible. Such a plethora of information adds to the celebration of democracy.
Civil society thus needs to be seen as vital for plurality. Plurality is the symphony of differences that only civil society can sustain. Discussing it merely as ethnic will not do. But more a federalism of formal oppositions predetermines debate. It is civil society that provides the gossip of difference to the vitality of politics. It sustains the unexpected. Such a situation is pedagogic, and civil society provides the informal pedagogy of culture and politics.
This brings one to the question of the university today. Sadly, people see it as a formal market for knowledge. Yet, the original function of the university was dissent. Dissent is an integral part of the learning process, and the university functioning as a dissenting academy provides the stuff of knowledge and democracy. A touch of revolt and anarchism is a normal part of the university. Only the university in combination with civil society can grant the festival of differences that politics desperately needs. Difference writes the poetics of civil society, which complements dialogue as its fundamental process. In that sense of civil society, this essay becomes both a prayer and a dream for a different one.
The question beyond the university can be understood as a tripartite relation between knowledge, information and communication. Interstitial gossip connects all three, and it is only gossip that provides the humus of difference that democracy so desperately needs. One needs today a combination of the formal and informal, the textual and the oral. The resurgence of an oral society, in the age of written text on a digital system, guarantees a different kind of politics. The university today must be a tribute to such an orality. Orality reveals something more primordial and ever-present in a society like ours.
The weakest part of the current regime is that it has no sense of the future. The future is an invitation to an ever-growing past. It demands invention. It demands memory and a trusteeship of memory. Only a civil society in its polysemic state can sustain such politics. It is important that memory, orality, difference and diversity remains a critical and dynamic part of today.
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations