One of the great tragedies of contemporary imagination is that democracy as a discourse has become impoverished. As an imagination, it needs to renew its creation myths. The old social contract built around majoritarianism and electoral view is no longer adequate. It has the tendency to become authoritarian in its everydayness.
The direct democracy experiment did recharge the imagination, but it also revealed that democracy needs craftsmanship that renews its assumption in a changing world. One discourse that needs to be re-examined is the relation between democracy, knowledge, information and communication. These need a new discourse enacting out the dialogic nature, revealing the dynamics between technology, knowledge and democracy.
Democracy lost out in the age of the storyteller. A storyteller imparts more than news. He embodies the angst and enthusiasm to the creation myths of the time. Modern media has brushed aside the storyteller. The whole commons of fables, myths, parables and stories is tending to disappear.
One has to realise that news as information creates forms of obsolescence. It erases what is old, it erases the question of oral memory. Memory is not information. It is a lived era. It is like being more at home with the world. There is a phenomenological intensity to the way it unfolds.
One major illustration of this came when political scientist Chandrika Parmar was interviewing an entrepreneur. We wanted to talk to him on pollution, but he was intrigued by our studies on the partition. He insisted on talking about his experiences. He referred to the train from Pakistan—of hiding in the bathroom, of watching people being slaughtered. He spoke passionately time and again, until we discovered he was seven years old when the partition occurred. We realised he had internalised the story of his father.
Such ‘ersatz memory’, as Ashis Nandy called it, is a recurrent phenomenon especially among the third generation. Nandy suggests one way of making sense of the world is by living other people’s lives as one’s memory. Modern information frames memory into data. The biggest victim of this, as anthropologists point out, is the oral imagination. Orality loses out to the written word.
In The Singer of Tales, Albert Lord has shown that memory is stereotyped in modern times. He displays that oral memory is not rote for the singer of epics who recites up to 5,000 lines. Lord shows that remembering is not mechanical, it is a creative construct where invention joins recollection in the re-making of the poem.
A different set of problems was raised by Nikhil Dey, the social activist associated with the right to information movement. Dey notes that to link law and information one needs an interdisciplinary discourse; it cannot be limited only to rights. Once we commoditise and commercialise information, one moves beyond the RTI framework. Dey seems to imply that one needs the idea of the dialogue and commons to capture information. The notion of rights leans more to the patenting world, where mere definitions become corsets.
One needs a mapping of silences—a language of the communitas to elaborate information. One has to ask whether tribal memory needs archives and records. Or does one need a different way of reviving the oral imagination? Orality, as anthropologists have pointed out, is not just a technical medium but is associated with a community. It has an epistemology, a style of community that has to be understood.
Going back to the tribal question, should land records be digitalised when land is seen as belonging to the entire community? There is an ambiguity here—when land records get digitised, the information is accessed beyond the tribal community. The question is no longer an innocent one—whose information is it and who should be able to access it. Data on a large scale becomes an invitation to others. MGNREGA is one example where information gets centralised. The irony is that when information get digitised, the people for whom it is meant have the least access.
Communication, too, has to be looked at in a new way. Modern discourse often becomes monolithic and monolingual. The other is missing or becomes secondary. It is particularly clear when we look at minoritarian and marginal discourse. It is in this context that once has to understand we need a plural framework of knowledge. Science can no longer hegemonise other knowledge systems. One needs a plurality of knowledges and a way of mediating between them.
For example, modern agriculture has to deal with traditional forms of cultivation, understanding soil, topography etc. Two concepts have been suggested in this context. One is the idea of cognitive justice, the right of different forms of knowledge to co-exist and complement each other as long as they also contribute to the livelihoods and myths of the community. Cognitive justice is required to have, say, plural systems in medicine with alternative ways of looking at a problem. It is the diversity of languages and knowledge that we must celebrate. Knowledge must be seen as an act of trusteeship. It would be wonderful if every school became a trustee for a dying language, a fading craft and a disappearing species.
The other solution is the idea of a ‘knowledge panchayat’. The introduction of any policy needs a knowledge panchayat to democratise it. It is a representation of different communities, different knowledge systems that go into the making of a project. Knowledge panchayats would give a place to the housewife and the tribal in the articulation and critiquing of policy. It is clear by now that democracy must be more inventive than science if it is to survive. The survivor as citizen has to acquire a new status in the remaking of the democratic imagination.
What I have tried to do in this essay is to suggest new ways of looking at democracy. Here, theories of knowledge, ideas of communication, and the future as time become as critical as citizenship in the electoral system. Democracy must explore new kinds of citizenship for the future. The current democratic imagination is both subdued and frail. What it needs is an explosion of the imagination and the scholarship to accompany it.
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations