Politics of Social Science Knowledge in India: A Postcolonial Appreciation
Rajan Gurukal

Social science knowledge got introduced in India as a part of the colonial modernisation of education under the British rule. Social science was taught along with other sciences to provide a general knowledge about the European civilisation, a certain level of cognitive ability, and some skill in communicative English. The preparation of an informed citizenry and competent workforce for reproducing the colonial government was the aim. It enabled the educated to take up employment in the British Indian civil and military services as anticipated in the Minutes of Macaulay. Barring the most brilliant few who entered the Indian Civil Service cadre, a good majority of the bright people became teachers in schools and colleges. They taught social science as told by the European writers, of course with occasional attempts at resisting Eurocentrism and the western contempt for indigenous systems of knowledge, albeit without much effect. Probably the resistance had some effect on India’s historiography as well as in the making of the Indian nation, but by and large, the social science knowledge acted as an instrument of westernisation. It did trigger national political consciousness against colonialism, but only as an affirmation of the western impact. The great Gandhian exception apart, there was no Indian alternative to what the west exemplified. Uprooted in indigenous knowledge systems, the scientists as well as social scientists were largely left with no sources for cognitive encounters with the west. It is true that many great intellectuals emerged advocating Indian ways of life, but hardly any one to be emphasising Indian epistemology. Even those intellectuals who took to specialisation of metaphysics were incapable of escaping the western representational trap of Orientalism. They often internalised what was construed by the west as Indian. Deeply implicated in the game-theoretical situation for half a millennium, even the postcolonial India finds it difficult to think differently and paradoxically has to look at the west for decolonisation.

The paper is not to critique this inescapable trap and set a revivalist agenda, but to examine in the light of the postcolonial social theories the conditions that led to the depoliticisalion of social science knowledge. In fact, social science knowledge in India could not maintain its European positivist rigour. This was true in the case of pure sciences too to a great extent So scientific rationality has been a superficial trait of even the educated society throughout the age of colonial modernity and after. Naturally, social sciences continued to be presented with no focus on the foundation of the knowledge and it fell flat in the classrooms as mere literature. Most of the Social Sciences became play of words in flowery sentences. Each of them soon shrank itself into the cocoon of language that completed the process of alienation and total deflection from real social phenomena and processes around.

Now the Positivistic claim of Social Sciences as predictive empirical sciences has phased out. However, most of the students and teachers in Social sciences in India still continue the exercise of learning their discipline in lighter ways as people ignorant either about the alleged foundation of the positivist Newtonian physics or about its collapse into postpositivism. Just as the foundation of linear dynamics had not bothered them in the past, the present shift to a new foundation of fuzzy, fluid and stochastic nature does not bother them. This predicament of total indifference to the socially useful component of the social science knowledge continues to the postcolonial present.

In postcolonial perspective, the useful knowledge in Social Sciences is not anything that can directly solve social problems. It can only resist the problems through the mobilisation of social awareness, stimulation of policy debates etc. In other words its task is primarily the enlightenment function of political preparation for social actions. Naturally the inculcation of the politics of knowledge becomes the most vital aspect of social science education and the clarity about the epistemological relation of knowledge to politics is its top priority.

But these are what the higher education in Social Sciences has been consistently failing to achieve, not only due to their pedagogic superficiality but also due to their pretentious objectivity, neutrality and a variety of other depoliticising strategies. The paper attempts to hypothetico-deductively explain how the social science knowledge has always been remaining stripped off its politics, from the colonial to the postcolonial reality.