The Third Eye of Governance: Rise of Populism, Decline in Social Research by Dr N Bhaskara Rao, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2021; pp 301, ₹ 599, Paperback.
Researchers and academia seldom think about the foot soldiers who collect data by travelling to villages, blocks, or districts and interviewing households and communities.
This article raises wider questions like whether the social sciences have been able to provide any meaning to the Covid-19 crisis by exploring the life worlds of body, time and nature. It also focuses on the role of policy and the connectivity between social science and democracy.
While agreeing in substance with Ramachandra Guha's critique of expatriate Indian intellectuals, that commentary is extended here to (a) point to an important impediment in their intellectual project coming in the way of their taking their migrant status seriously and hence interrogating their milieu with greater rigour; and (b) reply to grounded patriots that there are other legitimate albeit unstable locations from which to construct a social science. Turning to Guhaâ??s peculiar smugness about 'relevance', it is argued that in talking of discourse and deployment of power within intellectual communities, the nation may not be the only legitimate category of analysis.
The Kashmir University campus has been declared out of bounds for the media and the vice-chancellor has instructed university teachers to keep away from the media and avoid expressing their opinions on political matters. This is nothing short of an assault on academic freedom and fundamental rights and the silence of the national media on it mirrors the media's indifference to all the other outrages perpetrated in Kashmir.
Dharma Kumar was a controversial figure, one whose role it was to call into question the comfortable views of a series of established orthodoxies. At times in doing so she could rub even close friends the wrong way. But no one who studied with her will forget her generosity (whether intellectual or personal) and the wide intellectual horizons she opened up. In an academic world where petty intrigues are the rule, there was nothing in the least small about Dharma Kumar.
