Articles by Shiv Visvanathan

Just as the Mandal report challenged the amiable sociology of the day, and the middle class dreams of mobility, the prospect of the Durban conference on race is doing something similar to the discipline of sociology by juxtaposing and even assimilating the categories of caste and race. There is a danger that social scientists, so involved with pursuing their particular point in the debate, are in fact condemning themselves to their own ghettos of illiteracy. What is needed is a different point of entry that sees dalit sociology not through the eyes of the academe but in terms of its own emic categories.

Present behind the Supreme Court judgment on the Narmada dam is not only a Nehruvian imagination, but a public administration view of the world. The court seeks to construct a rational, statist discourse which has little place for other voices of protest. In the judgment's final pages dams, democracy and development come together in a new trimurti.

The politics of knowledge and the discourse of culture as politics today is enclosed in a hypertextual circle that lacks the suppleness of the embedded quarrels of the university of the 1960s. This prompts the location of debates on diversity, plurality and the university in a longer 'duree' ranging across the colonial and post-colonial era and framing a wide range of issues. This paper first deals with the concept of the university and its relationship to the liberal imagination and then explores the nationalist debate on how the modern university was conceived. A third section deals with the issue of language and educational policy focusing on the battles triggered by the Mandal Report. The concluding section examines the immediate question of nuclearisation of India and Pakistan and the possible role of the university in this context, outlining a critical role for it.



More than the novel or the pamphlet, it is the bureaucratic document, as expert's report or as a commission of enquiry, that has captured many of the great dramas of the 20th century. It is these reports that will survive as the archives of democracy in India. The Lentin Report on the deaths due to contaminated glycerine at the state run J J Hospital in Mumbai is such a document, a contender for the Great Indian Novel. The report examines four institutions, the hospital, the industry, the Food and Drug Administration and the politician, in painstaking detail showing how individual acts of corruption, each insulated in itself, together led to the tragedy. And, typically, its findings lie unattended till today.