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| Photo: Hemachandran Karah |
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| Humanities are gaining visibility in institutions devoted to engineering
and technology such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Photo: The Hindu |
At the heart of humanities education lies empathy, a capacity to understand others in their own terms and contexts. To this end, disciplines in humanities — including history, literature, philosophy, and psychology — rely on the art of interpretation. An interpretative mind can not only take cognisance of life situations, near and far, but also instil thought processes that can transform one’s ideas about them from within.
So the ‘impact factor’ of humanities, so to speak, is categorised in terms of capacity to transform imagination, reasoning, and thought itself, albeit through somewhat intangible means. Influences on the mind are difficult to quantify, so are their outcomes. This renders humanities scholarship vulnerable to ridicule, neglect, and outright discrimination. This is not all: a conflicting relationship with the science establishment and a confusion concerning the appropriate medium of learning burden Indian system of education in humanities.
Science-humanities divide
Thinking about humanities’s discordant relationship with the science
establishment, I cannot resist a bit of a flashback. As it happens now,
we high school students herded ourselves into first, second, third, and
fourth groups just after our high school board exams. With a shocking
sense of artificially created hierarchy among us on the basis of our
choice of groups, we began branching out, pursuing courses in material
sciences, biological sciences, commerce, and, last of the lot,
humanities. Trapped in our shells by a rigid sense of specialisation, we
started on our individual journeys from where we were expected to speak
in mutually unintelligible languages, chase divergent job markets and
organise our inner lives and rate our knowledge systems in sync with the
realities inherent in our disciplines. This mentality persists till
date, bewitching technologists and humanities experts alike.
Consequently, both fail to appreciate the idea that the efforts of a
social scientist and a scientist can actually complement each other.
Scientists and technologists work on problems using mathematical and
experimental methods. Their vocation is based on the premise that all
problems are amenable to scientific solutions. Scientists even aspire to
devise grand frameworks — like the M-Theory — that can potentially
explain everything about the universe and the humanity’s evanescent
place in it.
In pursuing such grand chases and technological feats, scientists work
closely with the industrial and military complexes as much as the ruling
dispensation. Naturally, they approach existing power structures and
controversial debates surrounding them with caution. Also, they tend to
stay away from politics, often reasoning that it does not come within
the ambit of their vocation.
Social scientists brand such a withdrawal as ‘Rightist leaning’. This is
clearly incorrect since a typical Indian scientist’s formative period
is anything but politically inclined. If humanities scholars desire a
more imaginative learning world for scientists, they should, by all
means, push for the same. After all, it is disciplines such as Medical
Humanities that have prompted Western medical science establishment into
thinking about the patients’ inner worlds, looking beyond their
illnesses. Similar feats can be replicated in India too where humanities
are gaining visibility in institutions devoted to engineering and
technology such as the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).
Source: The Hindu
