Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections

One of the crosses one bears when one teaches politics in the West and is a lowly, non-Western person, is that one sometimes has to teach a course that is variously modeled as 'Politics of development,' 'Third World Politics' or in my alma mater, 'Emerging Nations.' I did not enjoy this course in any incarnation for the simple reason that it seemed to need to be about everything with only fourteen-sixteen weeks in hand, a student body with virtually no previous training in world history or geography and an underlying logic that across its incarnations, was rooted in a worldview to which it was hard to make reality conform.

My survival strategy while writing the syllabus was to include what was important to the department and what was important to me, overloading the course even further. My version of the course was an improbable combination of the way development economics was taught by our professors at Elphinstone College; my experience growing up in 1960s-70s India; the political development literature of the 1960s, and a grab-bag of emerging points of view from wherever I had wandered. If the original conception of the course covered, as I snidely put it, everyone but four white men, by the time I was done with it, it was un-teachable.

The worst classes I ever taught were in this course. And this, in spite of this being a subject of interest to me. (Maybe that is why?) Ten years after I was last forced to teach this couse, this summer as we planned a year ahead, I found myself saying very gingerly, perhaps we should offer THAT class. My colleague was shocked, having heard me complain bitterly on more than one occasion. A grab-bag of random reasons made me think this could be workable.

• The course is located in Chennai, India.
• We are constantly talking about change, about old and new, tradition and modernity.
• The interface between global and local, colonial and postcolonial are everywhere around us.
• So much of the politics we discuss is about social transformation.
  
• Governance challenges, heritage and identity come together in the places we visit.

My instinct is that the course can be made to work, but having said that, I am realizing that it can only be done if every assumption upon which the Western courses are based is examined critically. I have to go beyond, gosh, there is, there has to be a better way, and beyond, I will find that way, and I am sure this can work... to making it happen in a way that is worth taking a chance that teaching this course will once more be a miserable experience.

To this end, I am going to start a series of blog posts, where I think aloud and try to make something that I can live with.