Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 4

Courses in this area are usually some extension or variation of "Government and Politics of.." courses. By appending Third World, I think they aspire to capture something of the process of change. Once they do that, they cannot be just about politics.

'Third World' states were more or less the same as those states of Asia and Africa and on some issues, Latin America, that had once been colonized. Colonialism, by the definition of anti-colonial writers everywhere, was only partly about politics and administration. It was also ideological and cultural; and it had begun as economic exploitation. Therefore, studies of these places that were 'Third World' had to be also about other dimensions.

Especially, cultural. Since colonized peoples were somewhat backward and definitely traditional, the most useful variable to explain anything about them must be 'culture.' Not politics. Not economics. Nothing quite so rational and gentlemanly.

And then you look at the origins of the study of these states in American academia. It is rooted in 1950s anxieties about containing communism. What made states stable? What allowed democracies to develop? What would prevent revolutionary activity? These are the kinds of political questions that motivated that literature. It is a different matter that these questions inspired some really interesting empirical work and a useful vocabulary for describing politics. But Third World countries got frozen for a few decades in a certain taxonomy, defined not by them but for them.

The shift occurred when authoritarian governments started falling in Latin America and then in Eastern Europe. Democracy became a topic that could be associated with the 'Third World' suddenly, and there is still an industry of democratization experts, both academic and field, out there. Illustrated best by the Ukrainian expert sent by the National Democratic Institute in Washington DC to advise Sri Lankans on their election process. in 1980.

Then there was the course I taught in my last semester at graduate school: Emerging Nations. I taught it once as the politics of development and then chose to interpret it once narrowly and in keeping with my dissertation, as nationalism and decolonization and the politics of the same. Worked better as the last, but really, that was quite a departure from the intended purpose of the course. But from where were the 'Nations' emerging? Which 'Nations'? Were they also states? And into what were they emerging.

No idea at all.

Teaching 'Third World Politics': Reflections 3

A linear view of history and the human experience makes it possible to place communities along a continuum and label them 'backward' and 'advanced'. All of us do it in the judgments we pass on each other on a daily basis. However, as an intellectual construct, it is hard to accept and harder still to teach.

One could place colonial-nationalist-postcolonial on some sort of a timeline, but what did they mean for the more practical details of everyday life.

• In the 1950s, Jawaharlal Nehru called large multipurpose hydro-electrical projects the 'temples of modern India.' India did benefit from them. But over time, the problems with large projects have become evident as well, whether for their seismic effects as in Tehri or for the displacement of peoples as in Narmada. Are we now moving to the model the Cholas and their Sri Lankan counterparts used--large networks of smaller canals--for irrigation on the one hand and nuclear energy on the other? Is this forward, backwards or lateral movement?
• Allopathy is regarded as the modern system of medicine. So why are more and more people gravitating towards alternative systems that are older, such as ayurveda, yoga, yunani and siddha? Is this retrogressive motion?
• Thousands of young Indians work in high-paying but more or less dead-end jobs in the IT sector. Are they doing better or worse than the tradition artisan who earns less but at least has infinite scope for creativity?
• Or are this last question and others of this sort utterly inappropriate in that they romanticize the past at the expense of well-being today?
  
• What is today's well-being if it creates a less than liveable tomorrow?
  

Because questions like this come around again and again as we travel and discuss Indian history and politics, it seems appropriate to do a course that will ask them formally and systematically.

But that is not what traditional 'Third World Politics' do. The term 'Third World' ties us to development issues, and 'development' is imagined in linear terms. They posit a certain unidirectional journey, in which a large swathe of humanity is condemned to trail the front-runners, fighting neverending battles for unreachable goals. Rostow's four-stage model of growth is an example; as Busybee liked to joke in his Independence Day columns, India was perpetually stuck in the take-off stage.

Teaching "Third World Politics":Reflections 2

Let's start with this 'Third World' tag.

Forget the political correctness stuff. Dress the term any way you like and you still have no way of understanding what it means.

• poverty
• inequality
• tradition
• old technology
• unresolved political issues
• 'backwardness'

Where can you find these? Today, practically everywhere. Being 'Third World' is a condition not a location. Teaching in nice classrooms in the 'First World,' sometimes the 'Third World' was three streets away, sometimes a neighbourhood my student had left behind and sometimes a place far away.

Once you accepted that, what was your course about? Almost everything, every place and everybody.

What was the difference between teaching this course, teaching introductory political science or government and teaching American or Indian politics? Just a little value judgment, a little prejudice and a little historical accident.

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.