How does one explain the enormity of the Treaty of Westphalia to classroom of students for whom 'Teen Murti Library' is in a 'VIP area'? For whom Europe is a stain, with a struggling to shrug off a boot?
This is not to suggest that tourists have remarkably grey, grey cells, or that to travel is to know. One needs to swiftly pass through the darkness of Ghosh's 'The Shadow Lines' to be reminded what Yuddhishter quietly observed: to travel and to move are two entirely different things. They frequently are conjoined, but part again amicably. But to move, often becomes the defining motto. For the tourist, to move is to get away. And for students, and teachers for whom 'to move' often means to get on with the syllabus. And for an excellent examination of the distinctions between travelling and toursism see Wanda Vrasti's essay here http://www.politicsandculture.org/2010/08/10/wanda-vrasti-the-politics-economics-and-ethics-of-independent-travel-rewriting-the-ethnography-of-the-travel-trope-2/). How does one move on from the alien and strange syllabus of International Relations and World History? One where wars are being waged in a moment and time and land lost in the past? Disembodied and ruptured from one's own train of memory?
The tragedy is that Europe, the World, Latin America, The Past, and Memory are all taught coldly, through a really dry map called the syllabus. And as Pouliot points out, there was a time when maps and syllabi's were not standardised pieces of paper printed in a machine, but had lovely tiny details: where can the traveller stop for a drink of water, which tree is really shady and where will one come across that tempting bunch of berries, which one MUST not eat? Such maps and syllabi no longer exist.
What one has instead is a dry, informative and universal roapmap. Where does one begin with International Relations? With the First World War. Where does one end? with the post cold war period. And in this entire universe which the student enters, a world which INTERSECTS with the history of South Asia at several points, but those points are severed and bled dry. So the fact that India Gate was built for those soldiers who fought during the war is not a part of international relations, or that the end of the Ottoman Empire seeped into the nationalist discourse is not...and that rich debate between Bose and Nehru on the issue of 'what is right for an empire, is not right for the colony' is passed over.
Its a pity. Because Europe again, and the world again, is taught as a world out there. compact and coherent. but for how much longer can one ignore those leaky taps, whose waters dismiss sovereignty and territory with a quick wave? And why isnt Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence a text in IR to demonstrate the leakiness and weariness of the true 'age of empires'.
No comments:
Post a Comment