Summer 1996
JOURNAL

An Indian at Yale

A VISITING PROFESSOR'S RUMINATIONS ON AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AND THE YALE EDUCATION
Dilip M. Menon

In the early 1970s, the great director Satyajit Ray made the only political film of his oeuvre, and aptly called it The Adversary. Of course, in those balmy days everyone was political and drew inspiration from the radicalism across the Atlantic of the 1960s. The hero of the film, unemployed, and probably unemployable because of a particularly irascible nature, goes through a series of job interviews with boards peopled entirely by reactionaries of one or the other color. At one point, shortly before his drift towards permanent unemployment and terminal apathy, he is asked by yet another interview board what he thought was the greatest human achievement of the twentieth century. He replies, "Vietnam’s victory over the U.S.A." One of the interviewers asks testily whether Armstrong’s landing on the moon was not worthy of being considered the pinnacle of the achievement of human aspirations. And our hero replies saying, "Well, that was bound to happen some day. The victory of Vietnam over the entire might of the American army represents the unexpected yet inevitable triumph of the human spirit." Needless to say, he had given the wrong answer. The board rejects him, he up-ends the table on them and walks out to an uncertain future. This scene encapsulated the ambivalence of most thinking Indians in their perception of America: on the one hand, the New World where Science and Progress ruled; on the other, the nation which carpet bombed -ancient civilizations into an appreciation of democracy. Even today, this ambivalence persists among liberal Indians, and indeed, within myself.

While at the University of Delhi in the early 1980s as an undergraduate and wrestling with this ambivalence, a few of us were concerned that we should make an elementary, and necessary, distinction between governments and peoples. For had not the Indian government sinned as well in its inability to tackle poverty and inequality and its quelling of political radicalism? And were we to be tainted by this failing? So, wanting to salvage what was radical and good from what we saw as the edifice of American hubris, we turned to African-American literature and the emancipatory moment of Ellison, Baldwin, Angela Davis, Leroi Jones, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X. It allowed an admiration of Americans while maintaining a critique of America. Outside the university, untouchable groups in western India (renaming themselves Dalits, or downtrodden) had discovered the Black Panther ideology and incorporated it into their struggles, calling themselves the Dalit Panthers. And, of course, in a nation imagining itself through the film industry, America also meant Capra, Sturges, Ford, and Huston — a world peopled by gunslingers, idealists, and hard-bitten cynics. As yet, no real, live American impinged on these constructs. Sometimes, leafing through the National Geographic with its stunning visuals of lowering skies and almost Martian landscapes, one wondered whether there were any humans in America at all. Was it just a landscape of the imagination, created from text, screen, and montage?

sorely missing in the hierarchical gloom of Oxbridge. And so when after my return to India, I applied and was invited to Yale as the Rice Visiting Lecturer in History, I saw this as an opportunity to further redefine my attitudes (in the belly of the beast!). I was conscious that I was coming to an America vastly different from the one of my youthful imagination — the ravages of Reaganism and economic recession had signaled a move away from the liberal politics of the sixties and seventies. But universities generate their own world through a sheer act of will, particularly if they are wealthy enough to insulate their illusion. Witness Oxbridge with its candlelit halls, opulent feasts, porters in bowler hats, and manicured grass in the quadrangles on which only the faculty may walk. Yale, with its endowments and its look of Victorian England, has successfully created an illusion of its own, unmarked secret society buildings being the least of it.

However, there is a difference, and a difference distinctly American. This became evident to me when I attended a Fellows’ meeting and the speaker was someone who had worked for the College kitchens and now was the Mayor’s assistant. The incident was palpably democratic and demonstrated that it was not one’s class but one’s experience which determined the respect one could get. It was something difficult to conceive of in either England or India, intimate enemies bound together by their belief in ineffable hierarchy. Again, there was an informality between senior faculty and junior, between student and teacher, which allowed for an interaction based on personal merit rather than any inherent rank. Of course, "schmoozing" exists among students as well as faculty, but it is noticeable and remarked upon precisely because it is conceived of as generally undesirable behavior. Another aspect which initially unsettled me but then won me over by its innate principle was "shopping period." That students should be able to determine whom they should be bored by and for how long seems to me to be an eminently sensible proposition. It places a compulsion on the teacher to be accessible as well as reasonably entertaining, while being awesomely erudite, of course. All of these seemingly different facets were connected by one significant fact: you only got the respect you deserved. This is as fundamental a democratic principle as you can get.

There have been a few dissonant notes as well. My time at Yale has coincided not only with graduate student unrest (though there have been no barricades or storming of administration buildings), but also the negotiation of worker’s contracts. Coming from India where student unions are an integral part of university life arising from their historical associations with the struggle against colonialism, it is difficult to understand the complete exclusion of such bodies from Yale. Universities are as much about education in a particular discipline as about a broader instruction in civic virtues: student unions are the training grounds for democratic values. Further, the exclusion of "politics" from campus generates narrow notions of obligations to the community in which one lives. It is not surprising to find the opinion among many students that the University is run for them, since they pay hefty amounts for services. This thinking glosses over the fact that the University is comprised of those who work for it as well. That Yale is about teaching and research as well as about rebuilding New Haven is a concept that needs a wider and political definition of community. The absence of that is where my perception of the tangible presence of democratic values has been less optimistic.

On the whole, it has been both a humbling and enriching experience. My students have taught me a lot through their affection, intelligence, and sometimes their awesome talent in other spheres, such as music. Moreover, their attitude towards education as something that extends beyond the narrow bounds of disciplines (again something unique to the American system) has spurred my own intellectual aspirations. Too often, in classrooms elsewhere, I have encountered an unwonted cynicism: what use is all this in the real world? In the classrooms at Yale, there is still a sense of adventure and that is something I shall take back with me to India.

To return to the beginning, the ambivalence remains, but I have met Americans who forced me to rethink my tired old prejudices. When I left India, one of my old uncles said to me, "No education is complete without the experience of the New World." Now I feel halfway educated.

Professor Menon is the Rice Visiting Lecturer in History at Yale University.