Knowledge in the Periphery
Mahesh Paudyal Prarambha
There is a general belief that knowledge is centrifugal. It originates in the universities where learned minds convene and move towards the periphery, particularly to the rustic zones. General expectations are that the cities that have the privilege of owning the universities produce knowledge and export to the villages. This very belief places the city-dwellers at higher intellectual footings than their country counterparts, and hence the villagers are generally believed to be meek, innocent and gullible.
I too believed the same till recent times. My own association with the university program has been long – first few years as a student, and for a couple years now as a faculty. I bore the obvious fallacy that we at the university produce, define and dissipate knowledge and civilize the rustics. My recent visit to some rural areas of Ilaam in eastern Nepal has completely toppled my earlier beliefs, and replaced them with new insights.
What forced me to think hard on the issue was an old face – a rustic village old man of around seventy. Jibabal in Sulbung-3 Illam was frank in confessing that he had never been to Kathmandu and had just attended a school that taught him Nepali alphabets. It had just been six months that his home saw electricity, and road – an unpaved and still to be graveled – just the previous year. Yet, he put such questions in front of us, whose answers the intellectual mafias of our nation have not been able to deliver for last many, many decades.
I had Basanta Kumar Basnet – a university student at the post graduate level with me. He had been privileged to pass through every nook and corner of the district and almost every trail as a social worker. He was stunned too, for his conscious roving through the district had not been able to enlighten him with this rustic wisdom.
Jibalal wanted to know how the educational policy of the nation was going to address the economic imperatives of the country. He wanted an answer on why such a popular and studious youth leader like Gagan Thapa should not be made the leader of this nation. His queries encompassed environmental issues – the felling of the tress in the periphery of Sulbung due to the access of road and transport, and the threat it produces to the rare flora and fauna. He had answers about the origin and historic importance of the mighty Maipokhari. He wanted to know why the administration was mum when the tourists who came to see the sublime sunset from Pashupatinagar boarded guest houses on the Indian side, inside of choosing a Nepali restaurant. He knew how each plant we came across on the uphill trail could contribute to healing, and how the red pandas were being threatened because of poaching.
The questions of educational policy and economic imperatives ire indeed vexed questions, in the absence of whose answers, the nation is at such a low tide of economic development. We at the university have always been discussing at the classrooms, and a few of us – also from the proud universities – who write on papers and speak on the media, have been arguing on the same without an answer. Big names – educationists and planners, economists and experts – have been dogged by the question, not for a decade or so, but for centuries. The plain question that came from an uneducated laity in the remotest hinterland of the nation shakes the entire intellectual world, and leaves the academia answerless.
What stunned us next was his question why Gagan Thapa should not be made the nation’s top leader. We wanted to breathe away his question with the ready-made argument that experience and age too counted. His immediate rejoinder was, “What have the experienced and the aged ones done?” We thought for a while and concluded that in fact, they had done practically nothing. What we call the progressive, inclusive and modern thinking that are thought to be baked and hatched at the universities and cities, was spotted beside a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye.
As a teacher of environmental studies, I found no reason to continue harping Robert Frost’s “Brook in the City” or Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with us” to explain our type of environmental concern. The “education fad” we have been suffering from, and the western fetishism we have acquired make us sound studious, but cannot in any way stand in par with the Sulbung old man, whose concern was in no way less than the most vexed issues that concerned the world’s environmental scientists and leaders at Alma-Ata, Kyoto, Singapore or Copenhagen. His questions pertain to the highest order of environmental conundrum assuming the form of a universal debate lately.
In fact, the root of our ignorance, in my opinion, lies in the belief that knowledge takes birth in the universities in the city and moves towards the town. The universities give an academic approval to the knowledge picked up from all sources, including the periphery. It becomes the grossest blunder to think that knowledge includes the scientifically verifiable positivism, and mathematically computable facts. Once we acknowledge that knowledge encompasses anything that has attempted to explain and document the physical and biotic world anywhere on earth, we are better equipped to understand the world at large.
A quick look at the curriculum of the most antique universities shows that they taught disciplines that could be immediately located in the rural landscape of the earth. One of the first programmes Takshila University during the Gupta regime offered was on herbal medicine. Ujjain laid emphasis on astronomy, of which, the village folks were, in a way, the masters. The argument is valid because they preceded Bruno, Copernicus and Galileo. At Sarnath, art, architecture and painting were offered even to international students and all these disciplines conformed to the rural life styles. Other programmes according to historical evidences included logic, grammar, philosophy, and literature, Buddhism and Hinduism – all in a way concerning humanities, and few or almost none of them positivistic. Even Plato’s Academy had programs in gymnasium and music that concerned the humanist aspect of life.
My argument therefore is quite evident: we have knowledge scattered in the unexpected places in our country. People of little formal education and negligible excess to the outside world are wonderful archives of knowledge. They can plague the intellectuals, and force them to think many times before they utter their ready-made, anemic arguments. If intellectuals in a country like Nepal want to contribute to the overall development of this nation, they must turn to these peripheries for discovering knowledge instead of munching though the bulks of the western delivery, and counting them as the ultimate. Our ridges, gorges, trails and caves are rich libraries; let’s turn to them now! Let’s make knowledge centripetal. Let it pour in from the periphery and deluge the city centres and academic hubs.
There is a general belief that knowledge is centrifugal. It originates in the universities where learned minds convene and move towards the periphery, particularly to the rustic zones. General expectations are that the cities that have the privilege of owning the universities produce knowledge and export to the villages. This very belief places the city-dwellers at higher intellectual footings than their country counterparts, and hence the villagers are generally believed to be meek, innocent and gullible.
I too believed the same till recent times. My own association with the university program has been long – first few years as a student, and for a couple years now as a faculty. I bore the obvious fallacy that we at the university produce, define and dissipate knowledge and civilize the rustics. My recent visit to some rural areas of Ilaam in eastern Nepal has completely toppled my earlier beliefs, and replaced them with new insights.
What forced me to think hard on the issue was an old face – a rustic village old man of around seventy. Jibabal in Sulbung-3 Illam was frank in confessing that he had never been to Kathmandu and had just attended a school that taught him Nepali alphabets. It had just been six months that his home saw electricity, and road – an unpaved and still to be graveled – just the previous year. Yet, he put such questions in front of us, whose answers the intellectual mafias of our nation have not been able to deliver for last many, many decades.
I had Basanta Kumar Basnet – a university student at the post graduate level with me. He had been privileged to pass through every nook and corner of the district and almost every trail as a social worker. He was stunned too, for his conscious roving through the district had not been able to enlighten him with this rustic wisdom.
Jibalal wanted to know how the educational policy of the nation was going to address the economic imperatives of the country. He wanted an answer on why such a popular and studious youth leader like Gagan Thapa should not be made the leader of this nation. His queries encompassed environmental issues – the felling of the tress in the periphery of Sulbung due to the access of road and transport, and the threat it produces to the rare flora and fauna. He had answers about the origin and historic importance of the mighty Maipokhari. He wanted to know why the administration was mum when the tourists who came to see the sublime sunset from Pashupatinagar boarded guest houses on the Indian side, inside of choosing a Nepali restaurant. He knew how each plant we came across on the uphill trail could contribute to healing, and how the red pandas were being threatened because of poaching.
The questions of educational policy and economic imperatives ire indeed vexed questions, in the absence of whose answers, the nation is at such a low tide of economic development. We at the university have always been discussing at the classrooms, and a few of us – also from the proud universities – who write on papers and speak on the media, have been arguing on the same without an answer. Big names – educationists and planners, economists and experts – have been dogged by the question, not for a decade or so, but for centuries. The plain question that came from an uneducated laity in the remotest hinterland of the nation shakes the entire intellectual world, and leaves the academia answerless.
What stunned us next was his question why Gagan Thapa should not be made the nation’s top leader. We wanted to breathe away his question with the ready-made argument that experience and age too counted. His immediate rejoinder was, “What have the experienced and the aged ones done?” We thought for a while and concluded that in fact, they had done practically nothing. What we call the progressive, inclusive and modern thinking that are thought to be baked and hatched at the universities and cities, was spotted beside a mossy stone, half hidden from the eye.
As a teacher of environmental studies, I found no reason to continue harping Robert Frost’s “Brook in the City” or Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with us” to explain our type of environmental concern. The “education fad” we have been suffering from, and the western fetishism we have acquired make us sound studious, but cannot in any way stand in par with the Sulbung old man, whose concern was in no way less than the most vexed issues that concerned the world’s environmental scientists and leaders at Alma-Ata, Kyoto, Singapore or Copenhagen. His questions pertain to the highest order of environmental conundrum assuming the form of a universal debate lately.
In fact, the root of our ignorance, in my opinion, lies in the belief that knowledge takes birth in the universities in the city and moves towards the town. The universities give an academic approval to the knowledge picked up from all sources, including the periphery. It becomes the grossest blunder to think that knowledge includes the scientifically verifiable positivism, and mathematically computable facts. Once we acknowledge that knowledge encompasses anything that has attempted to explain and document the physical and biotic world anywhere on earth, we are better equipped to understand the world at large.
A quick look at the curriculum of the most antique universities shows that they taught disciplines that could be immediately located in the rural landscape of the earth. One of the first programmes Takshila University during the Gupta regime offered was on herbal medicine. Ujjain laid emphasis on astronomy, of which, the village folks were, in a way, the masters. The argument is valid because they preceded Bruno, Copernicus and Galileo. At Sarnath, art, architecture and painting were offered even to international students and all these disciplines conformed to the rural life styles. Other programmes according to historical evidences included logic, grammar, philosophy, and literature, Buddhism and Hinduism – all in a way concerning humanities, and few or almost none of them positivistic. Even Plato’s Academy had programs in gymnasium and music that concerned the humanist aspect of life.
My argument therefore is quite evident: we have knowledge scattered in the unexpected places in our country. People of little formal education and negligible excess to the outside world are wonderful archives of knowledge. They can plague the intellectuals, and force them to think many times before they utter their ready-made, anemic arguments. If intellectuals in a country like Nepal want to contribute to the overall development of this nation, they must turn to these peripheries for discovering knowledge instead of munching though the bulks of the western delivery, and counting them as the ultimate. Our ridges, gorges, trails and caves are rich libraries; let’s turn to them now! Let’s make knowledge centripetal. Let it pour in from the periphery and deluge the city centres and academic hubs.
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