Language Knowledge and Decolonizing the University

Rattling the bag – Language Knowledge and the transformation of the university in South Africa and India: Dilip Menon

Dilip Menon, Kafila

Susa lo-mtunzi gawena. Hayikona shukumisa lo saka

Move your shadow. Don’t rattle the bag

JD Bold, Fanagalo Phrase Book, Grammar and Dictionary, the Lingua Franca of Southern Africa, 10th Edition, 1977

In the bad old days in South Africa, whites spoke English or Afrikaans, the languages of command. When they did engage with those that did not speak English, there was Fanagalo, a pidgin based on Zulu peppered with English and some Afrikaans. Fanagalo was developed in the mines and allowed directives, if not conversation. The struggle against apartheid produced its freedoms, its heroes and heroines and new dreams of equality. As Richard Pithouse in his article shows, twenty years down the line the sheen has worn. Unemployment, xenophobia, violence, crime and a seemingly entrenched inequality dog our dreams. We live with the constant premonition of becoming an ordinary country, a nation like any other.

Peasants, states and civilisations

Dilip Menon, The Hindu

James C. Scott, who is due to deliver a major lecture in Delhi this month, discusses his shaping influences, his interdisciplinary orientation and his political outlook.

James C. Scott is one of the most distinguished social scientists writing today, with political scientists, historians and anthropologists claiming him for their own. Born in 1936 and educated at Williams College and Yale, he is currently Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale. He is known for his seminal contributions to the study of peasants, power and resistance marked by extensive fieldwork and a sophisticated engagement with social theory in prose characterised by clarity and passion. The trilogy The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976), Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) explored issues of patron-client relations, hegemony and the everyday expressions of resistance in peasant societies with literary flair, an ethical commitment and depth of local knowledge. His most recent work, Seeing Like a State (1998), explores forms of state knowledge and what he terms “state simplifications” arising out of the need to govern that run aground on the rocks of the recalcitrance of local facts. Currently, Professor Scott is engaged in fieldwork in Burma (Myanmar) looking at how peoples of the hills evade the reach of states and civilisations. He will deliver the second Indian Economic and Social History Association public lecture on December 19 at the Stein Auditorium, Habitat Centre, New Delhi. Professor Scott responds to questions from Dilip Menon, who teaches history at Delhi University.