The politics of curriculum and pedagogy: teaching cultural studies in North East India

Abstract

The emergence of cultural studies in the North East of India makes for interesting reading. North East India, with its polyvocal realities entranced in its ethnic diversities, ethnic strifes, internal displacement of people and migration (or infiltration) from Bangladesh and Nepal, ‘Western’ and ‘materialistic’ (read urbane) mode of life in the largely Christian hill states of Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram, which goes against the mainstream Indian grain, and the rhetoric of neglect, should have provided ample opportunities for an engagement with cultural studies. Yet, cultural studies was rather perceived by many as ‘study of culture’ that owes its antecedents to the legacy of colonial Anthropology and Folkloristics (with its colonial etymology and postcolonial mutation) that celebrated the ‘documentary’ over the ‘analytical’. There was strong opposition by others to the ‘migratory’ theories of the West and cultural studies was very often read as transmission of performative genres, that too in the realms of the ‘classical’, and these were sought to be grounded in Sanskrit aesthetics, which was seen as contrapuntal to the Folkloristics Departments and folklore curriculum in some of the universities of the region.

Cultural studies was mostly done under the auspices of the English departments in the region, until the first Department of Cultural Studies emerged at Tezpur University in 2002, as a rechristened version of the erstwhile Department of Traditional Culture and Art Forms, which was offering a Master's programme in Cultural Studies with a focus on folklore and Indian aesthetics and Western literary criticism. To be in sync with the changed name, introductory courses in semantics, anthropology and sociology were introduced. Subsequently, the university authorities exerted tremendous pressure to initiate courses in performative arts, ostensibly to make the students ‘more’ employable, which the department continues to resist, by both polemics and evasion.

Keywords:

• culture
• curriculum
• ethnicity
• folklore
• northeast
• pedagogy