Rukmini Bhaya Nair

This essay focuses on the semantic link between the notions of ‘universality’ and the ‘university’. It does so by tracking changes in the specific roles played by universities on the Indian subcontinent, a region of the world with a legendary reputation for cultural diversity and difference. Plotting a narrative arc from the longue durée of the precolonial ‘Axial Age’, followed by the colonial Age of Empire, and now the postcolonial Age of the Anthropocene which has as its central motif the destruction of nature by humans, the essay explores the complex morphology of that dual and ambiguous construct ‘human nature’ as it is shaped by the technologies deployed and the epistemologies of ‘indifference’ developed in Indian universities at various historical junctures. Finally, mention is made of the constitution of a ‘we’ within the apparently benign halls of academe with a view to understanding the putative ‘minor universalisms’ of the future.

This paper is an enquiry into some commonalities between fiction and atheism. It suggests that ‘disbelief’ may be a state of mind shared by both and asks how a meaningful semantics might be derived from the mental stance of disbelief. Albert Camus’ The Plague, published in 1947 post the trauma of two successive world wars, is a key ‘existentialist’ text that focuses on this dilemma. Not only is this work of fiction especially relevant to our current times of natural, political, economic and psychological distress gone ‘viral’, it is also one in which a blunt question is posed to the atheist hero of the novel, Doctor Rieux, in Oran, a small French Algerian town fighting a terrible pandemic: ‘Do you believe in God, doctor?’. Rieux’s answer is telling: ‘No, but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out.’ It is this human ‘struggle’ to discern the contours of the invisible ‘in the dark’ that could animate the thought worlds of fiction as well as of atheism. The paper seeks to draw out some of these putative similarities through the lens of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ and J.L, Austin and John Searle’s classification of basic speech-acts. It also considers the evolutionary, affective and cross-cultural appeal of the parallel narratives of science and religion. Oran’s most remarkable aspect, Camus insists, is its ‘ordinariness’; yet, it is here that the ‘extraordinariness’ of the plague strikes. Quotidian local circumstances thus paradoxically set in motion the sorts of ‘universal’ inquiries into ‘what it means to be human’ that, my paper argues, alike motivate the fiction of atheism and the atheism of fiction.

This essay draws attention to the almost coeval birthing of the transitive verb ‘outsource’ and the now invisibly hyphenated noun ‘postcolonialism’ in the late twentieth century, to suggest that, via the violent enjambment of these oddly disparate yet fraternal words, some of the meanings that attach to the former term have consequences for a contemporary reading of the latter. Just as in the sphere of economic transactions much of the ‘back-end’ work for ‘finished products’ is accomplished by cheap and largely anonymous sources of labor in the developing world while the design and logo rights typically remain with the usually high-profile parent company located in the developed world, within the epistemological complex ‘postcolonial studies,’ the productive locus of ‘theory’ is usually to be found in western universities, while the ‘data’ to substantiate this theorizing—the material production of disaggregated ‘small parts’—is outsourced to ‘native speaker’ researchers in diverse far-flung locations such as the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, or West Africa. Nair finally explores ways in which ‘postcolonial theory’ in its current formation can self-reflexively monitor these complicated processes of insourcing and outsourcing, offering a set of interdisciplinary practices that could help resolve the fraternal tension between the harsh historical inheritance of postcolonialism and the alluring economic attractions of outsourcing in a world at once ideologically divided and linguistically unified by English.