Why I left academia?

 

Nah, it was not a sudden decision. Things have been leading towards that direction for quite some time and of course, there were immediate trigger events which hastened my decision.

I had to leave academia because I had no choice. Like hundreds every year, I was screened out of the job market and thereafter I found it impossible to continue in the profession. The meagre pay of a guest faculty position was not enough to make both ends meet. I applied to many institutions and colleges for a full-time position. Interviews followed and I came close but did not get any calls. The application process was gruesome – interviews were notified on websites and on the day of interview, the candidates would arrive two hours before the scheduled time and make a beeline in front of the office. Often a hundred candidates would vie for a single post. I presented myself in many such interviews – cut a sorry figure in some and in others, managed to impress the interviewers – but was unable to toe the line that separated the good from the bad.

One fine day, I decided to move on. After all, I could pursue my interest in books outside the academic structure as well. And yes, it was my love for books, specifically my passion for literature that drove me into academia years ago. As a starry-eyed teenager, I saw my verdant college campus as the perfect place to delve into the golden realms of literature. Later on I would re-enter the outside world as a man transformed by - as Wordsworth said - the strange seas of thought. At the university, I was surrounded by scholars who were generally well-meaning, although driven more by careerism than by the love for books. The defining time came when I realised that my love for literature had become a liability. The entire concept of literature has been discredited and brushed under the carpet. Once in an airless conference hall, the discussion turned to the necessity of promoting what is called low art (as opposed to high art), when a middle-aged professor declared with an air of adolescent superiority: there is nothing called art or literature. They are historically constructed.

[# If there is nothing called art, how does one talk about low art? How can one declare something and simultaneously claim that there is now way to measure it?]

 In literature departments today, the question of whether something called art and literature exists depends on the social groups in question. If it is the privileged groups, the existence of a specific type of writing called literature is categorically denied; but if it concerns a writer from the vulnerable social groups, it is assumed that there is something called art and literature. This line of argument, or aporia (to be precise) is based on the naive belief (akin to a second-class romanticism) that reading and researching literatures written by marginalised groups would somehow improve the living conditions of the oppressed and vulnerable people. Love for literature is therefore no longer the primary basis on which students and scholars are evaluated. Rather it is one’s political and ideological stand that distinguishes the good from the bad students.

In the faculty lounges and living quarters, in the street addas and late night revelries, what issues forth is envenomed rhetoric in the garb of academic research: Austen is an imperialist...The Mahabharata is nothing but the war cry of an advancing civilization...Raja Ravi Verma is a chauvinist. No matter how much I reasoned with the pundits, I found my voice lost in an endless cesspool of doctrinairism.

[At this point, it would be unfair if I don’t acknowledge a small circle of professors and research scholars who have bravely defied the normative demands of contemporary academic opinionatedness. I had the good fortune to learn a great deal from such old-school academics who are, I am afraid, on the verge of getting extinct.]

During the last couple of years, a topic often retailed in academic circles is the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020. Teachers and students often contest a simple point in the NEP – the hinging of education to the needs of the developmental state. Such yoking, says the silver-haired professor, reduces the university to a cog in a machine, whose function is pruned in order to churn out men and women who would staff the different departments of the government. What our silver-haired prof means is obvious and could be true – the NEP fails in its endeavour because it views the university as any other government department. But anyone who has been associated with a university knows that it is meant to be a place where young men and women seek their dreamy paths, forge identities and learn the merits of passive contemplation. The university is not meant to be used in an instrumental sense; rather it is supposed to be the breeding ground of ideas that would go on to transform our world.

Well, this seems to be a perfect line of argument. But I wish the same wisdom prevails among the academic community when it comes to the teaching of literature. Literature, if its existence is acknowledged at all, has been reduced to a means and end binary, an instrument through which one can learn about something else. Such instrumentalization of literature makes a mockery of the argument being given against the NEP’s vision of education as a means to an end. Do we have a moral ground to criticise others if we commit the same mistakes? Do we have the right to accuse others of what we ourselves are guilty of perpetrating? The NEP’s instrumentalizing of knowledge is but a spitting image of the academic community’s reductionist views of literature.

            I am fatigued. I haven’t read a good novel (forget poetry) in years. But the promise of literature beckons from a place that is unbounded by the academic straitjacket. The solution to the ills that plague literature departments (more generally, humanities and social sciences) is commonsense – the mere understanding of the difference between political awareness and indoctrination. But I resolve not to take the mantle as I have moved on to the interloper’s pleasure zone. I am a free man.