This cartoon from @thetoonguy today in @TheHinduMag today, which captures the reality of knowledge supremacy, triggered an old memory that had been buried deep inside for 13 years.
The Children's #Science Congress was taking place in Baramati, Maharashtra in 2008. I had travelled with an incredible bunch of geohydrologists from ACWADAM, Pune, to see how #science was being encouraged for school goers.
I landed up in a room where children from across the country were making presentations on #biological #sciences. One presenter was from #Nagaland & she made a fantastic presentation on local #rice varieties in her village.
She put up images of each local variety, listed their local names, how their flavour and quality differed. She talked about her grandmother who maintained the seed bank and taught her about these rice varieties and how they were disappearing from Nagaland.
This presentation was perhaps the only one on alternative ways of knowing and doing #science. I loved it. She should have been lauded and praised. Instead, the panel of judges, all science teachers from schools in mainland #India, seemed unimpressed.
One male teacher, condescendingly asked, " you are presenting about #rice, do you know the Latin name for rice"? This was the stupidest question that can follow a beautiful presentation like that. The girl didn't know & her #knowledge had been rubbished with a single question.
The man persisted - "how can you even present about rice if you don't even know the Latin name? It is Oryza sativa. You should have started your presentation with that." I witnessed first hand how #science was being murdered in the Children's Science Congress.
This cartoon reminded me of how we have unhesitatingly adopted the #knowledge hierarchies of the west, and learned to discount & rubbish all alternative ways of knowing. We are not only imitators of white man's #science, but we have also ingrained that #colonial attitude.
A breathtakingly beautiful presentation on local rice varieties is not scientific, because the student didn't know the taxonomy. This is how we erase #knowledge pluralism in this country for indigenous groups and communities in classrooms across the country.

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More from @amitangshu

3 Jul
"The Dry" could have been just another murder mystery film, but what made it interesting was how it weaved in the #ecological crisis in #Australia - #bushfires & #droughts - with the social crisis in #rural farming communities & small towns.
The swirling dust devils, the dried up #rivers & creeks, correlates with a societal collapse. The washing of a car with waste #water, the red crud that emerges out of shower heads, all narrating how a #rain starved society has hit its #ecological limit.
It is also about the decline of the farming community in #Australia. A telling comment in the film - an old #farmer worrying about how his #land will be tilled after he is gone: "Farms with no people. Imagine that. No need for towns. No need for any of us."
Read 4 tweets
19 Jun
In the 19th century, a Bengali Shudra widow had outwitted The British East India Company & protected the #Ganga as a #commons for fishing rights, using Anglo-Saxon #capitalism’s potent weapon — private property. My story on Rani Rashmoni.
thehindu.com/society/the-sh…
I have grown up with this understanding that Bengali's are bad at business, we are somehow too intellectual & idealistic to survive the rough & tumble world of commerce. Poppycock! If you study 19th century Bengali capitalists, they amassed huge wealth & power through trade.
Rani Rashmoni thrived in an upper caste male dominated world of commerce with a strong moral compass. Her philanthropy was legendary. She was deeply empathetic of the plight of the underprivileged - the only landlord of her time who actively divested from indigo cultivation.
Read 8 tweets
18 Jun
"the concept of “#decolonizing” is being circulated, thrown around, & even abused by many individuals who hijacked it without having direct experience & connection to what many decolonial thinkers call the “colonial wound”.Fascinating piece from Louis Yako counterpunch.org/2021/04/09/dec…
"I think it is absurd to have many privileged and institutionalized Western professors who have no firsthand experience with the colonial wound to give us lectures, workshops, or write about decolonizing this or that matter."
"The colonized, slowly but surely, become at once the dagger and the wound to themselves. We come to such a place where we cooperate with the dagger against our own wounds."
Read 5 tweets
11 Jan
I have never used #WhatsApp, ever. I always saw it to be an invasive & privacy violating tool. In #India, that translated into being called "Luddite" & an anti-social. I watched it being made mandatory for office groups, housing societies, public services & vendors. 1/1
My resident housing society secretary recently shouted at me for not being on #WhatsApp. I didn't realise it was mandatory, I told him. "If everyone is on it then what's your problem?" He hollered 2/2
But that's what everyone did. Joined a platform unthinkingly, because it was "convenient" and those who were trying to think things through were made an object of frustration and ridicule. 3/3
Read 8 tweets
9 Jul 20
"Anustup"/ "অনুষ্টুপ" is a 54 year old independent #Bengali literary & cultural journal (ISSN: 0974-2697). It is now officially recognized by @ugc_india on their list of approved journals. Scholars publishing in #Bangla/#বাংলা pls consider subscribing & publishing. cc @maitreesh
Regional language journals are dying across #India. Anustup doesn't even have a decent website because it doesn't have resources. It will only sustain if more people subscribe to it. Please write to Anustup at anustuppotrika@gmail.com
And the list of people who have published in this journal will surprise you. It includes (late) Ritwick Ghatak, (late) Hemango Biswas, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Arindam Chakrabarti, Partha Chatterjee, Maitreesh Ghatak, and many others. So do engage!
Read 5 tweets
20 Nov 19
1/1 I have been a regular at many Geographical Society talks in recent years in Edinburgh. And I find them to be fascinating & very informative. But there are some issues which I has been niggling me & I have to put them out. Caveat: #Thread.
1/2. Though speakers end up traveling to the majority world, there is rarely any discussion on how these former Anglo European colonies dealt with years of systematic loot and oppression. For example, in today’s talk with a legendary photographer, he said & I quote:
1/3. “Of course there was no Pakistan then. There was only India. And you know we were running India then”. He was talking about his trip to Karakoram. He just papered over UKs role in dividing the subcontinent & what horrors unfolded, which we are still living with.
Read 10 tweets

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