The Educational and Cultural Activities of Colleges in Udupi and Dakshina Kannada Districts – a Report
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MICRO-STUDY 4 The Production of the ‘Local’: The Educational and Cultural Activities of Colleges in Udupi and Dakshina Kannada Districts – A Report Mrinalini Sebastian Higher Education Cell Centre for the Study of Culture and Society Bangalore 2007 1 Contents The ‘Production of the Local’ – A Report Narrative Report of Field Visit Undertaken by Malathi Belur Annexure I Annexure II Annexure III Annexure IV Annexure V Annexure VI Annexure VII Annexure VIII Annexure IX Annexure X Annexure XI Annexure XII 2 Executive Summary This micro-study has made a survey of the undergraduate colleges in the Udupi and Dakshina Kannada districts with the objective of understanding the many efforts at constructing histories of local cultures which are predominantly in the form of the publications brought out by the colleges, the universities associated with this region and the independent research and resource centres. The micro-study adopted as its methodology a combination of interviews, institutional reviews and analysis of publications and critical material. The study has arrived at the following conclusions with regard to higher education practices in the Udupi and Dakshina Kannada districts: - the most dominant mode of research in this region invokes the distinctively ‘local’ culture in many different ways – as folk, as local performative and ritual traditions, as linguistic variation, as ecological uniqueness - in Mangalore University and the affiliated colleges the regular curriculum offers the more conventional form of ‘history’ and pays attention to the basic tenets of a discipline - there is a disjuncture between this ‘formal’ approach to ‘history’ and the engagement with the local through research undertaken at other institutions such as the Regional Resources Centre (RRC) at Udupi - the researchers engaged in investigating local cultural practices are mostly from the faculty of these ‘formal’ educational institutions and engage in this form of research in the co-curricular spaces - there are three different phases in this engagement with the local: a. the nationalist-modernist phase best represented by the work of Shivaram Karanth 3 b. the (international) ethnographic -- folklorist phase demanding the institutionalization of the study of the ‘folk’ and the local religious/performative traditions and the phase of international scholarship and funding c. the local/documentary celebratory phase, the phase where disciplines such as Kannada, History, Ecology and Applied Biology get ethnologized through the use of the method of documentation and categorization Considering that all the cultural and the academic activities of the colleges in the co- curricular spaces is greatly invested in exploring the ‘local’, the micro-study recommends that this is an area where further intervention is possible. However, in order to ensure that this engagement does not remain merely celebratory or affirm merely local and regional identities, the micro-study suggests the following modes of intervention: - supporting research initiatives from the region that analyze further the relationship between disciplines, construction of ‘regional’/’local’ identities and linguistic/ cultural nationalism - conducting workshops (preferably involving the Departments of History and Kannada) in order to raise methodological questions and questions about what might be the appropriate ways of writing the histories of the region and local folk and popular cultures - setting up a network of college and university teachers who come up with a proposal for curriculum development projects - offering fellowships to a few scholars to examine the pedagogic potential of the existing material and a few college teachers to actually engage in the task of curriculum design - proposing new directions for interdisciplinary ‘regional cultural studies’ that take into account the contemporary social, political and economic realities of the region. 4 Introduction: This micro-study is built on the understanding that the actual practice of higher education in any given region is shaped by the history of the region, its institutional and intellectual legacies and the dominant modes of constructing knowledge which are available to the academic community in that region. A prior survey of the educational institutions in the western coastal region of Karnataka has revealed that the academic and the cultural institutions in this region are deeply involved in explorations of practices and traditions which are viewed as indigenous and local1. This active engagement with a wide range of issues and practices specific to this region is accompanied by a large number of publications on related topics. The present study tests these early findings about patterns in research and tries to relate it to undergraduate education in the region. Its objective is to arrive at a set of recommendations that will help make the best use of the research potential available here for purposes of enhancing teaching capability and strengthening innovative interventions in higher education through curricular and co-curricular programmes. TOR: According to the TOR, the scope of the work includes the following: • Survey of the institutions in the Udupi and Manipal areas and the innovative educational and cultural activities they are involved in ; • Review of the Kannada Sanghas and the publications of colleges; • Identifying and analyzing efforts at constructing histories of the ‘local’ (histories of locations, institutions, movements), the ‘folk’ (Yakshagana, 1 See Undergraduate Education: Perspectives from Karnataka, Part II of the Strategy Paper on Higher Education. This section was a report of a general ethnographic study of undergraduate education in different regions of Karnataka 5 Bhuta traditions), linguistic traditions (Tulu, Konkani); its impact on UG education; • Discussion with scholars, institutional personnel and students who have interesting insights on above-mentioned issues The Background: The coastal districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi have known private intervention in the field of higher education for a long time now. Apart from the Government College (established in 1866, and now called the University College, Mangalore), most of the other older educational institutions have been set up by the different orders of the Catholic Church, the Academy of General Education, Manipal, the SDM Educational Trust and the Admar Mutt of Udupi. Though these institutions have, in one way or the other, enjoyed the patronage of different prominent communities in the region, it is to be noted that they are rarely recognized as ‘communal’ institutions. These private institutions (which received grants –in-aid from the state government in the late 1970s) have contributed significantly towards the growth of higher education in this region. Much before the pronounced expansion of private participation in the field of professional education, these privately managed institutions had become a significant presence in the field of general undergraduate education and they continue to exert a great deal of influence in shaping the tenor of higher education in this region. From about the 50s – but more so after the 70s - there have been conscious efforts in the coastal regional of Dakshina Kannada (now divided into Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts) to document, preserve and interpret the very heterogeneous forms of ‘local culture’. The well-known Kannada writer Shivaram Karanth was one of the first to take interest in the ‘folk’ traditions of performance. He brought recognition to Yakshagana which was a popular form of performance and reintroduced it as a respectable cultural practice to his own contemporaries. He was responsible for taking this form of performance to the international stage. His own understanding of the ‘Folk’ has left a 6 mark on the subsequent engagements with various forms of ‘local’ cultures by other scholars and practitioners. An important institution that has contributed greatly to the production of knowledge about the ‘local’ is the Regional Resources Centre for Folk Performing Arts (RRC) in Udupi. A key figure in this regard was the then Principal of MGM College, Ku. Shi. Haridasa Bhat. The founding of the Regional Resources Centre, which was initially supported by the Ford Foundation, and the intervention by international and local scholars in creating an interest in Folk Studies, gave an interpretative shift to this engagement with local histories and cultures. During this period there is a methodological emphasis on ethnographic documentation and an accurate capturing of a practice/ oral text. This is accompanied by an analytical framework that is informed by the theories of semiotics and performance. Much of the later publications draw from these earlier interventions without, however, reflecting on the methodological challenges posed by an academic inquiry into local cultures. In terms of academic structures and disciplinary interventions, the most obvious outcome of this engagement is the introduction of ‘Folkloristics’ in some institutional spaces. An indirect but important impact of this might have been in the form of the central place occupied by Folklore Studies in the Kannada University of Hampi, and the accompanying mandate that the University should support research in the field of Kannada Culture. (See marked sections in Annexure I). In colleges affiliated to Mangalore University, however, this very visible interest in the ‘local’ is not necessarily reflected in the ‘formal’ training