‘Mumbai has a key role to play in contributing to the idea of civilisation’

Shoulder: The birth of a civilisation: Prof GN Devy launches a Centre for Civilisation Studies at Somaiya Vidyavihar University, with two lectures at Asiatic MUMBAI: In the early 19th century, the scholars who founded the Asiatic Society in India schooled the scholars who worked in Europe on the Orient

Shoulder: The birth of a civilisation: Prof GN Devy launches a Centre for Civilisation Studies at Somaiya Vidyavihar University, with two lectures at Asiatic

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MUMBAI: In the early 19th century, the scholars who founded the Asiatic Society in India schooled the scholars who worked in Europe on the Orient. “They produced a body of knowledge about India, which shook the very foundations of the many fields of knowledge in Europe,” says academic-activist Ganesh N Devy. “Because a new thesis about language, about the prehistoric migration of people outside Europe was proposed. It made them realise that there are civilisations outside the Latin, Greek and Egyptian civilisations they had known. Here was an Asian civilisation.”

In the city to give two lectures on the idea and imagination of civilisations at (where else?) the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, Devy explains ‘civilisation’ as understood by scholars 200 years ago. In the book he co-edited this year, ‘The Indians: Histories of a Civilization’, he wrote that it signifies “the breath-catching excitement experienced by a generation of relatively recent observers when they suddenly came across not too different people in the past: people who set up large cities, developed architecture, arts, amenities, trade, economy and beyond”.

The city was the beating heart of civilisation, which today, he says, is going through “a cataclysm, a crisis”. “The ecological emergency all over the world is pointing its fingers to urban settlements and their consumption of natural resources. It is making people think if urbanism is viable, if city habitats will last. In this situation, when the idea of a large city is going through a big churn, the world’s attention has returned to civilisation. This happened in the 19th century as well, when the city was emerging.”

Voice of reason

As the author or editor of nearly 80 books, Devy, in his seventh decade, continues to be a formidable voice of unheard voices. A former professor of English literature at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, he made the “uncommon migration from the fields of literary criticism to anthropology to linguistics”. His field work with Adivasis led to the formation of the Adivasi Academy in Tejgadh; the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre in Vadodara; and the unprecedented People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), a comprehensive documentation of all living Indian languages, in 50 volumes. With the help of 3,500 volunteers, he catalogued 780 languages, including Chaimal in Tripura, which is spoken only by five people.

The Padma Shri recipient says, “I believe in collective work, not individual work – the work that is necessary and not that I should be doing to become a large figure. The linguistic survey was necessary because the government was not doing it. This history book had to be done because the government wanted to prepare some kind of (agenda-driven) report, and I thought, ‘We need an alternative report of inclusive society.’”

With this mindset, Devy is embarking on another mega project. “I want to bring out a significantly large body of books on civilisations from 52 nations in Asia: from Russia to Sri Lanka and from Turkey to Japan.” About 500 scholars from different fields will work together, with Devy based at Somaiya Vidyavihar University, which will create a Centre for Civilisation Studies. “What is ahead of me is unimaginably large, and only a collective can achieve it. I hope I will have time in the world to complete that work, or at least make a good beginning, so that others can take it forward.”

Devy was spurred to take this on because of a book titled ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (1996) by American political scientist Samuel P Huntington. “He proposed that European Christian civilisations have been clashing with Asian Islamic civilisations for a thousand years. I have a new hypothesis. It states that for the last thousand years, from Syria to Turkey, Japan to China, and East Asia to India, civilisations have collaborated, not clashed. But, this collaboration has not been studied fully. If we foreground the constructive exchanges and migrations, the give and take, the learning from one another, helping each other to survive, developing each other’s philosophies such as Sufism, and doing humanitarian charitable work, if we focus on that, the tendency of the world to demonise Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or Jains will go down.”

He has chosen to base this project in Mumbai, because “Mumbai has a key role to play, as it did in the 19th century, in contributing to the idea of civilisation,” he says. “It is a large, interesting, composite city, which accepts everybody. If that model is defined, proposed, propagated, if we speak about it openly, frankly, critically, but constructively, the world in the future will be more peaceful, more accommodative, and more democratic. That’s why I want to speak from here.”

(Prof GN Devy will present two lectures on ‘Thinking Civilisation’ at Asiatic Society of Mumbai on September 5 and 6.)