ABSTRACT
In moving beyond the need for a protectionist discourse on the university, this essay raises some pertinent questions about the future of the extant university-imagination. Can the university become a site for a “post-capitalist praxis”, and not just an “anti-capitalist critique”? How might the standard surviving expression of the university become adequate to a form of educational experience that does more than critical knowledge production – or in fact, produces an epistemological adventure of ‘knowing-being-doing’? Praxis – as what Dhar accurately identifies as the “foreclosed of the university-imagination” – is precisely the Tagorean formulation of a radical critique of colonial education systems in Shantiniketan and Sriniketan. A form of pedagogy that works with and through (and not on) the slave’s knowledge-praxis could, in Tagore’s worldview, bridge the life-worlds of the subaltern and the theoretical alienation of cognitive learning. Dhar titillatingly postulates the ‘idea’ of Development Practice as consisting in an attempt to re-vision the university as a mode of ‘actioning research’ and ‘righting/writing wrongs’ – a movement towards transformative praxis!
