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The politics of curriculum and pedagogy:

teaching cultural studies in North East India
Parag Moni Sarma
Published online: 19 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Parag Moni Sarma (2012) The politics of curriculum and pedagogy: teaching cultural
studies in North East India, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 26:1, 137-146, DOI:
10.1080/02560046.2012.663173

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 Under fire
The politics of curriculum and
pedagogy: teaching cultural studies in
North East India
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Parag Moni Sarma

Abstract
The emergence of cultural studies in the North East of India makes for interesting reading.
North East India, with its polyvocal realities entranced in its ethnic diversities, ethnic strifes,
internal displacement of people and migration (or infiltration) from Bangladesh and Nepal,
‘Western’ and ‘materialistic’ (read urbane) mode of life in the largely Christian hill states of
Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram, which goes against the mainstream Indian grain, and
the rhetoric of neglect, should have provided ample opportunities for an engagement with
cultural studies. Yet, cultural studies was rather perceived by many as ‘study of culture’ that
owes its antecedents to the legacy of colonial Anthropology and Folkloristics (with its colonial
etymology and postcolonial mutation) that celebrated the ‘documentary’ over the ‘analytical’.
There was strong opposition by others to the ‘migratory’ theories of the West and cultural
studies was very often read as transmission of performative genres, that too in the realms
of the ‘classical’, and these were sought to be grounded in Sanskrit aesthetics, which was
seen as contrapuntal to the Folkloristics Departments and folklore curriculum in some of the
universities of the region.

Cultural studies was mostly done under the auspices of the English departments in the
region, until the first Department of Cultural Studies emerged at Tezpur University in 2002, as
a rechristened version of the erstwhile Department of Traditional Culture and Art Forms, which
was offering a Master’s programme in Cultural Studies with a focus on folklore and Indian
aesthetics and Western literary criticism. To be in sync with the changed name, introductory
courses in semantics, anthropology and sociology were introduced. Subsequently, the
university authorities exerted tremendous pressure to initiate courses in performative arts,

Parag Moni Sarma is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Tezpur University,
Assam, India. parag17@tezu.ernet.in

ISSN 0256-0046/Online 1992-6049

pp. 137–146
26 (1) 2012 © Critical Arts Projects & Unisa Press
DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2012.663173

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 Parag Moni Sarma

ostensibly to make the students ‘more’ employable, which the department continues to
resist, by both polemics and evasion.

Keywords: culture, curriculum, ethnicity, folklore, northeast, pedagogy

Introduction
The University shall endeavour through education, research and extension to play a
positive role in the development of the North-Eastern region, and, based on the rich
heritage of the region,
to promote and advance the culture of the people of Assam …
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study the rich cultural heritage of the region …

the diverse ethnic, linguistic and tribal cultures of the state.
– Tezpur University Act 1993

It was, ostensibly, a quest for a balance between progress of technology and

maintenance of tradition, that the Department of Traditional Culture and Art Forms
(TCAF) was established as a department in the School of Humanities and Social
Sciences at Tezpur University in 1995. The purpose was to fulfil ‘the objectives
of the University in respect of the study and promotion of the cultural heritage of
the north-eastern region, and particularly the state of Assam, as laid down in the
Tezpur University act’ (Datta 1999: 8). The founder intellects of the department were
particularly worried about the ‘progressive erosion of the traditional lifestyles, value-
systems and artistic expressions of big and small societies in the non-western world
caused by waves of modernization and westernization’ and that ‘cultural studies
have assumed a special significance … in a country like India with an extremely
rich and colourful heritage of art and culture – whether elite or popular, classical or
folk, written or oral – the study of traditional culture and artistic material can in itself
be most exciting and rewarding academic pursuit’ and contribute ‘towards a fuller
understanding of the process by which the Indian society … have been coping with
the forces of modernisation and westernisation (and, now globalization)’ (ibid: 1).
It is clear from the above that the Department of TCAF saw cultural studies as distinct
from the discipline of cultural studies, a fact borne out by the name of an anthology
published by the department titled Culture studies themes and perspectives: essays in
culture, folklore, linguistics, aesthetics & literary criticism (2003). The main agenda
of the department was to resist the global and the Western, and to foster the traditional
and the folk, which were clearly seen as an antithesis to the aforementioned. The first
syllabus of the department reflects this preoccupation with two courses on folklore,
two on languages and literatures and two on society, culture and tradition – all from
a declared North East perspective, but with a ‘special reference to Assam’. Added to

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 The politics of curriculum and pedagogy

these were courses on performing and visual art and Western and Indian aesthetics.
The early recruitment into the department determined the academic agenda: there
was a renowned scholar of folklore who was equally well known as a singer (but
publicly kept his academic and artistic pursuits insulated), a scholar of Assamese
literature and language (but not linguistics), a sociologist, an anthropologist and a
Sanskrit scholar, who was also an accomplished performer of classical dance forms.
The last fact only went on to strengthen the popular misconception associated with
the department which equated ‘culture’ to ‘performance’.
The department drew enthusiastic students from all parts of the region, attracted
by the innovative courses, and also engendered by the existing political and social
situation in the state. The university was set up as a part of the deal the government
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of India had inked with the influential All Assam Students Union (AASU) and All
Assam Gana Sangram Parishad (AAGSP), which saw the end of the long drawn-
out agitation launched by the two organisations against the unabated influx of
Bangladeshi nationals into the state, and for the safety and security of indigenous
culture against the ‘corrupting’ influence of the culture that came along with the
Bangladeshi infiltrators. Thus, any course designed to uphold the culture, language
and society of the state had many takers around the time the department came into
being. The first crisis that the department faced was for this very fact; the considerable
number of students passing out of the department had no immediate or direct takers
in the job market. Placement was emerging as a buzzword at Tezpur University and
TCAF was seen as the cause of an aberration to the statistical well-being of this new
university.
However, any immediate antipathy was stalled for two main reasons: the
benevolence of the first vice-chancellor and the fact that the department was one of
the first in the university to attract a considerable funding grant of $200 000 from
the Ford Foundation, to establish the North-Eastern Archival Centre for Traditional
Art and Folklore (NEACTAF) in 1998. It was felt that the documentation was
‘extremely important on at least two counts – first it is the social obligation of
the present generation to preserve as much of the artistic heritage as possible, and
second, such documentation would provide valuable material for the students of
culture not only with a regional scope but also with national and global perspective’
(ibid: 15). This, however, went on to strengthen the folklore bias of the department,
and folklore material was collected extensively from all parts of the state. Much of
it lies in VHS format, and as the department ran out of funds to digitise them, Ford
Foundation did not renew its initial generous sponsorship. The early research profile
of the department also reflects the importance given to folklore.
Meanwhile, with the changing of the guard at the top and subsequent non-renewal
of the Ford Foundation grant, the founding bonhomie that the department enjoyed
with the university administration went into a downswing, and the spectre of

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unemployable students graduated by the department assumed threatening proportions.

The second vice-chancellor was particularly uncharitable toward the TCAF, not
mincing his words as regards the quality of both the courses and the students, and
with the imposing figure of the folklore doyen leaving the department at the end of
his term, the rest of the faculty had to endure rather uncharitable times. Campus lore
abounded around the treatment meted out to teachers and students alike, the most
enduring of these being the satirical dismissal of the NEACTAF as tepid Nescafé;
professors, some of them figures of national eminence and held in high esteem, came
and left, unable to cope with the vagaries and whims of an unrelenting boss. The
feeling was that the department was heading towards a natural death, but no one had
bargained on the resilience of silence or the impatience of the vice-chancellor who,
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failing to see a natural death in the immediate future, in a certain epiphanic moment
in 2002 changed the name of the Department to Cultural Studies (CS) on the eve
of his term in the university coming to an end. Without the necessary academic
acumen and no idea of what such a change entailed, the department was destined for
further hardship. This article seeks to understand the politics of curriculum framing
and subsequent pedagogic strategies that the department is adopting to circumvent
popular misconceptions and the rabid anti-theory stance of many of those who
determine the smooth passage of such a curriculum.

Cultural studies and the study of culture

Cosmetic and hurried changes were effected in the curriculum, and courses on
semiotics and cultural theory were incorporated. However, much of the baggage
of TCAF remained, with the folklore component being further strengthened. In
fact, this syllabus was a model for the revision of the syllabus of the Department of
Creative and Cultural Studies (CCS) at the North Eastern Hill University (NEHU),
Shillong, where folklore is the principal component in the pursuit of cultural studies.
The Department of Cultural Studies and Creative Arts emerged in the North Eastern
Hill University at Shillong in the state of Meghalaya, from its diploma and certificate
courses in folkloristics, with the aim to mediate global trends with local ‘tribal’
issues. No other cultural region in India was as distinctly ‘Western’ as the North East.
Western music and fashion and other lifestyle statements mediated both the local and
the global long before globalisation became a buzzword in India. Coupled with these
‘global’ influences is a resurgence of traditional religion, customs and fashion, that
gives the cultural landscape of the region a liminality and transience that cultural
studies is bound to respond to.
This interest in folklore within the ambit of cultural studies can be accommodated
within the premises of an early model of Indian cultural studies that was rooted in
‘indigenous forms of social knowledge’ that ‘problematized the idea of culture and

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questioned the standardized categories of politics, economics and science’ (Sardar

& Loon 1999: 76). Instead of treating folkloric forms as targets for documentation
that would keep alive for posterity the quaint practices of the ancestors, folklore
can be seen as a dynamic flux that reflects the transformation of traditional
communities in modern collectivities that mediate tradition and technology, history
and the contemporary, and also the recovery of valid traditional behaviours to offset
universal categories such as rationality and nationality. Such an approach can offset
the documentation ‘ad absurdum’ and mimetic duplication happening across the
country in the field of folklore studies. Also, it would contribute to making ‘cultural
studies a totally indigenous enterprise based on … unique categories of knowing and
being’ (ibid: 84).
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But that there was no differentiation in the public sphere at Tezpur University
between the pursuit of cultural forms and cultural studies as a distinct discipline
was reflected in the general attitude towards the department as it had to organise all
‘cultural functions’ (the song and dance components) of important university events
such as Foundation Day or the Convocation. Students, too, joined the department
under the popular misconception of cultural studies being the pursuit of cultural
forms in their performative dimensions. They were surprisingly good performers,
and did a good job of dance and song routines, whenever assigned such. This not
only gave credence to the popular misconception, but furthered the vicious cycle.
Burdened with a lack of teachers the department struggled until about 2004, when the
lot of the department started improving. A new vice-chancellor had joined from one
of the Indian Institutes of Technology, where cultural studies exists as a component
of the social science courses offered to budding technocrats. He took it upon himself
to revamp and revive the department and recruited new teachers to enlarge the scope
of the courses offered. In came new teachers from varied backgrounds: two from
departments of English from two neighbouring universities (with interests in gender,
translation, oral aesthetics and the translation of ethnic literatures of the region); a
senior professor from the Department of Assamese at Gauhati University (with work
in cultural history and performative forms). In addition, media and ethnicity was
added to the profile of the department through the recruitment of young scholars.

Towards a cultural studies mooring

The curriculum needed drastic revision to accommodate the diverse interests of the
new recruits. It was also an unprecedented opportunity to reorient the curriculum
to reflect the concerns of the discipline of cultural studies, with a special relevance
to the North East. Thus, the 2010 syllabus of Cultural Studies at Tezpur University
tried to introduce areas such as ethnicity and nationalism, Northeast studies, gender
and sexuality studies and media studies, in an attempt at a ‘sentient’ engagement

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 Parag Moni Sarma

with issues of concern to students in the region. In a socio-cultural ambience of

ethnic mistrust and intolerance, changing gender equations in traditional matrilineal
communities of the region, and an academic intolerance of an alternative point of
view, the agenda of promoting tolerance to difference and coming to terms with
change is perhaps of paramount importance.
An extremely heterogeneous region, a blanket term such as ‘North East’ is a
misnomer in the sense that it might convey an impression of a homogenous entity.
Basically a coinage of convenience, the term ‘North East’, however, helps foster the
notion of an entity that can be termed a multi-ethnic mosaic. Consisting of eight states
of the Indian Union, the region is marked by the existence of numerous ethnic groups,
and the unique dynamics of continuous and evolving relationships that exist between
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the different ethnic groups is an interesting area for scholars of culture. Ethnicity is
emerging as a focal consideration in the politics of identity in contemporary Assam,
a state of the Indian Union in the North East of India. Often identified as a flashpoint
in the subversive politics that question the logistics of the Indian nation, North
East India is emerging as a cartographic domain that posits questions of internal
colonialism and hegemony. Cartographic reorientation of territory based on factors
of linguistic and ethnic identity is perceived as some sort of utopian deliverance
from the stranglehold of an uncompromising notion of the nation. Hence, the North
East of India is dotted with armed insurrections for autonomous territories or total
severance, depending on the population and the spatial domain of the ethnic group
in question.
The expressive traditions of the region have also been serving as negotiative
mediums, whereby the people are responding as local, national and global entities in
an epoch of great change. A slew of events over the past few decades has pushed the
region into the mediascape of the nation, including immigration, insurgency, Aids,
violent ethnic assertions and the so-called ‘look East’ policy of the Indian government.
Identity formation is one of the most pertinent problematics of the contemporary
socio-political episteme in North East India. Pluralism, multiculturalism and multi-
ethnicity are theoretical premises in which the whole question of the emerging
dynamics of social, cultural and political identity are sought to be located. Ethnic
assertion, revivalism, reverse appropriations and quests for a separate space are the
major motifs that infuse and inform the contemporary socio-political and cultural
idioms of the region. Most resistant and resurgent idioms are centred on the issue of
linguistic identity, and language doubles up as a socio-cultural indicator.
Early ideological moorings of the department chose to stress the romance of a
syncretic relationship between the different ethnic groups that went on to forge a
seemingly interdependent and interlinked cultural and ethnic coalesce in the region.
This was seen as a factor contributing to the emergence of a coherent socio-polity,
which, in turn, was a contributing constituency to the great Indian nation. Thus,

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one of the earliest publications from the department was a reprint of the souvenir
published in the Indian History Congress, retitled as Aspects of the heritage of
Assam (2002). The quest for a rainbow country pushed to the background obvious
differences. Cultural forms that constantly strived to meet the historical requirements
of a unifying discourse by accommodating and glorifying cultural subtexts in an
attempt to forge a greater cultural text can now be viewed as failed agents of an
untenable nationalistic consolidation. The quest for naïve syncretic folklore texts
in the field – that celebrate interdependence and acknowledge a common ancestry
– is a thing of the past, as those very texts are the rationales of revivalist rhetoric
celebrating distinctiveness and separateness. The abandonment of current united
strivings drew attention to the politics of difference, which was becoming pronounced
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in the region. Cultural studies as a discipline had to respond to questions of ethnicity

and nationalism. The colonial rationale of state formation as an administrative
convenience was already overturned when states were reorganised in independent
India along the basis of language affiliation. Colonial Assam fragmented into four
states: Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram in post-independence, riding
on ethnic nationalism based on charges of linguistic hegemony of the Assamese,
neglect by the Assam government, and a lack of opportunity for human resource and
infrastructure development. The fragmentary trends have continued, with numerous
autonomous units being continuously carved out of what remained of Assam based
on similar charges, and similar divisive trends evolved in the other newly created
entities.

Narrating the North East

One of the important concerns of cultural studies in India is the role and agency
of the English language, and the politics of English pedagogy. The response of the
departments of English was an important factor in consolidating the discipline of
cultural studies, as they tried to emerge from the crisis of being a colonial construct
that sustained the machinations of power equations of a colonial time in a post-
colonial epoch. With narratology emerging as an important analytical paradigm,
the study of ‘cultural artifacts’ that tell a story (Bal 1997: 3) has become integral
to English studies. Thus, in the age of cultural studies, one should perceive the
concept of narratology to be one that ‘implicates text and reading, subject and object,
production and analysis in the act of understanding … a theory … which defines
and describes narrativity, not narrative; not a genre or object but a cultural mode
of expression’ (ibid: 222). While English literature studies would perhaps remain
‘simply a subdiscipline within a much broader, far more integrated Historical and
Cultural Studies’ (Ahmed 1995: 281–282), it would be the role of cultural studies
to explore and lay bare the pedagogical role of Western Literary studies’ agenda

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in the inferiorisation of the Orient (ibid: 163–164). In the North East, it is an ever-
regressive bind; the inferiorisation of the region by the nation; the inferiorisation of
minor ethnicities by the majority and so on.
The politics of narrating the North East is introduced to students of cultural studies
through a general course on North East studies that tries to study the present situation
from the colonial legacy and its mimetic aftermath. The course introduces students
to the emerging notion of the North East as a space of academic exploration, and
looks at it as a discursive formation that straddles multiple factors such as geography,
culture, history and politics. Moreover, North East also enables the exploration of the
continued legacy of India’s tryst with the West, facilitated by the colonial experience
and how it is narrated in the national imagination. A major part of the region is
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Christian by faith, and cultural forms negotiate the traditional with the Western. An
important impact on notions of ethnicity is the proliferation of global expressive
forms and the interactive generation of new forms, especially amongst the youth.
Thus, in Assam, we have traditional folk songs and tunes like the Bihu rendered
to the accompaniment of electronic percussion and stringed instruments, while in
Meghalaya, Western folk complements the local, and musicians such as Bob Dylan
are iconic, with the annual Dylan festival being a cultural landmark of the state.
These and similar manifestations – especially in the realms of dress and expressive
forms – are new badges that are sported by an emerging youth culture. Thus, it is not
unfamiliar to hear sobriquets like North East being the land of ‘jeans’, or Shillong
being the ‘rock capital’ of the country.
The introductory course on North East is complemented by a theoretical course
on Ethnicity and nationalism, where units on national identities, race and racisms,
tribalism and ethnicity are explored with a special unit on ethnicity and gender that
makes particular reference to women. It is not uncommon to find women from the
North East being sexually harassed in other parts of the country, as the image of
‘sexually permissive’ or ‘liberated’ women from the region does the national rounds.
Ethnic profiling of a most demeaning type is found at work here, as statistics on
Aids and the morality of women of the region are coalesced to generate a repressive
narrative. The North East is frequently perceived as a ‘diseased’ liability to the nation,
with Aids often being seen as metonymic of the malaise. It is essential to understand
the politics behind such a narrative and to interrogate the dynamics pivotal in its
generation. It has also been said (most famously) that as the crow flies, North East
is closer to Hanoi than to Delhi. The cultural affinity that North East India enjoys
with South East Asia is undeniable. An historical overview of the movements of
people in South East Asia and North East India reveals common contours, and an
exploration of the political and cultural fall-out of India’s ‘look East’ policy is an
important area of attention. The promised economic windfall for the region is, in

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itself, a problematic that requires an understanding of the region as both a route to

South East Asia and a market, with all its accompanying pitfalls.
Disciplinary bias was also largely responsible for the representation of the North
East as early representative narration issued forth from colonial biases and its
postcolonial persistence, and the subsequent corrective turn. Thus the relationship
of cultural studies with anthropology, sociology, history and literary studies is
explored in the course Cultural studies and allied disciplines. The corrective turn in
History writing, initiated by the Subaltern School of History Writing, has had a huge
influence on cultural studies scholarship in India. The North East particularly has
responded warmly to the role of oral history in subverting colonial construction, and
in generating alternative paradigms that contest anthropological and sociological
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narratives.

Cultural studies: mediating the local and the global

That cultural studies cannot be exclusively local and has to have methodological
and theoretical familiarity and affinity to cultural studies elsewhere in the world,
was clear to those who took the initiative to revise the curriculum of the department
at Tezpur University. Thus, courses on Methods in cultural studies and Introduction
to cultural theory were also introduced. Units on Lukacs and Marxism, Adorno and
culture industry, Gramsci and hegemony, Althusser and ideology, myth and Roland
Barthes were introduced. The theoretical paradigm of the disciplines was linked up
with the feminist approach and gender studies where the notion of sexuality in an
Indian cultural environment is explored, and the cultural polemics represented by
the body (both feminine and masculine) is interrogated. The introduction of gay and
lesbian studies was met with great resistance in board meetings, as this was declared
irrelevant to the Indian context in general and the Assam context in particular. The
field was derided as symbolic of Western intrusion into Indian academia that diluted
the purpose of teaching students ‘culturally relevant’ courses, and it was only after
a great deal of polemic that the units on sexuality and gender were retained in the
syllabus.
It was the continuation of ‘culturally relevant’ courses like Folklore and culture I
& II and Performance and culture that helped ensure the incorporation of the more
‘radical’ and ‘Western’ courses. Yet, folklore had to move beyond mere methods
to appraisal that would perceive it to be a live and relevant area of study in the
annals of cultural studies. Theoretical aspects of folklore studies were incorporated,
and the works of scholars such as Dell Hymes, Denis Tedlock, Arnold Krupat,
Linda Degh and Margaret Mills were included, as were areas like urban folklore,
ecology and folklore, and folklore and ethnic assertion. The media are complicit
in the narration of the region, hence the course on Media and culture traces the

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theoretical foundations of the media, articulated within the paradigm of cultural

studies. Courses on film and television studies try to mediate the global dynamics
in film and television production with those of the national (read ‘Bollywood’) and
the local regional entertainment industry. This, in a university with a Department
of Mass Communication and Journalism, was seen as a transgression into the niche
area of another discipline. It was only after many a clarification, with ample help
from the external members of the board, that the academic body of the university
was convinced otherwise. Doubts continue to persist, however, about the validity of
an overtly ‘Western mode’ of reading the media and its veracity in an Indian context.
The onus is on the department to validate the changes effected and the assertion that
cultural studies is not the study of culture and of training students in the performative
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dimensions, but is an appreciative mode that links people, society and culture to the
discursive cultural forms that constitute us as individual and social beings.

References
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Bal, M. 1997. Narratology: introduction to the theory of narrative. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Datta, B., et al. 1999. NEACTAF: a profile. Tezpur: TCAF, Tezpur University.
Sardar, Z. and B.V. Loon. 1999. Introducing cultural studies. Cambridge: Icon Books.
Tezpur University. Tezpur University Act 1993. http://www.tezu.ernet.in/foundation/index.
html

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