Delhi University holds the utopia close, the utopia of a future that thrives even in fractured realities. In cracks of imagination, the consciousness tries to hold ground, the “Not-yet” lingers, waiting to spill the past into the present, yielding the unfinished dreams. The naivete of optimism and the glaring reality of pessimistic thoughts will merge, coming alive with hope of utopia.
The “banking” model of education, Paolo Freire writes, reduces the students to passive recipients of established and sanctioned knowledge, becoming the upholders of truths deposited into them. In such a system they become the collectors who safeguard the accepted ideas, carry them forward and continue the cycle.
This erodes the possibility of invention and reinvention of ideas, as knowledge becomes a gift bestowed upon them by the knowledgeable. This system is accompanied by the projection of an absolute ignorance onto the students, a decisive characteristic of the “ideology of oppression”, one that allows the teacher—the knowledgeable opposite of the ignorant student—to legitimise their existence.
This creates a hierarchy, benefiting those in power as students internalise the hierarchy, abandoning the idea of ever challenging it. They adapt to the world as it is and the disoriented reality deposited onto them. Education thus becomes a form of conformity rather than the liberation of minds and societies. A pedagogy of domestication that is presented as emancipation. This system serves the interest of those in power, of the oppressor—one that has no intent in revealing the world or transforming it. When reforms in education institutions are accepted with credulity, when dissent and debates are treated as threats, and education in itself is commodified, knowledge becomes inert, and hope becomes an indulgence rather than a necessity.
The post-colonial hangover of the nation had kindled a fire of critical understanding, of reasoning and producing knowledge to intervene and transform the system rather than becoming a subdued interpreter of it. It was established on the idea of learning from history, rather than fragmenting it and slowly obliterating it from our consciousness and collective memory.
The glorious institutions were to serve the nation and become the space for reimagining society beyond the colonial traces. So what has changed? Or was it a utopia that could never truly materialise? Were political dissent and criticism of the administration once welcomed but stifled now? Or is it that the opposition exists now in ways it did not before, thus inciting relentless attempts of suppression and surveillance?
While we contemplate the complexities of numerous such possibilities, the anticipation of the “not-yet”—a nation that is still in the making—itches to be scratched. Ernst Bloch, in his work The Principle of Hope, talks about the various manifestations of “not-yet-being”. The not-yet conscience of human and the not-yet becoming of history. He talks about the possibility of the world becoming something and having the tendency, the latency, to something. For him, the world that continues to strive for something is the amalgamation of a utopian intention, the idealistic world. He writes about the kernel of hope, the human spirit that dreams of the utopia, and this dream occupies an important place. However, in the process of talking about the hope of the future, the utopia, he talks nothing of the future. Rather than trying to predict or prefigure the next step, he dives into the past. He insists that even during moments of decay, the utopian impulse will survive. The barriers between past and future can come undone, and the unfinished dreams of the past spill into the present.
“The barriers erected between the future and the past collapse by themselves; the future is not now visible in the past, while the past is avenged and collected as a heritage of the publicised past, and the minnow becomes visible in the future.” He does not try to sink into a contemplation of the past but tries to make the past into a living source for revolutionary action, for a praxis orientated towards the achievement of utopia. He reminds us that history is not sealed but waiting to be reawakened. He defines Marxism as utopia, but it does not insinuate that he denies the scientific character of Marxism. For him, the revolution is inseparable from a unity between reason and hope, sobriety and imagination. Thus, the “cold” and “warm” currents of Marxism need to come together.
The cold, being the rational, analytical critique of existing systems, and the warm, the utopian longing for a transformed world. The “warm current” of Marxism is what Bloch calls “militant optimism”— an “active hope in achieving utopia.” But he distinguishes this optimism from “flat automatic optimistic faith in progress”. For him, the extensive indulgence in false optimism can become the “new opium” of the masses, and thus he insists on the “non-guaranteed character” of utopian hope. As Bloch talks about the ‘Not-yet’ and all the possibilities that exist within the decades of historical moments that have passed, a system that tries in every way to replicate the banking system closes off the ‘Not-yet’ by treating reality as fixed by those in power to do so.
The DU that was envisioned by countless young dreams and the DU that exists presently in all its glory in countless minuscule ways might try to diminish the anticipatory consciousness, the yearning for collective transformation. Yet the resistance, in different forms, cracks through the past and submerges in the present and continues to hold bricks from falling apart.
From the 1970s student protest against the Emergency that met arrests and censorship to the Pinjra Tod movement in 2016 that envisioned gendered freedom on campus, the principle of hope continues to thrive. DU that was before and that is now, in this sense, does not become two different timelines but rather becomes moments in the same unfinished utopian dream. In the suppression and surveillance, this utopia sits quietly between lecture notes, continuing to scream through the protest chants, in hopes that a generation of students will live that utopia. These micro-utopias reflect the insistence that “Not-yet” is alive in action. But how far can it go? If we shed the passivity of thought and idea, what might we dare to dream? What worlds might flow through? Will the oppressed ever dare to intervene and recreate what has been ordained as the reality of time? Can collective amnesia ever be reversed if we don’t dismantle the sanctioned truths? When we act as mere recipients of knowledge and upholders of the status quo, can the utopian impulse truly stretch its reach?
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reeba khan
