Dreaming South: Celebrating the togetherness of difference

An invitation to the South does not deny the North. It affirms it as an acceptable difference. I want to emphasise the togetherness of difference.

Also read: Telangana’s KTR wades into the delimitation debate

Positive side of difference

The slogan should be “I differ. Therefore, I am.” Difference unites us to a different level of complexity. Difference sustains us, while uniformity becomes a form of impoverishment.

Hospitality, plurality, and diversity informing dialogic imagination should anchor federalism. It should not become a catechism of diktats. Like quantum science, it is built on a playful uncertainty, not the grimness of security.

In this sense, my ecology, my pluralism, and my federalism have much in common. In celebrating difference, they create a sense of freedom and creativity, not the South of delimitation but the South brimming with alternatives. As JP Don Levy, a South African writer, once said, “A future is a country where we will do things differently”; such as the South. Our experiences need to be different because India needs the fecundity of differences.

It is also a question of memories and storytelling. Southern memories need to be retold. The South, like any pickle, needs to taste and feel different.

Memories lose the edge and the sense of dialect when they are standardised. I want my South to be a different sensorium, realising that my sense of being and identity lies in its smell, taste, and memory.

Consider our religious leaders. Each region invents differently and celebrates difference.

The religion of Ramana and Jiddu adds to the whole by being different. If we can have 300 Ramayanas, why can the South not have 600 definitions of itself? An invitation to playfulness and memory alters the project called the South.

Take education or politics. The vision of the South has been different and more sensitive to justice. It does not see NEET as neat at all. Diversity need not hurt education. One must go beyond an obsession with entry into a vision of quality.

The Southern imagination has experimented with schools and colleges. Its blend of diversity and equality needs to be brought back. The South has a huge legacy of pedagogic and educational experimentation. We need to bring it back to life.

The NEP could have a southern variant. Diversity in education is always a strength. Imagine an IIT catering to local needs and strengths. Let our regional engineering colleges sustain the language of the crafts.

The South can add diversity to the technology India desperately needs. The idea is not to disrupt but to create a diversity of imaginations.

Also read: Federalism and the rightful South voice

Peninsular outlook of the South

After the recent cyclones, southern activists often tell me Delhi thinks with a landlocked mind. It thinks from land to sea. The South needs to dream differently. The sea as an imagination needs to be constitutionalised.

In the same context, I heard the activists say that the coastline needs to be revived as a culture, politics, and ecology. The Rights of the Coastline Movement must be a part of this new South of cultural politics.

The South of art and creativity must invent itself differently. I remember UR Ananthamurthi dreaming of a different UNESCO of regional translations and folk theatre.

We need a new cultural network where Carnatic music is anchored in a multiplicity of languages.

We also realise that justice and creativity go together; that folk, Dalit and feminist imaginations go together and create an inventive diversity. The South must cultivate its indigeneity from craft to food.

Dreaming South is dreaming of a new plurality, rescuing federalism from its dry-as-dust uniformity. The South must secede from the old idea of federalism to invent a new India.

But the South is not just a region. It is a heuristic for the future. Regions don’t have to wait for the nation-state and its officialdom to re-create the Anthropocene to repair our damaged nature.

The South should reinvent its projects around a new notion of ethical and ecological repair. Regions need their academy of science. Regional academies should embody both Swadeshi and Swaraj. Between playfulness and trusteeship as a science, we reinvent the idea of being Indian.

A new syncretism

In a deep way, memory, innovation, and a new syncretism become critical. The South must become a scene of two great dialogues, one between different knowledges and one between different religions. No dialogue of civilisations is complete without this.

A dialogue of knowledges needs to include the indigenous and craft knowledges. The South must be a constitutional and technological blend of the oral, the textual and the digital.

Pedagogy must be as strong as politics in creating a new vision. This needs new metaphors, new myths, and fragments of cosmology that can only come from religion. We need three sets of dialogic experiments.

First, we need to create a more plural sense of Islam, like the ones initiated by Zia-uddin Sadar and his group. Let’s face facts: The Muslims in the South are more at home in India. They do not have to play the conventional minority card.

We need to create plural Islam, which must come from the South. Kerala and Hyderabad have shown signs of such an awakening. The South can become a creative alternative to the orthodox Islam of Saudi Arabia.

Secondly, it is time to go beyond the current ideas of Christianity. The Christian experiment and dialogue initiated by Abhishaktha Nanda needs a second round with playfulness like that of Raimundo Panikkar.

Thirdly, Hinduism in the South must become more syncretic. The South must embody the plural genius of Indian civilisation.

The South one is proposing is both memory and invention. A reworking for the future. It is an experiment with civilisation and society seeking classic dreams and new possibilities beyond the staleness of Indian politics.

One realises that this essay is a beginning. And like all beginnings, it sounds like a blend of manifesto and handbook. But the possibilities are exciting.