The contribution of ancient Indian academicians has been recognised by their modern counterparts across nationalities, particularly in contemporary inter-disciplinary researches where social work needs to borrow ideas from Indian philosophy through cross-pollination
The conferment of Bharat Ratna to Nanaji Deshmukh is a great gift to academicians, professionals and students of social work discipline in India who have been celebrating his birth anniversary on October 11 as Indian Social Work Day or Bharatiya Samaj Karya Diwas and are dedicated to decolonising social work education in Indian universities.
Since time immemorial, Indian academicians have been working for the integrated and holistic development of society. Although termed in different typology, the ancient Indian academicians have developed various methodologies and models to engage with and address the concerns of society, from individual to family, community to nation and the whole world. They were the first to present the philosophy of international peace by presenting the concept of a global family or Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. The contribution of ancient Indian academicians has been recognised by their modern counterparts across nationalities, particularly in contemporary inter-disciplinary researches where social work needs to borrow ideas from Indian philosophy through cross-pollination for negotiating functional deadlocks related to human behaviour.
In our school days, we were taught a lot about the great Indians who had done great social service and also spearheaded reform movements from time to time. However, at the university level we were made to learn that social work as a practice was alien to the Indian sub-continent before establishment of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai by an American citizen during British colonial rule in 1936. This is because in the social work curriculum, there is hardly any mention of the social service and reforms of the great Indian philosophers, academicians and legendary personalities who flourished from the century before Christ. Students of social work are also compelled to swallow that it is because of TISS that social work was gradually included in university curriculum and that we received it as part of our colonial heritage. Till date, the curriculum related to social work in almost all universities follows a pattern set in the British colonial period — import a template from Euro-American countries and implement them in Indian universities. Except some institutions with Indian academicians did design their curriculum on the basis of the Gandhian philosophy. This strategy of “import and execute” has been best explained by Kalyan Shankar Mandal in his research paper, ‘American Influence on Social Work Education in India and its Impact’, published in the Economic and Political Weekly on December 9, 1989.
We are not against idea exchange but this intellectual import in the discipline of social work has been unidirectional. The idea to dismantle this intellectual cage imposed on us by the colonial government of British India was always on the mind of our free-thinking academicians. A ray of hope came when the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindu Vishwavidyalaya, Wardha, invited social work academicians from across the country to design a new curriculum for the discipline in a two-day national workshop titled “Bharatiyakaran of Social Work Curriculum” last June. Over 40 social work academicians and practitioners from over two dozen Central and provincial universities participated. The academicians also adopted a 10-point action plan to decolonise the curriculum through an intellectual movement.
During the workshop, they unanimously recognised the academic and professional contributions of Nanaji Deshmukh to social work and adopted a proposal to celebrate his birth anniversary as Indian Social Work Day.
Bharat Ratna Nanaji Deshmukh was a multi-faceted personality, a social worker par excellence, educationist and development economist. He was also active in politics but perhaps the only politician who voluntarily proclaimed his retirement at the age of 60 and became a full-time social worker. He not only developed his own model of integrated and holistic development of the villages but also implemented them in practice. He single-handedly turned the fate of over 500 villages in the drought-affected areas of Chitrakoot in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. He also established the Mahatma Gandhi Chitrakoot Gramodaya Vishwavidyalaya on February 12, 1991. This is the first university in India dedicated to rural development and is a great centre of learning his social work models based on the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and the integral humanistic philosophy of Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhayaya.
Social service models, practices, reform movements, rural reconstruction experiments and socio-developmental philosophies of Nanak Dev, Jyotiba Phule, B. R. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, Narayana Guru and all those who evolved from the Indic perspective should be given due space in the curriculum of social work at various levels. There is need for high quality research and experimentation in this direction for which the government agencies should provide required resources.
The conferment of Bharat Ratna is a welcome step and indeed a landmark for social work discipline in India but there is a long way to go.
(Dr Bishnu Modhan Dash is a Faculty in Social Work Department of Delhi University’s B.R. Ambedkar College. Siddheshwar Shukla has been Fellow in Makhanlal Chaturvedi University, Bhopal.)
