His masters voice
The mammoth task may hammer off the rust that shrouds our intellect and thus sharpen the critical faculty of a researcher to great extent, but the world does not benefit much by this development of a single person
Hisham M Nazer
As long as creative shadow or strikingly rhetorical argument will be denounced in a research work from the field of Social Sciences and Humanities, researchers through their research works will only benefit other researchers for their research works, without any real social impact. Can the subaltern understand what has been written about Can the Subaltern Speak? in a dull and dry conventional language? If not, who are we really getting all these degrees and promotions for? Who do we write for?
I understand an excited mind, due to a strong surge of sincere emotion, might write in a manner that lacks academic seriousness. But is that absolutely objectionable even if the essence of a research (the meaningful use and analysis of relevant data) is duly maintained? To you all I ask this simple question: do most of the conventional research articles make us think, or do we merely use them for our own professional purposes?
Except a few, the way most people are doing researches in Bangladesh will one day leave us with a pile of similar or redundant explanations of things that do not have the power to inspire change, refinement, or a different perspective. Unfortunately this noble project that is supposed to produce knowledge and offer scholarly/philosophical insights into relatively unclear subjects is undertaken by an academic as a filler of a requirement. Today research attests promotion instead of effective dissemination of knowledge and that is why once a project is done, a researcher is also done with it (again, to be clear- researches done in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities).
The mammoth task may hammer off the rust that shrouds our intellect and thus sharpen the critical faculty (and the data seeking skill) of a researcher to great extent, but the world does not benefit much by this happy development of a single person, who might or might not continue to contribute through their thoughts. One might reasonably argue that in fact happy/content researchers (who are not readily intellectuals per se) are a good sign for future development, and to some extent I agree with that wholeheartedly because I too believe in gradual changes because finally only what is done or thought carefully, sets in.
But in Bangladesh, where most of the academics have perhaps adopted the poses and the practices of the West rather hastily for personal gains, securing the future is only possible through setting right what is wrong in the present. This wrong is just an extraordinary lack of ordinary understanding, of our common sense, that requires realistic treatment from academics who too have duties beyond their classrooms and committees. They too must at least attempt to break free of the official drills and speak/write from genuine concerns, albeit in a tempered fashion.
The need for an objective outlook is an understandable concern, but why should a researcher be objective only through their language and their manner of expression? It is not so unknown a fact that there are research works that are done perfunctorily, that means once started, the researcher, although convinced of their own incapability, cannot abandon the project due to peer/professional pressures and therefore goes on filling pages with subjective ramblings but in a suggested and appreciated objective, uncreative language.
Then there are works that are devoid of any spirit, expressing unbearably objective arguments that are actually restatements in new phrases.
They lack a vision, an originality which is actually needed to offer a fresh and curious perspective so that the argument also reaches lives besides securing a space in the assembly of bibliography. Is it at all a fruitful practice to be so objective as to fail to access the subjective world of an individual? If we cannot stir the inside, how can we possibly hope to witness the actualisation of ideas? Or was that never the goal?
Departments that deal primarily with literature/creative writings get the brunt of my criticism. It is a general, even idealistic, expectation that if they grow the tendency of owning what they study, that is if they achieve the nerdship through serious studies combined with practice, students of literature are bound to be creative besides being critical. The proper training of reading between the lines (which requires personal dedication/madness to a great extent), of uncovering the unconscious of the text prepares one, in the practical sense, to see the mechanism behind the machines, to understand the reason behind an action or a reaction.
Knowing very well that this can happen, how can we be so naive to not recognize the potential threat of a creative drug that no amount of rehabilitative therapy can ever remove from the system thus intoxicated? Can we even openly confess that we want it removed, which in other moments we are very fond of praising? That is how a creative critical mind suffers from adverse reactions and rejections, and these rejections often come from people most of whom are not creative themselves in the traditional sense of the
word.
If we want actual progress in Bangladesh, then we have no way but to nourish the creative spirit even in change-forbidden places. It is not just any change for the sake of change, for that can be devastatingly misleading. It is a change to destroy what does not allow us to deconstruct. It is a change to confront all those who fear and therefore block changes. It is time we acknowledge the positive influence of a creative touch in our researches, otherwise the burden of impotent words will be heavy upon us. It is time we follow the foot-line of those who we revere and study and whose creative works had researched data and whose researches had creative beauty, instead of becoming parrots that can mimic human voice without ever saying anything imitable.
Let us offer the world our inner world in a manner that all may relate. Let us reach the brain, not without reaching the heart.
The writer is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Varendra University
