From time to time, Arcade publishes interviews, essays, and other statements by figures on the front lines of humanistic teaching outside the United States and Western Europe. These statements consider the settings in which the humanities are being discovered by a new generation of students; they share methods and approaches and speculate about the future of the disciplines. 

This interview with D. Venkat Rao of the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, India was conducted in January 2025 by SHC Director Roland Greene and Digital Public Fellows Utsavi Singh and Mahishan Gnanaseharan as part of his visit to the Stanford Humanities Center. A complementary portion of the interview can be read in the Future of the Public Humanities Colloquy.

Arcade: You have proposed a Critical Humanities approach to inspire research and teaching in and about cultures "heterogeneous to the heritage of the West." This approach encourages students and scholars in non-Western societies both to learn the foundational ideas of European intellectual history, and to develop critical leverage with which to reframe that history as something other than hegemonic and inevitable. In non-Western societies, the benefits of such a program for intellectual life should be obvious. How do you see the effects of Western thought and its reconfigured relation with cultures it has dominated for centuries? What examples illustrate the possibilities of such a new relation?

Rao: It seems to me that Critical Humanities is more an impulse to pursue a hunch, rather than a program or a project, let alone a disciplinary domain. It is an impulse that spurs response when one is exposed to the heritage of the West, especially among those cultures that may or may not have chosen the heritage of the West as their destiny; and more important, the ones who begin to sense that they are not the implied or intended addressees of this heritage. Violence and persuasion on the one hand, and ambition and exigencies of survival on the other, impel one to receive this heritage as everyone's destiny. In such a fraught context, one begins to sense: what if one's own inherited languages do not quite resonate with the forms and currents of the Western heritage?

The critical impulse impels a double move: to explore and respond to the resources of the language(s) one has inherited, and those that one is exposed to. However, such moves and responses have to work without any guarantees and promises. The unpredictable consequences of such double moves are likely to be equivocal both in the context of their emergence, and in other contexts which might be open to such an impulse. One can work only in good faith without alibi.

It is difficult to predict the effects of such double moves within the context of the heritage of the West. However, given that these moves risk revealing the limits of that heritage, they surely would incite responses. One may see the possibilities of convergent explorations, that is, of thinking together even while thinking differently.

For example, one might explore the status of certain salient themes of the Western heritage—say, writing, narrative, identity etc.—in cultures that are exposed to that heritage. Are these themes granted any privileged status universally? How do they develop differentially?

To a certain extent, my Sanskrit background helped me to sense such questions in my context.  Sanskrit is said to have dispersed from an alleged natal provenance: the imaginary Indo-European language (after all, the Indo- is none other than Sanskrit). If this is so, the shared sources that departed from the natal home must lurk in other languages. Among these, Sanskrit is the major language, and perhaps the only one, with extended continuity, to spread across locations, times, and formations. Its idiom and ethos endured across these traversals.

In the scenario of such dispersal, it is worthwhile to inquire about the ways the shared roots and saps shaped different languages and cultures. Most seminal concepts of a foundational European philosophy—phusis (nature), ousia (essence), ethos (character or spirit), aitia (cause), and so on—are vibrantly enlivened in Sanskrit. In forging a metaphysical tradition from them, however, European thought has muffled their mnemocultural resonances, by which I mean their continued life in collective memory.

Such observations (and questions) of the Critical Humanities can be made only through the task of thinking together across the prevailing contextual borders (department, discipline, school, university, territory, nation, etc.). As can be seen from the conversations and communications that the Stanford Humanities Center has singularly extended over the years, the open-ended weave of the humanities can play a vital role in reconfiguring our modes of being and forms of reflection. 

You and others have written about not only the double move you describe here, but a resulting "double bind" for those who would rethink the humanities in India and elsewhere: of understanding the discursive structures received from the West but then suspending them, which entails refusing to reproduce their logics. Presumably, you have operated within this double bind for many years. What observations or advice would you offer to those scholars and especially students, who are now recognizing it?

For me, the double bind is less a paralyzing concept than a lever put to work in specific contexts for enabling one to move about in such a context. One can provisionally see a context as a "given," though one can never determine exhaustively what this given contains. To start with, my context of teaching and inquiry is the given of the European university and its discursive heritage. In other words, the contexts we find ourselves in, or have chosen—such as language, nation, gender, discipline, community, and many more—apply veritable double binds to us. They are double-faced and sharp at both ends: they can paralyze and open up. Contexts are palimpsests of a kind, and it is impossible to force the palimpsest to provide a transparent and wholly intelligible, homogenous text. One takes the chance and struggles to find minimally coherent openings, which enable one to communicate across contexts.

When one confines oneself, for example, to the university, the only institution available (say, apart from the layered thickets of the internet, a pale simulacrum of existence itself) to grapple with the palimpsests of reflective experiences, one can learn to respond to it as a context of double bind that at once opens and shuts the possibility of shared communications and relations. Similarly, one can see one’s own language as a context of the double bind. While the cherished terms of the languages of the human sciences—such as philosophy, literature, religion, narrative, identity, culture and a plethora of others—appear to enable our descriptions of non-European cultures, they do so in a European frame. How do reflective modes of being elsewhere sustain themselves without recourse to such languages?

For example, there is barely any work exploring in the Indian context what the absence of writing (the lithic) or imaging (the iconic) over millennia might tell us about how and why performative reflection was preferred to the graphic or plastic. What do such alithic and non-plastic modes disclose about their worlds? Such questions become intelligible only in the discourses of the human sciences today. Caught in the double bind, as one always is, one can murmur: what do you do with what you have? The responses may not be always coherent and continuous.

Whatever its strengths or limitations, the thinking done in the name of the humanities tends to be fragile everywhere in terms of credibility and funding. A Critical Humanities prompted from outside the centers of the metropolitan West holds the promise of intellectual renovation but also of institutional risk, that is, undermining programs that are already under assault from political and commercial forces. How should such a Critical Humanities consider the risk alongside the promise? Are there strategies you envision for addressing such risk?

It is indeed a very real issue: the onslaught on the discourse and the institutions of the humanities. Hence, the emphasis on the qualifier "critical": indeed, the humanities have been in a critical condition like an etherized patient. My response to the earlier question might appear to be yet another kind of attack from the "outside" (if it is really an outside). Yet, I cannot see what I do as located outside what is broadly designated as the discourses and the institutions of the humanities. Despite what I outlined a moment ago, and without contradicting it, I do not at present see any alternative institution or discourse that can grapple with the concerns I pointed out. 

The singular task of the humanities—an interminable task indeed—seems to me to be essentially affirming and complicating the web of formations (physical, biophysical, and biocultural), relations, and actions that constitute what is called existence. This task is, however, without a program, telos, or any promise of perfection or purity. Even when such a task was not designated as the humanities, it touched and moved the web of existence. Today, it seems to me that the humanities (for a want of any better term in the English language) alone can nurture that impulse of refining and reorienting. Hence yet another nuance of the "critical."  The task of the humanities is of the most critical significance.

But how does one confront the onslaught? Here I can speak only from the context of my work in India. About 45 million students go for higher education at the tertiary level today, far more than the number that gets into higher education either in the United States or in Europe. They are all exposed to some domains of the humanities. But in India humanities education is wholly aimless. The institutions, not just those of the humanities, are in disarray not because of some deeper reflective questioning of their historically violent implantation, but precisely because of the total absence of such a questioning. The ongoing gestures of reform currently underway come nowhere near the problem and the task involved. The rhetoric of the New Education Policy (2020) regarding the "Indian vision" of education is ill-thought in its conception—based on the simplistic idea of substituting Western education with some putative Indian cultural education—and its agenda for institutional reform is managerialistic. 

Yet, despite the skewed nature of its conception, I tend to see the "Indian vision" as a potential opportunity to risk a certain kind of work. This opportunity requires a fundamental reconfiguration of what gets circulated as "India" and its culture. What has come to be called Indian culture is essentially the immemorial makings of clusters of heterogeneous cultural formations or communities, devoid of any seamless unity. The inheritors of such shared cultural memory are the millions of students and teachers who people the university. 

But there is the rub! The relation between these inheritors of lively cultural memory and the institutions and the discourses that the inheritors embrace is monstrously vitiated. The colonial legacy that implanted the institution called the university aims at stigmatizing and denigrating such memory and its custodial sources. One must struggle to work out the possibilities of suturing this calamitous rupture. As can be seen, the task of Critical Humanities is immense and almost impossible to render. But one can’t give up. The "given" must be teased out further to see its affirmative possibilities.

In short, what is being suggested in the Indian context is that the spectacular manifestations of cultural forms and memories in public, manifestations largely sustained by the public, must be connected to the critical impulse of the humanities and their institutional structure. Such involvement of the public (that is, the myriad cultural formations that compose India) to enhance the work of the humanities through the university is urgently needed.

You have observed eloquently that the humanities classroom in India, which accommodates perhaps the largest population of humanities students in the world, takes little account of the diversity of language, caste, religion, region, and other factors that converge there. What are the most urgent interventions in the space of the classroom, which is both notional and actual? What would be the short-term and long-term aims of a pedagogy drawn from Critical Humanities?

A very important question indeed. My earlier responses in this regard already outline the scenario and suggest ways to attempt forging responses to the intimate alien house called the university and the humanities programs that teachers and students like me inhabit. What is called (if this patently European concept can be retained—an instance of the double bind) the culture of "India" is a colossal assemblage of radically differentiated cultural forms brought forth and sustained by internally self-differentiating formations (the custodians and kindlers of cultures, the guardians of memory). These formations and their forms are spectacularly "public" and warm the everyday living of millions of people. The task of Critical Humanities is to fathom this assemblage as an affirmative source to reflect and forge responses to concrete situations that we face in the university context (such as designing programs, courses, assignments, projects, conferences, workshops, inquiries and dissertations), and above all, learning to raise different kinds of questions than what one is programmed to raise—for example, the relation between what is called caste and culture.   

In the Indian context (perhaps this can be extended), the classroom is a veritable formation of such a complex assemblage. There is nothing homogeneous about it—and this observation confronts the question of the identitarian category called "India." But precisely there are the possibilities!  Each student in the composition comes with a language. Every such language carries with it at least a millennium of creative and reflective use. Such languages are at the base and end of other cultural forms like painting, sculpture, performance, and ritual traditions. The pertinent language that the student brings is a wormhole for interminable exploration. Starting there, the student can affirm the possibility of reorienting oneself in the double-bind scene of learning. 

Let me give an example: a course on the performative traditions of India focused, to start with, on the primal composition, invoked over two millennia, called the Natyashastra, which deals with dance-drama and dramaturgy. The text is in the Sanskrit language. As a starting point, in dealing with themes and issues regarding performative modes of mediating affect, verses from the Sanskrit are presented. Students turn to the rendering of this composition in their respective languages (which may be Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Malayalam, Bangla, or English among others, depending on the students).

The originary text gets multiplied by different languages. Such a scene of learning opens a variety of issues concerning the text and the receptions it has received in multiple languages across different time spans. Above all, the scene enables sensing the opening of a wormhole and the weaving of a palimpsest of relations. One can begin to explore how Sanskrit interfaced with each of the languages in terms of their prevailing reflective currents, if any. Further, how does a Sanskrit composition—say, the Mahabharata—get received in a language such as Telugu (which, incidentally, excises the entire section of the crucial Bhagavadgita in its rendering), and what do such responsive receptions tell us about how we might configure the relation of hospitality between the "host" (Sanskrit) and the "guest" (the receiving language)? The performative tradition of Chhou in West Bengal, for instance, renders the episodes of the Mahabharata by emphasizing a specific affect, that of the flavor of virile prowess. Such experimental pedagogy not only enlivens the classroom but affirms the possibility of orienting the student on a path of further inquiries.

Such experimental Critical Humanities pedagogy invites innovative responses in term-end projects. In one semester's course on the question of (non)narrative compositions of Indian traditions, the focus of the sessions was on an eleventh-century text composed of stories related in a maze. The term-end project was a collaborative digital composition where each cluster of students ventured to provide a response in image, music, performance, and text formats. The project is introduced through a brief but comprehensive account of the text, its antecedents, and its ramifications into other cultural forms. Similarly, a project on the renowned Panchatantra (said to have inspired The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, and many other such texts and traditions) brought forth an entire website composed of a variety of nodes related to the text’s travels across the globe and the mediations it received in image, music and cinematic formats.

The composition of the Panchatantra course was more challenging.  Students came from various Central Asian countries, Indonesia, Iran, Yemen, and from India with various language backgrounds. The Panchatantra traveled across all these and many other regions. The challenge was to focus once again on the responsive receptions of the composition and its relation to the Sanskrit original. It seems to me that such experimental pedagogy and inquiry can be tested across institutions and territories wherever there are universities. For such experiments, research clusters and collaborations can be envisaged. 

What is implied in this experiment is that in the classroom scenario, one needs to be sensitive and responsive to the context of reception. One needs to know whom one is teaching, the "one" here being not an isolated organism, but a deeply textured formation of biocultural traces and weaves. I am convinced that, given the resources of digital media, such research-teaching clusters can be formed across individuals within an institution, department, discipline, institution, and geopolitical territory,. Cultural flows and geopolitical territories cannot be reduced to some isomorphic relation, at least in the humanities classroom. To be sure, the sciences have already opened to such collaborative research; but the sciences by definition entirely bracket the cultural background of the object and the inquiring subject.