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. Another portion of our conversation with Rao was published under the Interventions section of Arcade. 

In the United States and Britain, there has been an institutional turn in recent years toward the public humanities, which is defined as humanistic thinking and research rendered legible to a broader public. Is there a public dimension to Critical Humanities? What are the implications of a Critical Humanities for public understanding of the humanities?

If the domain of humanities encompasses creativity, reflection, action, learning, sharing through innovative cultural forms (related to the weave of the senses and going beyond them), grappling with questions of being, and going on with the unlikely (not like oneself) and the heterogeneous, then the concerns of the humanities are ubiquitous across the planet. For me, the field of humanities implies, apart from reflective creative forms, even the very clusters of people that bring them forth. But most of these cultural forms and formations have for a long time been disavowed or discarded in the discourses of the humanities. It is this combination of cultural forms and formations that I tend to consider as Critical Humanities at one level.

The work of these countless clusters and constellations of forms and formations is what lives on in the open (in the Indian context, for instance) as cultural memory of immemorial generations. The combined weave throbs across the planet even to this day. In the Indian context, the university as an institution can hardly acknowledge, let alone communicate with, this constellational weave. The entire cultural memory, for example, concerning the accounts of gods and their deeds, their boons and curses, conceptions of existence and temporality that such accounts embody, and a range of complex issues are performatively imparted even to this day in the Indian context to hundreds and thousands of clusters of people in public places every day. No humanities teacher is in a position to come anywhere near the depth and competence of such public performative renderings of a pravachanakaara or kathakaara—immersive purveyors of longstanding performative memory.[1] Perhaps such memory figured somewhere in Greek antiquity, but it has disappeared into the tomes of academic discourse. One can continue to see such memory enacted and enlivened every day in thousands of sites.

Perhaps one can say that what I describe as the mnemocultures of India already bring forth most vibrantly what is called public humanities. Mnemocultures performatively render inheritances that cut across languages, communities, locations, regions and classes, and genders today. One can think of jatras (journeys), lilas (phantasms of play), melas (enormous gatherings), utsavs (festive celebrations), among myriad others—and incidentally all these public events are aimed at overcoming sorrow through processes of reorientation. It seems to me that these extraordinary performative renderings of cultural and critical existential concerns (in speech and gesture, in pigment and in plastic, in music and meditation) eminently form the public humanities in the Indian context. The institutionalized humanities have yet to come anywhere near such spectacular renderings of enlivened shared memory.

One might even say that since the nineteenth century in Europe, the discourse of the humanities consolidated itself by disavowing and disparaging such enlivened cultural memory. This antinomy will have to be overcome. Such an overwhelming task impels one to grapple with the foundations of the asymmetric interface that the European West irrupted in the world. Primarily, but systemically, one will be drawn to overcome the deepest (Platonic) metaphysical fissure that manifests as an antagonism between muthos and logos, that is, myth–poetry–song versus philosophical thought. I tend to see this as the necessary task of the Critical Humanities in every sense of this formulation—to overcome the divide between the critical on the one hand and the creative, performative, and reflective modes of being on the other.

You have proposed a Critical Humanities approach to inspire research and teaching in and about cultures "heterogeneous to the heritage of the West." In non-Western societies, the benefits of such a program for intellectual life should be obvious. How do you see the effects on Western thought and its reconfigured relation with cultures it has dominated for centuries? What examples illustrate the possibilities of such a new relation?

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. 

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.

Universalism, the projection of common values across cultures and periods, while foundational to the humanities in the West, has come under criticism and revision for many years. Recently, you and others have argued that concepts such as health, democracy, and even humankind belong to a universalist creed. For those humanities scholars and students of all cultures who have perhaps tacitly accepted some version of universalism, how do you envision movement away from it? Given the potency of universalism as an organizing principle for thinking in and across the disciplines, what are the means and the stakes of such a move?

Although on many occasions I too have given in to questioning the universalist claims projected in the Western heritage, I have begun to see the need for a more nuanced response to this issue. This is not to claim universality of all cultures, nor to obscure the continued claims of circumscribing universalism to the thought-adventure of the West. Many of the honored thinkers of the West observed the singularity of the West in "deracinating" (Jacques Derrida’s formulation) itself from the pulls of particularistic bonds. Such deracination gets mostly celebrated but sometimes it is also seen as the beginning of a rupture within the heritage. It seems to me that the internal critique of the West highlights this moment.

It seems important to notice that one sedimented consequence of this rather identitarian event is the structuring of what can be called “difference”: that is, difference between "one" and "others." One significant ramification of it was a violent hierarchization of differences, specifically between the universal and the particular. Today, it is impossible for any formation (of any kind) to live on without facing the question of difference. The task of critical humanities seems to me to expose oneself to the issue of how different biocultural formations deal with this question in their goings on in existence on the one hand, and consider the European event as just one form of resolution to the question on the other.

To take one domain of learning from the Indian background of Sanskrit and other languages, there are traditions of literary inquiry that can be used to discern a significantly different way of addressing the question from the one that emerged from a European heritage. The practices of such inquiries spread over a millennium, from before the seventh to the seventeenth century of the Common Era and beyond, are gathered into a formidable field of learning called Alamkaarashastra (the domain of figures of speech) and Kavyamimaansaa (literary inquiries). The latter is also the name of a treatise by the tenth-century poet-inquirer Rajasekhara from northern India.

Here the inquirers, themselves often accomplished poets, offer reflections on the non-normative rules of practice, the dos and don'ts, of composing poetry or drama. The usual method adopted here is to state a general rule, often pertaining to sound, gesture, sense, context, collocation, quality, insight, or motif or theme, and give an example to illustrate it without any elaborate analysis of how effectively such a rule works in a particular poetic or performative composition. Yet almost in the same breath, the inquirers go on to enlist exceptions to the general rules that are contextually enumerated, and provide one or two examples to demonstrate the exceptions. Accordingly, such rules are not crystallized into some unchanging universal norm or theory that cannot be questioned.

An eleventh-century literary inquirer from Kashmir, Mammata, captures in his Kavyaprakasha (the literary radiance), this impulse of relating-without-unification as the most significant aspect of the poetic composition itself: poetry, he declares, is that which is composed in accordance with conventions, but is bound by no regimen of rules. These extended literary inquiries emerged from a primal source which over millennia has already addressed the question of difference in a "reflective-poetic-song" form, the Rig Veda. Indian reflective traditions over the centuries evince a certain kind of reflective integrity on the basis of such inquiries opened by this "originary" (without origin) composition. They remind us that no one responding to the question of existence (the complex of formations–relations–actions) can escape or disavow the problematic of difference, even as they affirm a notion of the always already-every day and the eternally changeless. But it is not appropriate to prolong the response to the question in this space.

You have underscored that an “impulse to pursue” Critical Humanities can emerge from re-evaluations of the legacies of Western heritage. This framing of cultural intercourse between Western and non-Western intellectual cultures evokes comparisons to Edward Said’s framings of the links between culture and imperialism. Is your notion of Critical Humanities related to a Saidian understanding of cultural imperialism? If not, why?  

Yes, unquestionably, Edward Said’s work was path-breaking and unparalleled as it carved the roads of postcolonial studies. It demonstrated in most persuasive ways how power consolidates and legitimizes itself.  Legitimization of power can happen in non-coercive ways.  The work of culture succeeds in disseminating the work of power across the subjugated regions in apparently non-coercive ways.  It accrues “pleasure and profit” (to use Said’s phrase) to the colonized.  Said’s main contention is that the creators and receivers of the work of culture cannot ignore or disavow the complicity between the dominant power and the edifying gratification that it purveys and spreads.  While without denying the genuineness of the pleasure and profit that one receives from the work of culture of the dominant, Said’s persistent effort has been to insist on being vigilant about the complicities and expose them in public.

The work of critical humanities is not unrelated to the dynamic work of the pioneers of postcolonial studies like Said.  But the scenario has changed.  Postcolonial studies have long ago been domesticated and exhausted themselves.  The questions they raised and grappled with (the dominant-subordinate, elite-subaltern, the structural binarisms) and the language in which they were framed have become a part of sterile jargon of the university.  Above all, for someone like me who works from the barely rethought context of the university and the role of higher education elsewhere, not just the very domains of the humanities and the institution of the university but even the  “cutting-edge” interrogations of the institutionalized domains of study remain part of goods imported from the West.  It is from such an unexamined context that the impulse of critical humanities emerges.

How to respond to the institutional and discursive structures that have been institutionalized with force and persuasion, from the receiving ends?  When one pursues this question one begins to see that these structures impose an asymmetry between the provenance that generated them and the context in which they are implanted; this asymmetry in the context in which I work manifests as a violent structural hierarchy between Europe and India.  One realizes in the process that the asymmetry structurally mutes the context of reception.  Whether it is post-war American Studies, post-colonialism, post-structuralism or Maoist-Marxism, the asymmetric structure and its muting of the context seem to continue to prevail.  These studies and isms rather have deferred if not occluded the possibility of rethinking the context of reception. 

My teaching context impelled me to face this fundamental problem.  It seemed to me that as long as the idiom of reflection that still survives in the context of reception does not receive attention, the asymmetric structure would continue to prevail.  This idiom of reflection throbs in the multiple languages and cultural forms and they are embodied and enlivened by the very heterogeneous clusters that compose the Indian classroom.  These languages, their idiom and the inheritors of them form the assemblage in the context of reception and they have the potential to spur the impulse of critical humanities.  At one level, these very resources and their inheritors are of critical significance, but they are also exposed to assimilative effacement. What are the ways in which these palpable resources can be forged to respond to and transform the asymmetric structure which continues to efface them?  

The work of critical humanities moves, firstly, further from the colonial-imperial template of culture-power relation to a more foundational task of unraveling European sources of thought and their ways of interfacing with others (human and non-human); secondly, the task itself is undertaken from the risky effort of drawing on the muted (and mutated) but surviving resources of the contexts of reception.  From such striated ground-level inquiry, even the much cherished conceptual pair – culture and power/politics – will have to be unraveled and examined to see if it is still not the determining force of such conceptions. But such inquiry into and from the backgrounds of the asymmetrically orchestrated structures must be undertaken without alibi.  Mere reversals only reinforce in more vicious ways the structures that one wishes to displace.

Therefore, it seems to me that the language and the critical work of Edward Said and others is a significant signpost for the work of critical humanities but the latter, as I understand it, is not a replication or extension of it.  The problems that the work of critical humanities concerns itself with (teaching, multiple languages with extended lively heritages, domineering occlusive structures, traps of complicity, etc.) and the paths it tries to move on, in my view, relatively differ from the metropolitan contexts of the universities of the West. 

The discourse of "crisis" in the humanities has been extensive and enduring, with some observers arguing that a permanent crisis is one of the conditions of humanistic work. How does such a crisis appear from the perspective of a Critical Humanities?

Curiously, the very apt formulation of crisis as permanent impels one to suspend the comfort of universality applied to the Western heritage. Crisis is the privation of a zone of comfort, especially in the realms of modes of being and forms of reflection. Edmund Husserl characterized crisis as the loss of capacity of the spectacularly advanced sciences to relate to the primal resources of the "life world" which brought forth the exemplary ideality of science; and he saw such crisis impinging on the conception of European humanity itself. But this idea of crisis is now seen as planetary.

However, crisis is also an opportunity to initiate a fundamental change, a chance to reorient oneself from exhausted modes of response. Crisis indicates the impossibility of a permanent model, a foolproof method that would work forever for everyone, everywhere. But there are always efforts to deny, disavow or manage crises. Such alibis can be found in every domain of being and thinking.

In the context of such aggravating crisis, the critical impulse affirms the opportunity to unravel what has been implanted and to plunge into what has been inherited to gather resources to face and respond to the given situation. Given that crises are scalable in nature (across times and formations, relations and actions) in what is called existence, there can be no absolute final solution to the problem of crisis as long as existence—the complex I referred to earlier— instantiates itself recursively. Responses to crises are determined by how one receives and relates one’s endowments, what comes to one as one’s lot (the given), on the scalable formations of crises.

For example, in the everyday situation of teaching at an Indian university, one may not see any crisis at all in incorporating, by default as it were, the latest models (isms) and methods of thinking and analysis that get projected from the West. Such responses of disavowal let life go on. It takes a sense of the ruptures and violence among these models to impel one to respond to their anomalies and contradictions. The impulse of Critical Humanities affirms the currents of differentiated modes of being and forms of reflection, which cannot be programmed into a crisis-free totality. Here the context of reception (the Indian scenario of, say, teaching) provides the most enduring experience of living together with radical differences.

In some ways, the turn toward the non-human taking place in the Western humanities—for example, in history and philosophy oriented toward ecology—has been a tonic for these disciplines. Nonetheless, it can hardly be denied that the foundations of these same disciplines remain strongly constituted according to a long-established sense of the human at the center of the world. In the work that you and your collaborators are undertaking, how do the humanities accommodate a decentering of the human? How do you envision a turn toward other forms of life and existence that has the force of something greater than licensed within the established paradigms—not an excursion but a revolution?  

The conceptualization of modern science and the crystallization of the concept of the human (Man) are deeply correlated. Martin Heidegger describes this as the (modern) metaphysics of subjectivity and traces its sources to what he calls the "first beginning," the phase of Plato and Aristotle in the Greek heritage. Displacement of the geocentric episteme (in Michel Foucault’s sense) appears to have been contingent upon the privileging of the anthropos, though the tendency toward such elevation has antecedents in the Greek (for Heidegger) and Christian traditions. But from within the European tradition, structurally and historically "another beginning"—that is, a prior intimation, now lost or forgotten, which can still be reawakened—was envisaged by some thinkers in the West. Such a "turning" was seen as essential to overcome the deeply sedimented metaphysical rupture inaugurated in the beginning and further aggravated (and crystallized) in the modern period. A turn towards another such beginning was still seen as a possibility from within the European heritage.

Heidegger thought that such a turning, though it was barely imagined in his time, was essentially a preparation for Europe to enter into a dialogue with the East (for him, Japan). Perhaps a fundamental rethinking of the (unexplored or disavowed) ancient traces of phusis (the Greek concept of φύσις or nature, which derives from the words for growing or becoming) would serve today to re-envision a general science of modes of being. After all, phusis in the pre-Socratic phase of Greek antiquity strongly resonates with the Sanskrit –bhu, with its layered senses that have been deeply textured in reflective-creative traditions over millennia.

In such a context, a Critical Humanities may lend some clarity to the situation.  Is the rupture and crisis of metaphysics which characterizes the entirety of the European/Western heritage a universal given? Doesn’t this very heritage, through very concerted and persistent efforts, demarcate and distinguish European identity by framing non-European cultures as incapable of developing universal conceptual structures of thought, devoid of any sense of history? Didn’t the respected thinkers of the West deny other cultures the ability to "deracinate" themselves and thus cover them with the very metaphysical heritage which is seen as the source of the crisis?

Such cultures which have had no use for the metaphysical heritage appear to be not epistemic in nature but essentially praxial-reflective—that is, embodying forms of reflection which are described as mnemocultural. Perhaps the humanities, though themselves an offshoot of modern metaphysics, still can be seen as a praxial source or site of reflection.

Such sites of learning are difficult to foresee in the context of my work and in the destitute intellectual scenario of the present. I can’t help saying that the impulse of Critical Humanities has yet to find receptive institutional shelters in the Indian context—though I must place on record that I do not see this impulse as a new "revolutionary" discipline declaring some putative paradigm shift. The impulse will run into sand the moment it gets institutionalized.