Poetics of Development

Abstract

Development is a multi-dimensional aspiration, struggle, sadhana (striving) and process of change and transformation. So far, mainstream discourse and practice of development mainly focus on what can be called the prose of development: the hardcore and hardware issues of economics, politics and infrastructure and rarely explore the subtler dimension of development. The discourse of development is too prosaic, and there is very little poetry in the mood and methods of the advocates, engineers and executives of development. While there is some effort in exploring and reflecting upon the pathways like art and development, there is a very little effort in exploring poetics of development. Such an exploration includes exploring new visions of human development and earth realization coming from many traditions of poetry from classical to the contemporary. The present essay explores these as well as the ways in which ethical concerns in ethics can dance together with aesthetics going beyond polarity between them which constitutes a transformational aesthetics of self, culture, society and human development. Poetics of development builds on such broader social aesthetics, ethics of development and transformational aesthetics but it also wants to specifically focus on the need to develop poetic creativity in one’s life and society. It wants to interrogate existing imaginative cage and prosaic fundamentalism of state, market, civil society and religion in which we are in and challenges us to write poems not only in pieces of papers but also in our bodies, souls, social relationships, especially relations across borders of caste, religion, nation and gender.

This builds upon my presentations in our workshops on this theme at Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai and Indus Business Academy, Bangalore as well as at Institute of Ethnology, Jagiellonian University Krackow; Department of Anthropology, University of Melbourne; Department of Sociology, Punjab University; and Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA). I thank Professors Janusz Baranski, Monica, Shipra Sagarika and Mukul Kumar for their kind invitations and to the participants for their questions, comments and reflections. I also thank Prof. John Clammer for his comments.