I have been reading about the sociological dynamic and literature of the Blacks in America in the period following the Abolition in 1860s, and many of its features, directions and debates have gripped my attention. A significant public debate that took place in the folllowing decades – indeed for more than half a century till what is known as Harlem Renaissance (some prefer to call it just Harlem Naissance) named after the Black-dominated area of Harlem in Manhattan, was about how best to raise the lot of the Blacks. As is well-known nearly 90 percent of the Slaves were in the American South (states like both Carolinas, Florida, Louisana, Atlanta etc which formed the Confederates as stood against the Unionists in the Civil War). The support for abolition in the North was not just due to sudden moral pangs but a solid economic rationale of need for workers in the rapidly industrialising North, while the Blacks were mostly in the Plantation-dominated South. After the Abolition there was huge movement of the Blacks northward known in American history as the Great American Migration.
In the years that followed, there were two schools of thought among the Blacks. One was to raise their community from extreme deprivation through Vocational education and Entrepreneurship. The pre-eminent thought and action leader of this school was Booker T. Washington who built a huge institution with this purpose and served as a prototype for similar programs. But soon enough, there rose a line of thought which challenged this view and, in course of time, actually became the dominant view that education cannot be seen just having an instrumental value (that is of measuring its effectiveness by mere outcome of income / financial status etc). It has its very core, an intrinsic value, which is empowerment, to use Amartya Sen’s terms – freedom and access to a broader set of choices at one’s disposal, or what some economists call the ‘General Human Capital’. It is not that this was a new idea. Its seeds even in the Modern age go back to the German Polymath Humbold after whom the Berlin University is named) who shaped the countours of higher education in Germany in the early nineteenth century, though the age of specialisation (which some regretfully call the McKinsey idea of education as opposed to rhe broad-based Humboldian idea) has continuously challenged, and even displaced it.
This was the key idea of the Harlem Renaissance which saw great literary and cultural flourishing among the Blacks. The Movement had the conviction that Blacks have to emerge as artists, poets and practioners and imbibe High Culture, not merely to win social prestige, but stand shoulder to shoulder, in intellectual terms, with their White counterparts. Thus we see great men like Langston Hughes, Claud McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain LeRoy Locke.
Du Bois was the first Black to earn a PhD from Harvard, while Locke was the first Black to receive the Rhodes Scholarship and with great difficulty got admitted into one college at Oxford – institutionalised rascism was not limited to America only.
Locke, in 1920s, published ‘New Negro’, an anthology of finest specimens of Black poetry, art, cultural writings, and many of the ideas in it gave a new hope and direction for the American Black.
About Lock and Du Bois, Martin Luther King (Jr) later remarked, “We are going to tell our children that the only philosophers who lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Lock came through the universe.”
Around the same time, Du Bouis came up with the concept of the ‘Talented Tenth’, propounding the idea that at least 10 percent of gifted blacks should go for Liberal Arts education in high centres like Harvard and get steeped in classical scholarship (rooted in Greek-Latin). Then only, he was convinced, they could represent themselves befittingly in Parliament and participate equitably in the National Mainstream. In fact these Harlem thinkers were broad-minded enough to see that the mission of the ‘New Negro’ was to contribute to development of American nation as a whole, and not just their community. They were, as can be seen from their ideas, far from any parochial approach .
A young Ambedkar, studying in Columbia University in New York at that time, was fascinated by these developments. He saw in this seeds of his own plans to raise the lot of the dispossessed community to which he belonged (then called the Untouchables). He had entered into an active correspondence with Du Bois and surely must have realised the importance of education in humanities and law in creating public intellectuals for the Dalits back in India in times to come, which mere technical education and Entrepreneurship could not have given.
Just imagine Ambedkar returning to India as a billionaire (a successful entrepreneur), or imagine him as a yester-day version of Adani or Ambani. Can anyone think his contribution to India would be greater in that case? The answer is clear. And here is the validation of De Bouis’s theory of ‘The Talented Tenth.’
I often think of this even in the work we do. How often people miss the importance of the instrumental value of education is an abiding puzzle to me. Its commmon for people to measure the success of our (or similar) educational efforts among severely impoverished communities in terms of money earned by children / youth at the end of their formal education. When I say a good percent of girls, even after graduation, get married and settled in family lives, I see their jaws dropping. People don’t realise that the power of intrinsic education, the General Human Capital, will always remain there with them and they are already empowered. Similarly, if some of our children get into public life at local level (as has happened in some instances), say becoming a Sarpanch in Panchayat, I would feel they are using their empowered selves in a splendid way.
I shall end this with a favourite anecdote of mine about Sri Aurobindo. Aurobindo, in his pre-India life in England, had been a master of no less than half a dozen languages, a record topper in a Latin and Greek at Cambridge University and in the ICS entrance. Once in his later life at Pondicherry he was asked, “you seem to know of the whole world literature of last three millennia, but we don’t see you speaking much of science and technology,” Sri Aurobindo, with his sharp wit reparteed, “Not one word of Chemistry or any other damned sciences! My school sir, was too aristocratic for such plebian pursuits.”
Vinayak Lohani, 29th January, 2025