The Idea
Vidya Ashram is to find one’s feet in the new storm. Globalisation,
information technology, loosening of the nation state, and the American
wars, all constitute the new storm sweeping every idea or institution off
its feet. ‘Knowledge’ is the explicitly stated epicentre of
this quake storm, therefore Vidya Ashram to find one’s feet.
It has been our belief all along that radical intervention in the world of knowledge is a necessary condition for a radical transformation in society. Our belief in this proposition has increased multi-fold since the appearance of the Internet and what is often called the Information Age.
We observe that the new discourse of Knowledge Management has challenged the hegemony enjoyed by Science. Until now Science assumed the status of the only legitimate knowledge in the public domain. But now things are different.
As the Internet expands its scope over all types of knowledge activity, people’s knowledge (lokavidya) is finding new recognition. However even as this recognition has come, the poor are becoming poorer, the lives of peasants, workers and artisans are being uprooted from a new end.
Therefore there is a demand for a radical intervention in the world of knowledge. However currently there is no such politics of intervention. The new radical politics of emancipation must speak the new language of knowledge.
Until now the hegemony of Science precluded the possibility of such a politics. Now we can build a knowledge movement to weave the canvas of possible political imaginations and initiatives with a promise to deliver from the point of view of the poor, the outcast, the oppressed.
The Ashram is not a monastery. It is not a university. It hopes to inaugurate constructions of new domains of epistemic activity, public domains. Vidya understood somewhere in the interaction of knowledge, science, art, language, philosophy, wisdom, reason, faith, etc. is the focus of dialogues, debates, interactions and in fact all the activity at the Ashram and by the Ashram.
