Reflection without Reflexivity

Edited by Murli Desai, R.R. Singh and Sanjai Bhatt
Jaipur: Rawat Publications, Rs. 1,195-00

Journeys in Social Work Education in India: Emerging Reflections comprises autobiographical narratives of 17 retired teachers about the “live [lived] history of social work education in India” (p 271). The book is edited by Murli Desai, R R Singh and Sanjai Bhatt. Set out by editors, the authors have recorded their academic contributions, administrative accomplishments, and collaborative works with state and non- state actors. Despite the claim of being a “live[d] history,” the book could not open up a nuanced discussion and a critical self-reflection on contemporary social work education and practice. It appears as a chronicle of a few urban institutions and biographies of selected teachers who provide a ringside view of social work in India and invariably extend information about the histories of various associations and the stories of their rise and fall. The review more specifically comments on the pathology of the social work discipline and its disengaged response to the sociocultural realities in India.

Social Work as an Academic Idea
Social work has been an ally of the nation state and a successor of the West’s Charity Organization Societies and Settlement House movements. Led by middle-class individuals (mostly women) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were created for international and interstate urban immigrants to help them acclimate to the new sociocultural environment. A tripartite by-product of global capitalism, colonial urban governance, and intellectual expansionist movements like the Social Gospel and Protestant Liberal Internationalism, social work later infiltrated the colonial geographies. Originating from this location, professional education in social work was started in 1936 in colonial Bombay to train “personnel” to work empathically with immigrants and the urban poor. The subject discipline, concurrently, under the influence of “one nation one body” (p 213) and nationalistic heroism, routed in developing literature and remedy methods on psychosocial individualistic problems and partnering with “ongoing national policies and programmes” (p 47) in the nation- building project.

Philp (1979), argued that the handling of the bifurcated nature of academics with field practice in social work, its porous boundary, and the historical battles over gaining, maintaining, or losing of fields of activity have long been both an ambiguously embedded and challenging territory. The attempt to “rescue” it from the “theory-practice” dichotomy poses a real-time test for the authors of the book.  However, it is only able to glance at the phenomenon and inform the modus operandi of social work which revolves around the two conceptual schemes. The orientational domain constitutes a disparate set of adapted “Western” theories drawn from psychology and sociology to build knowledge on the problems of individual inadequacies and societal issues. Governed by a psychiatric deluge and increased mathematisation of the discipline, the next core aspect is to apply derivative interventional methods such as casework (especially), group work, and community organisation to solve the problems in- formed by these theories. The attention of the book remains on the latter and the bulk of the pages is dedicated to detail this. It focuses on the profound use of the “core methodology of social work” (p 35) and the usefulness of the “social case- work process” (p 75) for the micro- management of individual and family issues. Nonetheless, stories of successful demonstration of practice models based on critical theories to engage with macro issues could be an antidote to the acritical format of social work.

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A Book of Undifferentiated Uniformity
The write-ups of the authors share a relative commonality in terms of the style of the content in the descriptive documentation of their journeys. Armaity Desai, K V Ramana, H M Marulasiddaiah, R R Singh, and R B S Verma, as rotational administrative heads of various departments and institutions, count their achievements in “playing a leadership role in national and international associations and contributing to policy in state and national governments” (p 1). A special emphasis is put on their policy recommendations and contributions in shaping India’s social work teaching and research directions. The accounts of Vimla Nadkarni, Asha Rane, Niranjana Gokarn, Lina Kashyap, Murli Desai, Anil S Navale, Philomena D’Souza, and Ghandi Doss concentrate on curriculum reforms and the ensuing developments that culminated in bringing innovative courses and centres of social work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Nirmala Niketan, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Bangalore University, and the School of Social Work Roshni Nilaya. In the attempt to weave the relationship between theory and practice and a curriculum that is “discipline-specific, experiential and critical pedagogy-based” (p 233), they offer handy curricular and field practice-related recommendations.

The reflections of Hazel D’Lima, Kalindi Mazumdar, Devi Prasad, and Helen Joseph briefly provide insights into teaching–learning processes and hint at the structural challenges that social work faces. In a situation of “ideological deficit which should be an overarching concern of the profession” (p 255), the need to ask critical questions about the profession is ushered in their chapters, but this “ideological deficit” is again not deliberated upon.
 
The ‘Neutral’ Social Work
Social work distanced itself from embracing contemporary sociocultural issues as its epistemic concern. Despite more representation of female scholars, the book does not look into questions of gender and sexuality sufficiently.  It scarcely addresses the crucial context of long-sustained caste hierarchies and casteism, class marginality, and ethnic conflicts. If there are any references to these concerns, they are as interpolations in a few lines or a paragraph. Armaity Desai mentions an instance where the “biased police” (p 25) served the interest of the majority during the outbreak of the 1993 violence in Mumbai. The one “courageous” act is that of involving student volunteers to “forge communal harmony” (p 138) during those difficult times, writes Kalindi Mazumdar. Devi Prasad writes of how he “faced discrimination” (pp 243–44) along the lines of caste and geopolitical divide during his initial college days at Andhra University. This is the only reference to caste-related discriminatory practices.

As the director of TISS, Armaity Desai somehow could only offer limited institutional protection to the teachers sup- porting Medha Patekar’s Narmada Bachao Andolan. “I did not own their consciences and they were free to act on their belief” (p 23), she replied to the higher authorities when asked to address the matter. Part of the fact is that the fraternity seldom participates in protest movements, rather it prefers “symbolic participation” (p 78) to not invite any “controversy” to its comfortable academic zone. Anil S Navale, who was with the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Gujarat, remembers that “from 1969 to 2005, [he] led and involved batches of social work students in relief, reconstruction, and rehabilitation” (p 124). Earlier in the same paragraph, he writes that “disasters and calamities, whether natural or man-made, have intermittently occurred during [his] working life” but remains silent on India’s one of the most brazen “man-made” calamities—the 2002 Gujarat pogrom!

Social work proclaims a discipline committed to promoting societal change underpinned by the principles of justice and rights challenging sociopolitical structures while utilising social science theories. However, apolitical preoccupations in social work continue to dominate both the past and the present.
 
Elitist Social Work?
The representation of authors from Mumbai-based TISS and Nirmala Niketan in the book outnumbered that of other institutions. As many as 11 contributors have closely been associated with these “epicentres of prestige.” Given this fact, one may wonder if selecting individuals and institutions misses the core principles of representation. The pedagogical and field practice discourse depends on official knowledge and the “legitimate” sources that are chosen to refer to. One is puzzled to note that in the present scenario where Muslims become “hyphenated citizens” compared to the “axiomatically natural citizens” of India (to refer to Pandey [1999]), the response of main- stream social work scholarship to their everyday dehumanisation and growing Islamophobia is nearly nil. It perceived the Muslim question as backward-going in the forward-looking nation-building project before and after India’s independence. The topical shift came late only when with experiences of discrimination, young scholars and teachers started questioning the elitist ecosystem of social work moving from being a “research subject” to becoming the researcher. Taking inspirations from the sociological and political theories, this new generation of scholars is also emphasising that caste questions are less representational and more philosophical and that this value is “not of affection but reason.” It is backed by a moral and political necessity of the “margin” to debrahmanise academic spaces, as argued by M S S Pandian (2002), if at all, modernity is a liberating societal project.

Is social work praxis possible without engaging theoretically and practically with the most social concerns of our times? The social seems redundant in this narrativisation of the social work discipline in India.
 
Clamour of Indigenisation
A preferred corner of social work scholarship is to harp on the non-contextual “Western knowledge” ill-suited for Indian theory and practice. Earlier too, people like Hans Nagpaul, P D Kulkarni, Mehr C Nanavatty, G R Banerjee, and many others voiced their worries about the non-applicability of “Western knowledge” to the Indian context. This old debate lingers in the present as well. The book proposes the need for basic research “into our own realities” (p 48), and argues that social work’s omission of the “deep-rooted local culture, language, history and life” (p 59), and the non-inclusion of “our Indian tradition” (p 204) into practice methods are allegedly ailing the very basis of philosophical orientation of social work in India. However, this Indian “context” or the Indian “tradition” is never de- constructed, and nor has it entered into the realm of theory.

The book loudly laments the professional imperialism of “the West’s knowledge, ideas and values” (p 255) and the inability of the “Western individualistic clinical model to deal with the social problems” (p 160). The appeal to discard the “Eurocentric” curriculum has been in demand for decades but with no definitive propositions. For instance, the book discusses the practice variants at length but is weak at theorising the very phenomenon of practice. The debate on the “professional status” of social work is often reduced to establishing a state- commissioned regulatory council as a panacea while pushing back crucial sociological problematics of the profession in social sciences.

The agony for context-specific literature is a genuine plea. But in the case of India, “the concern of Indianisation is rather isolationist and parochial, without rigorous practice and its documentation in the contemporary international con- text” (p 287), R R Singh rightly observes.

On a fundamental level, social work needs to contend with the binary nationalist thought of “desi and derivative” to create a research space for the “beyond” to include subaltern questions and legacies of marginal reformers and thinkers Guru (2002). The “jurists” reject the derivative and embrace desi in the guise of decoloniality to create another colony of the “core.” The politics of desi knowledge production floats without indigeneity and theory. For true epistemic decolonisation, it stands to reason that the urgent necessity for social work is to bring exclusive literature and practice models on caste and Muslim questions in a gendered manner by the marginalised.
 
Lessons to Learn
Similar attempts of this kind have been made elsewhere but the given project appears to be far from those exemplary works. The two illuminating memoirs, Character  Is  Destiny by Alice Salomon and Daughter of Persia by Sattareh Farmaian, inform us to historialise the being as lived history and ontologise life experiences of a person in the larger context. Salomon relates her journey from the Gestapo’s nastiness in Nazi Germany to becoming the founding president of the International Association of Schools of Social Work. Sattareh, the founder of Iran’ s first School of Social Work in Tehran, offers an anthology of despair and hope while negotiating the feudal regime of Pahlavi to the Islamic revolution of Khomeini. Clifford Manshardt’s Pioneering  on  Social  Frontiers  in  India and M S Gore’s Memories that Linger are autobiographical treasures in the Indian context. In Manshardt’s scheme, the Hindu–Muslim problem is a constant variable to be considered to initiate any social policy practice in India. For Gore, the social context forms the ideology and its manifestation in the action of a person as he located himself in the bigger sociocultural picture and different time- space contexts.

The authors of Journey in Social Work Education in India: Emerging Reflections do not travel from self-in-the-other to the self. The book is so neutrally naïve that it fails to probe into the landscape of societal structures and complex realities of Indian societies and cultures that would have shaped social work education, research, and practice. It seems rather that the book sees the value of an individual’s act free from sociocultural determinants and does not assume that knowledge is a social product. The authors do not reflect on these complexities as one needs freedom from the “immediate” to make sense of their historical-social-political context. The immediate of social work is trapped by caste, religion, patriarchy, region, and other intersectional variables since it is fundamentally “ahistorical, apolitical, and acritical” as bodhi s r1 would argue. A deeper engagement with the immediate would have created the possibility of more relevant social work in our given context.
 
Abu Osama ([email protected]) teaches at the Department of Social Work, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.

Note
1. The name is formally written in small letters.
 
References

• Farman-Farmaian, S and D Munker (1992): Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from Her Father’s Harem through the Islamic Revolution, Crown.
• Gore, M S (2007): Memories that Linger, New Delhi: Serial Publications.
• Guru, Gopal (2002): “How Egalitarian Are Social Sciences in India?” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 37, No 50.
• Manshardt, Clifford (1967): Pioneering on Social Frontiers in India, Bombay: Lalvani Publishing House.
• Pandey, G (1999): “Can a Muslim Be an Indian?” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol 41, No 4.
• Pandian, M S S (2002): “One Step Outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and Public Sphere,”  Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 37, No 18.
• Philp, M (1979): “Notes on the Form of Knowledge in Social Work,” Sociological Review, Vol 27, No 1.
• Salomon, Alice (2004): Character Is Destiny: The Autobiography of Alice Salomon, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

 
Courtesy
Economic & Political Weekly 
April 19, 2025

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