Institutionalising the Individual

As a research scholar of History at the University of Hyderabad, I hope not to be judged exclusively on my affiliation to that University simply because its Department of History is perceived to be good, but not as good as those in the Jawaharlal Nehru University or the University of Delhi. My fear, therefore, is that if I were to compete with their students for employment, publication, or scholarship, I would always find myself on the losing end. If, however, I were to be judged exclusively on my knowledge and research on History, I believe I might just be able to manage. Or so I started telling myself since the day I was convinced of my inability to secure admission in places like these.

Although this is how I wish to be judged, I rarely judge others as individuals themselves, satisfied as I am mostly in treating them as personifications of their institutions. For instance, I assume that every aspiring historian affiliated to a University I consider better than mine to be better than me, just as any individual affiliated to a University I consider lesser than mine to be lesser than me. Unfortunately, this habit extends far beyond the University into institutions of all sorts. Therefore, if an individual is published in the right places and praised by the right people, also in the right places, that individual automatically becomes the right person for me even without having taken the trouble to read the person myself. The only reason for such hypocrisy that I can think of is intellectual laziness where the popular perception of an institution becomes a convenient shorthand for me in judging a person, a practice that saves me the trouble of taking the time to know the person as an individual before forming some sort of an opinion of her/him. It would seem that I have bought - lock, stock, and barrel - into the Curriculum Vitae life, where the more impressive an individual's CV, the better the individual herself/himself.

Recently though, this hypocrisy has been troubling me, to the extent that every time I judge an individual thus, I stop and re-think. Interestingly, I have come across a few individuals who prefer identifying themselves with their institutions rather than have themselves treated as individuals. These are ones, who, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, drop names of institutions, even of other more illustrious individuals they have associated with, to create an impression of being impressive by virtue of this association alone. This can even be seen in contemporary scholarship where certain people are invoked, time and again, through citations and quotations to supply authority to an argument and, thus, validating it simply by their presence among the references. While I am usually taken in by any such display of generous name-dropping, I do wonder, usually later when I am alone, whether there is any point to being a person whose self-worth is derived not from who they are, but rather from who they know.

More importantly though, I wonder why someone would even bother being such a person. The answer seems to be insecurity, the same insecurity that plagues me into believing that an institution makes an individual. People like me feel so paralysed psychologically that without the crutches offered to them by their institutional affiliations, they feel incapable of standing up and walking on their own two feet. The only problem is that someday, these crutches will be taken away and then, we will have nothing to keep us standing. So, here's hoping that the crutches remain forever. Or, at least, as long as I remain.