On this episode, my guest is Manish Jain, a man deeply committed to regenerating our diverse local knowledge systems, cultural imaginations and inter-cultural dialogue. Inspired by MK Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ivan Illich, his illiterate village grandmother, his unschooled daughter, indigenous communities and Jain spiritual philosophy, he is one of the leading planetary voices for deschooling our lives and reimagining education.
He has served for the past 25 years as Chief Beaver (ecosystems builder) of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India and is co-founder of some of the most innovative educational experiments in the world - the Swaraj University, the Jail University, Complexity University, Tribal Farmversity, the Creativity Adda, the Learning Societies Unconference, the Walkouts-Walk-on network, Udaipur as a Learning City, the Families Learning Together network, Berkana Exchange. He co-launched the global Ecoversities Alliance with 500+ members in 50 countries.
Show Notes:
Kidnapped by the American Dream
Grandma’s University
Reclaiming our Cultural Imagination
Cultural Imagination for the Culturally Homeless
The Radical and Exponential Power of Trust
Unlearning Cultural Appropriation in the Oral Tradition
Jugard, or “playful improvisation”
Being Reclaimed by Ancestors
Swaraj University - Money, Love, and Death
Alivelihoods and Deadlihoods
Traditions of Hospitality in Rajasthan
Ecoversities
Homework:
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome, Manish, to the End of Tourism podcast. Thanks for joining me today.
Thank you, Chris. Great to be here. Great to be with you.
Speaking of here, I was wondering if you could share with our listeners where you find yourself today and maybe what the world looks like for you where you are.
Yes, I live in a very magical place called Udaipur.
It's in Rajasthan, India. I have been here for the last 25 years. Before that I was moving cities every year. I was living in the U. S. and Europe. And my village is about two hours from where I live, from the city. And I have lots of relatives here, lots of ancestors around. And this happens to be one of the major tourist destinations of India.
So it's an interesting combination of very [00:01:00] cosmopolitan kind of global jet set coming in, but also lots of traditional culture, local knowledge, still alive. We were lucky to be called backwards and underdeveloped. And so many things have remained but again under, under continuous threat by kind of urbanization and global economy.
But yeah, it's a very beautiful place, lots of palaces, lakes all kinds of animals on the street. On a good day you'll see an elephant walking down the street or a camel just in our neighborhoods and yeah, I love it here. So it's, I mean, it's found a place in my heart for sure.
Hmm. What a gift. What a gift to, to live in a place that you love and, you know, it seems to be that question at the heart of the themes of the podcast and in that regard, I wanted to begin by asking you a little bit about your journey, Manish. So[00:02:00] from what I've read, from what I've heard, a lot of your work centers around de schooling and unlearning, specifically with Swaraj University and other educational endeavors, Ecoversities being one of them.
And I'd like to return to those themes and projects in a little bit and start by asking you, among other things, about your earlier accolades as a Harvard graduate and someone with a degree from Brown University. One of your bios says that you worked for, among others the American multinational investment bank, Morgan Stanley, as well as UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank, and USAID in South Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union.
And so I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share what led to your initial involvement in these rather prominent institutions, and then subsequently, what led to leaving them behind thereafter?
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, hearing that [00:03:00] always gives me the shivers a little bit. It's like such a long time ago now. But so I kind of actually grew up with a deep sense of wanting to serve, serve the world. And when I was growing up I actually, I tell people I was kidnapped when I was three years old, born in India, but then taken to the U. S. Kidnapped by the American dream, which I over time realized was a nightmare for most of the planet.
So this deep sense of service has always been, been with me, maybe from my mother, from my father, from my grandparents, many, many sources from, inspired by also Gandhi and, and Tagore and many other Indian freedom fighters.
But I kind of grew up with this narrative, if you want to serve, you should go to the big places, the places of big power, those institutions, that's where you can influence, that's where you can make the most impact. And so that kind of was a trajectory that I, I kind of [00:04:00] got put on I kind of was very good.
I never liked being in these institutions, but I was very good at faking it I faked it through school all the way to Harvard and, and so I was pretty good at faking it and eventually it caught up with me and I started feeling like I was becoming a fake. So, but going to those places I thought there were, you know, those were the centers of power and that when I got there, I started feeling that these places, each of these places, one by one, I started realizing that they were actually quite powerless in many ways, surrounded by a sense of scarcity and fear and very limited imagination.
And so one by one, I became disillusioned with each of each of those places. I was expecting that, you know, these would be the places which could help serve humanity, but I realized that they were built on, you know, this continuous model of extraction and colonization and exploitation of [00:05:00] life.
And so even with education, I felt like, okay education will be the solution and I started realizing that education was a huge part of the problem. And so that's what led me started me on the de schooling path to try to see how we can find other ways besides relying on these institutions and the logic of capitalism and commodification to solve our problems. You know, over time I started really developing a severe mistrust of experts.
I was one of them, like, although I'm fake and so are the rest of these guys. So by the time I was 28, I hit the wall. And I was like I don't have anywhere else to go, I've been to all these big places, and I don't really see, see any hope from them. I don't think they can be repaired either or that they can actually take the kinds of initiatives that are needed to change the game.
So that's what led me back to India then[00:06:00] to be with my illiterate village grandmother. And I thought I'll take care of her. And then I, my wife and I realized that we had inadvertently become part of our grandmother's university and she was our unlearning guru. To both Get beyond I would say a lot of our own fears and anxieties, get beyond a lot of the, let's say Western liberal do gooder frameworks, get beyond our attachment to institutions just to solve things for us and start to understand and remember, I think remembering is a word that I have discussed many times with old common friend of ours, Gustavo Esteva, but start to remember that we have much more richness and wealth and creativity, possibility within us and our, and within our communities. So that's been a little bit of the journey to re remember and reclaim and reimagine things.
I [00:07:00] remember seeing in one of your talks that you said that your work or to you, what you understood your work to be is, is a way of reclaiming our cultural imagination. I'm wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on that.
Yeah, I think basically I think the deepest form of colonization has happened is to our imaginations.
And there is a phrase from the eighties from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher called TINA. "There Is No Alternative." So, as there was an uprising that started happening around the world questioning the dominant development paradigm, the global economy, it was quickly suppressed, repressed by this phrase, TINA.
This is the best system that we have, and you know, there's, there's nothing beyond it, so you should just try to improve what's there. And so I think what then [00:08:00] people are forced into is to try to fix or let's say work with what is the existing frameworks and definitions that we have been fed about things like progress or development or success or happiness and then we are all in a very deep endless losing race to try to catch up with something.
And we're not even sure what happens when you win. Maybe that's where it hit me. You know, there's a saying, if you, if you beat them at their own game, you lose everything. And so I kind of started realizing that personally, and also when I was looking at the development paradigm more different more closely.
So I think, you know, what else is possible first of beyond the kind of logic of the rational mind, what's possible beyond the anthropocentric perspectives that we have on life, what's possible beyond global corporations and institutions deciding what's best for us, what's [00:09:00] possible beyond markets and technologies as the solutions for all of the planet's woes.
I think that's what we're trying to explore when I talk about cultural imagination. And I, I think that the first step is to open up the definitions again. This is another thing I think many of my elders, Gustavo, and, Ivan Illich and a person here in India who was a friend of Gustavo's, Claude Alvarez, many were urging us that we need to open up the definitions of things.
So that's what usually I think in a lot of the decolonial movements, what didn't happen that we accepted their definitions of development of the good life, all of those things. And then we started pursuing that, but actually it's a very exciting time that we can actually crack that open. And see, okay, what is it?
Little Bhutan, a country of 700, 000. People asking, you know, what is happiness? And saying that[00:10:00] you know, the West, you guys have all the money, you guys have all the technology, you have all the armies, but are your people happy? So I think, you know, this is happening in obviously in Latin America, "buen vivir," in India, Swaraj, so many movements, which I think are challenging the given definitions and creating a space for us to dream differently, to tap into a different worldview which recognizes a sense of the sacred and recognizes that we are not just, you know, cogs in the machine in terms of our purpose on this earth.
So I think those are, that's a little bit of what I mean by reclaiming the cultural imagination.
Hmm. And you mentioned Swaraj and I'm really excited to dive into that and see where this notion of reclaiming cultural imagination fits there in a place and not just in philosophies.
But I wanted to ask you this kind of this little follow up question in regards to the cultural imagination. Because we've [00:11:00] had the great honor to befriend and learn from people like Gustavo. But I think of my family and friends and compañeros, colleagues in Toronto, major North American metropolis.
And I wonder how reclaiming the cultural imagination looks like or could be for people who would consider themselves either cultural orphans or culturally homeless. You know I mean, you and I have distinct ties, it seems, and a lived memory to the places our people moved or migrated from or still live in.
And so there's a bridge of sorts that already exists that on some level can still be crossed. What about the people who have no lived memory of where their people come from or who would admit, or at least can offer up the idea that they have no culture?
Yeah, so, oh, that's a great question. So, [00:12:00] I think maybe the first thing I would kind of offer in that situation is that one is a question of how to reconnect to the land and the territory you live in the place, the water, the rivers, the mountains, the forests. There's a tremendous amount of memory that, that lives in the place which can help us recover parts of ourselves that have been lost. The other is, I think, in terms of reconnecting to our bodies again, there's a tremendous amount of wisdom. We can recover again from our own bodies, from our breath also reconnecting to our breath in a very profound way and help us recover things.
And also when I talk about culture, I think the essence of culture without being an essentialist, is is what I call gift culture. Mm-Hmm. So this culture of, of connection, of care, of kindness, of trust, of hospitality, of [00:13:00] forgiveness. There's so many traditions like that, wherever we are, and we can also create new traditions around these things.
And so, a lot of times we confuse culture for the food or for the clothes or for the music of a place. But I think the deeper level of all culture is a gift culture, which is a reminder of the interconnectedness of life, the thread that is woven through all of us, connects us to something very sacred and even divine in some sense.
So, I think that reconnecting to the spirit of kindness and care is a huge step. We've been doing a lot of experiments over the years around gift culture and reconnecting to a field of trust again. I call it the radical and exponential power of trust.
Much of our work and I would almost say in the miracles that I see every day in our work are because of this field of trust that we have been able to reconnect to and this is what my [00:14:00] grandmother, I think, was helping me to reconnect to in terms of culture is because I remember growing up in the U. S. this continuous thing of don't trust anyone, don't trust your neighbors, don't trust anyone, somebody, anybody is being kind to you because they may have an angle. They may steal from you or cheat from you or whatever, and I think it took me a lot of healing to come out of that and that has been a phenomenal journey in terms of opening up possibilities for how I connect, and one other thing I would say is that.
A lot of, I know this has been a major unlearning area because I used to be very critical of all of this cultural appropriation that we see in the West, people picking up things in here, here and there. But as I've been in India and I've become more connected to the oral traditions, very different kind of ethics and philosophy and ways of, of living and doing things that lives in an oral tradition.
Like [00:15:00] I grew up with this strong fear of, you know, plagiarism. You know, that was the one thing Harvard and Brown hammer you is about plagiarizing. Cite every word. Chris said this, or Gustavo said this, right? And I found in the oral tradition, there's a different kind of trickster level playfulness that you can take anything, play with anything.
You don't have to cite, you can modify, you can change, you can adapt. And I think I've been trying to bring that more into these conversations around cultural appropriation, because I think people get so afraid nowadays of being bashed for exploring a different culture for taking things.
Obviously, there is a level of depth and engagement and commitment, dedication to understanding something that I would invite in that. But being able to pick up things, I think has been part of our culture. People take things and spread them and appropriate them in ways that keep them alive and moving so it's something I've been exploring a [00:16:00] lot is that it seems very much more controlling and part of the old paradigm to say that we need to protect and there are certain cultural gatekeepers and certain kinds of people who who will tell you you're right or wrong in the culture.
So I also would want to open up that conversation, exploration with people.
Thank you. You know what I mean? You know what I mean with that? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It definitely points towards a notion of cultures being static and that there being a degree of authenticity, a kind of original foundation or culture for a people which seems to be a relic of 19th century anthropology and things like that.
And, and a restriction that we are just these bodies in this present time. You know, in India, obviously we talk about reincarnation and so there, there may be other, other cultures within us and that we've lived that [00:17:00] want to express themselves and want to be opened in this life as well, which maybe our body and our place doesn't necessarily give us that opportunity, but the possibility exists, or the the desire even if is there so. I would want to invite us to all of that as well.
Mm hmm, and you've been speaking a lot about how your time in India has really been an opportunity for you to unlearn, maybe disassociate a little bit from the taught worldview that you had in the United States.
And this next question comes from a friend of ours dear friend Erin, and She wanted to ask about your move to India or move back depending on how you choose to understand it and how that experience has been for you as someone who grew up on the other side of the world and what do you think it means in the context of [00:18:00] your migration to be claimed or reclaimed by a place.
Beautiful. Yeah. I think it's been quite a powerful and even I would say magical journey because as you said, the place and the people reclaim me. Part of it is that, you know, my relatives are here, my ancestors are here. And so at times when I felt, you know, a little bit out of place they reminded me that I belong here and I'm welcome here.
And I think what I've made a very strong effort to do is to reground myself in different ways and maybe those ways have been made the transition more smooth or beautiful in one way. So one is like, you know, a lot of the ideas, for example, or work that I'm doing I've tried to find cultural reference points and stories that makes sense because initially when I came, a lot of the things I was talking about, [00:19:00] people were like, oh, that's another Western idea. That's something you're just bringing. It's not Indian, blah, blah, whatever. So I started to look for stories in the past.
So when I talk about my university, Swaraj University, I tell people it's 5, 000 years old. Our first chancellor was from the Mahabharata, Ekalavya, the story of Ekalavya, the first documented, self-designed learner and so that all of a sudden something clicks differently for people of how they hear it, how they connect it. When I talk about, for example, when we used to talk a lot, Erin, since you brought her up, we explored a lot of zero waste and upcycling together.
There's a word in Hindi, jugard, which means playful improvisation. So, using our own words to describe it rather than trying to take everything from English and translate it. But also I'd say, you know, like people would say, again, zero waste. This is a Western sustainability thing. I said, no no, wait a second.
Our grandmothers are all zero waste masters. So, you [00:20:00] know, let us understand that all of these ideas are actually connected to many things that we have in our own culture. So that's made it a very beautiful thing because it's not only being welcoming, it's actually unleashing a lot of energy that had been pent up with people like fear and you know, self -limiting, self-belief, self -suppression in a sense.
So all of a sudden hearing that, Oh, this is actually has roots in who we are, has opened up a lot for ways we engage in people to accept me and some of the ideas and experiments we've been sharing. So that's been good. And I think the other thing is really a kind of regrounding. So when I moved back, I was good at PowerPoint and Excel.
My worldview was through Microsoft products, right? So what I learned again was to reconnect to farming and our food systems. And I think Aerin and Yeyo's journey is also, we've been together on this for many years, but [00:21:00] also to local language again, and you know, making our own clothes, building our own buildings, you know our own healing techniques and plants here.
So, just reconnecting to a lot of those things have helped the place to welcome me in different ways and also me to be able to build different relationships with a lot of diverse people here as well. And I think the third thing is really that just to add was like this, one of the deschooling ideas was to core is to shed these labels of failures of looking, you know, at only educated people as intelligent.
So there's so much wisdom and creativity and beauty and love that is with people who don't have degrees. And so being able to see that because I was able to let go of these labels and these frameworks has really helped me again, beautifully connecting with many people and many energies here.
Wonderful. And [00:22:00] do you think that those, those points that you just mentioned, that they were causes or consequences of you and your people there opening Swaraj University? Or did it evolve into that? It happened, you know, like I said, we have more than a thousand faculty in Swaraj University, and they are grandmothers and farmers and artisans and mountains and lakes and, and trees, the human, the more than human.
The one other thing that's really been very powerful is, you know, the place I live in, I would say about 80 percent of the people living here talk to their ancestors. Like without a shaman, they can, you know, like my cousins or my aunt can channel ancestors and we would have all night prayer rituals to talk, connect with them, invite them.
And it's like people, and for me with my western trained scientific mind, I [00:23:00] couldn't understand this initially and then it started to open up once I kind of allowed myself to breathe with it opened up a whole different set of possibilities also in engagement to the place where the ancestors were welcoming me. As well to this place. So, that has been beautiful.
And another thing that happened was I met, again, a lot of traditional healers. So 25 years ago when I was meeting them was a huge amount of skepticism. My mother's a doctor in the U. S. and she doesn't trust anything Ayurvedic or folk medicines or anything.
So when I met them, I was skeptical, but as I spent time with them, and started seeing that they're, they actually have some very deep power. And when I asked them, you know, how did you learn all of this stuff? Because you think of this plant with this, you know, the bark of this and the, you have to boil that with the roots of this and mix it with this.
I'm like, so many combinations and permutations, right? And I'm like, they didn't have supercomputers. [00:24:00] So I asked them, how did you guys learn this? And they said, what do you think? And I very proudly used to say trial and error, you know, that must be the scientific method. And they would laugh like crazy.
And I'm like, what, what was it like that? That's so primitive trial and error. It's so primitive. I'm like, what? And they would, I said, how did they do it? They said, Oh, we could, our ancestors could talk to the plants. And so once I kind of started to allow that worldview to permeate me, it started to create a different sense of connection to the place, I think.
And so it's been a very beautiful journey to in a sense, one can say rewild myself here.
And are those, are those themes incorporated into swarajs, and I don't want to say curriculum, because we all know that's a four letter word for a lot of people, but but in terms of de schooling, in terms of unlearning, in terms of, these kinds of old time [00:25:00] learnings, what does a student maybe encounter at Swaraj?
Yeah. So there's no curriculum per se, but we have, you know, a few different elements to it. It's all derived from living together, right? So, one is obviously, we call it learning from the gift of conflict. So as you're living together, there's conflicts that start to emerge all the time.
So those conflicts are very beautiful entry points into kind of reflecting, if you, once you move beyond the blame narrative to reflect on yourself, what's triggering you, why do you feel disturbed about it? So very, very powerful opportunities to reflect on oneself. We have also what we call a lot of unlearning challenges.
So those are optional, but we've created different challenges because we felt there's a lot of conditioning that people come into. Swaraj with and they're around many different areas, but I would say three of the common ones are around most [00:26:00] common around money unlearning our free fear, anxiety scarcity that's related to the money system.
Even our self worth gets tied so much to the money system. So, we have a lot of different experiments around that. The second is around love. Both starting with self love, but then how we understand love, how we relate, notions of jealousy, inferiority, all kinds of things which are tied to love.
And the third is then death. Death. And so are so these are places that we explore a bit. We have different experiments where people can, you know, for example, and imagine your death would be an invitation that we would invite people into a process. So there's a lot of unlearning experiments. And then the third is that people actually then have a lot of space to design their own personal programs of what they want to explore.
And in that process, because you're living in a community, lots of informal learning is happening. Peer to peer, your friend is doing [00:27:00] something. Maybe you start, like, I'm not interested, but after a month of seeing your friend, or a few months, you start, it's just something starts, you know, entering into your system and you realize, Oh, maybe I do like this or this is interesting.
And your friend leaves it. I've seen cases, a friend leaves it and the other person picks it up and you know, takes it forward also. So, all of this kind of cross pollination is happening all the time, which is very beautiful. So those are some of the things that happen in Swaraj.
And I think where we would invite this is we are becoming more, I think we've become more and more bold over the years, like with this idea of ritual and the sacred. So, in India, there was a lot of, you know first from the left, a lot of bashing of ritual and sacred as these were Brahmanical tools to suppress and these are superstitious. And these tools are, you know, the Marxist idea that these are to [00:28:00] control the masses.
And then also, it was bashed because these are ways to cement a kind of fascist Hindu paradigm which is against minorities and things. So, there was a lot of, lot of stories running in our heads around ritual. And then our own personal experiences that oftentimes meaningless, they become fractured, they become rigid and so what we've tried to do is really reclaim the space of ritual in Swaraj.
And part of that is with our ancestors or with the more than human. And so inviting people to look at ritual in a very different way has been very interesting. And sometimes I'm involved in rituals and I'm like, what are you doing? The inner voice says, dude, what are you doing?
You know, like, who are you at this? And, you know, so all of that old stuff that we kind of grew up with in terms of the scientific analytical mind, which sees everything that it can't understand as [00:29:00] superstition sometimes reappears in certain ways, but I think it's been part of the journey to really create a space at least to engage with this, and so in Swaraj very much it's, it's there as well, and, and maybe the, the way we explain it is there's a need to go beyond the kind of the rational, there's a, there's limits to the rational, logical fragmented mind of how it can see or what it can make sense of.
We often even talk about, you know, the way we're trained to think about the crisis is part of the crisis. So, you know, so this space of entering into kind of a liminal energy, a different frequency together is maybe very powerful. And those can be through many different ways, right? Through music, through dance, through food, through fasting.
In India, it's really through silence, you know, so it doesn't always have to be plant medicines, which you find more in Latin America and Africa, but in India, meditation and silence and fasting were and [00:30:00] breathing were really different ways that have been experimented over the centuries for people to enter into a different kind of consciousness together.
Well, it sounds like an incredible place and an incredible project. I hope if the winds allow me to travel again in a way that maybe they once did that I'd be able to experience that myself.
Yes, we have a long, we Udaipur and Oaxaca. So the chances for those winds appearing are pretty good.
Amen. Amen. And speaking of Oaxaca our mutual friend, Yeyo had wanted me to ask you about this formulation of yours and all he wrote was livelihoods as opposed to deadlihoods.
Oh yes, a alivelihoods, alivelihoods. We made a distinction because a lot of people are wondering what can I do today [00:31:00] in the world. And so the first thing is to help them see that most of what the university, the conventional university is preparing us for are what I call deadlihoods. The work, whether you're in law or in finance or in psychology or I.T., somehow or other, they're tied to a deadlihoods economy that is extractive, military, violent. So, how can we start to understand how we ourselves are implicated in that kind of economy. And so that's one part of it. But then to also think about, you know, the work that's needed today in the world is what I call alivelihoods. And that starts with, you know, what makes my spirit come alive?
Because we've we've heard this, "lots of work is soul sucking." So, what is the work that actually nourishes our soul? And gives us meaning and purpose, you know? Lets us reconnect that, you know meaning, purpose, spirituality is not something you [00:32:00] just do on a Sunday or you do in a class, but it's actually tied to the work you're doing in the world and how do we integrate that?
What is the kind of work that is helping my community come alive? That is actually shifting power from global corporations back into communities, which are kind of, what is the work that's building, weaving the bonds of trust? And care, kindness, compassion back into community life. And what is the work that is regenerating our ecosystems?
So what I call our real wealth. So how do we compost the money system? And start to regenerate real wealth with it. Our health, our forests, our soils, our waters, which are all over the world are in massive, massive degradation stages right now. And how do we regenerate the social bonds again?
The trust networks again, that can give us a sense of security, of care, of belonging, of respect, of [00:33:00] dignity. So that's kind of the loose framework we have for that. And I think one other element is that what is the work that will help us shift the worldviews that we have?
So the worldview of the planet is being a dead entity and human beings being the only intelligent beings on this planet and the kind of fear that is driving much of the decision making. How do we start to shift to a different worldview that many indigenous communities had a sense of, much better sense of.
So, what is the work that can help us shift the narratives of who we are? Why are we on this earth together? Why are we, you know, perpetuating these ideas of ownership or of borders of you know, so many things that we have kind of internalized, which are fundamental to the modernist project.
Is there a way to start to unravel these or shift these? So what is the work that allows us that? So I call all of that, all of that a livelihoods, really, and the invitation is to help [00:34:00] people think about how they can be doing that. And I think the other element in that, which is really important is, how do we move beyond this like individual self help kind of narrative we've been fed. You know, like the problem is in you. You have to fix yourself.
Whereas how, how do we shift it more to how do we want to understand the systems and the institutions and how they're operating, but also, you how do we focus more of our care and our energy and our healing around healthy community, rebuilding healthy community, because that's what will give us a different sense of power, a different sense of possibility and things.
So that's a little bit about it. There's much more, many layers, but just to give you a sense.
Yeah, thank you for that. You know, I'm reminded in this, in this context of deadlihoods and the kind of modern condition and the economies that prevail as a result. There is and has been, especially in the last two centuries, this kind of not only degradation of community, but of course, the dissolution[00:35:00] of community and in the sense of people moving to the big city or other countries for better lives.
And sometimes necessarily. So like sometimes it's simply their only option, right?
And, this is very, very much evident to me in the work that I do here in Oaxaca. And you know, I had come across this declaration from 2009 in a, a very rural village in the Mixtec region of Oaxaca, where a group of peasant families from different villages alongside their migrant kin or family spoke for days about the consequences of their movements, and at the end of that three day assembly, declared alongside the right to migrate, the right to stay home and the right to not migrate, and so I'm kind of curious what kind of dynamics you've seen in India In terms of that economic impulse to [00:36:00] move, to leave the village, to migrate and maybe what part Swaraj and endeavors like it might play in those dynamics.
Yeah. So I think, part of it is you're saying is physically forced displacement due to development projects, massive development projects or war. But a lot of the displacement has been sold to people package as to people that the urban lifestyle or the American lifestyle is the lifestyle and what you're leading is impoverished, is insignificant, is backwards. You know, there's all kinds of ways. And so much of what education role was is to convince us that somehow the urban lifestyle is what is to be aspired for. So a lot of people move because of that. I have my experience with rural people and working with rural people is that a lot of them, they're like,
"we're quite happy where we're at. But what happens is when our cousin comes from the city, they bring [00:37:00] fancy phones and motorcycles and money and they show off and that's what really makes us feel really bad."
And then we have to, what we've tried to do is to counter that with, you know reminding people of what a shitty life urban life is.
Most people are living in slums. Most people are, if you're not, you're living under continuous stress and tension to make ends meet in polluted environments these days and lots of traffic. And so I at least, you know, try to remind people that in their villages, they may not have that many material things but they're the Kings of the village.
They have fresh air. They have clean places, good water to drink still. They have good food, fresh food they're eating. So that's been an interesting journey. Sometimes people understand, particularly the older people understand. This is the other thing that schooling played a major role is to try to kill the voices of wisdom.
So, like my grandmother or other elders would be [00:38:00] told, "Oh, you're uneducated. What do you know about what is a good life or what is, you know, the way forward? And so those voices still are silenced quite a bit because young people go to school for some years and then they think they are much more knowledgeable about what life is all about or what's important in life.
So, I think what's interesting is that what we're saying about the breakdown of what the urban success story was or the urban model, it's becoming more and more clear to people, like they're seeing that so there are people I know who are moving back. Udaipur is a very small city and a lot of people who have been connected with us have decided to stay in Udaipur rather than moving to Delhi or Bombay, which has been the trend.
And so I think it's a very important thing to keep looking at. I think if people see if they have a good life in smaller places, a lot of people are ready to come [00:39:00] back. Because the stress, the continuous stress and speed of big city life is I feel is taking a toll on people and also the whole promise is there's jobs and everything.
And so you see more and more unemployment also happening in big cities. So, I think there's an interesting question right now in people's minds of what, what to do and where to go.
So you know, it very much seems that one of the ways that what I'll call, I guess, well, either modern people or cultural Americans seem impoverished by is in the realm of hospitality. The lack of hospitality towards not only their neighbors at home, but, but abroad among hosts, you know, most people stay in hotels or Airbnbs. Most tourists anyways, they eat at chain restaurants. They're taught a transactional worldview and all exchange tends to end up in a customer service evaluation. And I feel that this is very much what [00:40:00] tourism has done to that part of the culture, that we would otherwise refer to as hospitality.
And so I'm curious in your opinion how would you define radical hospitality? And how have you seen it perhaps as an antidote for the industrial hospitality modern people so often encounter.
Yeah. I would that's a great question. So I think I've had the experience in being in Rajasthan of many traditions of hospitality and I would even say radical in the sense that all over India we say that " treat our guests like gods." So that's probably as radical as you could get with hospitality, if I treat you like a god, right? And what it means to me is, not to God in the sense of the pedestal of God or somebody remote, but actually God in the sense of this is my way [00:41:00] to find another connection to the divine in all of us, the divine that connects all of us.
And so when I am able to receive somebody with that spirit, I'm able to touch into something very deep within myself also. And we have so many traditions here which again, in our work, we're trying to recover and remind people, remember in different ways. I would just share a couple of things around that.
So one is like, in the desert, when it gets really hot up to 50 degrees Celsius, probably the most hospitable and sacred thing you can do is offer somebody water. So with the industrial consumer tourism, we have a parallel underground system happening.
So you can go to stores and you'll see bottled water, for example, where people are paying and they buy it. But if you kind of look closely, you'll see on almost every corner of the old city where, where [00:42:00] most of the tourists come, there are clay pots, which people fill up every day for which are called piaos.
So the tradition was that to offer any passerby, any stranger, water, is one of the highest gifts you can honor with them because it's so hot and so I've seen women fill water and carry it from even very far away to offer it to strangers, which is so humbling and so powerful that people would actually be able to offer this.
So you can see these pots, people are sitting there sometimes, sometimes the pots are just filled and left with a glass for people to fill themselves and drink. But this is a very powerful way to remind us that there is a different way to relate both to resources like water and how we see it, which is non commodified.
And so my grandmother would never think of charging money for water. If I ever told her, she'd be like, what is wrong with those [00:43:00] people? There must be some real deep sickness in them. "Let's go charge money for water." And so I think that, you know, that's an example of an entry to a different understanding of what is water, what is our relationship with each other and I wouldn't say what is water, almost you could say who is water. That question gets opened up as well through this act.
And so the other thing around radical hospitality and I care, I would say there's some traditions that are called guptan here, which is kind of the invisible giving tradition.
So a lot of what do you find, hospitality these days, is around showing off or people should know who's serving you and who's giving you. And here, there's another sense of care that is given where nobody knows who is the giver and to try to remove that arrogance of the giver when care is offered.
And so it's offered with a deep sense of service, but to try to remove the ego element that I am the giver, I'm the one who's [00:44:00] helping somebody or being hospitable to them in some way. So I think that's also been quite inspiring to me, how to enter into that real space of humility as part of a radical hospitality tradition.
And I think that these things do have a very essential role to play in challenging what's happening in the world and, and building different kinds of models and systems, because if care and connection is not part of that I don't know what the, what the new models, what they would stand on.
And so these are this has to be the foundation of something that can grow. And every time, you know, if you ask me every few years, it deepens and changes because of experiences here. When I first I heard about it from Gustavo. I was like, "Oh, this is so beautiful." But I had relatively little ideas of how it would actually look every day.
I see more and more examples of it in living practice here where I live. So yeah, it gives me a lot of hope that [00:45:00] maybe that's one of the keys to finding our way forward.
Well, thank you, Manish, for your time today and this wonderful, wonderful conversation. Before I let you go to sleep and probably tend to family, I'd like to ask, how might our listeners find out more about your work, about Swaraj University, and I know we didn't have time to speak about it, but the Ecoversities project.
Yeah, it's been wonderful to, to talk with you, Chris. I do hope that we can welcome you someday to Udaipur as well. The one thing I would say is that Swaraj University is part of this alliance, translocal alliance around the world called Ecoversities, so a network of like 500 plus alternative universities in 50 countries.
And the idea [00:46:00] was that, you know, these are, in a sense, kind of part of an underground railroad, if you would say for people who are walking out of the system or trying to figure out how they can live differently on the planet together. And the beautiful thing is that, you know, anyone can declare themselves an ecoversity, their community.
And there's a huge diversity of things, ranging from the farmversities and the forestversities and the riverversities to, you know, like deathversities and travelersversities grandmothers' universities and jail universities and all kinds of spaces. So, this is really to reclaim different kinds of knowledge systems and different learning processes that have never been valued by conventional universities.
And to maybe start to create a space, as I said, to live together, to reclaim our hands and our hearts and our bodies and [00:47:00] our homes as well as our holistic heads And to try to dream, to dream something together. So we have a website, we have gatherings, I would invite people to, to come and and visit us and connect with different eco overseas around the world.
I have a 21 year old daughter. She's been unschooled. She never looked at a textbook or an exam or a classroom really in her life, except, you know, like we took her to see children in a classroom, like you take kids to see animals in the zoo so she could see what it was like for a couple of days.
But so, you know, really wanted to create a model, not only, I mean, for myself, for her, for other young people to be able to learn and be in different kinds of communities and experiments around the world. So, we invite you all to help create the new models that the world needs with us.
I'll make sure that all of those links and [00:48:00] resources that you mentioned, Manish, are there on the End of Tourism website when the episode launches. And on behalf of our listeners, blessings on your day, your path, your tongue, and thank you so much for joining me today.
Thanks, Chris. Thanks for your wonderful work and good luck with the new projects that are emerging in your life.
Thank you, Manish.
S5 #6 | Relearning Home & Hospitality w/ Manish Jain (Ecoversities)