Draft Invitation for the South Asia Social Forum 2014

After several World Social Forum gatherings and assemblies from 2003 to 2006, at
Hyderabad, Mumbai, Karachi and Delhi, the WSF process seemed to run out of
steam in this part of the world. It is not that South Asia has been lacking in political
turmoil, nor has the processes of neoliberal restructuring and destruction of
institutions, environments and resources has abated. It is also not as if another
platform, another forum, another network has been found which serves to bring
together diverse movements together for dialogue and an assertion that another
world is possible.
Perhaps the world is changing in a way which challenges our conventional
understanding. Apparently leaderless peoples movements arise in several countries
to overthrow well-entrenched regimes. In South Asia movements have arises that
seek to hold the governments accountable to the people rather than to narrow
interests. Two antagonistic words join together as military humanism or
humanitarian militarism to leave our sensibilities aghast. Mobile phones become
ubiquitous and Internet penetrates into all areas of our lives and plays political role
in surprising ways. On the one hand the process of building of knowledge societies
goes apace, whereas the world is awash with everyday violence.
There is certainly a disjunction in the world. Or, perhaps not. Building of knowledge
societies is not an apolitical project unconnected to the destruction of lives and
livelihoods unfurling in the world. People who are displaced, whether loosing homes
and livelihoods on the pavements, farmers loosing land and water, or adivasis
loosing rights to forests, there is something common among all of them. They all
loose the opportunity to earn their livelihood on the basis of their own knowledge.
What is common among all displaced is that their knowledge is their own. It does
not come from school or the university, or from the Internet. Their knowledge is
epistemically derided therefore culturally powerless, legally hemmed in by
restricting their access to resources therefore economically powerless. Those trying
to organize these people are struggling to find pathways to confront the ruling
dispensation.
These people living in remote and not-so-remote realms have survived the industrial
age and they have done so on the basis of their own knowledge. Now in the age of
knowledge societies they are going to be uprooted all over again. In the proposed
South Asia Forum planned to held in February 2014 at Luckhnow, India, we hope
that the various social movements will assemble together explore common
possibilities based on the common premise that the last person in society is also a
knowledgeable person. Knowledge is not something bestowed by specific
institutions alone. Knowledge traditions permeate societies and in fact knowledge is
a precondition of society. Such a premise will help undermine a gulf that we notice
even within WSF gatherings, at least in our part of the world, between the university

educated and the rest. If we look at society and social movements through the lens
of knowledge, then perhaps we can imagine a real knowledge society.
WSF has been understood as an open space. Such an understanding and practice
has also been criticized as being politically ineffective. If we proceed from the
understanding that another world of knowledge is necessary for another world to
be possible, we will be able to see that a command structure is not possible for
peoples knowledge movement. New forms of social organization have been seen to
be emerging even in the movements in the Arab world. Such forms of organization
can be described as tana bana, to use a term heard most often in the context of
weaving. Connections and relationships through which communication of knowledge
takes place in knowledge traditions of people may help us to conceptualise anew
the idea of open space where it is seen not merely as a best practice but as
integral to a new political imagination of social transformation.
Ideologies of social transformation have privileged a linear mode of communication
deeply informed by the model of science. We need to explore another mode of
communication and understanding which is most evident in practices of art. We can
see the underlying currents in the larger world of knowledge today where science
no longer dictates the protocols of knowledge.
Apart from the world of activists and social thinkers we invite artists,
communicators, film makers, writers to explore this new tana bana that is taking
shape and forge open and strong relationships for imagining a kind of social
transformation whose end result is not just another variant of capitalism. South
Asian societies have particularly strong and numerous diverse traditions of
knowledge and tana bana and we need to explore how we can see these as
sources of strength.