History Association Programme-3
Dr. Mathew A. Varghese, who did his PhD in Urban Anthropology at University of Bergen, Norway
delivered a lecture entitled Getting on with a Discipline for the students of the department on 16-9-
2014.This is the third lecture in the series organized by the History Association, which aims at introducing
new areas and concepts from different fields of social sciences. Starting out with a personal note on the
basic queries that confronted me as an undergraduate student, Dr. Varghese tried to raise the importance
and possibility of an informed disciplinary platform right at the under graduation stage. This is from where
further enquiries can proceed. The emphasis is on a need to engage with respective disciplines both
with a sense of its unique trajectories as well as with respect to the contemporary institutional settings.
Thereby it is possible to avoid reductive and unanalytical arrangement of disciplines around unquestioned
themes. Often practices of multidisciplinarity stays short of substantive enquiries. The lecture touched
on historically contingent contexts of disciplines and internal critiques that often made the respective
disciplines ever more relevant. Towards the end thoughts on possibly useful academic exercises students
can take up are laid out. Among them are; investigations into the processes of disciplinary evolution
and methodologies; trying to think with the popular and cliched perceptions of respective disciplines; as
well as follow up of significant engagements of certain practitioners in the public realm. The latter is not
by way of getting coopted as ‘applied’ or embedded academicians but as critical thinkers. As a coda he
argued that, informed interdisciplinarity, will only come with the process of, and at a stage of, sustained
disciplinary enquiry.
