Greetings from India! Our efforts at negotiating a responsible and graceful exit continue another day but I'm afraid I am not optimistic for their outcome. Pious poetic prattle about the superiority of "the Indian understanding of time" notwithstanding, our interlocutors seem content to allow the question whether we depart this afternoon or tomorrow morning to consume time which may well represent the last chance to prevent India from entering years of violent chaos and division. As occurred already in the real Simla Conference, I fear ours too will pave the way for partition.What am I talking about? I mentioned last month, I believe, that I'm participating in a conference on a new pedagogy known as "Reacting to the Past," which gets students energized about learning (we're told) by letting them enter history through a cleverly recreated historical turning point. The games are so designed (we're told) as to let students experience the importance of persuasion, of ideas in context, of personalities; actual historical events are slightly altered in order to allow some contingency as the game is played - until a final "post-mortem," when students learn what really happened.
One of the two games on offer here (in greatly compressed versions) is about Indian independence, and imagines that the unsuccessful conference to which the British Governor General called leaders of India's political parties in Simla in June 1945 might have achieved something. To prise us loose from the historical record it postulates that the actual Governor General was killed in a bombing on his way to SImla, and two replacements are sent from London. This allows them to quiz the assembled Indian representatives about things Lord Wavell would have known, and also creates a space for new ideas.
By some twist of fate, I find myself one of these two interim Governors General. (The other, by another karmic twist, is from New Zealand - and spent 1997-2006 at Melbourne Uni, before moving to a teaching job at Cleveland State University. We tut-tut together at romantic American notions about coherent and teleological history, and whispered the holy name of Inga Clendinnen.) I am saddened if not entirely surprised to have to report that these Indians seem unwilling to consider the possibility that, just this once, we may truly have their best interests at stake. Or at least that their best interests may, just this once, coincide with ours. It is an unprecedented historical opportunity which might even seem to confirm their loopy views on time (!), but they are passing it up.
I'm not yet a convert to this approach; it is certainly very engaging - if emotionally nearly overwhelming. After the denouement and the post-mortem tomorrow morning, partition may have become inevitable again, but I may find answers to satisfy my worry that the buzz of such a game disrupts students' broader commitment to learning and respect for historical consciousness more than it deepens them. If there were a way to harness its excitement without making the rest of the curriculum seem onerous and unworldly, it would be as much fun to teach as to play.
