Dr Brainerd Prince
In the previous column, we spoke about the green bucket being the bucket of primary sources and solutions to the research question. The goal was to identify an appropriate object of research that would provide answers to the research question raised. Let us refresh our memory of the framework of the buckets – the red bucket stands for the academic discourse that gives us our research question. The green bucket refers to phenomena, texts, experiments, or anything that provides the answers to the research question. Finally, the yellow bucket refers to the methodology that is used to get answers to questions and make a unique research contribution.
Let me give an example here from my own research. My central research question was about the very nature of religion and its distinction or lack thereof from the secular. The research question could be framed as how is religion related to the secular? The hypothesis I had was that both the religious and the secular have had a similar conceptual structure. However, I needed evidence to prove my hypothesis. I was looking for some thinker or philosopher who had done some work or written something in this direction whom I could study and from whose work I could get the ‘solution’ for my research question.
Applying our framework of the buckets, any philosopher and his text that was qualified to be the primary source for me must have used the language of religion and the secular and must have been able to look at them in a similar fashion rather than as binary opposites. I was proposing a new language, the language of tradition, which helped me go beyond this binary of religion and secular and talk about both as traditions: religious traditions and secular traditions. Thus, I claimed that both have the structure of tradition built into them. That was the direction I wanted to look into for the solution to my research question.
As I was looking for a suitable philosopher whose texts would give evidence and prove my hypothesis, I stumbled upon Sri Aurobindo’s texts. It was written 100 years before my research, and I was eager to find out if he had similar ideas. I remember a friend of mine, a good researcher based at Oxford, who came to me one day and asked whether it was appropriate for me to look at Sri Aurobindo as a primary source because he was so distant from this contemporary debate on religion and secularism. And how anything he wrote would have any significance to this contemporary debate? This question was legitimate. There must be a resonance between the primary source and the research question that has been raised. If there is, then the distance of time would not matter, rather, it would only make my research more unique.
Therefore, my first task was to ensure that the Aurobindonian texts possessed the language of religion and secular and that Sri Aurobindo was looking at them in a similar fashion rather than as binaries. Very interestingly, as my search continued, I stumbled upon a letter that Sri Aurobindo had written to Baptista, a barrister who was associated with Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
And in that letter, he wrote, “Next in the matter of the work itself. I do not at all look down on politics or political action or consider I have got above them. I have always laid a dominant stress and I now lay an entire stress on the spiritual life, but my idea of spirituality has nothing to do with ascetic withdrawal or contempt or disgust of secular things. There is to me nothing secular, all human activity is for me a thing to be included in a complete spiritual life, and the importance of politics at the present time is very great.” [bold and italics mine]
Although this was in a private letter written in January 1920, it contained a deep insight into how Aurobindo viewed secularism and its relationship with religion or spirituality. This text demonstrated that Aurobindo, writing about a hundred years earlier,had similar ideas about the relationship of religion to secularism. This became the central premise upon which I decided to take Aurobindo’s texts as my object of research to find solutions for my research question. Of course, as I read Sri Aurobindo’s texts in detail, the language of religion and secular was more prominent, and a way of looking at life beyond religion and secular was indeed the central quest of the Aurobindonian project. And therefore, it mapped very well with the research question that I had proposed for my project.
Identifying the green bucket or object of research is the first step towards answering the research question of the red bucket. At this point, often we are pushed to pursue the green bucket and collect data and evidence. My advice for you is not to do so, but to wait. Even if your supervisor or board of study pushes you to run ahead, you should gently refuse and not pursue after the green bucket of primary data.
A legitimate question one could raise is this – if we have indeed identified the appropriate green bucket of the solution then why wait, why not pursue the solution and answer the research question immediately?
This brings us to the yellow bucket that stands for methodology. With what constraints would we interpret the data and how would we say something original and new that answers the contemporary research question without blindly producing the data from the green bucket? How will we find our voice and argument? If Aurobindo’s texts answer the questions of the religious studies discourse, then what is my role in this research enterprise as a researcher? At this intersection of the red and green bucket lies the yellow bucket which explicitly brings to the fore the role and purpose of the researcher within whom this dialogue of buckets is taking place.
Without taking command of the yellow bucket, one should not proceed forward with the green bucket. However, the identification of the green bucket is necessary to do the work of the yellow bucket of methodology. Research methodology is a misunderstood phenomenon. But more on it in the next column, next month.
Dr Brainerd Prince is an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Thinking, Language, and Communication (CTLC) at Plaksha University, Mohali.
