School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemAnimal Justice and Moral Mendacity(Rowman & Littlefield, 2018-08-15)I wish to take up some of the sentiments we have towards animals and put them to test in respect of the claims to moral high grounds in Indian thought-traditions vis-à-vis Abrahamic theologies. And I do this by turning the focus in this instance—on a par with issues of caste, gender, minority status, albeit still within the human community ambience—to the question of animals. Which leads me to ask how sophisticated and in-depth is the appreciation of the issues and questions that are currently being debated in contemporary circles? What degree of awareness could we say has been present in the traditions—not just in some perfunctory, platitudinal, belief-based descriptions or prescriptions, but in actual explanatory and morally sensitized senses?
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ItemGlobalisation: Good, Bad, and the Ugly; casualties of Indian Liberalisation - a Postcolonial Perspective(Levant Books, 2017)The paper discusses the views of three economists, Amartya Sen, Pranab Barhdan and Partha Dasgupta on the liberalization of the Indian economy, which has brought severe changes since the 1990s. The paper argues that despite this liberalist move there are multiple problems and injustices across the society remain unanswered, particularly in the areas of education, literacy, health and medical care, gender inequities, unemployment, farmers' suicide, and other societal challenges (including the entrenched caste hierarchy). What counts as the index of growth is a matter of some debate among the economists being discussed, but the real .concern is the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. Case studies are entertained to explicate the ramifications of globalisation and its impact on Indian economy.
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ItemThe numerical small: Casualty of Hyperglobalisation Purushottama bilimoria(Routledge, 2018-01-01)Post-colonialism takes as its starting point the parallel developments of homogenisation and heterogenisation, in their concreteness, and several disjunctures or differentiations that they bring to the fore, by working through colonial history from the erased space of the native consciousness. There are, however, scholars like Arjun Appadurai who believe that transnationalism and globalisation go hand in hand and that they actually work together to the advantage of social transformation and newer formations. Proceeding with the idea of an anxiety of incompleteness created in the space between majorities and minorities, it could be argued that the continuing presence of the Muslim in India, in spite of Partition, is the result of a failure of the Indian nation-state. The version of secularism that has failed is one that seeks to distance religion and collective religious aspirations from the political structure and legal processes of a society in a multicultural and pluralist environment.
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ItemThe Meaningful "End" of God, Faith, and Scripture(SUNY Press, 2017-03-15)For the purposes of this short tribute I shall take up four salient insights and the ensuing attempted reformulations that the late and much celebrated Professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith had to offer to not only the discipline of Study of Religions, but also more specifically to the History and Philosophy of Religion in the cross-cultural context, and to Islam in the context of India’s religious cultural and – I would like to underscore – legal pluralism). From my experience as an Editor-in-Chief of Sophia I have come to learn a lot more – than from my own narrower training - about the sorts of issues Professor Cantwell Smith (hereafter, Smith) was tackling, and how the legacy that bequeathed the intellectual (albeit the academically circumscribed) world with, has a made a marked difference to the study of world cultures and life-patterns. These episthematics or aporias that I focus on in and from the thinking of Smith are: 1. The problem of ‘God’ 2. Faith vs Belief 3. Scripture 4. Ritual over Transcendence
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ItemThe Limits of Intolerance: A Comparative Reflection on India's Experiment with Tolerance(Lexington Books, 2017-10-24)The central contention of this chapter is that the Indian subcontinent exudes a much longer history than the West in its attempts to come to terms with intolerance, to set limits to it, and to develop a moral psychology of critically engaged tolerance between its multivocal groups and communities that might otherwise be rent apart by differences. India is known as a land of vibrant religious activity and variety where multiple exclusivist and inclusivist sects, as well as universalizing religious ideologies, have competed with and modified each other for millennia. To be sure, there have been tensions, shortcomings, and practices of exclusion––for example, within the caste-structure and toward women––as well as sporadic outbreaks of civil violence. Nevertheless, India may be said to be moving, at least in attitude or disposition, toward what Amartya Sen calls a trajectory of “symmetric tolerance,” meaning a balanced relation of mutual respect among and amidst contrary positions without foreclosing dialogic criticisms in a democratic spirit.
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ItemReinventing "Classical" Indian Dance with or without Indigenous Spirituality in Three Contemporary "Secular" Continents(SUNY Press, 2017-03-27)Selva J. Raj showed immense interest in Indian cultural productions and the ways in which a culture, along with its artifacts, historical nemesis, and also popular religiosity, could undergo transformation, even if it takes a subversive impulse to trigger that subtle or momentous change in the power relations. He tells us how after observing rituals occurring at a Hindu shrine for quite a few weeks, his desire to partake of the prasada from the coconut offering became irresistible, so much so that he finally dashed across to the shrine to receive a few slivers of the smashed coconut which he consumed with relish. This act was performed in a hybridly marked cultural space and, as Selva describes it, in “an interactive and assimilative spirit—some might say, transgressive spirit” (2008a, 48). The second narrative describes how, after a Hindu puja was performed at the construction site of his elder brother’s planned home, his Catholic sister-in-law proceeds to complement the Hindu mason’s vastu rites with her own idiosyncratic Catholic one, wherein she sprinkles holy water and places a crucifix and other Christian votive items around all four corners and pramanic-andaz the mason had chalked out.
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ItemDisenchantment of Secularism: The West and India(Springer, 2014)This Chapter is an exercise in comparative secularism. In this chapter I will be concerned basically with a critique of Western conceptions of secularism, beginning with Hegel’s invention of a particular reading of secularism that, through imperialist literature, gave a preeminent direction to the ideology of the less-religiously orientated Indian nationalists during their drawn-out independence struggle. My main concern will be to contrast the Western debates on ‘the secular’, particularly in its recent permutations or attempted revisions as a response to the crisis of modernity, with the current Indian debates —where ‘ the secular; has all but been hijacked by the Hindu Right —and to show—reversing Hegel’s trajectory—what impact the latter could have on the former. There is some evidence of this already occurring, particularly in Charles Taylor’s work and travels wherein he does make some gestures towards looking at non-Western experiences of secularism (which is taken more or less to be synonymous with secularization). There are severe limitations to this overture however, and the chapter hopes to sound a word of caution on the kind of excitement over which Taylor seems to have become something of a celebrity in the academe. Even more disappointingly, one does not find a similar emphatic approach or opening to non-Western experiences and rethinking of the secular in the works of other modernists; and I point to Habermas and Žižek as my examples, who I touch on, albeit very briefly. This lack or lacuna makes both the discourse of modernity and the supplementary critique of secularism much the poorer for it.
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ItemDharma in the Hindu Epics(NYU Press, 2015-11-06)Bringing together ideas, issues, and debates salient to modern Indian studies, this volume charts the social, cultural, political, and economic processes at work in the Indian subcontinent.
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ItemNegation (abhava), non-existents, and a distinctive pramana in the Nyaya-mimamsa(Springer International Publishing, 2015)The chapter examines the three types of negation described in the Mimamsa school in their treatment of the kinds of permissible, prohibited, and excluded (vipratipratisedha, nisedha, pratisedha) sacrifices that are otherwise enjoined as injunctions (vidhis) in the Vedic passages. The paribhasa ('metalanguage') rules becomes instructive with the development of grammar for its application to more secular speech. To give one prominent example, the injunction, 'he shall eat' is denoted by N[F(x)], where F(x) denotes 'he eats' (and modally, 'it is necessary that he eats'). Now a prohibition (nisedha) or negation of this injunctive sentence, if it is as injunction, is symbolized by N[¬F(x)], not by (¬N)([F(x)]) or (¬N[F(x)]). Hence it is signified by the sentence 'she shall not-eat'. N[¬F(x)] belongs to the paryudasa or exclusionary negation, where a noun (as distinct from a verb-form) is negated; its other form being N[F(¬x)]. The second part explains the distinct pramana or mode of knowing absence as abhava (and its variation, anupalabdhi), i.e. non-perception or the cognition of absence. The uniquely Mimamsa position - as distinct from the Nyaya's - is that every thing is counternegatively marked by its own prior and future non-existence, and so when something, x, that was there, is cognized as being 'absent', this really is a perception of its 'non-existent' other, and 'non-existence' is arguably a real universal. This view makes way for a Meinongian knowing of non-existent objects.
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ItemToward an Indian Theodicy(Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2013)Indian theistic solution to the problem of evil – universal injustice - is an off-shoot of the logical theism of Nyāya and philosophical theologies of Vedānta thought. Their respective teleo-cosmologies underscore an ontology of divine creation, sustention and periodic dissolution of our world. An N-factor is introduced governing the moral sphere, namely, the principle of karma. The presence of karma (moderated by optional choices) potentiates individuals’ actions, good and bad; this mitigates the need to seek justification for God allowing horrendous amounts of suffering to occur. God cannot be held morally responsible for the evil in the world because he depends on the laws of karma toward maintaining just order. The role assumed by karma theory is a unique feature of Indian theodicy (theistic and non-theistic). Hence, it is consistent within Hindu philosophy to hold both that there is evil qua karma in our world and there exists an omnipotent God.