Presenting a canon of names of contemporary India

Indian Political Thought: A Reader

Edited by Aakash Singh, Silika Mohapatra

Price: $41.95

• ISBN: 978-0-415-56294-2 Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
• Published by: Routledge Publication Date: 26th April 2010 (Available for Pre-order)
• Pages: 320 About the Book

This Reader provides a comprehensive introduction to the study of contemporary Indian political theory. Tracing the development of the discipline and offering a clear presentation of the most influential literature in the field, it brings together contributions by outstanding and well-known academics on contemporary Indian political thought. The Reader weaves together relevant works from the social sciences — sociology, anthropology, law, history, philosophy, feminist and postcolonial theory — which shape the nature of political thought in India today. Themes both unique to the Indian political milieu as well as of universal significance are reflected upon, including tradition, secularism, communalism, modernity, feminism, justice and human rights. Presenting a canon of names and offering a framework for further research within the broad thematic categories, this is a timely and invaluable reference tool, indispensable to both students and scholars.

Table of Contents

Foreword. Introduction: What is Indian Political Thought? Aakash Singh and Silika Mohapatra Part 1: Provocation 1. The Poverty of Indian Political Theory Bhikhu Parekh Part 2: Evocation 2. Gandhi's Ambedkar Ramachandra Guha 3. The Quest for Justice: Evoking Ghandi Neera Chandhoke 4. Tagore and His India Amartya Sen Part 3: Secularization 5. Is Secularism Alien to Indian Civilization? Romila Thapar 6. Secularism Revisited: Doctrine of Destiny or Political Ideology? T.N. Madan 7. The Distinctiveness of Indian Secularism Rajeev Bhargava Part 4: Communalization 8. The Blindness of Insight: Why Communalism in India is about Caste Dilip M. Menon 9. In Search of Integration and Identity: Indian Muslims since Independence Mushiral Hasan 10. Sikh Fundamentalism: Translating History into Theory Harjot Oberoi Part 5: Modernization 11. Gandhi, Newton and the Enlightenment Akeel Bilgrami 12. Scientific Temper: Arguments for an Indian Enlightenment Meera Nanda 13. Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity Sudipta Kaviraj Part 6: Reconstruction 14. Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideology of Adulthood Ashis Nandy 15. Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism Gyan Prakash 16. The Commitment to Theory Homi Bhabha Part 7: Emancipation 17. Justice of Human Rights in Indian Constitutionalism Upendra Baxi 18. Emancipatory Feminist Theory in Postcolonial India Ratna Kapur 19. Righting Wrongs Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Part 8: Conclusion 20. The Poverty of Western Political Theory: Concluding Remarks on Concepts like ‘Community’ East and West Partha Chatterjee

About the Author(s)

Aakash Singh is Research Professor at the Center for Ethics and Global Politics, Luiss University, Italy. His scholarly interests range from comparative political philosophy to liberation theology and applied critical theory.

Silika Mohapatra is Research Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delhi, India. Her research interests include classical metaphysics, phenomenology, semiotics and the ethics of self and society.© 2007 Routledge, member of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Business

Label of tradition is an illusion of control

How to read holy books Posted on February 15, 2009 by Sandeep

An essay by Sri Krishna Prem (Ronald Nixon): When a man says he believes in something or other (I do not mean rational belief based on consideration of evidence) itwould be more correct to say that he hopes that it may be true and, action and reaction being equal and opposite, he at the same time fears that it is not. Every belief then has its corresponding doubt lurking some where in the shadow. It is for this reason that men of strong religious beliefs become SO fanatical. Silently gnawing at their hearts, insi diously whispering in their ears, is an army of doubts, shadowy beings inhabiting a twilight world but corresponding exactly with the beliefs which, like so many children’s kites, go soaring up into the bright sunshine. It is to silence those whispers, to lay those ghosts in the basement, that the believer strives with all his might to convert others to his creed. Criticism he cannot stand because of the echoes that it raises down below where all should be silence; and so, just in proportion as he increases the force of his own beliefs, he magnifies the tension within and, filled with an inner hatred of himself, he vents his explosive anger upon others. Thus from a mere fanatic he becomes a persecutor.

What, then, should be our attitude towards the ancient scriptures, or, indeed, towards books in general? Books may be divided into two classes: those that are based upon inner experience and those that are mere words strung together with more or less skill. The latter class may be ignored altogether. It may be asked: how, if we are ourselves ignorant, we may know that a book is based upon genuine experience? The answer is that the Truth exists already in our hearts, however ignorant our outer personalities may be; it is a sheer fact that words that spring from deep realization raise echoes within us if we listen to them with free minds. The words, as we say, mean something to us. Perhaps there may be other books, equally the fruit of some one’s experience, which raise no echoes within. In that case it is some lack of sympathy or of experience, some knot of prejudice in our minds, that prevents our hearts from acting as resonators, and so we pnt the book aside. When that happens it is doubtless a pity bnt it cannot be helped; we are not ready for that particular message and its study can do us no good.

If, however, a book does ‘mean something to us’, if we have reason, inner reason, to think that it is a record of actual experience, wc should set aside all questions of its date and authorship, its orthodoxy or heterodoxy, its agreement or disagreement with other books. Instead, we should give our hearts to its study, trying to penetrate behind the words to the thoughts and realization for the expression of which those words were selected. [Excerpted from the book Initiation into Yoga by Sri Krishna Prem, ISBN 0091256313]

Can Carnatic music do with a little more sax? from churumuri by churumuri 

An evergreen debate on tradition versus modernity in Carnatic classical music has been revived with the music season on in full swing in Madras.
Last Sunday, T.M. Krishna, while arguing for preserving the integrity of the Carnatic tradition, wrote in The Hinduthat instruments like the saxophone and keyboard were just not cut out for the south Indian classical form.
This has drawn a response from the pianist Anil Srinivasan in the Sunday magazine of The Hindu:

“Tradition has become indelibly linked with the past. This is where the problems begin. We get autoregressive when discussing the preservation or conservation of a tradition. Trapping it in a time capsule and not allowing it to breathe or acquire newer characteristics is antithetical to the very notion of an intergenerational transfer….
“Historically, traditions were largely oral and were passed on from one generation to another….
“Music cannot be classified. To the human mind, the illusion of control or self perception leads it towards instant and automatic categorisation. We want to label everything we encounter because it makes us feel at least temporarily in control of the environment. And hence terming Carnatic music a tradition becomes a hook on which we hang our approximations of what we think South Indian classical music ought to be.”

In the same issue of The Hindu, Aruna Sairam tells Dr Srinivasan:

“Tradition exists to show you who you are. Innovation should be encouraged to show you who you could be…. Innovation is an approach to an existing body of work that has not been thought of before. In that respect, each of us is innovating constantly…. Only two things matter: be true to who you are, and be sincere in what you want to articulate. If this happens, the music will transcend categorisation and analysis.”

Poetic theory & dramatic art of Sri Aurobindo

Young Aurobindo's Vision: The Viziers of Bassora — Dr Manoj Kumar Mishra
A Commentary on Sri Aurobindo's Poem Ilion — V. Murugesu
Sri Aurobindo's Yogic Consciousness & Poetry — Dr Nikhil Kumar
Sri Aurobindo and World Literature — Goutam Ghosal
Rainbow Bridge: A Comparative Study of Tagore and Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo's prose style (with a foreword by V.K. Gokak)


The Renaissance on Sri Aurobindo's Criticism — Goutam Ghosal
The Birth of Savitr — R. Y. Deshpande
Towards New Age — R. Y. Deshpande
Indian renaissance and future of the world - R.Y. Deshpande

Amal-Kiran: Poet and Critic

Sri Aurobindo and Greece — Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna)
Talks on Poetry — Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna)
Sri Aurobindo on Shakespeare — K. D. Sethna
Sri Aurobindo's Poetry and Sanskrit Rhetoric — Jugal Kishore Mukherjee
The Wonder That is K.D. Sethna Alias Amal Kiran — Jugal Kishore Mukherjee
The ascent of sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri — Jugal Kishore Mukherjee
Sri Aurobindo and Sanskrit — Dr Sampadananda Mishra
Sri Aurobindo's Plays: A Thematic Study — Sheo Shankar Jaiswal
The Plays of Sri Aurobindo: A Study — S. S. Kulkarni
Sri Aurobindo and the Poets of the Dawn — D. Venkateswara Rao
Sri Aurobindo: The Critic of English Poetry - D. Venkateswara Rao 
Sri Aurobindo: His Poetry and Poetic Theory — Prem Tyagi
Image, Symbol and Myth in Sri Aurobindo's Poetry — G. S. Pakle
Sri Aurobindo: His Mind and Art — Dr Kalaamani
Sri Aurobindo: Critical Considerations — O. P. Mathur
Dante and Sri Aurobindo: A Comparative Study of the Divine Comedy and Savitri Prema Nandakumar 
Sri Aurobindo: The Poet of Nature & Other Writings on Savitri — Asoka K. Ganguli
Sri Aurobindo's Savitri — Asoka K. Ganguli
Savitri, The Mother — Prof. M. V. Seetaraman
STUDIES IN SRI AUROBINDO'S DRAMATIC POEMS — Prof. M. V. Seetaraman
The dramatic art of Sri Aurobindo Avanindra Kumar Sinha 
Perspectives of Savitri: Volume 1 — Essays and articles by various authors

Symbolic Dimensions of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Earth, Love and Doom: Mythic Symbolic Dimensions of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri Nanda Kishore Mishra 
The dialogue with death: Sri Aurobindo's Savitri;: A mystical approach Rohit Mehta
Sri Aurobindo's Savitri A. B. Purani Sri Aurobindo's Savitri: An Approach and a Study
Readings in Savitri,: Sri Aurobindo's epic Madhav Pundalik Pandit 
Dawn to greater dawn: Six lectures on Sri Aurobindo's Savitri K. R Srinivasa Iyengar
Eternity in words: Sri Aurobindo's Savitri Rameshwar Gupta
Sri Aurobindo: A study of Savitri and other selected poems A. N Dwivedi
Savitri: Epic of the Eternal V. Madhusudan Reddy 

The language has remained as aloof as ever

The Telegraph Front Page > Opinion Tuesday, December 15, 2009 OPED
Letter, spirit and persons
One’s thoughts must necessarily have a language that is tangible, organic and perhaps a combination of the languages of the thinker. Since the act of thinking precedes express... Read..

If Gujarati, my mother tongue, is a language of my primal emotions — there are terms such as those for items of food, parts of the body, to urinate, to go to bed, house… that I think of primarily in Gujarati — Arabic could very well be a language of my fears. While walking down a deserted road or while feeling there is a ghost in my bathroom, I find myself chanting snatches from the several passages I know in Arabic. I don’t know what they mean, but in moments of extreme anxiety, I am assured they are protecting me from evil.
Hindi, my second language in school, is one that keeps reminding me of Bollywood, and of the mindless filmy and melodramatic sessions — khush to bohot hoge tum aj, says a friend tilting slightly to one side like Amitabh Bachchan, to which one is expected to come up with an appropriate retort, Shashi Kapoor style.
INSIYA POONAWALA

By the throat
Languages are persons. Or at least, they have personalities, even characters, that may be pleasing, rough, transparent, tricky, furtive, sunny, bleak, manipulative, pliant... Read..

Devanagari holds no terrors for me. But except for hai and, perhaps, a few words like ladka or ladki, the language is an insoluble mystery to me. They tell me that watching Hindi films is a great way to pick up the language, everyone knows Hindi because of Bollywood. I have done so, faithfully, and the language has remained as aloof as ever. Hindi songs I love have not helped. I have learnt up the meanings of words, I have tried to read paragraphs of stories — and have ended up by being put in my place, puny and powerless. [...]

Official callers on the phone often insist on talking in Hindi, making my shamefaced English seem disgracefully out of tune with a resurgent India, and giving me no chance to display the frantic goodwill and desperate apology on my face. Worse, I don’t get it. I don’t follow a word once the conversation crosses the mark of three words. Hindi trounces me every time, apart from the fact that there is a deafening buzz in my ears when I find myself trapped in it. If a language refuses you, there is nothing you can do about it.
Pity I’ll never know who I would have been in Hindi.
BHASWATI CHAKRAVORTY

Tongues in the dark
Is bilingualism a kind of bisexuality as well? Are our English-speaking erotic personalities different from our vernacular ones? To what extent are sexual identities linguisti... Read..

As I was carefully translating into Bengali words and phrases that I would automatically use in English, the very nature of these things, their ‘feel’, started changing for me. I found myself becoming a different kind of speaking personality — a voice whose sexuality felt discomfitingly alien, and over which I seemed to have less and less control. Paradoxically, what this extended mother-tongue made me feel was not a greater facility of communication, but its opposite — a peculiarly tongue-tied distance from other human beings that was at once social and more intrinsic than social. [...]

In a society riven with inequalities, sexuality has a conflicted relationship with both language and silence. Most forms of repression and oppression feed on silence. The breaking of these silences often involves importing words and concepts into the vernaculars from another linguistic register or language (usually English). Such ‘consciousness-raising’ then becomes informed with the awkward gradients that separate the worlds of these languages or registers.
Sexuality’s necessary darkness needs to be protected as much from the divisive and clarifying glare of language as from the ills of benightedness.
AVEEK SEN

Edmund Wilson in Banaras; Pericles and Plato in Hampi

Peter Watts alert from The Pinocchio Theory by Steven Shaviro
Peter Watts is a brilliant science fiction writer — I have written about all four of his novels on this blog (Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth, and (at greatest length) Blindsight).

A note on Orientalism from The Joyful Knowing by Mike Johnduff
So, I divorced literary theory from critical theory a bit last time. But I did so not to knock at the latter so much as show how literary theory is really doing something else, something less critical in the sense that people have been lately been referring to it--that is, negatively, and with its Kantian overtone. This isn't to say that ideology critique isn't also what we do in literary studies

Dec 11, 2009 another great Gibbon half-sentence from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek
He’s always able to say a lot very elegantly before he hits his first semicolon:
“The arts of negotiation, unknown to the simple greatness of the senate and the Caesars, were assiduously cultivated by the Byzantine princes…”
But the theater of action under discussion here is Persia, and Gibbon just can’t ever quite make Persia as interesting a theme as it really is.

Mirror of Tomorrow Re: Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the New Age by Kishor Gandhi—an Appraisal by RY Deshpande
by paulette on Sat 12 Dec 2009 Permanent Link We should also take into account that the Greek civilization, like all others at that time, was based on slavery; the preceptors and law-codifiers were slaves; women were not part of the political system, but beautiful subjugated foreign ladies were brilliant, cultivated entertainers of the wealthy; homosexuality and even pederasty were current, and so was sexuality under whatever form. [...] Regarding historicism, here is another example, rescuing me from the shock of reading, regarding the dharma-fulfillers emperors of Hampi -- one thousand years after Pericles and Plato!:

“Beautiful maidens seem always to have been present, and concubines frequently accompanied the king. The literary sources portray the Vijayanagara ruler surrounded by women who adore him and spoil him, and with whom he cannot resist flirting; in this respect, he is considered as an irresistible erotic figure. Even when he leaves the palace, the king is rarely without the company of his favourites. The foreigners comment appreciatively on the dress, ornaments and varied accomplishments of these ladies, confirming that some were educated and talented courtesans. [the equivalent of the Greek hetaeras, high class cultivated courtesans?] However, the women who were seen with the king on these more public occasions are to be distinguished from the royal queens and family members who were confined to segregated and strictly guarded zones within the palace.” [From “Hampi”, John M Fritz & George Michell, pp.35-6.]

Dec 11, 2009 The Selfishness of the Selfless from One Cosmos by Gagdad Bob
One important area in which Christianity and non-dualism radically diverge is over the question of hope. In the former, not only is hope permitted, but it is one of the theological virtues. In contrast, in non-dualism there is nothing to hope for and no one to hope for it, for neither sappy hope nor the dopey hoper are within the scope of the Real.

A couple of days ago, some astute commenter -- Warren, it was -- mentioned that one of the benefits of non-dualism is that it authorizes one to indulge one's impulses without having to feel guilt or shame before the transcendent Other. Non-dualists may dispute this characterization, but they really don't have an ontological leg to stand on, for just who is doing the disputing? And just what are they pulling if we have no legs? (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Is it any wonder that the list of self-styled non-dualists and "independent gurus" who have set up shop in the West -- e.g., Da Free John, Chogyam Trungpa, Deepak Chopra, Krishnamurti, Rajneesh, and all the rest -- reveals a litany of duplicitous sexual, financial, and spiritual abuse? They are always -- either conveniently or inconveniently -- blindsided by the very desires they deny and claim to have transcended.

Coming up: The Middle Stage's Books of the Year from The Middle Stage by Chandrahas
Coming up over the next fortnight on The Middle Stage: as in 2008, two long essays on the best fiction and the best non-fiction that's come my way this year. On Written For Ever: The Best of Civil Lines
It is immediately clear from Advani’s anthology that the magazine published some outstanding non-fiction in its heyday (the late eighties, when three issues came out in quick succession). Dilip Simeon’s “O.K. TATA: Mobiloil Change and World Revolution”, an essay about a truck driver who discovers that his khalasi, or helper, is a Naxalite, evokes life on the road in the most sumptuous detail, while Ramachandra Guha’s “An Anthropologist Among The Marxists” describes with a giddy devotion the author’s first-hand knowledge of the various Calcutta factions of Marxism gleaned as a doctoral student in Calcutta. Alongside Pankaj Mishra’s “Edmund Wilson in Banaras” (published elsewhere), these essays must rank as two of the greatest in modern Indian prose. Indeed, Simeon’s piece deserves further praise for the acuity with which it transforms the substantially non-English world of truckers into an English that never seems incongruous.

Meeting Prithwindra Mukherjee, Article and interview by Sunayana Panda '79, The Golden Chain, August 2009: There are many in the world who can speak several languages and quite a few who read more than one language, but rare are those who can express their abstract thoughts in more than one language in writing. Even in India, where there are so many official languages, urban Indians have great difficulty in writing even in one Indian language correctly.

Marshall McLuhan reminds us that technology extends the human body into inanimate form

Thoughts on the Fluid Piano from The Daily Goose by Matthew

I’m talking on the internal front, now. I’m talking improved musicianship. Here I connect this instrument with the kind of singing/listening exercises found in the first 150 or so pages of W.A. Mathieu’s monumental book Harmonic Experience. Mathieu (my teacher and friend) details singing exercises you will find, by my lights, no where else in contemporary Western musical literature. These exercises (informed by his own study of classical North Indian singing for over 30 years, as well as his training in European music and American jazz) provide the student with a felt-experience and internalized wisdom about harmony, about the way music works on levels very deep.

These kind of exercises (which in my online writing I have referred to as “Tone Yoga“) provide a number of benefits. But specific to this discussion, they allow one to develop an internal tonal compass, or pitch recognizer, whereby one can sense far more palpably and perfectly subtleties of pitch one didn’t really notice before. [...]

Marshall McLuhan reminds us that technology extends the human body into inanimate form. The wheel extends our feet. The plow extends our hands. Electricity our nervous system. The phone our voice. A house our skin. Thus Mr Smith’s piano, too, extends something of us. In part, the Fluid Piano becomes more of an extension of the human singing voice than the current piano; the voice can (and very often does) capture tones a piano can’t. But the extensions go further: a conventional piano, and thus the Fluid Piano to an even greater extent, extends a music order of polyphony, or many-voices at once. But no in an even more precise, attuned manner. It is up to musicians to make these possibilities musically appealing to the average listener.

The Fluid Piano doesn’t create anything “new” that we didn’t have before, but rather allows us to realize something in a more unnatural, artificial, externalized and examined way (like all technology). Which means Mr Smith’s piano, while seeming exotic, can in fact help us realize and express something we already have. Certainly the piano means a new playing field with a set of rules that include old rules as well as those new. And one of those is a profound challenge to the musician to know more about tones. Call it the a tool for “pitch etymology”.

As a musician, to know tones deeply in the body is, I think, a kind of responsibility, that of intimacy with the raw materials of music that hold a power and magic so crucial to human life. To be a musician means, at the end, that one must by spurts and fits deepen a relationship with nothing less than the enduring human heart. Itself an extension of . . . well, I’ll stop right here.

Bouquet of 24 sweet real life tales

Judge Saheb O Maharanir One-Third Dozen er Kahini: A Review

By Anurag Banerjee

Sri Aurobindo had once remarked that humour was the salt of existence and in a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy, he had written: ‘There is laughter in the Kingdom of Heaven though there may be no marriage there.’ And Yogi Krishnaprem too had remarked in one of his books: ‘Laughter was given by the Gods to man and it was one of their choicest gifts.’

Krishna Chakravarti’s latest book in Bengali, Judge Saheb O Maharanir One-Third Dozen er Kahini, echo the very words of Sri Aurobindo and Krishnaprem. In an age where we have forgotten to laugh aloud or whole-heartedly due to sundry reasons this book, which is a collection of twenty-four real life incidents, gifts us some very precious moments of genuine laughter and therefore it is instrumental in bringing the lost asset of laughter back to our lives.

The stories revolve around six characters— ‘Judge Saheb’ (Sanotsh Chakravarti, the late Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court), his wife whom he lovingly addressed as ‘Maharani’ (Queen) and their ‘one-third dozen’, that is, four children. On reading the stories, the reader is bound to feel: ‘I wish I had been a part of this one-third dozen.’ Such regret is justified because seldom in life do we have such experiences that remain as fresh as ever even after the lapse of several decades. Special thanks must be given to Krishna Charavarti not only for preserving these tales but also for sharing these anecdotes with us and giving us and posterity a reason to smile.

What is noteworthy about the author’s style of writing is that she does not merely write her words, she illustrates them. And as a result we could have a glimpse of the characters of the stories even with our eyes closed. Since the book is written in Bengali, only those who are Bengalis (by birth and choice) and who know the language would be able to relish this bouquet of sweet tales offered by the author. If only had this book been written in English it would have made a wider range of readers smile. Such tales are not meant for a particular period or age-group, these are tales of all times and for all ages. [Krishna Chakravarti « The Mother's Lasso]