India and the Challenge of the Global South

The idea of the ‘Global South’ arose from the conference of African and Asian nations at Bandung in 1955 even if the term has only recently entered academic parlance. To many it evokes what used to be called the Third World, just as it calls to mind anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s to the 1970s. However, the question is whether the idea of ‘Global South’ can be recuperated to furnish a more ecologically pluralistic framework of knowledge that would also accommodate more radical conceptions of dissent leading to social justice for the poor and the disenfranchised. After probing the prevalent ideas of ‘South Asia’ and the scholarship on South Asian history and religion, this chapter asks what the notion of Indic civilization brings to the idea of the Global South. It explores briefly the emancipatory potential of Indian epics and popular cinema, commenting besides on the varieties of Islam from South and Southeast Asia, before concluding with a lengthier exploration of the Indian idea of hospitality and how it can be channelled to contest the categories of modern knowledge systems.

Backwater Ecstasis

In this chapter Rajan contends that it is not enough to oppose modern universalism by positing a culture’s specificity in contradistinction to it. Universalism can only be countered by universalism, asserts Rajan, and argues that the underlying logic of ‘progress’ in today’s global ideology is still broadly Hegelian. The central question raised in the paper is: is this the only universal story that can be told? Rajan answers this question with a resounding NO! by pointing to an unlikely source: the meta-philosophical logic of the autonomous development of Indian philosophy which emerges when the Indian dialectician T.R.V. Murti and the Japanese philosopher Gadjin Nagao are read together. Rajan christens the unfolding of this logic in a social landscape of intercommunality as ‘backwater ecsatsis’, and argues that it is only in such ecstasis that an alternative to the failed Hegelian conception of the state as the crowning accomplishment of human community is to be found.

Learning and Happiness

This chapter outlines a framework within which to understand the link between practical knowledge and sociality. The objective is to understand the audacity and profundity of the attempts by Indian traditions to organize the social and natural spaces, relations, and events/acts as learning experiences. Developing that framework through the notion of practitional matrix, this chapter shows how Western normative thinking carves up Indian sociality into domains that render our experience unintelligible to us. Through a discussion of the Gandhi–Tagore debate it is argued that the actional frame is the only way to resist the normative frame. A brief characterization of normativity is offered to explain the emergence of entities such as ‘sexuality’ and ‘the caste-system’. The sketch of the alternative conceptualization of Indian sociality shows why we need to choose between history and the past, philosophy and adhyatma, religion and tradition, the caste system and the practitional matrix.

Rahul Sankrityayan and Ambedkar as Contrapuntal Contemporaries

The chapter explores intersections and divergences in the thought of Rahul Sankrityayan and B.R. Ambedkar, two significant public figures in twentieth-century India. Though growing out of a primary interest in Sankrityayan, a neglected and utterly fascinating figure of polymathic reach, with a personal trajectory of extraordinary variety, the chapter expands the scope to consider how he helps us reconfigure our understanding of a well-known figure such as Ambedkar. It considers their life trajectories as personal and public quests at a formative juncture of the emergent Indian nation’s history. Sankrityayan and Ambedkar’s complementary and contradictory engagements with the categories of modernity and tradition, spiritual and material, nation and world, caste and class, occupy the chapter in the main. Buddha and Marx—two figures whose reception and reinvention in the Indian milieu have a narrative that intersects with that of these two individuals—help frame the chapter as these contemporaries engage with Buddhism and Marxism as key conceptual beacons and historical precedents in the pursuit of human freedom, negotiating spaces national and international, and times past and present, as they help shape the future of a new India.

Darsana as Theoria

Plato’s Republic can be read as a philosophical defense of a new education, of a radical turn in the tradition of paideia. The traditional Homeric learning aimed at cultivating the best in man beyond the transient allurements of wealth, fame, and power. Abandoning the Homeric mnemocultural modes, Plato configured Truth, Good and Beauty as ends of learning and posited dialectics (dianoia against muthos) as the only means of attaining such ends. Judeo-Christian religion appropriated such configuration of learning for the spiritual foundation of man by means of the Word of God (Logos) and put an end to ancient pagan traditions. Over three and half millennia Indian traditions of learning have remained resolutely mnemopraxial: cultural memory put to work in actional lives. These traditions were drawn neither toward the dianoiac force nor the theological power of logos. This chapter attempts to undertake two tasks: (i) configure the modes and means of mnemopraxial traditions of learning and their heterogeneous dispersal; and (ii) the genocidal implications today of the epistemic rupture of these traditions unleashed by the European invasion.

History and Allegory

The first half of the chapter uses the case of Prahlada to make the point that the Puranic understanding of history implies a transition from a dark prehistory into the historicity of the Puranic present. The second part of the chapter suggests that this Puranic notion of a prehistory has affinities with the interiorized physiognomy of the soul typical of Kabir, which in turn has ties with Indo-Persian dastan literature. The key argument is that both the Puranas and Kabir speak to an ‘I’ that is yet to come, so that our standard account of Kabir’s seemingly proto-‘secular’ disregard for religious distinctions would have to be revised. Instead, one could argue that what is at stake for Kabir’s nirgun (hence its lure for subaltern communities) is an original embrace of difference as negativity, and only secondarily an understanding of what is ‘non-in-different’ in faith.

Sree Narayana Iconography

This study of visual imagery characterizing Narayana Guru (1855–1928) lays open engaging insights into the use of imagery in the spiritual and political domains. Often imagery is used by opposing interest groups, each one representing the Guru as champion of selective aspects of their own ideology. The paper explores how these obvious contradictions find room in the continuing legacy of the Guru. Also sketches, paintings and sculptures of the Guru continue to be forceful media in shaping these different narratives of the Guru, whether used as an object of a wishful visual (darsan) for believers, or used on captivating book covers meant for questioning students of philosophy. Imagery continues to drive storylines of this Guru, who upheld universal humanistic values, without mapping political, religious, or ethnic dividing lines anywhere on the globe.

The Transformative Power of the One World Vision of Sri Narayana Guru

This chapter focuses on the life and achievements of Sri Narayana Guru, a transformative figure in the social, political, and intellectual landscape of modern Kerala whose impact has been felt across all communities even as he remains a largely unknown figure in north India. The manner in which one person's intervention in one community is receiving attention from individuals and groups beyond the shores of Kerala and outside the original community within which he had his receptivity is shown as providing the transformative power to effect social change not only in Kerala but even beyond. Narayana Guru and his successors in the Gurukula Foundation lineage provide the vantage point for the potential of the movement. The unique approach of the Guru in challenging domination without antagonizing the other nor deprecating the elegance of the self, cutting through the societal sham, offers a renewed 'advaita' accessible to all, as argued in this chapter.

M.G. Ranade and Bhakti as a New Grammar for Indian Political Life

This chapter focuses on M.G. Ranade’s (re)interpretation of bhakti writings in light of the colonial encounter in nineteenth-century India. Ranade used the teachings of bhakti saints, among them Eknath and Tukaram, to assert values such as egalitarianism, compassion and co-existence in the emerging public sphere. This was in sharp contrast to the incipient voices of hyper-masculinity that were trying to fashion a more aggressive Hinduism and nationalism in response to the colonial encounter. Although Ranade was an upper-caste reformer, he pushed for a more just and inclusive Hinduism that spoke strongly against caste injustices and promoted religious tolerance. In doing so, he argued for a ‘softer’ Hinduism, not Hindutva. In many ways, he fashioned a new grammar for Indian public life that anticipated Gandhi’s use of bhakti in modern politics. This chapter teases out some of the major strands of Ranade’s use of bhakti and links it to Gandhi, arguing that Ranade laid some of the important groundwork for Gandhi’s introduction of spirituality in politics.

Another Cosmopolis

There is vague, random, empirical support for the persistence of some features in the South Asian concept of hospitality even among those who have experienced or witnessed large-scale ethnic cleansing and massive pogroms. Foremost among these features is the ability to live with radical diversities of the kind that can be easily seen as humiliating to other communities and capable of provoking ethnic and religious hostility and serious conflicts. The caste system with its ornate concepts of purity and pollution—and the touchable and the untouchable—is often seen as a prime example of this. Yet, persons, families, and communities can be found who navigate these barriers sometimes playfully and casually, sometimes by reading the offensive practices as cultural oddities of an otherwise friendly community that one must learn to respect. In the first case, by not taking the offending practices seriously enough; in the second case, by taking them seriously, as an essential part of the faith of another community that demands almost unconditional respect.