Suchergebnisse

This engaging, wide-ranging study in comparative social and political philosophy gives a well-argued account of how ideological and even utopian views, such as normative communication, development and justice, are sociologically rooted. It also shows how this fact has been reflected in the social history of Asian countries like India and China, as well as some Western countries during the last two centuries. To illustrate the underlying concepts, reference is made to influential thinkers, both from the East and West, from Hegel and James Mill to Marx and Maozedong, and from Gandhi to Rawls. The author, himself one of the major contemporary Indian philosophers, offers arguments to show that the right version of cultural relativism is objective and judgeable. Concrete case studies are cited indicating why even fundamental values like indivisible peace and "our own green planet" cannot be practically universalized. Yet this work is a sustained plea for improvable understanding between the East and the West and the transcultural value orientation of different cultures

Papers presented at the annual sessions of the Indian History Congress; previously published in the proceedings of the Congress

This essay explores what might result if histories of empire and colonialism took the material relationships of human and plant bodies as a fundamental framework. Gender both structured, and was reproduced through, various relationships shaped by collisions between British imperialism and the natural and social worlds of colonial India. Taking up the mutually constitutive formation of the sexuality of a plant body and the body of the sex worker in colonial India, this essay attempts to analyse gender more expansively beyond human bodies marked by colonial rule. It examines how labour, performed as sex work as well as floral sex work, formed an axis around which gendered relationships could cohere over time. It argues that placing the plant, its sexuality and its scaffolding botanical frameworks on the one hand, and anxieties of colonial patriarchal arrangements on the other, can further complicate and deepen a historical analysis of colonialism in South Asia.