Suchergebnisse

For decades Sudipta Kaviraj has worked with and improved upon Marxist and subaltern studies, capturing India's social and political life through its diverse history and culture. While this technique has been widely celebrated in his home country, Kaviraj's essays have remained largely scattered and untranslated abroad. This collection finally presents his work to English-speaking readers and, in doing so, reasserts the brilliance of his approach.As evidenced in these essays, Kaviraj's exceptional strategy positions Indian politics within the political philosophy of the West and alongside the p

This article identifies the difficulty in defining conservatism and then goes on to illustrate the contradiction inherent in conservative thought.* The central problem addressed by the article is the absence of conservative thinking in modern India. Contrary to the practice of labelling certain strands of thinking as conservative, Indian political thought of past two centuries hardly has any serious conservative tradition. Looking at the ideas of Malaviya, Gandhi and Hindu nationalists, this article shows that while some of their positions did come close to conservative thinking, they did not systematically pursue conservative thinking. A key reason for this is the colonial rupture that negative possibility of serious engagement with past.

Social science theory, the concepts and argumentative architecture through which scholars make sense of the vast processes of modernity—industrialization, étatisation, secularity, individuation—generated the first wave of theoretical concepts in the crucible of European history. Social science inquiry in India had no way of avoiding these concepts, Kaviraj argues, but it could not escape a sense of unease at the misfit between the assumptions built into these theories and concepts and the historical world it investigated. In the last decade, a serious discussion about these theoretical questions has emerged: one moving from dissatisfaction with individual primary concepts—like secularity, the state, citizenship, industrialization, labor—to a more generalized discontent regarding the nature of theorizing itself. Gopal Guru and Sunder Sarukkai's book The Cracked Mirror contributes centrally to this discussion at two levels: it questions the way in which social scientists have taken for granted the way they have thought about untouchability; at the same time, it raises with an undeniable sharpness the question of theory itself. What is the activity called theorizing? What is it meant to do? What are the criteria of success in this activity—besides the fluent and repeated use of concepts taken from the latest Western intellectual debates?