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The book is a wide-ranging inquiry into Indian intellectual, cultural, and political traditions; with discussions on subjects and topics of great interest in India today, including caste, the idea and politics of history, power, and love.
List of contents
- 1: The Social Representation of Power in India: A History in Fragments
- 2: Love in Future Tense
- 3: Cities of the Mind: Lost Cities and Their Inhabitants
- 4: The Uncommon through the Common: Of the Ramayana Performative Traditions
- 5: The Kannada Intellectual Tradition: Transcending Dichotomies and Binaries
- 6: Social and Political Role-play through the Theology of the Hindu Icon: An Exercise in Versatility
- 7: What 'Bahena' Saw
- 8: The Saddle of Experience: Adhyatma, Duality and Practical Knowledge
- 9: Interpreting Catastrophes: God, Karma, and Martyrdom
- 10: Backwater Infinitude: Pastness, Proprietariness, and the Symbolic Economy of Rupture
- 11: Othering the Same: Narayana Guru's Engaged Advaita
- 12: Beyond Binaries: Sreenarayana and the Political
- 13: Ambedkar, Tarde, and 'Castes in India': Six Remarks
- 14: Nature and Evil: Gandhi and Ambedkar on Caste and Untouchability
About the author
Vinay Lal is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Lal studied history, literature, and philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, before earning his doctorate from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He has also taught at Columbia University and the University of Delhi. He is the author or editor of twenty books, eight of them from OUP, and his writings span a vast canvas of modern Indian and colonial history, historiography, public culture, global politics, cinema, political psychology, and the politics of knowledge systems.
Summary
The book, the third volume to emerge from the enterprise known as 'The Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics', attempts to further the collective's ambition to put into question the certitudes of conventional social science discourse, decolonize the dominant knowledge frameworks, and understand how the intellectual and cultural resources of Indian civilization may be deployed to think both, about some problems in contemporary politics and culture, and to introduce greater plurality into the world of modern knowledge systems. Some of the collective's members remain deeply committed to reinitiating metaphysics into politics, and similarly, the collective's enduring interest in Narayana Guru is reflected in at least three chapters. Although engagement with Gandhi and Ambedkar is a familiar part of the Indian intellectual landscape, other chapters on offer pivot around histories of power, performative traditions, and modes of worship. Unlike the scholarship that is now the norm, organized around a distinct theme, this volume exhibits a more daring approach to India's intellectual traditions, traversing the world of Kannada intellectuals, the Kashmir Shaiva tradition, a Marathi Bhakti poet, and a contemporary Indian philosopher, as much as conceptual ideas drawn from a wide array of Indian texts and experiences.
