Balagangadhara

Religion lays claim to truth, both about itself and the Cosmos. It is true the way no other account (that we know of) is. However, religion also generates (or brings into being) a configuration of learning. That is, it enables a coordination of different learning processes into a configuration. A culture is such a configuration of learning. Could religion be a neural disorder? I do not see how we …

A Disquieting Suggestion Arthur Danto, the well-known American philosopher, prefaced a book he wrote in the 70’s on oriental thought and moral philosophy titled Mysticism and Morality with the following words: The factual beliefs (that the civilizations of the East) take for granted are …too alien to our (the West’s) representations of the World to be grafted on to it, and in consequence their …

[ Original , published Philosophica 40 (2): 77–107] Introduction Should action sciences exist, it is obvious what they would have to study; the nature of human action, the kind of knowledge that actions generate, the process of learning to perform different types of action and so forth. Comparative anthropology, as a discipline, studies and contrasts, where such contrasts are possible, the …

Though the book was published nearly two decades ago, Said’s Orientalism continues to be topical. Many have rejected the message of this work; others have attempted to develop its arguments yet further. This article will not be one more interpretation of Said’s book; after all, there are many such interpretations, including Said’s own. Instead, it probes the phenomenon of ‘post-Orientalism’. Even …

Introduction Perhaps it is best that we begin on a personal note. Neither of the two authors of this article is a ‘specialist’ in the domain of argumentation theory. Even though we have picked up smatterings of logic, we are not professionals working on either informal or formal logic. One of us is a practicing anthropologist, while the other is oriented towards comparative anthropology. And yet, …

Consider, say, a ritual like sandhyaavandanam. Here are two extremes, when it comes to saying what it is: (a) one goes very deeply into what Mudras mean, which of the mudras occur in this daily ritual; analyses the praanayaama as it is taught; goes into what the Gaayathri mantra really means; and so on. (b) The other extreme is an ordinary Brahmin who performs all the prescribed actions without …

It is an event because the colonial consciousness that I am talking about comprises of multiplicity of actions executed by indefinitely many Indians over a long period. It is a process because colonial consciousness reproduces itself, colonial consciousness is transmitted from generation to generation and it is learnt. Consequently, we need to understand the mechanisms of this process and the …

Speaking of ’the greatest mystery of our humanness’, Sinari raises the following questions: “Why are we present in the world rather than not being there at all? Why are we present to ourselves as world-experiencers and world-explorers rather than being simply there as perhaps animals are” (p.1) In brief reply to his provocative paper, I would like to reflect on the nature of these queries and with …

When we speak about ignorance, we can do so in two ways. One is by talking about ‘how the world is’; the other is by talking about ‘how we think the world is’. Even though we could use both ways to characterize ‘ignorance’, they are not coextensive (or synonyms) because (a) they are about different things – in the first case it is about the world; in the second case it is about what we take to …

In this post, I want to reflect on what it means to access and think about experience. Perhaps, not so much on what these words mean but what is entailed by (or what happens when we indulge in) this kind of activity. I think the best way to begin this analysis is by asking the following two questions about an activity familiar to most of us: what do we do when we think about ourselves? Do we do it …

Experiences are structured differently in different cultures. We believe that it is possible to give a true description of this difference, at some level or the other, asa difference regarding the experience of time itself. Consider the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. One of the central notions in these traditions is that of temporality. That is, they believe that all events, …

Introduction During the last decade or so, a new restlessness has begun to disturb the calm facade of the social scientific academia. As yet, it has no name. Better said, it has many names: from ‘reflexive’ to the ‘post-modern’. The ferment is not widespread, but the voices of discontent are coherent and articulate. The critical voices indicate the many kinds of dissatisfaction they have with the …

FRITS STAAL. Rules Without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences. Toronto Studies in Religion, Vol. 4. New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1989 xxii+490. In order to set the tone of this review article, let me begin straightway with a confession: I have been a closet admirer of Frits Staal ever since I discovered his writings in 1987. The reasons that undergird my attitude are several: …

Today, there are multiple images of India current in the West. There is the mystic India, an image that the German Romantics created and the ‘flower children’ of the sixties made popular. There is the third world India with enormous poverty and suffering, which the developmental workers have projected. There is also the India, the centre of IT outsourcing, which the developments in the last decade …

My book is not about India but about the western culture. It is a study of the western culture using one thread, namely, religion. To the extent I talk about India, I do so using some of the ‘facts’ that Indologists (and others) have so far used. My use of their facts (to show the opposite of what they believe they have shown) illustrates the consensus in the philosophies of sciences (of the last …

Whether or not we observe ‘commonalities’ has to do with the descriptive framework we use. Things might share common properties in one description; at the same time, share nothing common in another description. Both could be true descriptions of the same set of objects. ‘Perception of similarity’ is (at the moment our knowledge is in) is extremely difficult to analyze and understand. On the one …

It is partly a term of the art (in the philosophy of sciences) and partly retains the commonsense usage. When one compares theories (in order to choose the best one among the rivals), one compares them with respect to the important properties that theories should have. What these properties are depends upon the philosophy of science one subscribes to. For instance, one might think that a theory …

What did the theory of gravitation do? Apart from describing the fall of bodies on earth, it also tied the motion of planets and the ebb and tide in the sea to each other. This theory allowed us to predict the motion of the planets and helped us discover a new planet in the solar system. In other words, it provided a theory that unified phenomena. Until that stage, we did not know that these …

The English word ‘Hinduism’ not only carries multiple meanings it also appears to refer to many different things. If the context of the discussion were to help us disambiguate the reference of this word, it might not pose many problems for a serious discussion. Unfortunately, the context itself gets muddled. Each understands the question ‘Does Hinduism Exist? ’ in a different fashion. As though …

Let me focus on the citation “Ours is the true religion because, above all, it…stands up… to tell and to declare to the nations who are mere children of yesterday in comparison with us Hindus - who own the hoary antiquity of the wisdom, discovered by our ancestors here in India.” Two things are striking in this citation: the “truth” of a religion is directly linked to its “antiquity” and to its …