Jakob

I will take up some of the general points, which I think are relevant to the Indian American community at large. First, let me say I am impressed by the dynamism present in this community. In spite of the demands of daily life, Indian Americans find the time and energy to engage in intellectual debates about the nature of their traditions. In spite of the discrimination and “religion oppression” …

Clearly, advocates of the caste-based reservation system are worried by the recent upheavals in Gujarat and beyond. In his “The Patidar idea of reservations” (The Hindu, September 5), Delhi University sociologist Satish Deshpande attempts to ridicule the Patidars’ demand for OBC status while expressing his support for the reservation system. In this piece, I do not wish to defend or attack any …

Our recent piece on the valedictory speech of the minister of HRD at a Kolkata workshop elicited many replies from the readers. Some found that we indulged in a personal attack, our piece lacked “logic” and “argumentation” and one of her secret admirers, in her defence, even sent us a link to a report by Saptadwipa Ghosal in The Echo of India. Such responses demand an adequate reply. Actually, we …

From the mouth of some babes, pearls of wisdom and truth fall like gentle rain from heaven. From the mouth of others, idiocies pour in a torrent and are considered truth only because they occupy positions of power. We leave it to the reader to decide to which group our minister of human resource development Smriti Irani belongs. Keep in mind that she determines to a large extent the course of …

social science debate in India has been hijacked by the struggle between secularism andHindutva for decades now. usually the Sangh Parivar is blamed for this turn of events. However, it could well be argued that the Hindutva ideologues simply adopted the stance of the secularists. Perhaps the best illustration is the case of anti-Brahminism. To be against “Brahminism” is part and parcel of the …

This has been a tumultuous decade for the academic study of India. In his recent Offence: The Hindu Case (2009), Salil Tripathi provides a timely overview of the growing censorship and harassment that scholars working on India have faced. Not a pretty sight to behold: people have felt the need to ban books and terrorize authors, hassle teachers and disrupt classes, toss eggs at some and blacken …

The relation between religion and politics remains one of the important issues of our time. The discussions on this relation swing between two extremes: religious fundamentalism and liberal secularism. These are regarded as opposites. As the liberal perspective sees it, the secular state and its principles of neutrality and toleration are antidotes to religious fundamentalism[1]. Recently, this …

The annual reports of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) have long irked politicians and citizens from countries placed on its ‘watch list’. This is no different in India. In the 2015 report released about a fortnight ago, the country again occupies an unenviable spot in Tier 2, which includes countries where the religious freedom violations engaged in or tolerated by …

Rape of a Country Jakob De Roover Imagine. A filmmaker travels to Belgium because she has heard about the pedophilia scandals in the country. She directs a documentary film including an interview with an infamous pedophile, who says that the girls he raped had actually seduced him and that they really enjoyed it. The filmmaker then comments that Belgian society is responsible for creating such …

After the Paris attacks came the questions: Is this violence caused by Islam or unrelated to religion? Are the perpetrators believers or madmen? Do they represent the extremists that we find in any ideology? The responses were diverse: ‘Islam is a threat to free speech’. But many Muslims joined the protest marches in defence of the freedom of expression. ‘Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most …

One confuses between a definition and a hypothesis. Definitions tell us how we use a word and which objects it refers to. In the case of the term ‘religion’, a definition should merely address this referential task: which things are we referring to, when we use this word. It cannot give us any understanding of the structure or properties of religion and does not have empirical consequences (much …

M. N. Srinivas (MNS) claims that “a caste was able, in a generation or two, to rise to a higher position in the hierarchy by adopting vegetarianism and teetotalism and by changing its rituals and deities.” The first basic problem here is how one can establish the position of a jati in the supposed hierarchy and measure it in such detail that one can see over two generations that the jati has …

Editor’s Note: This article appeared in the Journal of Political Philosophy. Authored by SN Balagangadhara and Jakob De Roover. For an alternative research programme (paradigm) for studying India, Indian culture and Indian culture, study Balagangadhara’s Reconceptualizing Indian Studies, published by OUP, India. There are few places in the contemporary world where the problems of cultural …

We all agree that events like the Gujarat riots are tragic and terrible. But what is the role of intellectuals in avoiding similar tragedies in the future? Why can’t religion be political? Obviously, the duty of the intellectual is to try and help us understand the nature of the events and the violence involved. In India and abroad, the concepts of ‘communalism’ and ‘communal violence’ are often …

While re-reading certain passages from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006), I was so shocked by his combination of ignorance and arrogance. Forgive me for some Dawkins- bashing: In a memorable passage, Dawkins discusses the problem of Trinitarianism in Christianity and extends it to other forms of “polytheism,” such as the cult of the Virgin Mary and the saints in Roman-Catholicism. “What …

People like Scott Atran and Sloan Wilson abuse evolutionary biology to produce ad hoc explanations of an explanandum whose truth they presuppose: the universality of religion. Their explanations are no better than those discussed by Balu in chapter 5 of ‘The Heathen in his blindness: Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion. ’. Paraphrasing Balu, we may say that they consist of ’two quarters of …

It is very disappointing to see how these evolutionary theorists of religion lack knowledge of religions other than garden variety Judeo-Christianity (where they seem to have at least some factual knowledge, as in Scott Atran’s case, they reproduce standard textbook stories about Hinduism that have been left behind a few decades back). If they did a serious study, it would perhaps strike them …

When we consider Paul Hacker’s story on ‘inclusivism as a typically Indian thought form’, all we can conclude is that he has used a typically Christian thought form to understand an aspect of the Indian cultural traditions, which he is unable to understand because it is completely different from what he knows. Hacker’s inclusivism is merely an attempt to strip the following Christian account from …

Recently, the European Parliament hosted a meeting on “caste discrimination in South Asia”. At the meeting, participants stated that “India is being ruled by castes not by laws” and that they demanded justice, because there “is one incredible India and one untouchable India.” The EU was urged to come out with a policy statement on the subject. One MEP, referring to the caste system, said that …

The sustained efforts by certain Hindu groups in the west to redefine and “correct” long existing Hindu traditions are perhaps reflective of their desire to put in place a cogent and structured religious system that is able to hold its own against other scripture-based religions. Concomitantly, American identity politics and European political correctness is also “forcing” minority communities to …