What is wrong with the intercultural exchange of categories? Throughout one gets the impression that there is something “fundamentally wrong” with categories shifting in meaning over time or with the introduction of categories from one culture into another culture. But what is important about these shifts in meaning? What exactly is the problem in introducing the category of religion into India or …
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 …
Editor’s note: This article appeared in the Journal of American Academy of Religion
Abstract
The paper attempts a contrast between the process and the structure of the Christian and the Indian spirituality. Drawing attention to their dissimilarities, it attempts to reformulate the differences among the Indian traditions in a novel way. It argues that cultures and traditions are not just different; …
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 …
You ask whether ‘in principle’ a neurobiological theory on religion could “account” for the experience of the believers. The answer depends on what kind of an account you are asking for and what you have in mind when you say ‘in principle’. If you mean by ‘account’, whether it could predict or even explain, I do not think so. We know that, at the least, we are made up of atoms. Your question, in …
Many come up with criticisms like ‘Buddhist logics are different’ or ‘one has to follow Indian logics’. These criticisms sound profound! They are damn shallow, unless they answer the following questions.
What is their structure?
What are their axioms?
What are their rules of inferences?
What are some some crucial meta-logical theorems (do they all have deduction theorems?) etc.
What does it mean to be an Indian in this time and age? What does India have to give to the contemporary world? These overarching questions that echo in the mind of the post-colonial Indian cannot be truly answered by Western frameworks instituted at the behest of colonialism.
This book sets the stage for a reconceptualization of India studies. Clearing away intellectual deadwood, it initiates a …
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 …
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The Sanskrit word (that I know) that comes closest to the Greek ’telos’ is ‘Sankalpa’. It means ’to mentally determine’, ‘formulation of an end’ ‘desirous of (an end)’, ‘anticipation (of an end)’ etc. It also means ‘Buddhi’ in some contexts.
One of the primary properties of religion is that it generates questions about “the meaning and purpose of life”, “meaning and purpose of existence” and …
The problem with the advaita tradition today is its lack of intelligibility. ‘Maya’, for instance, does a tremendous lot of explanatory work, but it is hardly clear what it is; multiple concepts like ‘manas’, ‘buddhi’ and ‘chitta’ occur and we do not know how these concepts relate to each other, whether they refer, whether they are a part of psychological theorizing or merely an exercise in …
I would have liked to make the following points on the IER forum but either of the two moderators are (obviously) willing to be courteous enough to post my letter on their forum, despite my explicit request. Let me react to their letters on this forum, and I shall leave it there for the time being.
Neither Michael Witzel nor Steve Farmer answers my request for clarifications but simply take off on …
Steve Farmer is not an expert on secularism only in the sense that he has followed it from the ‘outside’ (meaning, probably, he has not written anything about the issue himself). Apparently, the reason why he has not contributed to the debate has to do with the fact that (a) no legitimate researcher can take the debate seriously; and (b) Farmer is one such. Witness how he describes it: “I’ve …
As I have often said, the most intriguing aspect of the Indian culture is the kind of knowledge it produced and encouraged people to produce: experiential knowledge which emerges by systematically reflecting on our (human) experiences in the world. As human beings, our experiences are many: no one set, no one kind of experience exhausts what we go through. From the purely personal experiences of …
With some justifiable distortion, one can claim that the Indian Adhyatmic traditions revolve partially around some ‘philosophical’ questions: what is real and what is existence? Is there a distinction between the two and, if yes, how to draw that line? This is a distortion because the debate never took this form; it is justifiable nonetheless to present it this way because it gives us a handle to …
One of the questions that has come up in this discussion is the following: are we logically forced to assume the ’existence’ of, say, Rama or Krishna, when we ‘believe’ in them? This question has partly been responsible for the discussion about the ‘historicity’ of Ramayana. Here is my answer as I see the situation today.
In some sense, we all work with some notions (however vague they might be) …
One of the debates in the Indian traditions is about the kind of creatures that exist in the world and about the reality of what exists. The Jains, for instance, disagreed that the “deva’s” of other traditions (with the properties they were supposed to possess) existed in this world or were real. (Their so-called ‘atheism’ is a result of this debate.) Consequently, when they call Valmiki Ramayana …
Are there Jati’s in India? Yes, there are. What kind of units or entities are they? I do not know; neither does anybody for that matter. It is a matter of fact that (a) they are not occupational groups; (b) they are not social classes (that is, there is no correlation between Jati’s and the ‘means of production’); (c) appear hereditary (though one could obtain certificates that ‘change’ one’s …
