Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India. Anand Pandian. Durham: Duke University Press. 2009. 1 + 325 pp (original) (raw)

Vivek Dhareshwar 1998 Valorizing the Present (Cultural Dynamics 10.2)

Cultural Dynamics, 1998

There are many cultures. But only one culture has offered descriptions of other cultures. What are the implications of this fact for the human sciences? Until the appearance of Edward Said's Orienta/ism, the human sciences did not find it necessary to interrogate either the status of these descriptions or the culture that offered them. The western descriptions of other cultures have recently been contested by postcolonial theory/discourse which has not, however, looked into the culture that produced the descriptions. Valorizing the present in India ( and other postcolonial cultures), this paper argues, requires us to take a road that neither Said nor postcolonial discourse has taken: namely, reconceptualizing the human sciences by theorizing the experience of the nonwestern cultures and, as a prerequisite to it, theorizing the West. Key Words ◊ cultural difference ◊ human sciences ◊ postcoloniality ◊ theory ◊ the West

What is a vishwaguru? Indian civilizational pedagogy as a transformative global imperative

International Affairs

Ambitions for India to enact the role of vishwaguru or ‘world teacher’ are a conspicuous feature of foreign policy discourse under contemporary Hindu nationalist rule in India. This discourse, and India's foreign-policy practice, engage the international realm with a puzzling intensity given Hindu nationalism's inward-looking and exclusionary emphasis on majoritarian cultural unity. In this article, I leverage International Relations scholarship on social closure, international order and recognition struggles to examine the historical lineages and recent articulations of nineteenth-century religious reformist ideas about India's world mission and spiritual superiority. I argue that different Indian civilizational imaginaries across time produce a pedagogical imperative, aimed at the transformation of global social hierarchies. Centred on a quest to assert social superiority and remake the terms of recognition, any given vishwaguru project nonetheless relies on internatio...

TIF-‘ Transgression ’ : Explaining contemporary India

2019

If one were challenged into choosing just one word to explain contemporary India what would that word be? This may seem like a puerile challenge, trivialising the difficult task of representing India that is too complex, too ancient, and too diverse to be explained by just one word. And yet in the history of the social sciences philosophers have attempted just such an exercise of using a core word to explain the essential nature of a society. "Dharma" was given such a status in the classical Indian texts. "Value" was the word Marx chose to explain capitalism. "Trust" is a word sociologists consider central to a society’s continued existence. "Ubuntu" stakes a strong claim for that position in South Africa’s lexicon. Posing the challenge, therefore, is not as outlandish as it initially seems.

Uday Chandra reviews Reworking Culture for Contributions to Indian Sociology

Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2023

The book under review is an intimate ethnographic portrait of everyday social relations and the rules governing them in the West Garo Hills of Northeast India. The author avoids taking 'culture' or 'custom' as givens, or worse, practising a form of salvage anthropology that claims to recover lost social mores. Instead, Erik de Maaker has taken a patient approach of listening to and observing his interlocutors over two decades of fieldwork in and around the Garo village of Sadolpara, close to the Indo-Bangladesh border. In de Maaker's nuanced portrayal of Garo village life, everyday sociality, governed by malleable norms (niam) between women and men of different matrilineal clans, lies at the heart of the community and their relationship with their lived environment.