Description
What does it mean to be Indian?
Why ask this question today? After all, a lot is written about India, her culture, her past, her society, the psychology and sociology of individuals and groups. Why is that not enough? Because what we have learnt about ourselves so far is either false or very fragmentary. If Indian culture is not simply a slightly inferior, slightly idiosyncratic variant of Western culture, as we have been told for a very long time, what else is it? Hence: What does it mean to be an Indian? This question is part of a much bigger issue: What makes a difference, any difference, into a cultural difference and not a social, psychological, biological, religious or institutional difference? Research into culture and cultural differences gives novel and surprising answers. Today, the question "What does it mean to be 'Indian'?" is almost incomprehensible. Is it a motto like "E Pluribus Unum" or "Satyameva Jayate"? Are Indians 'colourful' and 'beautiful 'people who wear bindis? Must we talk about national borders to answer this question? Or is it an institutional question like being citizens of the world's largest democracy? Do we belong to a culture of oppression and exploitation or do we sip from the divine nectar churned from the ocean? Is there something 'Indian' about our culture that goes beyond the differences between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs or Jains? What does it รผberhaupt mean to belong to Indian culture?
Written for an intelligent but lay public, this book plots in an accessible way the outlines of the differences that distinguish one culture from another Indian and Western in our case. It shares the results of 40 years of scientific research in the research programme Comparative Science of Cultures. This book transcends the distinction between the right' and 'the left' by looking deeper into ideas on human beings, society, culture, experience, the past, etc. One such cluster of ideas concerns the colonial past of India which is of relevance not merely to the colonized but the colonizer as well. This book straddles the fields of social sciences and humanities to tackle issues of knowledge and culture. It suggests an alternative to the ruling orthodoxies that constitute 'identity politics' today while showing that this label hides more content than even what their best proponents imagine.
ISBN:9781685234638
