Dhu, I request you to get together with Acharya and write up a more detailed response about Modernity and India. Its very much needed. Thanks in advance.
BTW, Balagangadhara's reply to Jeffery Kirpal
Our problem is as Engineers and technical people we dont know the language of discourse for social scientists and hence even when we have the right reply we cannot articulate it well. We need to develop wrtiting skills.
He writes of the angst we all went thru.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->15. The third charge is that your stance prevents you knowing you are blind. That is to say, why are you blind? Better said, what makes you blind? The answer to this has layers too, and let me peel just a few of them. To do that, I shall have to engage you in your own territory, on your own turf. That is, I want to talk to you about your understanding of your own culture and religion. (Is this not what 'cultural hermeneutics' all about?) Let me, therefore, play the ventriloquist and displace your voice to ask myself a few questions: Is the alienation from our own experience (that I spoke of) any different from what any believer undergoes in the west, when he 'discovers' that God is dead? Is my experience any different from a westerner losing his belief about God and the mystic? Are our travails anything other than the story of 'modernity' as it plays out in India?
16. Yes, to all three questions. Let me get again into an autobiographical mode to talk about some of them. I did not quite tell you what happened during those decades to me when we fast forwarded. Let us rewind a bit and see what happened to the lad between his 18th and 30th year. You see, he wanted to change the world and became a radical. He left home before he was even twenty, lived in the slums, worked in the quarry, went to the villages and even became a Marxist for a period of time. From an 'orthodox' Brahmin, he had metamorphosed into a fire-breathing 'atheist': India was backward, the 'caste system' was a curse, the Indian traditions were outdated, the 'gods' (though he still wrote it with a 'small g'!) did not exist (except that they once walked the lands of Europe!). A run-of-the-mill progressive, in other words. In short, the revolution could not come soon enough for him. However, what brought him to Marxism also brought him out of it: the inability of these stories to make sense of his experience. So, he came to Europe, not in search of the Holy Grail (how could he? He was born a Brahmin after all!) but to study the root-cause of the problems in Marxist theory. You see, in those days it was difficult for us to find books of Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and many other German philosophers in the public libraries. Even as I began to solve my problems with Marx, <b>a new issue was beginning to force itself on me: I had dimly begun to realize that I was an Indian, and that I lived as such in a culture I hardly understood. </b>
17. <b>This realization turned my world upside down; in doing so, however, it helped me regain access to my own experiences. The world that got turned upside down was the one I thought I lived in all the time. I had thought until then that I knew the western culture like the back of my hand: it was a shock to discover just how far I was from knowing either. I could hold forth on the notions of 'civil society', 'ought' in ethics, the histories of renaissance and enlightenment and, why, I could even eat meat and drink wine.</b> None of these, I discovered, meant anything: <b>I was and remained an Indian, even if I once thought I was 'modern'. Thus, I reflected on my experiences (fed by reading and yet more reading) until I could begin to grasp the outlines of the question, what is to be an Indian?</b> Seventeen years ago, I formulated these reflections as a research project, titling it after a poem from T.S. Eliot that goes like this: '...We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring shall be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time'. I had indeed arrived where I had started from: India, Bangalore, a Brahmin family. I began to know the place too for the first time, because, at last, I could begin to access my own cultural experiences in the way they need to be accessed. However, the job is not complete and the process not yet over. <b>During all these years, I have been constructing the tools required to gain access to our experiences because I realized too that my individual biography was but the Indian history writ small. </b>
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BTW, Balagangadhara's reply to Jeffery Kirpal
Our problem is as Engineers and technical people we dont know the language of discourse for social scientists and hence even when we have the right reply we cannot articulate it well. We need to develop wrtiting skills.
He writes of the angst we all went thru.
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->15. The third charge is that your stance prevents you knowing you are blind. That is to say, why are you blind? Better said, what makes you blind? The answer to this has layers too, and let me peel just a few of them. To do that, I shall have to engage you in your own territory, on your own turf. That is, I want to talk to you about your understanding of your own culture and religion. (Is this not what 'cultural hermeneutics' all about?) Let me, therefore, play the ventriloquist and displace your voice to ask myself a few questions: Is the alienation from our own experience (that I spoke of) any different from what any believer undergoes in the west, when he 'discovers' that God is dead? Is my experience any different from a westerner losing his belief about God and the mystic? Are our travails anything other than the story of 'modernity' as it plays out in India?
16. Yes, to all three questions. Let me get again into an autobiographical mode to talk about some of them. I did not quite tell you what happened during those decades to me when we fast forwarded. Let us rewind a bit and see what happened to the lad between his 18th and 30th year. You see, he wanted to change the world and became a radical. He left home before he was even twenty, lived in the slums, worked in the quarry, went to the villages and even became a Marxist for a period of time. From an 'orthodox' Brahmin, he had metamorphosed into a fire-breathing 'atheist': India was backward, the 'caste system' was a curse, the Indian traditions were outdated, the 'gods' (though he still wrote it with a 'small g'!) did not exist (except that they once walked the lands of Europe!). A run-of-the-mill progressive, in other words. In short, the revolution could not come soon enough for him. However, what brought him to Marxism also brought him out of it: the inability of these stories to make sense of his experience. So, he came to Europe, not in search of the Holy Grail (how could he? He was born a Brahmin after all!) but to study the root-cause of the problems in Marxist theory. You see, in those days it was difficult for us to find books of Hegel, Fichte, Schelling and many other German philosophers in the public libraries. Even as I began to solve my problems with Marx, <b>a new issue was beginning to force itself on me: I had dimly begun to realize that I was an Indian, and that I lived as such in a culture I hardly understood. </b>
17. <b>This realization turned my world upside down; in doing so, however, it helped me regain access to my own experiences. The world that got turned upside down was the one I thought I lived in all the time. I had thought until then that I knew the western culture like the back of my hand: it was a shock to discover just how far I was from knowing either. I could hold forth on the notions of 'civil society', 'ought' in ethics, the histories of renaissance and enlightenment and, why, I could even eat meat and drink wine.</b> None of these, I discovered, meant anything: <b>I was and remained an Indian, even if I once thought I was 'modern'. Thus, I reflected on my experiences (fed by reading and yet more reading) until I could begin to grasp the outlines of the question, what is to be an Indian?</b> Seventeen years ago, I formulated these reflections as a research project, titling it after a poem from T.S. Eliot that goes like this: '...We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring shall be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time'. I had indeed arrived where I had started from: India, Bangalore, a Brahmin family. I began to know the place too for the first time, because, at last, I could begin to access my own cultural experiences in the way they need to be accessed. However, the job is not complete and the process not yet over. <b>During all these years, I have been constructing the tools required to gain access to our experiences because I realized too that my individual biography was but the Indian history writ small. </b>
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