1st Edition
Critical Humanities from India Contexts, Issues, Futures
List of Figures. Foreword. Contributors. Acknowledgements. Introduction: Crossing (the) Legacies 1. Education and Structures of Moral Formation: The Limits of Liberal Education in India 2. In-discipline(s): Diversity, Disciplinarity and the Humanities 3. Sites of Learning and Intellectual Parasitism: The Case for New Humanities 4. Why Communalism is an Indian problem: The Relationship between Communalism and Hinduism in Colonial Discourse 5. Sacerdotal Violence and the Caste System: The Long Shadow of Christian-Orientalism 6. Caste as an Impediment in the Journey of a Bhakta: Lingayat Vachanas, Jati and Adhyatma 7. River Literacy and the Challenge of a Rain Terrain 8. Accents of Memory: Critical Humanities and the Question of Inheritance 9. Indian Culture and its Social Security System 10. The Politics of Knowledge, Here and Now: A Conversation with Ashis Nandy. Glossary. Index
Biography
D. Venkat Rao is Professor of English Literature, School of English Literary Studies, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, India. In addition to books in English and Telugu, he has published several articles in national and international journals. His recent work is Cultures of Memory in South Asia (2014). His other publications include In Citations: Readings in Area Studies of Culture (1999), a translation of Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy into Telugu. He has also translated into English, a Telugu intellectual autobiography entitled The Last Brahmin (2012). He has co-edited Reflections on Literature, Criticism and Theory (2004) and an anthology of essays on U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara. His interests include literary and cultural studies, image studies, comparative thought, translation, and mnemocultures. He has designed several courses interfacing culture, technology, and literary studies.
‘Critical Humanities from India opens up new avenues for comparative research in the human sciences. The prospect that it uncovers is a daunting one, exciting and important. This volume is destined to become a forerunner in a burgeoning scholarly field.'
Jürgen Pieters, Professor, Ghent University, Belgium
‘Seventy years after Indian political independence, a contemporary academic generation still faces the problems of radical intellectual emancipation. Not just consolidating versions of a post- or anti-colonial problematic or combating a still pervasive orientalism. But risking the recognition that the most difficult tasks of thinking disturbingly arise when the very concepts and terms with which one tries to think are themselves the problem. Whether questioning definitions of 'discipline', rethinking 'community', challenging the notion of 'caste', shifting 'geo-graphical' categories, or reconceptualising 'religion', this collection of essays contributes to the construction of an emerging 'critical humanities' for an Indian university terrain now potentially shaped as much by its pan-Asian student intake as by still dominant 'European' paradigms of how to think at all. A demanding but exhilarating collaborative undertaking by an impressive array of actively critical practitioners.’
Bernard Sharratt, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Kent, UK
