This book presents a comprehensive overview of modern conceptualizations of justice in India. It analyses how these concepts relate to traditional theories of justice – in Marx, Ambedkar, Gandhi and Rawls as well as social realities in India.
The book critically analyses theories of justice in India from a theoretical and comparative framework. It brings together contributions by well-known scholars to explore a range of questions and dilemmas around justice which have been brought about by a widening disparity between the powerful and the marginalized. The volume engages with the inadequacies of tautological theories of justice and fairness which fall short of adequately articulating the institutionalized forms of injustices and inequality facing citizens in modern society. It also explores exceptions and deviations from transcendental and universalist assumptions of contemporary theories of justice and studies movements and expressions of dissent and alternative structures and paradigms of conceptualizing justice.
This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of political theory, political sociology, political studies, sociology, social theory, post-colonial theory and exclusion studies.
1. Introduction
Albeena Shakil and Gopal Guru
2. Inception of injustice is in the conception of justice
Gopal Guru
3. Rationality and justice
Sundar Sarukkai
4. Marx and justice: Reviewing a contested issue
Sobhanlal Datta Gupta
5. Adequate justice, the fecundity of choice and the interlocutor
Samir Banerjee
6. Outline of a postcolonial theory of justice
Partha Chatterjee
7. Extending the sphere of justice: The dilemmas of everyday life
Gurpreet Mahajan
8. An other theory of justice
Sanjeeb Mukherjee
9. ‘Oustees’ of the contemporary system: Understanding displacement and the idea of justice
R. Umamaheshwari
Biography
Albeena Shakil is Professor of English at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana. She has authored Understanding the Novel: A Theoretical Overview, 2015, and guest edited three issues of Summerhill: IIAS Review, IIAS Shimla. She also co-edited JGLR: Women, Law and South Asia (Upasana Mahanta and Sameena Dalwai), 2019.
Gopal Guru is Former Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Currently he is the editor of Economic and Political Weekly. His published books include Humiliation: Claims and Context (Ed.), 2009; The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Theory and Experience (co-author Sundar Sarukkai), 2012; Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social (with Sundar Sarukkai), 2019. He has worked on Bhimrao Ambedkar's 'Philosophy of Moral Realism and Political Phenomenology of Touch' and contributed 'On Caste' in the International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology.
