[Published: Canadian Social Science 10(5) 39-47, 2014] Check Balu’s paper on comparative theology, and in particular Francis Clooney’s: Translation, interpretration and culture: on the disingenuity of a comparative theology
Read moreWhat is wrong with the intercultural exchange of categories? Throughout one gets the impression that there is something “fundamentally wrong” with categories shifting in meaning over time or with the introduction of categories…
Read moreIn our daily life, we hardly pause to reflect upon many problematic things that we routinely assume as self-evident. Such an attitude is useful since it allows us to focus…
Read more1. Many are concerned that English translations of some words from native languages distort their meaning. If we restrict ourselves to terms like ‘Deva’, ‘Dharma’ and such like, the worry…
Read moreIn the second half of the nineteenth century, some western-educated, Bombay intellectuals came together in the Prarthana Samaj (inspired by Keshub Sunder Sen of the Brahmo Samaj). Perhaps the best…
Read moreWe have developed partial explanations of why the secularism debate in India takes such peculiar forms and why otherwise intelligent people talk nonsense here. But we don’t do so by…
Read moreWhile reading Shabnum Tejani’s Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History (2008), I ran into the same weird point that Neera Chandhoke also tried to make at the RRI platform…
Read moreThe issue is simply this: why use Indic categories to describe the world? What is interesting or important about this goal or venture? This, as I said, is the issue…
Read more1. Social psychology, for instance, speaks of ‘categorization theory’, and we do use ‘categorization’ also in the sense of classification. However, unless one gives a technical meaning to ‘category’ (which…
Read moreLet me give the gist of the consensus and overlook philosophical nuances about categories. 1. Consider the following sentences: ‘It is raining’, ‘het regent’, ‘Es Regnet’, ‘Baarish aa raha hai’.…
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