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IPN Blog Guidelines The blog at IPN is a platform for philosophers and others to write about philosophy in India and also to express philosophically informed opinions. What kind of articles are published in the IPN blog? General articles about philosophy. Articles can be about Philosophy for Society and Public – Articles that explore the questions and events of society from philosophical viewpoints. Life of philosophy and philosophers in India – Articles that explore and document the experiences of philosophers and the nature of philosophy – as a discipline/practice/profession – in India. Academic Philosophy – Articles that introduce (either to fellow academicians or the public) a specific topic in Philosophy. Academic engagements like Brief, accessible summaries by researchers about their latest publications (books or papers) for wider dissemination Reviews of philosophy books Critical responses to papers Who can write for the IPN blog? Given that the aim of the IPN blog is to enable a dialogue between philosophers and the public, we accept articles from both philosophers and the public. Philosophers who are not members of IPN, including undergraduate and graduate philosophy students, can also submit. Submission Guidelines Critical Responses to Journal Papers There are two ways of initiating these response articles for the IPN Blog: A scholar can send a response to a recently published paper to the editors. The editors will try to reach the author for a reply to the response-note submitted. If a scholar has published an article recently, the scholar can get in touch with the blog editors with a few suitable respondents’ names (preferably faculty or advanced PhD scholars). Scope of response articles to journal papers at the IPN blog: Responses are limited to papers written by philosophy scholars in India. Only responses to peer-reviewed papers in respected journals are accepted. The paper, preferably, should not be older than 10 years. Points about structure: The response articles will consist of two parts: (a) the critical response by a scholar and (b) the reply from the author Each of these parts is around 300 words. A critical response should not just be a summary of the paper. It attempts to critically, and yet briefly, evaluate the paper by doing any of the following: raises some challenges to the paper’s claims, provides further clarifications/support for the claims, or extends the paper’s claims to other domains of debate. The author of the paper, in turn, replies to the points raised by the responder. Book Review There are two ways of initiating book reviews for the IPN Blog: A scholar can send a review of a recently published book to the editors. If a scholar has published a book recently, the scholar can get in touch with the blog editors with a few suitable reviewers’ names (preferably faculty or advanced PhD scholars). General points for all articles While submitting the article, please share the document over google-doc. The article can also be submitted as a standalone docx file. Please use the Chicago Manual Style author-date in-line citations and end bibliography. Use endnotes instead of footnotes. Please use Grammarly or other tools to remove spelling and grammar mista kes. We have a non-negotiable policy against plagiarism. Review process The article will be reviewed by the editorial team and suitable comments will be provided Wherever necessary, the editorial team will reach out to other scholars for their feedback and recommendations. Editorial team Manohar Kumar (Faculty, IIIT Delhi) Varun S Bhatta (Faculty, IISER Bhopal)

Mulla Nasrettin's Cogito Danish Hamid Independent Scholar Article # Jan 13, 2025 One day, while wandering through the Old Venetian bazār, I, Mulla Nasrettin, stumbled upon a rather attractive looking leather bound book, titled Meditations written by a certain Descartes. Now, you know me—I’m a man of reflection, and the word "meditations" has always had a certain allure. “Perhaps,” I thought, “this book might guide me to some inner peace or reveal hidden truths of the soul that this French philosopher has discovered.” So I bought it, tucked it under my arm, and made my way home, thinking I’d sit down with it after Isha. The night was quiet, perfect for a bit of soul-searching. I lit a small lamp, sat comfortably by the fire, and picked up the book. Meditations by Monsieur Descartes. “Let’s see what wisdom your little book has for me,” I muttered to myself. I opened the book with great anticipation. But alas! The first few pages were filled with long-winded ramblings about method, and oh! How this Descartes fellow loved to talk about himself! His achievements, his credentials, his method—Method this, method that! I sighed. “Where is the meditation, the wisdom, the Lubbu'l-Lubâb of the matter?” I asked aloud. “Am I reading about the vanity of an old man or a guide to truth?” But then—finally!—I came across something more practical. This Descartes began doubting things. Ah! Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. Doubting existence, doubting knowledge—this was something I could work with. Nasrettin Hoca likes a good doubt as much as anyone, especially when it comes to doubting about dreams, even in one's dreams. And so, I followed Descartes’s reasoning. I, too, would doubt the world around me, doubt my senses, doubt everything until only one thing remained. “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes concluded, and there it was—the grand revelation! I jumped from my seat. “Aha! I exist! I think, therefore I am!” But wait. This didn’t feel right. A different doubt now gnawed at me. Could it be that this Monsieur hadn’t doubted hard enough? He stopped too soon. He was content to rest at thinking. How could he be sure thinking was enough, enough to show I exist? I sat back down and rubbed my chin. “This Descartes fellow... He doubts, yes, but not quite as far as one must go. He should have doubted his own doubting! After all, if I’m to doubt everything, then why not doubt the very fact that I am doubting? Could it be that even my doubts are the product of someone—or something—else? I mean, who is to say these thoughts are mine at all?” With that thought, I stood again, pacing. “What if I am simply imagining my doubts? What if, in truth, I am a figment of someone else’s imagination?” And just then, my donkey, who had been lazily resting outside, brayed loudly. I turned to the door and squinted. “Ah, yes. The donkey. Could it be...?” My heart raced with this impossible thought. “What if it is not me imagining these doubts, but my donkey?” I strode outside to face the old beast. The donkey stared back at me, chewing slowly on his grass, completely indifferent to my hypothesis. “Tell me, old friend,” I said, crouching down to eye level with the creature. “Are you the one thinking me into existence? Is it you who doubts for me, making me question whether or not I exist?” The donkey blinked lazily. For a moment, the thought made me dizzy, but… I couldn’t dismiss it so easily. After all, if Descartes could doubt the existence of everything but his own thoughts, why couldn’t I go a step further? If I was to doubt everything, I must doubt that I am the one doing the doubting. Maybe the donkey—silent, patient, always observing—was the true thinker here, and I was merely his daydream. I stood, perplexed. “I doubt, therefore I am? No. Perhaps it is: The donkey doubts, therefore we are!” I walked back to my bed, shaking my head. This Descartes is too dubious a fellow, apart from being totally full of himself. The West must have come to really bad times when this guy is their star new philosopher. Oh to the good old days of Aristu, and Eflatun the Divine! But as I lay down to sleep that night, I couldn't help but worry. “Whether it’s my doubt or the donkey’s that gives me existence, one thing’s for sure—I can never look at the beast the same way again.” And with that, I drifted off, my mind slowly going into a haze….am I dreaming of the donkey, or does the donkey still dream of me?

Modernity and its Futures Past Nishad Patnaik Faculty, IIIT Delhi Book Excerpt # Jan 8, 2025 An excerpt from Nishad Patnaik's book Modernity and its Futures Past: Recovering Unalienated Life (2023, Palgrave Macmillan, India). The basic claim of the book is that the contemporary figuration of modernity, in the positivistic understanding of nature, and capitalist form of society (as two sides of the same coin), constitutes the reification of the original universal, critical-rational impulse of the Enlightenment. Such reification sets up a tension between the universalizing and particularizing tendencies of reason, reflected, for instance, in the current dominance of the de-territorializing forces of globalized capitalism, on the one hand, and the simultaneous reemergence of xenophobic forms of nationalism, based on narrow, territorially bounded identifications along religious, ethnic or linguistic lines on the other. The tension between the universal and the particular, symptomatic of this deeper structural tendency towards reification, leads to a series of impasses in the interconnected theoretical, ethical, political and economic spheres, which come to constitute our sense of alienation. The book responds to this problematic by attempting to reconcile this tension in dialectical fashion, and thereby articulate an ‘alternative’, non-reified conception of modernity, from within the modernist tradition . Thus, instead of understanding the tension between the universal and the particular, the one and the many, the same and the other etc., as representing a mutually exclusive either-or choice, the book approaches these issues by elaborating their mutually constitutive co-dependence. As a corollary, it shows that the series of impasses to which modernity succumbs in the interconnected theoretical, ethical, political and economic spheres, stem from the attempt to reduce the ‘universal’ to the ‘particular’ or vice versa. The work argues that if we resist this tendency towards reduction, we can still renew the emancipatory promise that Enlightenment modernity once held, for providing a rational-universal self-foundation for humanity, while simultaneously avoiding the pitfalls of a reified form of universality. As we know, (and as Husserl elaborates with his evocation of the sense of ‘crisis’ in what he calls the ‘European Sciences’) the early optimism and ‘naïve faith’ in ‘universal reason’ has long since given way to skeptical resignation in the face of the positivistic form of reason that comes to dominate. The ‘positivistic reduction’ of reason has resulted in a morass of ‘posts’—'post-modernism’, ‘post-truth’, post-structuralism, post-Marxism etc., at the level of theory, which indicate a tendency towards the ‘empiricization’ of reason. The effects of such empiricization are felt in the intertwined ethical, political, and economic domains. And yet, at the level of socio-political and economic history, as the long, sordid past of the contemporary capitalist figuration of modernity, marked by the violence of colonialism, slavery etc., shows, any straightforward positing of the universal dimension of reason, in the face of such skepticism and resulting empiricization, is no longer possible. For, it is precisely in the name of ‘universal reason’, mediated through the inherent expansionary economic logic of capitalism, that colonial subjugation and exploitation (primary/‘primitive accumulation of capital’ in Marx’s terminology) unfolded (and I argue, continues to unfold in a transformed modality under the current neoliberal regime, which imposes its own neo-imperialist tendencies). Indeed, the skeptical reaction to the universal claims of ‘enlightened’ reason, leading to their empiricization (positivistic reduction), stems, in large measure, from these effects of an uncritical, reified universalism, which (qua concrete or determinate universal’ in the Hegelian sense) tend to exclude certain cultures, peoples (and their interests), and modes of thought. This is because, as many thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Judith Butler etc. have pointed out, any determinate universal, qua determinate, must necessarily be limited in its scope. The scope of the universal has historically determined, and continues to determine, the constitution of identity and difference, the ‘same’ and the ‘other’, that is, those that are included in, and excluded from, its scope. In modernity, as the scope of the universal is extended, at least in principle, to include all human beings (and now increasingly non-human species), it can set up a movement where the excluded can come to ‘haunt’ the universal, forcing its expansion (but also possible contraction). This also indicates the possibility of modernist ethics as an ethics without specific content, or a negative ethics, that is committed only to the ‘gap’ between any concretization of the universal—the ethically invested content/normative order of any political discourse, and the empty universal it represents—its indeterminate ‘horizonal beyond’ by which it is necessarily oriented, such that the former is always subject to critique and revision in light of the latter. Explicating this movement (‘hauntology’) Butler, for instance, writes, modern “democratic polities are constituted through exclusions that return to haunt the polities predicated upon their absence. That haunting becomes politically effective precisely in so far as the return of the excluded forces an expansion and re-articulation of the basic premise of democracy itself” (Butler, 2000, 11) . These considerations make visible, the basic dialectic between the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’, in its enmeshed ‘theoretical’ and ‘material’ aspects. That is, they make visible both the constitutive interrelation and dependence between the universal and the particular, as well as the tendency towards reduction/reification of this interrelation to one of its poles (dialectical ‘one-sidedness’) that gives rise to the tensions or impasses inherent in our contemporary (alienated) modernity. It follows that the ultimately ethical task of renewing the emancipatory potential inherent in the critical-rational and universal dimension of reason that constituted the original impetus of Enlightenment modernity, in the face of its contemporary reified ‘theoretical’ and ‘material’ configuration, calls for a revised, non-reified conception of universality. The latter, I argue, can be nothing but a negative universality—a universality in constant ‘becoming’, (therefore, in its processive movement, nothing but a negative dialectic). Further, as I noted, the rearticulation of universality in this transformed, negative sense, in the face of reified (positivist and capitalist) modernity, amounts to the (re)articulation of an ‘alternative’, non-reified conception of modernity, from within the modernist tradition . For, as we know, the critical thrust of enlightened reason lies in the disenchantment of the world—stripping it of ‘meaning’ and ‘purposiveness’, which come to be seen as merely anthropomorphic projections. The disenchanted world, particularly in its capitalistic figuration, alienates human beings from nature and from each other. Thus, to rearticulate human emancipatory possibilities calls for the rearticulation of a non-alienated conception of both nature and society. However, the disenchantment wrought by the critical-reflective rationality of the Enlightenment cannot simply be undone in a return to pre-modern ‘enchantment’ —to a sacralised conception of the world, and to some posited ‘original’ unity with it in unalienated ‘immediacy’. For, on the one hand, the historically emergent critical-reflective experience of disenchantment (as an expression of reflective distance, transcendence vis-a-vis ‘immediacy’, inescapable mediation, or universality in a negative sense etc.), constitutive of our modernist form of consciousness and society, cannot simply be obliterated, in what would amount to ‘collective amnesia’ (although the dangers of such amnesia are always present, and become exacerbated in times of socio-economic and political crises). On the other, the earlier ‘enchanted’ conceptions of the world, with their naturalized/sacralised order and hierarchy, where the source of power and legitimacy lay in a transcendent ‘beyond’, were subject to their own modes of (unthematized) reification, and therefore, (implicit forms of) alienation. Thus, the rearticulation of human emancipatory possibilities, which can accommodate irreversible disenchantment, (or the negativity inherent in critical-reflective distance), must take the form of the recovery/renewal of an unalienated mode of existence, from within a non-reified modernity. The study begins by posing a question regarding our contemporary situation—why are we witnessing the resurgence of various forms of xenophobic nationalism, and the re-emergence of narrow, pre-modern solidarities along religious or ethnic lines, precisely when globalized, finance-driven capital is purportedly breaking down the traditional territorial and cultural boundaries of the nation-state? It elaborates this tension inherent in the present, by taking into consideration aspects of the arguments presented by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000), as well as by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983), while critiquing both. Whereas Hardt and Negri emphasize the supra-national tendencies of capital (captured in the de-territorialized sovereignty of ‘empire’), Anderson emphasizes the continued existence of nations and territorial boundaries. Yet, the present juncture is marked by both these tendencies, that is, both universalism (in the economic and juridical-normative domains) and particularism (nationalist parochialism). I argue that thinking of these tendencies as mutually opposed and exclusive, leads to an impasse both on the economic and political front, constitutive of contemporary capitalist modernity. More broadly, it results in a reified conception of modernity, which is the source of contemporary alienation. The latter then manifests itself in the regression to various pre-modern, parochial forms of identification and identity. This calls for a revised understanding of the present—one which does not merely emphasize one set of processes (universalistic tendencies), to the exclusion of the other (particularistic tendencies), but can account for their simultaneous co-existence. I account for this co-existence by arguing for their mutually constitutive co-dependence. By showing how the nation-state is essential to the wide-spread implementation of neo-liberal economic policies, I introduce the notion of hegemony (of the latter), as a possible, initial explication of this co-dependence. I take up this problematic in a concrete sense, through an analysis of the historical emergence of nationalist consciousness, and the ‘nation’, as a new, specifically modernist form of identity and political formation. It seems obvious that the modalities of nationalist consciousness and the conception of the nation itself, must differ depending on the historical and geographical contexts of their birth. That is, the birth of the nation state in the West, usually traced to the Westphalian peace treaties (1648) in Europe, and its emergence through the colonial encounter and anti-colonial struggle in Asia and Africa, in the 19th and 20th centuries, cannot be exactly the ‘same’ in their form, and certainly not, in their ‘content’. Yet, they do share certain continuities of form, arising from the universalizing tendencies inherent in capitalism, that give rise to colonial expansion, anti-colonial struggles, and the affirmation of nationalist consciousness/identities, on the part of the colonized. I elaborate these claims through an examination of Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), to compare and critique their analyses concerning the emergence of the ‘nation’. I show that Gellner does not take the ‘universal’ (both in its ‘structural’ and ‘normative’) dimension, inherent in capitalism too seriously. Thus, he does not see the close interconnection between the emergence of capitalist modernity, the rise of modern ‘nation-state’ (in Europe) and colonialism, preferring instead to restrict his analysis to an empirical level. Anderson in contrast, does take the normative dimension of ‘universality’ into account in his idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, only to rigidly fix its structural aspect in a ‘modular’ form that first arises in Europe, and is then transplanted to other parts of the world, through the colonial encounter. I discuss Partha Chatterjee’s critique of Anderson’s ‘modularity thesis’, in relation to the emergence of nationalist consciousness in post-colonial ‘imaginations’, in his The Nation and its Fragments (1993). I argue that the colonial encounter cannot be understood either on the ‘modular’ conception, or on Chatterjee’s ‘inner-spiritual’ and ‘outer-material scientific’ divide and the communitarian alternative that, he thinks, flows from it. Rather, its processive movement (which Chatterjee captures, but interprets differently) reveals the ‘inner dialectic’ (where Chatterjee’s conception of the inner-outer can be accommodated terms of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ phase that emergent self-consciousness goes through) constitutive of the nationalist consciousness that emerges in colonized subjects, in and through the struggle for independence. This incremental critique of Gellner’s, Anderson’s, and Chatterjee’s positions clears the decks for rethinking the possibility of unalienated forms of co-existence under conditions of modernity. That is, without taking recourse to various, ultimately pre-modern, sacralized conceptions of ‘community’, understood as modernity’s suppressed ‘other’. One such articulation of the ‘conditions of possibility’ of an unalienated form of life, which attempts to accommodate modernist disenchantment, is represented by Akeel Bilgrami’s work. Bilgrami shows how the tension between ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’, running through the Enlightenment, becomes the defining feature of modern liberal-democratic (and capitalistic) societies and cannot be resolved within it. This sets up the basic coordinates within which an unalienated form of society, in a modern, desacralized sense, must be thought. For, such a society must be able to reconcile the tension between ‘liberty’ and equality, which hitherto have always been thought in an oppositional sense, that is, as an opposition between individual liberty and collective equality. In his essay, Gandhi (and Marx) (2014), Bilgrami, in a two-step argument, first prepares the ground for an alternative, modernist form of unalienated life by bringing to light the contingent ‘hegemony’ of late capitalism. By tracing the historical and intellectual genealogy of capitalist modernity, and how it impinged on emergent nationalist consciousness in India under colonial rule, Bilgrami underscores both the historically, and rationally contingent character of the capitalist form that modernity takes. Yet, its contingency is not seen as such. That is, capitalism appears not as one possible configuration of modernity (that was ‘in fact’ realized) among other, equally historically and rationally viable possibilities (that, it so happened, were not realized), but as ‘objective’ (universal, rational) ‘reality’. Yet, I argue that on the one hand, the historically extant alternative visions that Bilgrami invokes (Levelers and Diggers, Gandhi), involve a sacralized conception of nature and of the human (and are therefore, not really ‘modernist’, but invoke a certain nostalgia for the pre-modern past). On the other, insofar as his rational, counterfactual argument, based on ‘opportunity costs’ remains a primarily negative critique of the rational argument (based on social contract) for capitalism (the rational justification of the privatization of the commons), it does not sufficiently account for the skeptical consequences inherent in the notion of ‘contingent hegemony’. In other words, it does not address the possibility that these skeptical consequences end up undercutting not only the claim to the (rational) universality of capitalist social organization, but also that of any alternative conception of modernity based on universal reason, understood in its positive institutional-social configuration. Bilgrami’s argument ends up affecting a split between reason and history that is in keeping with the tendency towards empiricization, where the movement of history, and specifically the socio-political domain, becomes nothing but an endless series of contestations and provisional victories (in the form of a temporary hegemonic consensus). To mitigate these skeptical effects of empiricization/particularism, I turn to the dialectical model of thought which emphasizes the movement of history through the movement of determinate negation, which is itself based on the processive character of reification. Through the latter, the universal dimension of rationality inherent in the historical emergence of modernity comes to be ‘reduced’ to the capitalist form of society on the one hand, and inseparable from it, the techno-scientific understanding of nature on the other. Such reduction, constitutes the source of our alienation in relation to others, and to ‘nature’. I trace this sense of alienation and its basis in reified modernity, via the ‘disenchantment’ of nature and of human relations, brought about through the historical trajectory and shape that modernity comes to take in the Enlightenment. I elaborate the imbricated historicities of the techno-scientifically mediated conception of ‘nature’ (as disenchanted), and the capitalist form of social organization (which permits the fullest manipulation and exploitation of ‘disenchanted’, quantified nature), through a discussion of Hegel’s Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, and Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s writings. Once this idea of a reified modernity determined by the capitalistic and techno-scientific framework, is established, it brings to the fore the question of the possibility of an ‘alternative unalienated form of modernity’. Yet, on the one hand, as I noted, such a recovery cannot mean a return to a pre-modern, sacralized conception of community and nature, since these forms of existence involve their own unreflective modes of reification, (in terms of deified, hence, ‘naturalized’ social hierarchies etc.), and therefore, unthematized modes of alienated existence. On the other, it cannot entail an orientation which, either in the present or in the future, attempts to restore or realize the immediacy of the ‘real’ (a ‘metaphysics of presence’) in the objective-universal sense (conceived either as ‘material’ or ideal-rational reality), specific to reified modernity. From an epistemological perspective, such immediacy (presence) is ruled out in principle—as varied philosophical traditions, from transcendental idealism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction etc. have argued. But, in a related sense, it is also critiqued from a political-normative perspective, insofar as the attempt to realize the impossible ideal/telos of a ‘society without antagonisms’, leads to a totalizing conception, which can have totalitarian consequences—a charge often brought against communist societies, which are said to exemplify a reified, distinctly modernist form of totalitarianism. Thus, the task of articulating an ‘alternative conception of modernity’, in and through the articulation of unalienated existence, calls for a ‘non-reified’ account of modernity. More precisely, as I elaborate in my reading of Marx, since the process of reification is inevitable (due to our spatio-temporal finitude, as Kant had already shown) it calls for an account where this process is reflectively and institutionally acknowledged, and thus rendered ‘harmless’ (echoing the Kantian sense of the term in the Transcendental Dialectic ) that is, where the institutionalized modes of such reflective acknowledgment circumvent the deleterious consequences of reification. Insofar as this task is explicitly political, it gives rise to further issues concerning the very possibility and scope of political-emancipatory projects. I trace these issues to universalistic and particularistic tendencies in the political domain. I noted how, when seen merely as contradictory, or mutually exclusive, the universalistic and particularistic orientations result in the reification of modernity, and in the economic and political impasses that flow from such reification. On the political front, the impasse manifests itself in the perpetual back and forth movement between politics conceived as merely empirical, that is, as an endless game of conflicts and provisional hegemonic formations in the name of the universal; and as making genuinely universal claims based on ‘justice’, or as the historical struggle/‘progress’ towards the realization of a ‘universally’ just, non-hierarchical, equal society. In contrast, I show that these particularistic and universalistic tendencies are mutually constitutive in a dialectical sense. How the mutual dependence and interconnection between the ‘particular’ and the universal in the political sphere, and therefore, the notion of dialectics itself, is to be understood, is the subject of debate between Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek in their book— Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000). I analyze this debate, and focus on Butler’s notion of a ‘universal in becoming’, as an elaboration of the constitutive relation between the particular and universal within the political, and thus, of the recovery and articulation of a non-reified modernity. The notion of a ‘universal in becoming’ raises further conceptual and ‘practical’ issues. Are appeals to ‘universality’ (the appeals to justice, rights etc.) that articulate contemporary politics, appeals to a ‘ contingent universality’ (as Laclau contends), constituted by projecting particular claims as apparently universal, but which come to acquire legitimacy only by acquiring hegemony ? Or can political claims and struggles be articulated by a universality that remains explicitly empty—devoid of determinate content, hence a processive universal always in becoming, and it is this very emptiness that constitutes its normative legitimacy, as both Butler and Žižek argue, although in different ways? I address this problem through a return to the writings of Marx and Hegel, which form the background of this debate. In returning to Marx and Hegel, I underscore the centrality of the dialectic for explicating how the notion of a ‘universal in becoming’, plays out in the in the domain of political economy. However, with this return, the dialectic is no longer restricted to the present—to the oscillation between the particular and the universal constitutive of the impasse of the political in contemporary, reified modernity. Rather, I take up the notion of the dialectic in its historical movement, in order to provide a revised interpretation of both Marx’s (and Hegel’s) positions. This revision shows how Hegel’s theoretical conception of ‘absolute knowing’, and Marx’s political-normative project of overcoming (capitalist) alienation (and the realization of unalienated existence), does not culminate in the dead-end of absolute self-presence. That is, it does not entail the ‘end of history’, where the ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of history finally come together in reflective self-coincidence, in a society fully transparent to itself—without antagonisms, difference etc. Instead, I argue that since reification is inevitable, (Hegel’s and) Marx’s position cannot amount to the overcoming of reification (in reflective self-coincidence or transparency) but to its reflective acknowledgement, an acknowledgement that is institutionally realized in post-capitalist, unalienated society. In other words, I show how the post-Marxist, post-modern critique of Marx, based on the claim that he succumbs to a ‘metaphysics of presence’ conflates the processes of reification and alienation. Marx’s aim is to overcome capitalist alienation, but this does not entail overcoming (structural) reification. This interpretation provides fresh impetus to the ‘universalistic’ dimension of the political, thus, to the possibility of universal political-emancipatory projects, in the face of the hegemony of the capitalist form of reified modernity. In the final part of the study, I further explicate this universalist dimension, qua ‘universal in becoming’, by turning to Adorno’s notion of ‘ negative dialectics ’. Through a discussion of this idea, against the background of the Hegelian (and Marxian) conception of dialectics in our revised sense (not merely as ‘determinate negation’, as Adorno insists), I bring to light points of continuity (despite Adorno’s critique of Hegelian dialectics), between the two conceptions. The negative element of the dialectic (movement of thought), that is, a dialectic that does not culminate, each time, in a determinate negation, or assert ‘the identity of identity and non-identity’, but stays in the moment of negativity, that is ‘points beyond its own identifying movement’, amounts to a reflective awareness of our own finitude. It indicates the ‘non-closure’ of the social, from within the social, and not as (empirical) contingency etc. In other words, as Adorno, explicating the ‘double bind’ in relation to social, argues, Marx’s critique of ‘identity’ qua equivalent exchange under capitalism, does not aim at abolishing that equivalence as a ‘matter of fact’. For, not only is form/identity inescapable in principle, but a return to earlier ‘forms’ of non-equivalence/non-identity would reinstate the injustice inherent in those earlier societies. Rather, as Adorno asserts, it aims at making the “inequality within equality” visible, and thus, “aims at equality too”. When we criticize the barter principle as the identifying principle of thought, we want to realize the ideal of free and just barter. To date, this ideal is only a pretext. Its realization alone would transcend barter. Once critical theory has shown it up for what it is—an exchange of things that are equal yet unequal—our critique of inequality within equality aims at equality too […]. If no man had part of his labour withheld from him anymore rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking. (Adorno, 2003, 147) Therefore, the basic principle of negative dialectics, including the “double bind” inherent in it, that Adorno indicates, also holds for post-capitalist society. The difference, in relation to capitalism, as I have underscored, lies in reflective thematization of this necessary intertwinement and movement between identity and non-identity. In other words, ‘inequality’/non-identity becomes discernible only from within the seeming ‘totality’/’closure’ of ‘equality’, of equivalent exchange; and yet, the critique that uncovers ‘inequality within equality’ also ‘aims at equality’—in the sense that the recognition of inequality cannot remain in the negative moment of critique, but must take the ‘positive form’ of the realization of equality as a “matter of fact”. Therefore, the basic principle of negative dialectics, including the “double bind” inherent in it, that Adorno indicates, also holds for post-capitalist society. The difference, in relation to capitalism, as I have underscored, lies in reflective thematization of this necessary intertwinement and movement between identity and non-identity. In other words, ‘inequality’/non-identity becomes discernible only from within the seeming ‘totality’/’closure’ of ‘equality’, of equivalent exchange; and yet, the critique that uncovers ‘inequality within equality’ also ‘aims at equality’—in the sense that the recognition of inequality cannot remain in the negative moment of critique, but must take the ‘positive form’ of the realization of equality as a “matter of fact”. This, Adorno writes, “comes close enough to Hegel”. The difference with respect to Hegel lies in the direction of ‘intent’ of negative dialectics. The latter does not, theoretically or in practice, maintain the primacy of identity—claim that identity is ‘ultimate’ or ‘absolute’ in a final reconciliation (of identity and difference, universality and particularity etc.) that constitutes the telos of the dialectical unfolding of reason. Rather, for negative dialectics, “[…] identity is the universal coercive mechanism, which we, too, finally need , to free ourselves from universal coercion, just as freedom can come to be real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any “Back to nature””. (Adorno 2003, 147) In the book my endeavor also has been to open up the space of non-identity within identity, in order to (re)imagine a different world, a world where freedom (in noncoercive identity/equality) becomes a “matter of fact”. By reaffirming the possibility of the political in this specific sense of a ‘universal in becoming’ that is, one which involves neither a return to some pre-modern sacralized conception, nor to a reified modernist conception of universality qua ‘presence’, I bring to light the possibility and scope of an unalienated mode of existence from within the modernist tradition. The central claim that I make is that the recovery of unalienated existence in this modernist sense, implies an acknowledgement of our finitude and dependence, with respect to nature and to each other. This reflective realization of our finitude is nothing but the acknowledgement of the ‘double bind’ (oscillation between relative and absolute difference, negativity etc.) in which we are always caught. I attempt to show, how Marx’s vision of a post-capitalist society amounts to an institutional acknowledgement our finitude in this specific sense of the ‘double bind’, to which the movement of thought/reason is subject. It is in this sense therefore, that the recovery of an alternative, non-reified conception of modernity, covered over in the course of the historical emergence of contemporary modernity and the reified form it takes, must be understood. References Adorno, T. W. (2003). Negative Dialectics . New York, London: Continuum. Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities . New York, London: Verso. Bilgrami, A. (2014). Secularism, Identity and Enchantment . Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Butler, J. (2000) “Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism”. In, Butler, J., Laclau, E., Zižek, S., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left . New York, London: Verso Chatterjee, P. (1993). The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories . New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism . Ithaca: Cornell University Press Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy . Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Review of Muzaffar Ali's book by Richa Shukla Richa Shukla Assistant Professor, IIT Bhubhaneswar Book Review # Nov 13, 2023 Book review of Muzaffar Ali's India, Habermas and the Normative Structure of Public Sphere (Routledge, 2023) This text called India, Habermas and The Normative Structure of Public Sphere is an attempt by Muzaffar Ali, a contemporary Indian political philosopher, to make us revisit the hidden ambiguity behind Indian Public Sphere in reference to Habermas’s idea. He points to this ambiguity by making us think the public sphere is a space that makes us think and question. The book submits a proposition that public spheres and its institutions go hand in hand. He also mentions three criteria for calling a public space. I couldn’t help but notice a tension that Ali wants to point out between his method on how he would do Philosophy vs how ideally Indian philosophy has been done so far. The larger arguments reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s proposition while she discusses the nature of Philosophy, i.e., it's important to think about what we are doing in Philosophy.[1] The book consists of 5 chapters, excluding a preface and acknowledgements. It begins by pointing out a reflection as well as a theoretical concern on how the contemporary Indian situation is a possible glitch in the theorization of Habermas’s public sphere. Rather, it proposes ‘Samvada’, (संवाद) as a method of further analysis. The philosopher here submits that there is a coherence between contemporary Indian philosophy and Indian political theory which can very well be used to theorise the native idea of the Indian Public Sphere. It not only presents a picture of Habermas’s Public Sphere but also, brings in Indian philosophers, political theorists, and a few feminist scholars as well. The first part of the book dwells on a reflective theoretical need: Can we ever think of a native theory of the Indian Public Sphere? The book attempts to not only answer this theoretical concern but also create a 'theoretical toolbox' [2] for the same. Additionally, it revisits and re-reads old debates in Indian political theory and Indian philosophy. This, Ali suggests, can help us in rebounding the normative foundations of the Indian Public Sphere. I couldn’t help but notice that the book takes a good philosophical lurk from the past, present and future of the Indian public sphere in terms of establishing theoretical discourses. It makes an attempt to understand the timeline behind these discourses. The book concerns how one can do Indian political theory considering we no longer can use Western frameworks as it's incapable of capturing Indian reality. He has referred to political thinkers like, Aakash Singh Rathore, Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarukkai, Aditya Nigam and many others to set the theoretical tone of Indian political theory. For instance, along the lines of these thinkers, he argues that we need to understand the audience, the Indian audience horizontally as well, as so far, we have been burdened by the Western way of doing Indian Philosophy. We have been colonised in our approach to Indian Philosophy at times. While he re-visits the concept of ‘Samvada’ in this manner, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between this and Upanishad saying: वादे वादे जायते तत्त्वबोधः which implies that it's through diverse opinions that we get to know the truth. The book while, analysing Habermas’s concept of the public sphere, critically analyses key elements from the Indian domain as well whether it's the Indian debates on religion, caste, lived experience or the corporeal body. He writes, "The conceptualized Indian situation throws up two essential markers regarding the inadequacy of the Habermasian public sphere. At the social level, the hyper-presence of religion within Indian society needs a multi-pronged instrument of public debate rather than a unilateral notion of rationality to shoulder real and true public opinion."[3] At a time when globally, the phenomenology of the public sphere is altering, this text makes a few pertinent interventions while keeping in mind Indian lived realities. While trying to establish caste as a ‘unique public lived reality’, one can look at movies like Article 15, Mulk, Sairaat, Masaan and shows like Made in Heaven , Kota factory , and Class which capture the Indian essence and the complicated relationship which we share between religion, caste and Indian public sphere. Ali looks at religion as an important aspect of India’s social context. He establishes that the role of religion cannot be underestimated in evaluating the political and social contexts of Indian societies. This has been established by drawing from political thinkers like B.R. Ambedkar, and Valerian Rodrigues. In the Indian domain, while deconstructing caste and religion, Gopal Guru argues the same.[4] He writes caste has wings, it can fly, and that’s why it reaches a place before we reach it. These aspects have lived experience to their credit too. I could think of Feminist Philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir’s description of lived experience, in her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity . She takes the example of glue and paper. The way we put paper on glue and it becomes impossible to separate them, in a similar manner, it's impossible to detach 'lived experience', from human existence and our social reality. The book walks on a thin rope of some pertinent theoretical concerns, visible criticism of Habermas’s concept and an alternative that Ali is trying to provide for the same. [1] Dolan, M. Frederick. "Arendt on Philosophy and Politics". https://philarchive.org/archive/DOLAOP [2] Term used by Ali for the same. [3] Ali, India, Habermas And The Normative Structure of Public Sphere , page no. 111. [4] Guru, Gopal. "Dalits from Margin to Margin." India International Centre Quarterly , 27: 111-116.

Back to Liberal Basics Danish Hamid PhD Scholar, Department of HSS , IIT Bombay Article # Feb 22, 2022 This article is part of the series of responses from philosophers on the hijab row . First a story, or what we like to call pretentiously – a thought experiment. Imagine that two brothers, Ravi and Vijay have ventured on a camping trip with a group of friends. They are all near the same age, there being no hierarchy between them. While walking through the forest, Vijay indulges his habit of plucking a single leaf from every low-hanging tree that he comes across. Ravi asks Vijay what he is doing. Of course, he can see what he is doing. What Ravi means is that he must explain his actions as being something worthwhile, sensible, and which someone might have a reason to do. In other words, ‘better give a good reason for doing this, or else, Stop.’ Is Vijay under any obligation to explain it to Ravi? I think not, unless he wants to. The others in the group agree with him. Ravi then turns back to Vijay and asks him to justify it, or offer an excuse for what he is doing. Now, “unlike explanations, justifications and excuses presume at least prima facie fault, a charge to be rebutted”. (Benn, 87) Is Vijay under an obligation to offer a justification for his innocent indulgence? After all, what’s so wrong about plucking a leaf every now and then? And it is not as if he was trespassing in a grove of threatened, near-extinct plants and trees, and neither is Ravi the resident Forest Officer, and last they checked, it was not a crime in any of the books of law. Such being the case, Vijay has “no obligation to meet a challenge to justify his performance until there is a charge to answer”. (ibid) Suppose, however, that in his capacity as an enterprising vigilante on behalf of Chlorophyll everywhere, Ravi decides to handcuff Vijay, thereby preventing him from his indulgence. Now, Vijay can properly demand a justification from him, and a mere ‘tu quoque’ reply (literally – ‘you also!’) that Vijay, on his part had also not offered Ravi a justification for plucking leaves, would just not fly. This is because Vijay’s actions had done nothing to interfere with Ravi’s. “The burden of justification falls on the interferer, not on the person interfered with” (ibid). So while Vijay might properly resent Ravi’s interference, Ravi has no ground of complaint against Vijay. Suppose now that the priggish Ravi does come up with a justification. Vijay, he says, is wasting his time – instead of pointless leaf-plucking, he could be doing something useful - helping the group plan the adventure, or listening to an ebook, or entertaining everyone with the song “Keh duun tumhe”. But, of course, Vijay doesn’t have to accept this justification for interference. Even if Ravi were right, and Vijay could have been doing something useful, what has it to do with Ravi? “An unfavorable evaluation of someone else's action does not necessarily warrant one's interfering to prevent it.” (ibid) The upshot for the Hijab Case – or any analogous case of interference Now, this story, a fabricated mish-mash from Yash Chopra’s Deewar and Stanley Benn’s A Theory of Freedom (1988) , is supposed to convey a simple point. Volatile and non-conformist though Vijay is, he is under no requirement to demonstrate to Ravi that he has good reasons for doing what he was doing. On the other hand, it is required of the conscientious but self-righteous Ravi that he must justify his interference in Vijay’s actions. The two demands for justification are incommensurable so to speak, which is philosopher’s talk to mean that they are not equal or equivalent and thus cannot be spoken of synonymously in any meaningful way. This is the most minimum, yet characteristic claim in liberal political thought – that unless your act is harming someone, nobody has a right to interfere in your actions, or prevent you from carrying them out. What constitutes harm in a given situation will be a job of a 500 page book by someone like Joel Feinberg in which the political philosopher will flesh out all her claims, followed by replies to all anticipated objections and counter-responses by other philosophers. How fun! However, this basic commitment of non-interference, if not an axiom in liberal political philosophy, is still something incredibly intuitive accepted by nearly all liberal political thoughts and its off-shoots, including modern day conservatives, socialists, many feminists, etc. It would just require a very strong argument to refute, and in the Hijab case, no one has offered any persuasive arguments yet. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is still the best place to begin thinking about this problem, and a fine example of philosophical writing where the writer anticipates many well worn counter-arguments and writes with characteristic verve. The upshot of this for the Hijab controversy should be clear enough. The Hijab is seemingly a harmless piece of clothing. To prevent women, or in this case specifically, pupils and teachers from wearing it to school would require a justification. Thus, the Preventers ought to justify why there ought to be no Hijabs in school. The Wearers, Donners, Hijabis, have to offer no justification on the liberal view that I laid out above, unless of course the Wearers, Donners, Hijabis, have themselves been forced to wear it (Some, primarily feminist thinkers, include conditioning and socialization also as reasons sufficient enough to question the Hijab. But very few go to the extent of supporting state coercion to wish to remove it). For the Preventers, matters complicate further when they want to single out Hijab over other religious symbols – the most obvious case being turbans sported by Sikh boys and men. But States are Special?! My readers might question me and say that I am misrepresenting the issue, and that the story I have related doesn’t fit the facts of the Hijab controversy. In my story, the characters are equal, there being, recall, ‘no hierarchy between them’. Those are not the facts in the Karnataka Hijab controversy. The state has decided that Hijabs are impermissible. The State is unlike Ravi and Vijay. Is the state, per me, under an obligation to provide any reasons of the sort that Ravi was sought to provide? Now we are in the realm of what Jeremy Waldron calls political Political theory – the nature of state and governmental institutions, political representation, accountability, secularism, the separation of church and state, and the rule of law. Explicating the limits and confines of state power, its relation with religion, with minorities, with religious minorities – that’s another 500 page book. What a fun topic – but certainly what a short article like this would hesitate to go into. It seems obviously true that a State is a different kind of animal, and certainly not like individuals. So while it isn’t OK for me to demand protection-money from you in exchange for protection, the state manages to collect taxes, and on my refusal to pay, may even fine me, or attach my properties, or send me to prison. So the State is special, apparently, and states have rights to make coercive laws and force individuals to do things which other individuals just don’t have. But this is too quick. Maybe the State has the power to do this, in exchange for protecting citizens' rights (and enforcing contracts, and preventing crime, and increasingly in the 20th century, in providing, healthcare, education, even jobs) because citizens agree that the state may be given these powers, along with all the corresponding duties, all neatly enshrined in a constitution, backed by the constituent power of the people. This doesn’t automatically mean that the State has the power to interfere in my personal life – what I eat, what I wear, who I worship, who I sleep with. Furthermore, it takes no philosopher to see that the State doesn’t speak in its own impersonal voice. It usually speaks in the voice of the Parliament, a legislative body, or occasionally the courts. On what grounds ought the Parliament decide an issue? Well, many, if not most liberals, would insist that any coercive rule argued for by any individual, or group which speaks for a proposition in the Parliament (from Parler. French, literally ‘talk shop’) ought to be based on a reason which is not sectarian, biased, or idiosyncratic in such a way that it is not acceptable to or justifiable, to all those persons over whom the rule is going to have authority. In a modern democracy, where free and equal citizens disagree with each other over profound or profane matters, including morals, religion, economics, and what constitutes the ‘good life’, how shall any moral or political limits be placed on us? The answer that is usually given by a version of liberalism called justificatory liberalism, is that any such imposition should be justified by an appeal to ideas, values, arguments that all those persons who are affected by said coercive rule, might be able to reasonably accept or endorse. Variations, qualifications, additions on this basic idea, will be a subject of, you guessed it, some more massive tomes by Rawls, Wolterstorff, Eberle, Talisse and other brilliant philosophers. The unsuccessful evasion of Philosophy So, philosophers might bring their tools to dissect and explore all these questions, and make us all the wiser about how the relationship between state, the individual and religious symbols in the public sphere all hang together, and some philosophers have offered to do in the (web)pages on this very network. But some others might suggest that in the interest of time and considering how disputatious philosophers are, there is no need to enter philosophical discussion in the first place. They might suggest that we ought to look instead at the nature of the Indian Constitution, its own version of secularism, the state of case-law and the practice of the Supreme Court. What do the courts say, and how to they decide these issues? What does the Constitution say? It is that document and no other that ought to tell us what the correct answer to this quandary is. So what does the Constitution say? Pertinent to this issue, a cursory look at the state of Indian Constitutionalism will tell us that it promises to its citizens the rights to equality, freedom of expression, right to life with dignity, and many others, while also giving the centre and state right to make laws such as the Karnataka Education Act. The truth is that whether the anti-philosophers like it or not, in deciding a question like this, the court will also have to dip into philosophical complexities. It will have to either balance the rights of the States and the individual (if that is meaningfully possible), or it will have to uphold the right of one party and not the other. In doing that, it will have implicitly and inevitably made a decision about which rights it deems inviolable. So as with everyone else, even the court will have to argue philosophically. One can do it well, and one can do it badly. And the truth is that, these questions are hard. So we might want to be humble, and err on the side of caution, and not be very confident in our considered opinions, to say nothing about our pre-reflective prejudices. The liberal view, I suggest, does just that. It keeps the peace, while seeking to protect the rights of all. And it often succeeds! Where do I stand? After this short explainer (written especially for non-philosophers), it should be obvious that on this Hijab issue, and any such issue where social or state interference prevents individuals from exercising their choice, I come down, unapologetically, on the side of the liberal principle. For me, Mill’s harm principle is not the last word on such matters, but it still ought to be first word. And therefore, I have to come down on the side of those who say that the girls have the right to wear the Hijab to school. I am not particularly invested in what the Muslim women in question choose to do eventually. They owe me or anyone else no explanations. In fact, I go even further. I do not like the mandate of uniforms. Sure, uniforms may have a useful purpose if they help channel the energies of pupils towards education, sport and play, and help them along in the direction of healthy socialization, instead of displaying the stark divides in wealth and incomes. On the flip side, they do seem to privilege regimentation and obedience over spontaneity and creative self expression. Be that as it may, in accordance with my liberal sympathies, I don’t agree that even these goods that I mentioned above are enough reason to force me to conform to uniforms, any uniforms (!), if I don’t want them. The reason you don’t see me (and many others like me) on the streets demonstrating against uniforms is perhaps because it doesn’t seem worth all the trouble, and frankly, a uniform isn’t egregious after all. I don’t like it in principle, but I’m willing to tolerate it. I’d prefer there weren’t any, but they don’t warrant a rebellion. [That’s the problems with us liberals, we did all the protesting we had to hundreds of years ago, when feudal and monarchical power didn’t respect our (liberal) rights to live, liberty and property, err...the pursuit of happiness. Now we wake up only when these rights are threatened...which is happening a little bit too often these days.] Between pragmatism and principle But I digress. There is a time to discuss the perils and benefits of uniforms. But this is not that time. Because the issue here is not merely about uniforms. If it were, then teachers wouldn’t have been seen removing Hijabs outside school premises before entering their classes (a scene which many onlookers have described as humiliating). This issue is after-all a conflict between religious self-expression and the right to education. Moreover, the mandate on ‘ uniform uniforms’ is sure to come a cropper, as soon as we consider other religious symbols such as the Turban. Considering that the mandate is soon to encompass the religious expression of other communities, in a country as diverse as India, one wonders whether an order like this is even rational. More importantly, to put a portion of a religious community in the unenviable position of having to choose between religious expression and education is prima facie unjust. In order to navigate around the above problem, we have seen recourse to pragmatic solutions in the past – such as that the courts shall decide whether a particular religious symbol is ‘essential’ to a particular religion. Now, given that different religious sects, trends, and tendencies in the same religion differ among themselves in their practices of reading, hermeneutical traditions, and their own debates of authority, it is difficult to see how even a constitutional court may be able to adjudicate on complex issues such as this. Anyone who knows anything about how scripture is interpreted is familiar with the deep and complex interpretive controversies, together with the demand of knowing the tradition in and out, along with expertise in a classical language, usually a dead one. What is essential to one sect is non-essential to another. I encourage readers to look up the case of Abdul Karim Shorish Kashmiri v The State of West Pakistan, where the Pakistani Court held that the legal process in incapable of determining the answer to the question ‘who is a Muslim?’, until this question was then determined by a Constitutional Amendment, leading to the change in the legal status of the Ahmadis from being Muslims to a non-Islamic religious minority. My own view is that Courts shouldn’t decide on such abstract issues of doctrine as what constitutes an essential practice, unless the rights of some individuals or vulnerable groups cannot be protected through any other means, or when the traditionalists are bent on abusing the rights of their congregants or other members of the community. Therefore, it is a mistake to go into the theological and scriptural niceties right now (or perhaps ever), about whether the Hijab is obligatory or optional in Islamic scriptures. What is important, however, is this Liberal minimum - that no organ of the state must interfere in the religious expression of a community as long as it doesn't harm people from another community or others within that religious community. Since no such prima facie case has been made, this rule appears coercive and oppressive. On the question of reform ‘Reform’ is a weasel word. What is reform to one section of a community is oppression and persecution for another. The liberal must take the principled stance against interference, without necessarily seeing every instance of it as morally pernicious per se. If an arm of the State is to be mobilized to protect the rights of those who do not wish to wear Hijab, and if this to be called ‘reform’, that is fair too, and that doesn’t by itself go against the principle of non-interference. However, if the reformist goal is the much ambitious one of ‘liberating’ Muslim, whatever that might mean, it is best that it must come from within the Muslim community itself, through dialogue, discussion, education. The truth is that only those who feel stifled by traditional authority and its imposition of Hijab will choose to call it reform. For many others, the word ‘reform’ is an affront against their avowal of religious identity. The state ought to protect those individuals who are harmed by those elements which seek to impose their view of the good life on them. But experience has shown that a purely statist ‘reformist’ interventions will only bury the problem and not solve it. The example of Ataturk’s and successive governments’ restraints on religious expression in the Turkish public sphere is right in front of us. As soon as political conditions in Turkey changed and the Erbakan- Erdogan Islamist governments came to power, Hijabs in a thousand flowery prints bloomed in Taksim Square. Therefore, one, the argument for coercive state intervention in this case needs to be very strong, and I haven't seen any one which I find persuasive. Two, even if those who wish to impose a Hijab-ban are right, their victory won’t be a permanent one. If they believe that educated, rational and reflective human beings would not wear a patriarchal relic like Hijab, they must allow girls to receive a good education, and one which inculcates critical thinking and see where the chips fall. The long march toward secular-reason Now, some might question me and say that the burden of my song has been to exonerate the Hijab, and its advocates. Quite the contrary. My position is that, as a non-Hijab donning man, it is not really my place to comment on the meaning of Hijab for many Muslim women. Although the more vocal among them have come for, against and even, believe it or not, for-and-against it. However, being a naive believer in the (liberal) dogma that correct opinions win out in the long term, if given enough breathing space and a conducive environment, I wish only to urge more discussion on the issue, which is not backed by the coercive arm of the state and the blunt instrument of the law. It seems to me that the correct (justificatory) liberal position is to let Muslim women decide. But what about the appeals to scripture, you may say. How can a liberal be pleased with a situation where religious people decide the issue invoking religious scripture, and speaking in a characteristically religious vocabulary? Well, one response is that ‘religious people, like all people, should get to decide what they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.’ That is the quintessential liberal claim. But this aside, there is an academic/historical question about the upshot of religious-style argumentation. I shall quote Jeffrey Stout on this point ...consider the early-modern debates among Christians of various types over moral and political questions. Here we have numerous groups, all of which were committed to treating the Christian Bible as an authoritative source of normative insight into how such questions should be answered. Yet they did not differ only on what this text says and implies. They also differed on who is entitled to interpret it, on whether it is the sole authoritative source of normative insight into such matters, and on who is entitled to resolve apparent conflicts between it and other putative sources of normative insight. Because they differed on all of these points, they eventually found themselves avoiding appeals to biblical authority when trying to resolve their ethical and political differences. The reason was simple; the appeals did not work. So the differing parties increasingly tried to resolve their differences on other grounds. In this respect, their ethical discourse with one another became secularized. (Stout, 93-4) Muslims, including both scholars and the laity, are increasingly coming towards discussions on all issues, about the proper role of religious, pietistic and rational or secular reasons in deciding all kinds of moral and ethical questions, and increasingly in the 20th Century the Muslim world is going through a similar process, that Stout has described above. The increasingly diverse conclusions that interpreters have come to after reading the verses that relate to, or at least seem to relate to something analogous to Hijab, tells us that in order to come to any sort of consensus on the topic, the discourse among Muslims themselves will have to eventually become secular, in that it will have to employ a vocabulary that doesn’t always invoke religious argument. Now, whether between all these competing tendencies it manages to reach a harmonious conclusion or merely a modus Vivendi, will be there for us to see. Regardless, statist interventions will only stifle this process of churning. If anything, the debate needs to be nudged along, not stopped. Unfortunately, in this case, it appears that some secular voices, and not religion, are becoming the conversation-stopper. And that is just not the ‘liberal’ thing to do. References Benn, Stanley. A Theory of Freedom, 1998. Cambridge University Press. Stout, Jeffrey. Democracy and Tradition, 2004. Princeton University Press ___________________________________________________________________________________________ Read other articles in this series: Ariba Zaidi -- A Word of Caution to 'the Uniformist' and 'the Reformist’ Danish Hamid -- Back to Liberal Basics Hina Mushtaq -- Can women decide for themselves? Sania Ismailee -- The Karnataka Hijab row is about Right to Education...

What Responsibility? Whose Responsibility? Bhaskarjit Neog Associate Professor, Centre for Philosophy, JNU Book Excerpt # Feb 7, 2024 An excerpt from Bhaskarjit Neog's book What Responsibility? Whose Responsibility: Intention, Agency and Emotions of Collective Entities (2024, Routledge, India). Published with permission from Routledge (India). Examples of collective wrongdoings abound across societies. The moral history of human society is full of such cases – the bloody wars, mob violence, racism, communal and ethnic riots, oppression by colonial powers, exploitation in the name of caste and class, and numerous incidents of coups, gang wars, corporate frauds, and terrorist activities. Their impacts on the moral community are so startling that we do not know how to reconcile ourselves to any punitive measures offered by any existing arrangements of a society. We go out in public and argue why the activities of such groups or collectives are reprehensible, and why we must excoriate them. In most cases, however, public rage dies down over a period of time without receiving much moral attention or condemnation. One of the reasons behind the disappearance of moral resentment from public memory is the fact that we do not always have a clear understanding of the simple question – who is responsible when a group or collective is held responsible? We do not seem to know much about the idea of moral responsibility for collective wrongdoings as much as we know about moral responsibility of individual wrongdoings. Although collective wrongdoings of this kind are ultimately carried out by individuals, it seems quite appropriate to first talk about the moral culpability of the whole organization or entity of which they are part. On the face of it, this idea of attributing moral properties to groups or collectives is uncomplicated and a matter of our everyday moral vocabulary. We can easily comprehend why a group or community deserves to be condemned for any action or omission, just the way any individual does. Non-philosophically speaking, the fact that, say, Nazi Germans are collectively blamed for their cruelty against the Jews is no more complex a matter to understand than it is to understand why Hitler is blamed for the same cruelty. As far as the normal comprehension of the meaning of blame is concerned, it hardly makes any difference whether the concept of blame is used in a collective or an individual context. The collective/individual contrast seems immaterial to the semantics of "blame" or other responsibility-bearing moral notions. But, to view it more analytically, there appears a serious conceptual problem. The idea of collective responsibility tends to become somewhat slippery and eludes our understanding when we try to understand it by following our easy grasp of the concept of individual moral responsibility. That Hitler is blamed for inhuman actions is easy enough to understand, because there is, or was, an individual human person in space and time that constituted the determinate target of our attitude of blame. In other words, there is a clear answer to the question: “Who is to be blamed?” or “Who experiences the feeling of guilt?” In contrast, there is no distinct identifiable target through which the idea of collective responsibility can be made sense of. Thus, when we talk about collective responsibility, one might bluntly respond with questions: What responsibility? And whose responsibility are you talking about? A collective – whether with a structure or without it – unlike its constituent individuals, does not seem to have any clear responsibility-bearing make-up. For it is not an embodied entity with its own consciousness and rationality required for being a moral agent. To track down its blameworthy character we need to know how and in what sense their actions and inactions are intentional or purposeful. Given that intentions and other responsibility-making psychological states are paradigmatically understood as a matter of minded entities, groups and collectives being non-minded, cannot be said to have such conscious states. Similarly, unlike their individual members, they cannot have or experience any moral emotions when they are made aware of their reprehensilizable behaviours. Neither can they sympathize or empathize with the victims of their actions in the way required of them. Nevertheless, it is a hard normative fact that we do talk about the moral responsibility of collectives, and we do hold them seriously morally accountable for many things. Many a time our responsibility statements about individuals are in fact grounded in a language of the responsibility of groups or collectives to which they belong. So, the questions that linger in our deliberative mind are: Is the phenomenon of collective responsibility really real, or is it metaphorical – a mere façon de parler , as many would like to call it? If it is real, is it a summation or incorporation of the moral responsibility of individuals, or is it something different from them – both in terms of its contents and meaning? And what gets added or obliterated in our standard understanding of responsibility when we see it through the prism of a collective framework? Besides, normatively speaking, how do we evaluate the moral status of individuals who stand up and raise their voice against the things that are done in the name of their group? For instance, how do we make sense of the moral status of those protestors who hit the streets with slogans such as NotInOurName or NotInMyName? This book offers a modest ground for judiciously responding to some of these questions. It aims to redeem collective responsibility by defending the consistency and legitimacy of collective intentions, collective agency, and collective emotions. It talks of collective moral responsibility as the responsibility of collectives without either reducing it to the moral responsibility of the collective members or making it a case where their exact moral positions are effectively made blurred. The ground for defending this account is thus a non-individualist or quasi-collectivist ground – a ground located in the contested space between two prominent approaches – collectivism and individualism. Three components may be considered for a standard justification of moral responsibility – intention, agency, and affective or reactive attitudes of the subject concerned. These components show why, how, and on what ground a subject may be taken to be an appropriate candidate of our moral evaluations. Intentions refer to the psychological state of a subject with which the action concerned is performed. Agency is the capacity that the subject has for being able perform a morally considerable action or omission. And affective or reactive attitudes are humane reactions of the relevant subject’s putative moral agency that is amenable for the attribution of moral responsibility. These components are important not just for the justification of moral responsibility of structured collectives but also for the less-structured collectives. To proceed on this path, I draw on the latest resources of two theoretically interconnected areas of analytic philosophy – first, collective intentionality, a newly developed area in the intersection of philosophy of action and mind, and the second, somewhat old but now a freshly rejuvenated field called social ontology with perspectives from psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences and other disciplines. Both these areas investigate the nature and functions of variety of cognitive and non-cognitive properties such as beliefs, desires, intentions, guilt, remorse, and others that underly the constitutions of collective affairs. While the justification of a substantive account of collective responsibility along this line has been in the know for quite some time, there has not been a systematic effort of bringing together two equally compelling approaches, namely the cognitivist and emotivist ways. I explore the possibility of combining them in a way that would elevate the debate of collective responsibility from the narrow confines of both individualism and collectivism. This is a book on morality of groups with a special focus on the concept of collective responsibility. So, naturally it is a book that can be catalogued under moral philosophy. But since it is a product of weaving and stitching resources of multiple areas of philosophy and other allied disciplines, its significance may also be seen in other fields of humanities and social sciences where the issue of collectivity is discussed and debated. The prospective audience of the book thus includes, but not restricted to, moral philosophers, political theorists, legal theorists, just war theorists, business ethicists, policy makers, and others who take interest in the general question of moral responsibility in collective contexts.

Philosophy Education and Job Competencies Nishant Kumar Assistant Professor, Joy University (Tirunelveli, India) Article # Nov 6, 2022 I recently switched to one private University in Tamil Nadu - Joy University. I had been assigned to frame the curriculum and course structure for BA Philosophy. While framing the curriculum, I stuck with a few questions that I thought to discuss with Indian Philosophy Network (IPN) members. Therefore in the IPN mailing, I raised a few questions in the hope to receive some responses. The questions were: what is the current trend in the job market, and how an undergraduate Philosophy student could easily get a job? Is there a job apart from academics and research for Philosophy UG students? If a Philosophy student has to go into journalism, law, HR, consultancy, etc., then why shouldn’t the student will study journalism, law, etc. respectively, and get a degree in that particular subject, instead of studying a few years of Philosophy? How Philosophy as a subject could generate jobs? These questions strike some IPN members as important to be discussed. In this regard, I acknowledge here sincere thanks to Sudakhya, Jobin Mathew Kanjirakkat, Mohan K Pillai, Siddharth, and Varun for discussing with me and giving me insight on these questions. While framing these questions, I thought that these questions would again land up to the fundamental question about philosophy - "what is philosophy?". Bertrand Russell has answered it as the love of wisdom whereby wisdom is having a comprehensive picture of reality. However, the sentence "comprehensive picture of reality" is contentious and raises further questions. How do we get a comprehensive picture without experiencing all the aspects of life? Suppose, I am a poor philosopher that earns so little that I can hardly sustain myself. However, I have been given a task to explain the life of a rich person. Can I be able to provide a comprehensive picture of a rich person without experiencing that life? Can I be able to know "what it is like to be a rich person"? Is it meant that we can never be able to provide a comprehensive picture because of our limitation to experience various aspects of life? If that would be the case, does philosophical knowledge get reduced to knowing some buzzwords, which upon hearing by common people would create an impression that philosophers are 'intellectual' persons? Is philosophy just about discussing random thoughts? Or does philosophy have some practical relevance in our day to day life? For Jobin, who is an independent philosophy scholar, the aim of philosophy is to "clarify the ideas and develop a reasonable concern for our fellow human and non human beings. Business or job-providers, on the other hand, are interested in increasing production, consumption and profits." Jobin’s statement consists of two parts (a) aim of philosophy (b) aim of job providers. Jobin has nicely summed up the aim of philosophy that having philosophical skill helps to understand various ideas in a much better manner than not having that skill. Further, by studying philosophy we would get exposure to ethical theories and thereby would be concerned for sentient beings. However, I am unsure why Jobin wants to completely differentiate the aim of philosophy from the aim of job-providers. If we differentiate it completely without considering "what it is like to be a job-provider" we are certainly restricting ourselves to know one aspect of life, i.e. aspect of a job-provider. This is because, to know about what it is like to be a job-provider, entrepreneur, business person, etc. we have to experience that state. Then only we could explain what it is like to be that person. Maybe Jobin’s view to differentiate the two aims is to point that the primary objective of philosophy is not to generate jobs and further there is less probable chance that an undergrad in philosophy could land up in high paying jobs. However, this does not seem implied from his other statement- "if an undergraduate [philosophy] program can include components of relevant aspects of business and environmental studies, it will be very helpful I think." This statement of Jobin conveys that if we will study philosophy through integrating other subjects then the importance of studying philosophy will increase among those students who want to get immediate jobs after their undergrad. The similar view is also maintained by Mohan, Sudakhya, and Siddharth. Mohan, a Trainee Counselling Psychologist, believes that learning only philosophy without integrating with other subjects or skill does not help undergrad students. He said "I do not think majoring purely in philosophy is of merit to students." Majoring purely in philosophy "does not equip you with a marketable skill, it does not familiarize you with a domain of work, it does not even give you a generic skill like teaching." However, "philosophy is an invaluable companion to other subjects". It equips ones "with the basic tools and exposure to reason and deeply understands the foundations and processes of any subject." For him, by studying philosophy we would develop self-reflecting skills as he said "philosophy offers a powerful set of tools to navigate the confusion and trials of young adulthood — where one is at that crucial phase of questioning, figuring out, and reconciling existential questions." In terms of getting a high paying job, his opinion is to combine philosophy with other subjects/domains/disciplines. This will, as he argued, "really elevate a person’s job success, and more importantly, life satisfaction." A similar opinion is also maintained by Sudakhya, a research scholar at University of Delhi. She suggests to include more subjects of applied philosophy in a curriculum of undergrad philosophy course. Her suggestion included "Philosophy of Technology, Ethical implications of IT, Business ethics/Corporate ethics, Philosophy of Law, Philosophical Counseling". According to her, these courses will help to "build practical skills" that are required in a job market. Siddharth, a philosophy faculty at Sai University, thinks the nature of philosophy is "to look beyond the immediately useful". That is, the primary aim of Philosophy course is to transcend the practical living and hence not to get involved in jobs, as he said- "I do not mean that a UG in philosophy is not likely to help you find jobs, but that this is not the primary aim of the programme". One question can arise here; isn't any phenomenon would have more than one primary aim? If it is so, why not studying philosophy courses would have two primary aims - (a) to look beyond the immediately useful (b) get a job. Why should we simply reject the practical way of living as not one of philosophy’s primary aims? I requested Siddharth to reply on this question. He responded that his comment "philosophy often seeks to look beyond the immediately useful" should not mean that philosophy does not "helps us transcend practical living and hence not get involved in jobs". Instead, it should be implied that philosophy wants us "to look beyond the immediate, to reflect on the practical (including jobs)." This last statement does not contrast with my viewpoint that philosophy course would have two aims. Furthermore, Siddharth thinks that philosophy is an important and crucial tool to help us in living in this world, and also as far as jobs and careers are concerned. This is because, philosophy can provide certain skills like "(a) reasoning in a systematic manner, (b) identifying concepts and assumptions the underlie issues, which trains them to be better at identifying problems and thinking about alternatives, and (c) an ability to organize their communication in a clear manner (especially written communication)." These skills "together be called critical thinking and communication skills." I agree with Siddharth that studying philosophy courses equips us with critical thinking and communication skills, which are essential skills for any student. According to Varun, who is a philosophy faculty at IISERB, there are two ways of thinking about the relation between philosophy and the job opportunities: (1) jobs specifically/traditionally associated with the discipline of philosophy and (2) the role of philosophy for any kind of profession. The often mentioned criticism of the discipline entailing a few choices of professions arises when we focus on just (1). Indeed, at present, we have only a limited set of imaginations of being a professional philosopher. Now, is this a "problem" or a "feature" of the discipline? Also, other Humanities and Social Science disciplines -- like literature, history and anthropology -- share these narrow possibilities of professionalism when compared to sciences and engineering. (Here, Mohan points that other Humanities and Social Sciences degrees, unlike philosophy, do offer the job opportunities as school teachers and researchers at think-tanks and other NGOs. This is yet to happen for philosophy degree holders.) Varun, thus, thinks that the job entailments should not be decided only based on (1). In contrast to this, when we consider point (2), we see that philosophy -- unlike any other discipline -- is in fact useful to a wide and diverse range of professions. Critical thinking and argumentative skills, exposure to ethics, and other philosophical perspectives are essential in every profession. Sketech by Nishant Kumar I agree with Varun and Siddharth that by studying philosophy courses, a student would be able to equip themselves with 'critical thinking and communication skills', or in short 'philosophical skills'. A philosophy student not only learns how to articulate a particular problem succinctly, but can also provide new arguments or can find the fallacies in existing arguments of any idea. However, I disagree with Siddharth that the primary aim of philosophy is not to get into a job. Instead, I strongly think that one of the primary aims of philosophy is to get into a job (a) to sustain itself (b) to get the experience of one aspect of reality, i.e. being into a job or to know ‘what it is like to be in that job’. Now two questions arise that (a) how a philosophy student can compete with other discipline/branch students to get hired by a company (b) how a company will profit by hiring a philosophy student. My opinion is that a philosophy undergrad student must take any kind of basic technical skills of their choice after their undergrad or during their undergrad to become a first preference for any company. Philosophy undergrad students will definitely learn faster because of having thinking skills that they acquired during their undergraduate program. With that technical skill they can easily get hired by any company that works in that technical domain. After getting hired, they must ensure that they will go through a training program of that job profile so that they will understand the job profile in a much better manner. With the experience of training program in company, having acquired technical skills, and having philosophical skills they can be a true asset for that company. This is because, a philosophy student with their knowledge of different cultures can understand the user demand of a product, and can explain succinctly to the team members for improvisation and innovation of any product, and can lead the team effectively. With their technical skills they can improvise a product and also can innovate new products as per the user demand. Although a philosophy student will be an asset for a company, I am skeptical that a philosophy student will stay forever in one company for the job. As Siddharth has mentioned that one of the aim of philosophy is to transcend practical living, I think that a philosophy student will definitely continuously switch to other companies to know various aspect of practical living or will go into research to find the comprehensive picture of reality.

Traditional vs Colonial: Navigating Dichotomies of Philosophy in India Ankita Kushwaha and Megha Kapoor PhD scholars, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University (respectively) and Teaching Fellows, Sai University Article # Dec 14, 2023 The realm of philosophy in India has diverse thinking traditions reflecting a blend of orthodox, heterodox, and various local cultural ideologies. Contemporary scholars find themselves caught in a pronounced dichotomy in the engagement with traditions, primarily shaped by historical forces. They are either charged for aligning with glorifying traditional concepts or critiqued for viewing the tradition through a colonial lens. Here, we seek to explore the challenges faced by contemporary philosophers of India while engaging with the philosophical concepts embedded in various traditional sources. We argue that in engaging with these concepts, philosophers are required to address the challenges posed by the above-mentioned dichotomous relationship. Moreover, as we navigate this dichotomy, our primary purpose is to stress the importance of thoroughly looking into traditional ideas. Noteworthily, in many instances, scholars accept the text without critical analysis and provide justifications that contribute to the glorification. In light of this, our primary objective is to emphasise an urgent need for a more rigorous and discerning philosophical inquiry that furthers the development of a more detailed understanding of the traditional ways of thinking. The Importance of Engaging with Traditional Ideologies How we perceive ourselves individually and socially is impacted by the environment in which we are born and grow. Any theorisation, therefore, cannot be in isolation. The theorisation must have an understanding of our traditions and local norms; at the same time, it must encompass our present lived experiences (Guru and Sarukkai 2012). Understanding various traditional sources is essential because they encompass the lived experiences of the past, which continue to shape our present experiences. The term "traditional" is often used to describe generational practices, values, and customs. These sources manifest in classical texts, typically composed in dominant languages like Sanskrit and Persian (Chandhoke 2019, 80), offering well-structured and organised insights into tradition. These local thoughts are embedded in diverse forms such as stories, folklore, fables, songs, and other cultural expressions. They not only provide a window into the historical aspects of a particular geographical location and community but also incorporate contemporary elements unique to their context. The recent discussion regarding the decolonisation of philosophy in India operates under the assumption that the colonisers have influenced the philosophical perspective. It necessitates a decolonisation effort to address the burden of Western thought that hinders the accurate representation of Indian intellectual traditions. However, the blame on colonisation from the perspective of Brahminism needs to be revisited. When colonisation occurred, Brahmins, well-versed in Sanskrit and holding higher positions, assisted the colonisers in shaping a new understanding of India, which led to the emergence of a form of Hindu philosophy that was dominantly Sanskritised, further resulting in the under-representation of thoughts from other traditions. Interestingly, despite being practised by a small portion of the population, Brahmanism managed to establish a subcontinental identity. Its popularity can be attributed to its ritual functions, ceremonies, and the adoption of Sanskrit as a common language (Thapar 1989, 209–231). The Dichotomy of Traditional vs Colonial The texts and ideologies of India represent various philosophical thoughts that provide insight into the intricate fabric of Indian society. Engaging with these texts and ideologies in a contemporary context allows for a deeper understanding of cultural heritage, providing a platform for critical dialogue. While acknowledging their historical roots, scholars must avoid absolutism to promote further an evaluative approach accommodating evolving perspectives. Therefore, in contemporary times, a conscious effort exists to critique colonial impact on philosophy in India by reviving and re-evaluating indigenous thought systems. However, the challenge lies in avoiding oversimplification and essentialisation. This task becomes even more complex, considering that many Indian intellectuals predominantly come from upper-caste backgrounds. This background gives them a privilege that does not necessitate them to critically examine their inherited traditions (Nanda 2010, 185). Consequently, this lack of critical examination from a segment of the intellectual elite further complicates the nuanced process of re-evaluating and revitalising philosophical traditions in India in the post-colonial context. This issue can be explored more closely by delving into the Mahabharata scholarship. When scholars discuss Mahabharata[1] as a foundational text for the Indian subcontinent, their use of terminologies and explanations may suggest that it is the greatest epic of all time for India. However, it is crucial to ask for whom it holds this esteemed position. Edward Dimock describes Mahabharata as the "founding library of Brahmin-Indian civilization," emphasising its role as an encyclopedia covering history, legend, edification, religion, art, drama, and morality specific to that civilisation (Dimock 1974, 53). Janaky adds another layer to this perspective, highlighting how the Bhrgus or Brahmins asserted authority over social, political, and moral realms not by controlling princes but through their influence on Mahabharata scholarship (Janaky 1992, 1997–1999). Overlooking this aspect universalises Mahabharata as a text for all, whereas, as Ambedkar points out, sacred texts of India contain a social philosophy responsible for the degradation of non-Brahmins (Ambedkar 2019, 393-395). Ambedkar further criticises the insufficient critical engagement with sacred literature, emphasising the detrimental impact of two contrasting attitudes: the uncritical commendation by a Brahmin scholar and the unsparing condemnation by a non-Brahmin. Both approaches, according to Ambedkar, hinder the progress of historical research ( ibid , 393). The disadvantage of such an approach is that either they miss the regressive ideas or articulate them in an oversimplified manner that ultimately glorifies the regressive Brahminical ideas. Therefore, there is a need for a more nuanced and critical examination of sacred texts to understand their implications on social history in the true sense. Moreover, another aspect of evaluation exists where scholars discard or appropriate various conceptions of Mahabharata because of evaluating certain aspects of the text from a colonial lens. For instance, German Indoligists interpreted Mahabharata as "framing Brahmans as 'priests,' and presenting themselves as reformers and liberators, while they collaborated with the Prussian (and later, Nazi) state" (Adluri 2016). As a response, a group of scholars in contemporary philosophy in India talk about the need for the revival of Indian traditional and religious thought. They hold that the modern liberal framework for conceptualising Indian society is the product of colonialism, as that has constantly undermined the significance of Indian traditional and religious thoughts. De Roover argues that even though liberalism "presents itself as a freestanding conception independent from any comprehensive doctrines or substantive conceptions of the good… [but] it continues to depend on a conception of the person and human social life that secularises protestant Christian ideas by transforming them into the topoi of political thought" (De Roover 2015, 237). Thus, he emphasises that Western liberal categories of thinking are not fruitful in conceptualising Indian society and polity as they are from different historical and political contexts. Even though the revival is significant and decolonisation requires discarding the underlying colonial mindset, the problem arose because of a similar pattern. There has been a constant effort to derive the themes or subjects of political thought from traditional ideas.[2] This pattern constrains critical engagement that further ends in accusing all liberal concepts as irrelevant to the Indian context (Nandy 1988, 189) merely because they are the products of Western civilisation (De Roover 2015, 234-239). Contrary to this, Patel says there is a need to engage with tradition without romanticising the past. She also emphasises that it should not also be a denial of all modern concepts. Thus, Patel emphasises a decolonial approach, which is "not a retrieval of premodern assessments that would consist of a folkloric affirmation of the past, nor an antimodern project of the kind put forward by conservative, right-wing, populist or fascist groups, nor a postmodern project that would deny modernity and would critique all reason" (Patel 2020, 10-11). Further, she suggests that there is a need for a new approach to social theorisation that critiques the Western conceptual framework through the inclusion of the experiences of the people. Additionally, the problem in reviving the traditional ideas is that India today no longer has the same structure as it used to have earlier. Various traditional concepts are not relevant in the theorisation of contemporary society. It is crucial today to theorise the contemporary issues along with the lived experiences of the ordinary masses. At the same time, we cannot accept the colonial framework without analysing its relevance to the lived experiences of the masses. When accepted without critical analysis, a philosophical inquiry may result in the glorification of either of the categories (traditional or liberal). The need is to not unquestioningly accept or discredit the traditional norms as well as the liberal frameworks of thinking altogether. Conclusion Navigating the dichotomies of glorification of tradition vs colonial mindsets presents a challenge for contemporary scholars. The revival of philosophy in India should not be limited to a mere glorification of tradition but should involve critical analysis that engages with the complexity and dynamism of the philosophical heritage. Therefore, a few critical questions arise in the discourse of philosophy today: what approach is suitable for philosophy in India? How can we decolonise philosophy without glorifying the past? What are its challenges? How will these challenges be resolved? Answering these questions necessitates a deep understanding of the challenges posed by the dichotomy. Hence, further research is imperative to engage with these intricate philosophical inquiries, offering a more comprehensive approach to the decolonisation of philosophy in India. [1] In reference to the Mahabharata, it’s important to note that there are multiple versions. Here, we specifically refer to the ancient Mahabharata of Krishna Dvaipayana, also known as Veda Vyasa. Our focus, in this context, pertains solely to the philosophical aspects of the text. [2] As de Roover argues that liberal ideas are the topoi of Protestant Christian ideas, various Indian political concepts are also topoi of Indian Tradition. For instance, in Gandhi’s thought, secularism refers to sarvadhrama sambhava. The idea of sarvadharma sambhava is rooted in the idea that the truth has many sides and cannot be grasped by human beings completely. Therefore, according to Gandhi, we should respect all conceptions of the good (see Gandhi 1995). References Adluri, Vishwa. 2016. “How We Should Approach The Phenomenon Of Studying Hinduism.” Swarajya , https://swarajyamag.com/culture/how-we-should-approach-the-phenomenon-of-studying-hinduism . Ambedkar, B.R. 2019. The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar , edited by V. Rodrigues. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Chandhoke, Neera. 2019. Rethinking Pluralism, Secularism, and Tolerance: Anxieties of Coexistence . New Delhi: Sage Publication. De Roover, Jakob. 2015. Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism . New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dimock, Edward. 1974. The Literatures of India: An Introduction . University of Chicago. Gandhi, M.K. 1995. Hindu Dharma . New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks. Guru, Gopal, and Sarukkai, Sundar. 2012. The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory . New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Janaky. 1992. “On the Trail of the Mahabharata: A Response.” Economic and Political Weekly 27 (37): 1997–1999. Nanda, Meera. 2010. “Arguments for an Indian Enlightenment.” In Indian Political Thought : A Reader , edited by A. Singh and S. Mohapatra, 175–186. Routledge. Nandy, Ashis. 1988. “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 13 (2): 177–194. Patel, Sujata. 2020. “Social Theory Today: Eurocentrism and Decolonial Theory.” Madras Institute of Development Studies . Accessed November 8, 2023. https://www.mids.ac.in/assets/doc/WP_240.pdf . Thapar, Romila. 1989. “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity.” Modern Asian Studies 23 (2): 209–231. http://www.jstor.org/stable/312738 .

Response and Reply: Theories of Recognition Muzaffar Ali; R Krishnaswamy Paper Review # Nov 15, 2025 Response from Dr Muzaffar Ali Malla (Assistant Professor, Averroes Centre for Philosophical Studies, Islamic University of Science and Technology) R. Krishnaswamy’s insightful essay, “ Recognition across Axel Honneth and Paul Ricoeur: Making a Case for Solicitude ” explores the theories of recognition by Axel Honneth and Paul Ricoeur. Krishnaswamy argues that Ricoeur’s notion of recognition-through-solicitude can address the limitations in Honneth's theory of recognition-through-solidarity as it provides a more inclusive model for recognition and justice. Krishnaswamy argues that Honneth builds on Hegel’s philosophy, emphasizing that moral values emerge from social interactions within a community (lifeworld). Honneth identifies three forms of recognition: family, law within community, and solidarity (with reference to social esteem and collective pride). However, Honneth's approach faces twin challenges such as moral relativism and discursive over-determination and Krishnaswamy discusses the second in detail. As an alternative, Krishnaswamy explores Ricoeur's Idea of solicitude and argues that it emphasizes mutuality and trust thereby avoiding the Honnethian emphasis on abstract reciprocity and “standards of the Traid” (family, law and solidarity). Ricoeur’s perspective focuses on personal, affective bonds such as philia (friendship) built on agape (unconditional love) and gift-giving, where actions are not bound by expectations or equivalence, and have a situational (and not standard-oriented ) outlook. The following questions demand consideration: Since language (gestural or vocal) remains the major medium of seeking recognition within communities, the limitation in Honneth’s approach may have more to do with “structural over-determination” rather than “discursive over-determination.” While Ricour’s idea of solicitude grants precedence to the idea of “unconditionality” and “situationality” in relations, our societies are burdened by conditional relationships that are purely transactional, although (at times) justified (for example market, division of labor). Therefore, solicitude while moving beyond and ahead of Honneth’s solidarity model may lead to over-simplification and one-dimensional exploration of the social realm. Further its application to understand the gender and caste based relations and the cry for recognition within these relations demand further engagement. Can the notion of simplified and generalized other be replaced with the notion of “other-within” and “other-without” to deal with the deadlock emerging from Honneth’s focus on generalization and Ricoeur’s focus on individuality? Reply from R Krishnaswamy (Associate Professor, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities) Muzzaffar Ali has raised three questions from a careful reading of my article on Honneth and Ricoeur. Given the limited space I will not answer each question sequentially. I will make some remarks that will answer hopefully different aspects of al the three questions. My aim in that article is to point to the limitations that may arise within a society to justice in so far as those institutions are not able to capture recognitional truths, as it were, that are self-evident to victims of social violence and injustice. Muzzafar Ali is right in that though I have formulated the problem in terms of language, it can also be applied to structures in general. The idea is that there can't be a structure within human society without it being mediated by concepts or ideology or language. To that extent, whatever I have said about linguistic over-determination applies to structural over-determination. Muzzafar Ali has noted that Ricoeur's view can't quite capture the social realities of injustice which are historically inherited like race or caste or gender. He says that in Ricoeur's model of solicitude, there is a danger of over-simplification in terms of social dynamics works. I am not sure here whether Muzzafar Ali wishes to raise a complaint against Ricoeur's explanation of social reality or whether he finds Ricoeur's prescription to adopt solicitude as the norm to be defective. If it is the former, I am sure Ricoeur would also agree, that he is not really trying to explain how injustices can happen as much as giving us a prescriptive plan as to how to avoid social violence that may emerge out of mis-recognition. Ricoeur's work on recognition is not therefore descriptive and thus to say that Ricoeur is not helping us to understand social reality is being unfair to Ricoeur. If Muzzafar Ali is trying to say the whole device of solicitude itself is ineffective or inadequate because if everyone adopts solicitude as the norm of social engagement where would ordinary transactional relationships go? Most of our everyday interactions are temporary and are purposed to fulfill some of our immediate needs and aims. Two points, one is there is no prima facie reason why we can't have transactional relationships with solicitude. One can be solicitous and still maintain temporary relationships bound by contextual concerns. Solicitude doesn't have to be permanent. The second point I wish to make is that even if solicitude and transactionality (if I may call it) are mutually exclusive, Ricoeur's view would still be something to take seriously, if we can maintain solicitude in some of our more important social engagements, if not in all.

Review of Muzaffar Ali's book by Satya Javvaji Satya Javvaji MA student, KU Luven Book Review # Oct 26, 2023 Book review of Muzaffar Ali's India, Habermas and the Normative Structure of Public Sphere (Routledge, 2023) In India, Habermas and the Normative Structure of Public Sphere , Muzaffar Ali sketches the theory and procedures of an adequate public sphere in India arguing that it has to focus on accessibility and acceptability of the individual participants. In a book that is comprehensive and accessible to a wide audience, Ali gracefully tackles the question of how to think through a native context while being aware of the overbearing Western hegemony on the one hand, and of the risk of delving into nativism or nationalism on the other. The context of the book’s conception starts with Ali’s personal discomfort with the rigid Western-Indian divide in his curriculum growing up. While authors from both geographies were being taught separately, there was a dearth of how to conduct native Indian political philosophy that neither preaches a pre-modern excavation of Indian values nor blindly adopts Western concepts and categories and applies them directly to the Indian context, which oftentimes much different. The book’s first chapter deals with precisely this question - “to figure out a way to deal with the West without a complete withdrawal and yet keep the elan vital of the decolonization project intact” (p. 13). Ali responds to it by arguing for a double native approach. Firstly, since a Western theory purports a universalism in its concepts, it remains essential for a non-western theory to engage with it and critically examine its shortcomings and exclusions. Secondly, these critical engagements have to form the basis of a native and decolonised Indian political theory that adequately captures the context of the society it is speaking with. An adequate theory does not stop at pointing out a historical or contextual exception to a Western theory, thereby proving it inapplicable. Rather, it captures the relevant conditions of possibility, that are socio-historically situated, to initiate a holistic theoretical basis that can, as is successfully carried out in this book, support an Indian public sphere. With this methodology in hand, in the second chapter, Ali discusses the notion of the public sphere in Habermas, whose contribution to its theory is considered field-defining in Western literature. The public sphere is the conceptual stage upon which members of a society exchange views of social and political significance that pertain to their collective life. In the Habermasian public sphere, citizens form a rational public opinion through the medium of linguistic communication which is seen as a reservoir of meaning. While everyone is theoretically invited to the public sphere, Ali points out that the notion relies on a singular universalizing idea and emphasizes the role of rationality disproportionately, thereby striving to keep the project of modernity alive. In doing this, it ignores that firstly, there might be multiple public spheres with diametrically opposed common concerns, and secondly, that since dialogue always already takes place within certain power structures, the marginal and historically excluded voices are either not heard or, to borrow Gayatri Spivak’s famous declaration, that the subaltern simply cannot speak. With these problems in mind and the direct non-applicability of this notion of the public sphere to India (that, according to Ali, is in part due to its heavy religious context), he discusses in the third chapter, that current Indian engagements with Habermas are either comparative or evaluative. Both these engagements pose challenges to the theory and provide critical ways of engaging with it, but either lose sight of the overall conceptual structure by focusing on particular historical examples/contexts or fail to offer a way forward in terms of moving out of the Western hegemonic shadow. Instead, what Ali aims for is a thick concept of the Indian situation that can, as a full concept, interact with the Habermasian theory of the public sphere. In the fourth and fifth chapters, Ali begins with the major chunk of his creative contributions to the idea of an Indian public sphere. He starts with the observation that existing critiques are mainly concerned about the lack of accessibility and acceptability of all to the public sphere. This leads him to frame these as the twin normative principles based on which he theorizes an imagined Indian public sphere. This is so that the public sphere is “gauged by the ease of access it offers to the communities and individuals of whom it claims to be on” and it accepts “the perspectives and viewpoints of all individuals sans any ifs and buts” (p. P. 117-18). He cautions again that he is not interested in a “nativist approach to portray the Indianness” but is instead aiming for a “native approach to conceptualize Indianness” (p. 84). For theoretical and socio-historical reasons, Ali chooses to focus on religion as the social entity that informs the Indian context, the historical idea of rationality in Indian literature and the burden of colonialism with respect to how it colours the reading of texts and consequently of understanding society. With respect to religion, Ali discusses the complicated nature of secularism in India, the socialized role of caste and the deeply political nature of these issues. Through the perspective of religion, it becomes clear that in the European context, the immigration of other religions forms a new conceptual problem while dealing with a universal and apparently secular public sphere. But when it comes to the Indian context, religion has always been part of the notion of secularism and is a “perennial entity within Indian societies” (p. 97). According to Ali, “majority-minority, upper caste-lower caste, powerful-powerless, man-woman binaries within the Indian situation are often anchored in religion” (p. 111). Additionally, he argues that the procedural communicative rationality advocated by Habermas does not apply to the Indian context if acceptability and accessibility are to be taken seriously in the public sphere, and that a combination of abstract rationality and contextual rationality has to be present. This takes seriously the notion that contextual examples cannot always be universalized and translated into abstract concepts and language. At the same time, it does not mean that context-based examples are simply supporting or adding legitimacy to a universalised social procedural reason. Ali proposes the term deuniversal rationality to understand the dual nature of rationality in the Indian context. He reformulates the two aspects of deuniversal rationality as abstract rationality and experiential rationality. With the help of Merleau Ponty’s theory of the embodied self, in combination with Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai’s theory of how the social sphere translates into embodied experiences, Ali argues that not only critical reflection and consequent articulation but also other aspects of the individual’s public identity namely their embodied experience, cultural conditioning and their emotional aspects of existence must have unrestricted access to the public sphere since these are not subordinated to reason but are fundamental aspects of the individual’s self-identity and hence self-expression in the social sphere. Ali writes that the aim is “to grant an epistemic passage to the lived body to enter as a medium of communication within the public sphere. The lived experience emerges as … a parallel and meaningful category for conducting the debates within the public sphere” (p. 128). Ali argues for the co-originality, to borrow Habermas’ term, of both the abstract component and the lived experience component in making up deuniversal rationality. He hopes this not only allows more people, previously excluded, into the contextual Indian public sphere but also, in recognising that the public sphere is carried as part of the individual’s lived experience, and that these very experiences are accepted as contributions to interactions in the Indian public sphere. While Ali is successful at conceptualizing a thick notion of the Indian public sphere based on deuniversal rationality that equi-prioritizes abstract rationality and lived experience, questions follow about how issues are resolved at the theoretical level when these two components contradict or disagree with each other. This sits in the wider debate about the post-structural turn in philosophy emphasizing that discourse always already happens within certain power relations that not only oppress but also produce individuals. Since Ali’s focus was on expanding who is included in the public sphere, what could possibly be clarified further is how disagreements are to be resolved once everyone is in the public sphere. This is keeping in mind the hyper-mediatized society we live in and the possibility of a fragmented and polarized public sphere that is sometimes clearly visible during discussions pertaining to national identity. Additionally, some readers could argue that according to lived experience unqualified epistemic privilege of expressing the truth complicates matters of intra-group justice and brings up the issue of intersectionality. This is because individuals, while referring to their lived experience hardly ever refer to only themselves as isolated individuals but to the group they see themselves as belonging to and speaking as part of. However, since they are simultaneously part of multiple groups and identities, it becomes important to keep in mind that all these identities affect the articulation of their lived experience and cannot be neatly separated into compartments. These are additional remarks since the intellectual involvement and theoretical rigour with which Ali takes on the ambitious project of theorizing a native Indian public sphere is commendable making the book essential reading for political philosophers, political and social scientists, theorists from the global South and everyone who wishes to understand the complexities involved in thinking about the native. Image-credit: © Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons

The Karnataka Hijab row is about Right to Education, not Freedom of Religion Sania Ismailee PhD Scholar, Department of HSS, IIT Delhi Article # Feb 22, 2022 This article is part of the series of responses from philosophers on the hijab row . The Karnataka case is not a hijab ban case per se. It is the case of imposing a uniform which happens to impose a disadvantage over religious people who display religious symbols like hijab, turban, kirpan, etc. Note a rosary under my collar or a religious bangle/thread hidden under my sleeve will not be incompatible with a prescribed dress code. The central question is then whether the burden imposed by the uniform on religious students constitutes unfairness that must be accommodated for ensuring justice (here, equal opportunity for education). In this specific case, we know that forcing the uniform without accommodating the demands of hijabi Muslim women will hinder their access to education which will be detrimental to their development. It will curtail their opportunities, mainly because we know the economic backwardness of the Muslim community in general and how it may affect Muslim women's opportunities to access education and employment. Religious women will not take off their hijab to go to school but prefer sitting at home. This happened in France and reduced the integration of Muslim women into French society . Therefore, it is incumbent upon the state to accommodate their demands rather than marginalizing an already marginalized group. The uniform rule does not stop anyone from being a Muslim with a hijab but hinders her access to education by disallowing wearing hijab on school premises. This is a subtle but pertinent distinction. I don't think an essential practice test is required to arrive at a solution. The essential practice test is used by Indian courts to scrutinize a controversial religious practice. For instance, whether Hinduism stops women of menstruating age from entering the Sabarimala temple. In the Karnataka case, the central concern is not whether the religious practice is contentious given the specificities of the case. The centrality of the hijab to the integrity and identity of these women is sufficient to accommodate their demands without curtailing their access to education. The centrality of hijab to their "ethical integrity" and identity offers valid grounds for distinguishing the hijab from other clothes like shorts or clown caps. The burden of making education accessible is on the state, not on the religious student. Therefore, the salience of these issues renders insufficient the "I want to distance myself from the BJP to support the Muslim woman" argument. Sundar Sarukkai's argument on the relationship between uniform and equality doesn't address the central issue by eliminating the Muslim figure. Besides, uniforms do play a role in ensuring equality, other things remaining equal. A cursory theme of the Karnataka row is whether the hijab is a patriarchal and forced practice or a case of false choice. Or whether the Quran prescribes hijab as a specific dress code or whether "it is high time for Muslims to accept social reform and move on." We often conflate what is practiced in Muslim societies as Islamic. This is an unconscious jump because oppressive practices by patriarchs (men and women) are justified in the name of Islam. But that doesn't necessarily mean it is indeed an Islamic practice. Here, I disagree with the claim that the hijab is a forced practice "always" (see Nilüfer Göle's study on the different reasons women do hijab--not always religious but not always forced as well). I am not saying hijab is "never" forced. I agree with the argument from control over women's bodies: imposing upon the woman to cover or not to cover is exercising control over their bodies. Take the case of triple talaq or nikaah halala. Powerful Muslim women's movements have used the Quran and sharia to fight patriarchy. So, claims that the Quran is an archaic text are false. Because if it was an archaic seventh-century text with no relevance, how do these religious women use it to secure their rights? (See the brilliant work by MUSAWAH on Muslim family law reform around the world). I am not suggesting that religion is never a tool for oppression. Over here, it is crucial to realize that religion can be a powerful source for reform. Liberal scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Ayelet Shachar have explained how the liberal dismissal of religion as patriarchal leaves the religious woman in a dilemma where either you can be religious or be liberated; there is no middle ground. This is a false dilemma. You can be religious and liberated. Powerful Muslim women's movements around the world are challenging this dilemma rooted in the Western liberal feminist framework along with fighting against orthodox religious interpretations and state repression of minority voices (see Amina Wadud's and Asma Barlas' works). The liberal feminist framework projects itself as a false universal such that if you fall short of its standards, you are branded as illiberal. Discourses on decolonizing theory have pointed this out. So the Muslim woman does not "need saving" from Islam by liberals ( Lila Abu Lughod ). Most people don't know anything about Islam's position on women and mistakenly conflate oppressive practices of Muslim societies with Islam. Of course, it is never enough to say this is not Islamic, even if it is justified in the name of Islam (similar arguments made in the context of violence in Islam and terrorism). But one must acknowledge religion as a powerful tool for reform. For instance, Raja Rammohan Roy used Hindu scriptures, not secular reasons, to argue against sati. For a philosophical piece defending the hijab in the French ban context, see Cecile Laborde . ___________________________________________________________________________________________ Read other articles in this series: Ariba Zaidi -- A Word of Caution to 'the Uniformist' and 'the Reformist’ Danish Hamid -- Back to Liberal Basics Hina Mushtaq -- Can women decide for themselves? Sania Ismailee -- The Karnataka Hijab row is about Right to Education...

Review of Modernity and its Futures Past Bhakti Gaikwad PhD Scholar, Savitribai Phule University Book Review # May 17, 2025 Book review of Nishad Patnaik's Modernity and its Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan Cham 2023). The text Modernity and Its Futures Past by Nishad Patnaik revisits the ambiguity surrounding the concept of modernity and its historical evolution. The book challenges the dominant Eurocentric narrative that modernity is a monolithic, linear process. It instead proposes a pluralistic and nuanced understanding. By engaging with political theory, philosophy, sociology, and postcolonial studies, the book makes a compelling case for re-evaluating modernity’s foundations and considering alternative frameworks that better reflect the multiplicity of human experiences. One of the key tensions the author points out is between the conventional understanding of modernity, which assumes a break from tradition, and a more contextual approach that sees modernity as a continuous negotiation with the past. This reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s critique of progress. For Benjamin history is not necessarily forward-moving but rather a complex interplay between past and present. The book argues that modernity should not be viewed as a complete rejection of tradition but rather an ongoing process of reinterpretation and transformation. The author argues that modernity is not just a Western phenomenon but an evolving discourse shaped by various cultural, social, and historical forces. The book consists of several chapters, excluding a preface and acknowledgments. It begins by pointing out a reflection as well as a theoretical concern regarding the inadequacy of Eurocentric conceptions of modernity in explaining contemporary global realities. The text proposes alternative approaches that account for the experiences of societies outside the Western framework. It not only critiques the dominant narrative of modernity but also engages with diverse intellectual traditions, including postcolonial theorists, feminist scholars, and decolonial thinkers. The first section of the book dwells on a reflective theoretical need: Can we ever think of multiple modernities? The book attempts to not only answer this theoretical concern but also create a ‘theoretical toolbox’ for the same. Additionally, it revisits and re-reads debates in political theory, philosophy, and global history to construct an inclusive understanding of modernity. This, the author suggests, can help in reshaping the normative foundations of how we understand modernity and its futures. The book carefully maps out the ways in which different societies have grappled with modernity, emphasizing that there is no singular pathway to modernization. The text explores how we can do political theory and philosophy in a way that is not burdened by the dominance of Western frameworks. The author has referred to thinkers such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Walter Mignolo, and Ashis Nandy to set the theoretical tone of the book. Along the lines of these thinkers, the book argues that modernity should be understood from within the realities of different societies rather than imposed as a universal model. The author critically engages with how the idea of modernity has been historically constructed, often to the exclusion of indigenous epistemologies and alternative ways of knowing. This reminded me of the Upanishadic saying: वादे वादे जायते तत्त्वबोधः, which implies that it is through diverse opinions that we get to know the truth. The book similarly advocates for a plurality of perspectives in understanding modernity, arguing that different cultures bring their own lived experiences and knowledge systems to bear on the modern condition. The book, while analyzing modernity, critically examines key elements from various domains, including religion, caste, lived experience, and the corporeal body. As Patnaik (2023) notes, “The conceptualized modern experience throws up two essential markers regarding the inadequacy of Eurocentric modernity. At the social level, the hyper-presence of local traditions and alternative rationalities needs a multi-pronged instrument of public debate rather than a unilateral notion of Western reason to articulate real and true modern experiences” (p. 101). The text further explores how globalization and digital modernity have transformed traditional understandings of modernity. The book suggests that in an era of technological advancements and rapid social change, modernity is no longer confined to a singular trajectory but is increasingly shaped by hybrid identities, transnational movements, and economic interdependence. At a time when globally, the nature of modernity is altering, this text makes a few pertinent interventions while keeping in mind lived realities. While trying to establish the idea of ‘multiple modernities,’ one can look at contemporary cultural productions such as films and literature that capture the nuanced relationship between modernity and traditional structures. The book acknowledges that modernity is not an abstract theoretical construct but something that is deeply embedded in the everyday experiences of people. In doing so, it argues that we must move beyond grand narratives and focus on the lived realities of individuals and communities as they navigate modern life. The author looks at religion as an important aspect of modernity’s social context. The book establishes that the role of religion cannot be underestimated in evaluating the political and social dimensions of modernity. This argument is reinforced by drawing from political thinkers like B.R. Ambedkar and scholars like Talal Asad. The text suggests that rather than viewing modernity and religion as opposing forces, it is more productive to analyze their complex interrelationship. This discussion also touches upon the limitations of secularization theory, arguing that the assumption that modernity leads to the decline of religion is not universally applicable. The book draws on examples from different societies to show how religious traditions have adapted to and shaped modernity in their own ways. The text further explores the question of crisis within modernity. It argues that modernity is not a stable or fixed concept but is continually in flux, responding to crises that emerge from within its own structure. The author examines various contemporary challenges; ranging from climate change and economic inequality to political instability and social unrest; as symptoms of modernity’s inherent contradictions. This discussion reminded me of Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ‘liquid modernity,’ where he describes the increasing instability and fragmentation of modern life. The book extends this argument by suggesting that modernity’s future depends on its ability to transform in response to these crises. The text proposes alternative pathways for modernity that emphasize sustainability, inclusivity, and a more holistic approach to progress. In its concluding chapters, the book turns to the question of modernity’s future. Can modernity be reformed, or does it need to be fundamentally rethought? The author suggests that while modernity’s foundations are deeply problematic, there is still room for transformation. By embracing a more pluralistic and inclusive approach; one that values diverse epistemologies and challenges existing power structures; modernity can evolve in ways that are more just and equitable. This discussion resonates with thinkers like Ashis Nandy, who have argued for a reimagining of modernity that is not dictated by Western models but instead rooted in indigenous and alternative traditions. The book’s vision of modernity’s future is both critical and hopeful, acknowledging the deep-seated problems of modernity while also recognizing the potential for new possibilities. Modernity and Its Futures Past is a deeply insightful and timely exploration of one of the most pressing intellectual debates of our time. It challenges readers to reconsider their assumptions about modernity, offering a nuanced and multidimensional perspective that is both critical and constructive. The book is particularly valuable for scholars of political theory, philosophy, sociology, and postcolonial studies, but its accessible style and engaging analysis make it relevant to a broader audience as well. The book walks a fine line between critique and reconstruction, offering not only a powerful analysis of modernity’s limitations but also a vision for its possible futures. In doing so, it makes an important contribution to contemporary debates on modernity and globalization, urging us to think critically about the world we inhabit and the futures we hope to create. References ● Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity . Polity Press. ● Chakrabarty, D. (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference . Princeton University Press. ● Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options . Duke University Press.