The modern understanding of India has been structured around a standard set of oppositions—tradition versus modernity, faith versus secularism, bhakti versus jnana, precolonial versus colonial, Sanskritic versus vernacular, to name a few. This book by the Backwaters Collective probes the disavowal that lurks behind these familiar pairs, and explores how we might be able to move beyond them into the realm of the ‘unthinkable’.
A closely related concern of the Collective is to safeguard the practices, ideas, and norms that inform the everyday life and common sense of the culture so as to foster the broader goal of an ecological plurality of knowledges. How might the intellectual and cultural resources of Indic civilization be deployed to understand our contemporary world in the face of the grave threat posed by the homogenizing system of global knowledge? Our sense of the temporal is now captured almost entirely by ‘history’, just as the idea of ‘development’ has hijacked what could otherwise be a more open-ended vision of the future.
The authors in this volume are united in the belief that the time has come to confront such questions frontally, no matter how unsettling that may be to our vaunted notions about ourselves.

About the Author

Vinay Lal is Professor of History and Asian-American Studies at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) and has written widely on modern Indian history, colonialism, the worldwide Indian diaspora, the politics of knowledge systems, public and popular culture in India, American politics, and the moral and political thought of Gandhi. Roby Rajan is Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and has published internationally in a wide variety of disciplines including operations research, economic theory, game theory, Marxist theory, and aesthetic theory.