Author: Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr
Publisher: Rupa
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 162
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8129106574
Description
Modern-day Indians turned the colonial encounter with the Western world into advantage by taking a keen interest in European and American writers and thinkers, while at the same time grappling with the intellectual challenges thrown up by their own society. But this rich exposure to East and West has not been fully explored and examined. Ideas are important in a democracy, and unless they are made accessible to the people, the vibrancy and quality of political debate will not improve. The thrust behind these essays is to bring to the general reader some important and valuable ideas, and to provide a counter-point to contemporary orthodoxies.
The essays in this book have been divided into five sections-politics, history, philosophy, literature and science. In each of them, the focus has been on some important issues and thinkers. The section on politics includes the little-known encounter between Mahatma Gandhi and Jewish philosopher Martin Buber on the question of Israel, Italian Marxist’s innovative interpretation of Machiavelli’s The Prince and the meaning of Henry David Thoreau’s famous tract on civil Disobedience, which had inspired Gandhi. The section on history deals with the problems of Indian historiography-ancient and modern, with Herbert Battlefield’s The Whig Interpretation of History as a prelude to debate questions of Indian history.
The next section deals with philosophical ideas, including medieval Islamic philosopher Al Ghazali, medieval Indian philosopher-scholar Madhava Vidyaranya, Plato’s disastrous rendezvous with politics, Kant’s view on an international organization to preserve world peace. Paul Tillich’s account of inter-religious encounters, a critique of modernity offered by Spanish philosopher Ortegay Gasset and Latin American activist-thinker, Ivan Illich.
The section on literature looks at the encounter of poetry and politics in the case of Valdimir Mayakovsky. Wladislaw Szymborska, Eugenio Montale, Imre Kertesz, Gao Xingjiang, while the last section deals with two science dissidents-Stephen Jay Gould and Staephen Wolfram.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE
PART I
Mullah Omar and Robespierre
Baudrillard revisits reality
Varieties of Fundamentalism
Security Experts are Dangerous
McNamara and Kissinger: clash of idealist and Realist
Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Buber on the Palestine Question
Subhas Chandra Bose and the Congress socialists
The Misty origins of NAM
Bakunin on Marx and Bismarck
Gramsci on Machiavelli
Popper Against Totalitarianism
Revival of McCarthyism
Thoreau: The Prophet of Free Market
The Virtues of Political Rhetoric
PART II
The Prejudices of Modern Historians
Remembering Max Mueller
A Tale of Two Historians
Hegel vs Tagore?
Romila Thapar and Asoka’s Politics of Dhamma
Sarvepalli Gopal, A Heroic Historian
PART III
Al Ghazali-the Philosopher who Quarrelled with Philosophy
A Medieval Text with a Modern Sensibility
Kant’s Prescription for World Peace
When Plato Played Politics
Wittgenstein Demystified
Theology, Telos, Tillich
Jose Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the masses
Ivan Illich, the Forgotten Hero
The Insecurity in Freedom
PART IV
Grappling with Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri
Maulana Azad’s Intellectual autobiography
Gao Xingjian: Raging Against Politics
Two Faces of communist Verse
Eugenio Montale: the Poetry of politics
Imre Kertesz: Conformist as a Rebel
Edward Said’s Escape from Orientalism
PART V
Stephen Jay Gould-The Passionate Scientist
Stephen Wolfram’s a New Kind of Science