Contemporary Indian thinkers not in varsity curriculum - The
Times of India Jan 31, 2013 CHENNAI:
The study of contemporary Indian philosophers like K Satchidananda
Murthy, Daya Krishna and K C Bhattacharyya needs to be incorporated in the
curriculum of universities in the country, scholars said here on Wednesday.
While classical western philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Wittgenstein
and Indian thinkers like Sri Aurobindo, Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Nehru
and Radhakrishnan need to be studied, importance also has to be given to
contemporary philosophers, they said. The scholars were speaking at a seminar
on the 'Philosophy of Professor K Satchidananda Murthy' organised by a
Delhi-based NGO Centre for Studies in Civilizations (CSC) and the Madras University 's
department of philosophy.
Member secretary of CSC Bhuvan Chandel said Delhi
and Punjab universities had "old syllabi
anchored more to western thinkers". However, she said wisdom is now
dawning with the Jawaharlal
Nehru University
recently revising its syllabus to take on board contemporary Indian
philosophers. Till four years ago, JNU did not have a philosophy section. She
lamented that contemporary Indian philosophers were not given their due and
there was no sincere effort to study them.
R C Pradhan, professor of philosophy from the central university of Hyderabad , noted that only since the
1990s have some universities included K C Bhattacharyya in the curriculum,
while Daya Krishna and Murthy are yet to be incorporated in the programme of
studies. Prof Satchidananda Murthy, who passed away last year, is
regarded as one among the outstanding philosophers of the younger
generation.
Ashis Nandy on Aurobindo –
A Tale of Inauthentic Modernity: Savita Singh January 30, 2013 by Pratilipi
Blog
Nandy concludes Aurobindo’s story rather somberly, as in his reading
after so much pain, Aurobindo’s bid for self-recovery still remains an
unconsummated gain; in place of authenticity he seems to have attained a
compromise between the East and the indispensable West… For Aurobindo,
discovering the East-in-the West became a transcendent goal and a practical
possibility… Nandy does not end his story of Aurobindo’s encounter with
modernity and its intervention in his life here. He still has a far more
depressing ending, which he simply adds to the story as a closing note… Most
certainly, there is another way of reading Aurobindo’s life. It could be quite
enlightening to bring in another reading here offered by another significant
hermeneutical thinker of India ,
Prof. J.L Mehta, who takes Aurobindo’s own statements about his life as an
authentic rendering of its truth. He treats them as more meaningful beginning
of his life’s story…
On this reading, what Nandy considers as being lost, that is,
Aurobindo having lost to the West, Mehta considers it as a mere adventuring of
the self to the Other, experiencing it in all its otherness as its own part.
For indeed, Mehta works with a hermeneutical insight as far as human
understanding is concerned. He writes, ‘so long as we live encapsulated within
one tradition, our own, and in the language that embodies it, we can think and
move and have our being only within the horizon of reality opened by it. We are
free within it, for it is of essence of tradition…. But we are also limited by
it, prevented from seeing what other tracks of vision may have brought to life.
We are hence unfree” and that, even ones own must be learned after voyaging far
into what is the other”.
Depicting the complexity of a hermeneutical life as that of Sri
Aurobindo, in which he arrives at an understanding of himself and that of the
West as part of each other, Mehta locates this understanding emanating from the
Vedantic as much as from a Heideggerian sources. He brings in Heidegger to
illustrate the interesting relationship the self has with its other, a position
which Aurobindo spawned by living out the kind of existence he did. Aurobindo’s
life came with a certain kind of depth where any stark differences between the
self and the other simply got dissolved.
[Prof
Savita Singh is Professor and Director of the School of Gender
and Development Studies, IGNOU. She wrote her Ph.D. thesis on 'Discourse of
Modernity in India : A
Hermeneutical Study', and earned her degree from Delhi University .
Fathoming
the Depths of Reality: Savita
Singh in Conversation with - Roy
Bhaskar, Savita
Singh - 2003 - This book presents the main features of Roy Bhaskar's
philosophy in a readily comprehensive form. The result is probably the simplest
and clearest statement of the themes and development of his philosophy ever
published.] 6:48 pm
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