The Raft on Our Backs

FROM : CARAVAN
PHOTO :http://caravanmagazine.in

IS THERE AN INDIAN WAY OF THINKING? The poet and sconsidered the question at length in a celebrated essay on the subject. The answer, he decided, would depend on which word of the question one chose to stress. The same is true of the following variation on Ramanujan’s question: Is there an Indian way of thinking about politics?

There are several things we might mean by this. For example, we might mean to ask: Is there an Indian way of thinking about politics at all? Or we might mean: Is there an indigenously Indian, rather than derivative, way of thinking about politics? Or perhaps: Is there an Indian way of thinking, systematically, about politics? When this question is asked by a historian, it becomes another way of asking about India’s tradition of political thought. Does such a thing exist? What sort of thing is it?


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