Modernity and Public Sphere in Vernacular
Purushottam Agrawal
The most crucial of the“features of modernity“ that can be “disaggregated“– and can be, “recombined in a number of different ways“– is the emergence of a new subjectivity which speaks through a re-definition of the individual’s relation with society and cosmos. Historically speaking, the emergence of a social constituency responding to, and participating in such a re-definition is very important to any process of modernization. A radical break from tradition or from the immediate past is not a pre-condition of the emergence of modernity either in Europe or elsewhere. To think in terms of alternative modernities is to recognize that the pre-colonial past of non-European societies was not rigidly determined by prescriptive forces of depersonalized systems of “civilizations,“ “cultures“ and “religious beliefs“ or in case of India by compulsive caste identities. It was also being made by self-conscious men and women whose subjectivities were acquiring the status of individual and collective historical actors. Talking of modernity either as a trend or as a period, it is more appropriate to think in terms of dialogue between various cultures, practices and traditions instead of diffusion from one place to the other. It is also useful to remember that in the history of both state and other forms of social organization, even diffusion, worked in “both … directions,“ as C. A. Bayly points out in the specific context of state and government in modern period.3 Let me (here agreeing with Mohanty) underline my categorical rejection of the cultural and moral relativism of the post-modernist variety. All said and done, humankind cannot do without a trans-cultural notion of human values and a set of minimum expectations rooted in the same. Such a trans-cultural universalism can be imagined and articulated only when we explore the trajectory of interactions between various cultures and traditions instead of attributing all yearnings of universal human values to European enlightenment and its export to other societies through colonization. To recall the apt metaphor employed by Sanjay Subrahmmanyam: …modernity is historically a global and conjectural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a set of diverse phenomena– the Mongol dream of world conquest, European voyages of exploration, activities of Indian textile traders in the diaspora, the “globalization of microbes“ that historians of the 1960s were fond of discussing and so on.4 Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 |
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Essays in this Forum
Rethinking the Global South
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi From Indian Literature to World Literature: A Conversation with Satya P. Mohanty by Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar and Rajender Kaur Asia in My Life by Ngugi wa Thiong'o The Global South and Cultural Struggles: On the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization by Duncan Mceachern Yoon The Fault Lines of Hindi and Urdu by Sanjay Kumar Reframing Colonialism and Modernity: An Endeavour through Sociology and Literature by Gurminder K. Bhambra Varieties of Cultural Chauvinism and the Relevance of Comparative Studies by Tilottoma Misra Literature to Combat Cultural Chauvinism: A Response by Shivani Jha Is There an Indian Way of Thinking about Comparative Literature? by E. V. Ramakrishnan Modernity and Public Sphere in Vernacular by Purushottam Agrawal West Indian Writers and Cultural Chauvinism by Jerome Teelucksingh Oral Knowledge in Berber Women’s Expressions of the Sacred by Fatima Sadiki |