Decolonization, Humanistic Legacies, and Social Science Practice

Part of the South Asia Program seminar series.

Another India embodies various facets of the decolonization imperative. It summons past episodes and images which have a living narrative and moral presence in the present, but are readily evacuated by social science. recalling these is to create a wider and more participative conversational space and help democratise intellectual activity. These acts of ‘recovery’ disclose a variety of humanistic legacies, revise the distortions about history and tradition, and also oblige us to revisit the claims of epistemic discontinuity or rupture attributed to colonial rule. Aligning - indeed, building - intellectual conversations with them integrates scholarly work with the lives of communities by engaging their narrative and philosophical achievements that continue to flow in the present. In short, Another India, explores a few means by which the long cherished and difficult aim of decolonizing social science practice can be aided.

The author:

Chandan Gowda is Ramakrishna Hegde Chair Professor of Decentralization and Development at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru.  Apart from his recent book, Another India: Events, Memories, People, he has edited Theatres of Democracy: Selected Essays of Shiv Visvanathan (2016), The Way I See It: A Gauri Lankesh Reader (2018) which later saw Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu and Tamil translations, and A Life in the World (2019), a book of autobiographical interviews he did with UR Ananthamurthy. He has translated Kannada fiction and non fiction into English, including UR Ananthamurthy’s novella Bara (2016). His book on the origins of development thought in colonial India with a focus on Mysore state will be published soon.  At present, he is editing and co-translating Daredevil Mustafa, a collection of short stories by Purnachandra Tejasvi and co-editing The Rammanohar Lohia Reader.