Western Concepts and Indian Realities

Speaker: Professor Arvind Sharma, McGill University

 

 

 

Chair: Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, Chairperson, IIC – International Research Division

 

 

 

Respondent: Prof Madhu Khanna, an Indian people historian of religion and noted Tantric scholar based in Delhi. At present, she is Distinguished Fellow (2013–2014) in Asian and Comparative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco

 

 

 

Modern Indian thought employs many concepts of Western origin such as secularism, democracy, egalitarianism and so on because of its close association with the West over the past three centuries and the prevalence of English in intellectual discourse in India. The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate that by doing so Indians may be modifying the Indian reality to suit these concepts without realising that this is happening and that the changes thus being brought about are not necessarily in India’s best interest. This raises the question: how wise it is to allow the Indian reality to be modified to suit the semantic conventions of European languages