This book focuses on the cohering elements across various texts and traditions of India. It engages with several significant works from the Sanskrit tradition and emphasizes the need to move beyond colonial and postcolonial engagements with the enduring cultural pasts of India. The chapters are grouped in three main parts: accented rhythms, dispersed mnemoscapes and inventive iterations. It addresses questions such as: what enabled cultural communication across very divergent geographical, temporal, locational contexts and among different cultural formations of India over millennia? What is this shareable impulse that pulsates across the domains of dance, sculpture, painting, poetry, dharma, music, medicine, the lore of rivers and the epics? It explains how modern Indian languages and especially their creative and reflective nodes are unthinkable without the intricately woven textures of these interfaces and their responsive receptions. This book is of interest to philosophers, humanities students, researchers and professors as well as people interested in exploring alternatives to European traditions of thought without an alibi.

This volume critically engages with the question of cultural difference and the idea of living with diversity in the context of India and Europe. It looks at certain essential European categories of learning such as art, nature, the human, literature, relation, philosophy, and the humanities and analyses texts from Sanskrit language (through Telugu resources) to argue that categories like prakriti, loka, jati, dharma, karma, sahitya, kala,etc. cannot be conflated with conceptual formations such as nature, world, caste, religion, (sanctioned) action, literature and art respectively. The book questions and unravels the efficacy of European concepts, theories and interpretive frames in understanding Indian reflective traditions and cultural forms. It also lays the groundwork for reorienting teaching and research in universities in the humanities on the basis of key cultural differences. By focusing on major themes in the humanities discourse and their limitations, the work engages with the writings of Heidegger, Derrida and Agamben, among others, from radically new vantage points of Sanskrit-Indian reflective traditions, and challenges prevailing ideas about Indian art, literature and culture. Part of the Critical Humanities Across Cultures series, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of Indian languages and literature, comparative literature, art and aesthetics, postcolonial studies, cultural and heritage studies, philosophy, political philosophy, comparative philosophy, Sanskrit studies, India studies, South Asian studies, Global South studies, and for those working on education in the humanities/human sciences.

This volume critically engages with the question of cultural difference and the idea of living with diversity in the context of India and Europe. It looks at certain essential European categories of learning such as art, nature, the human, literature, relation, philosophy, and the humanities and analyses texts from Sanskrit language (through Telugu resources) to argue that categories like prakriti, loka, jati, dharma, karma, sahitya, kala,etc. cannot be conflated with conceptual formations such as nature, world, caste, religion, (sanctioned) action, literature and art respectively. The book questions and unravels the efficacy of European concepts, theories and interpretive frames in understanding Indian reflective traditions and cultural forms. It also lays the groundwork for reorienting teaching and research in universities in the humanities on the basis of key cultural differences. By focusing on major themes in the humanities discourse and their limitations, the work engages with the writings of Heidegger, Derrida and Agamben, among others, from radically new vantage points of Sanskrit-Indian reflective traditions, and challenges prevailing ideas about Indian art, literature and culture. Part of the Critical Humanities Across Cultures series, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of Indian languages and literature, comparative literature, art and aesthetics, postcolonial studies, cultural and heritage studies, philosophy, political philosophy, comparative philosophy, Sanskrit studies, India studies, South Asian studies, Global South studies, and for those working on education in the humanities/human sciences.

The field of humanities generates a discourse that traditionally addressed the questions of what is proper to man, rights of man, crimes against humanity, human creativity and action, human reflection and performance, human utterance and artefact. The university as a philosophical-political institution transmits this humanist account. This European humanistic legacy, which is little more than Christian anthropology, barely received any questioning from cultures that faced colonialism. In such a context, this volume attempts to unravel the 'barely secularized heritage' of Europe (Derrida's phrase) and its fatal consequences in other cultures. The task of Critical Humanities is to explore the ways in which the question of being human (along with non-human others) today from heterogeneous cultural 'backgrounds' can be undertaken. The future of the humanities teaching and research is contingent upon the risky task of configuring cultural difference from non-European locations. Such a task is inescapable and urgently needed when tectonic cultural upheavals have begun to show devastating effect on planetary coexistence today. It is precisely in such a context that this collection of essays on critical humanities affirms, 'without alibi', the urgency of collective reflection and innovative research across the traditional disciplinary and institutional borders and communication systems on the one hand and Asian, African and European cultural formations on the other. Critical Humanities are at one level little more than communities on the verge (critical) but whose centuries long survival and resilient creations of cultural (and /as natural) habitats are of deeply enduring significance to affirm the biocultural diversities of living that compose the planet. Topical and timely, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and teachers of cultural theory, literary studies, philosophy, cultural geography, legal studies, sociology, history, performance studies, environmental studies, caste and communalism studies, postcolonial theory, India studies, and education.

The field of humanities generates a discourse that traditionally addressed the questions of what is proper to man, rights of man, crimes against humanity, human creativity and action, human reflection and performance, human utterance and artefact. The university as a philosophical-political institution transmits this humanist account. This European humanistic legacy, which is little more than Christian anthropology, barely received any questioning from cultures that faced colonialism. In such a context, this volume attempts to unravel the 'barely secularized heritage' of Europe (Derrida's phrase) and its fatal consequences in other cultures. The task of Critical Humanities is to explore the ways in which the question of being human (along with non-human others) today from heterogeneous cultural 'backgrounds' can be undertaken. The future of the humanities teaching and research is contingent upon the risky task of configuring cultural difference from non-European locations. Such a task is inescapable and urgently needed when tectonic cultural upheavals have begun to show devastating effect on planetary coexistence today. It is precisely in such a context that this collection of essays on critical humanities affirms, 'without alibi', the urgency of collective reflection and innovative research across the traditional disciplinary and institutional borders and communication systems on the one hand and Asian, African and European cultural formations on the other. Critical Humanities are at one level little more than communities on the verge (critical) but whose centuries long survival and resilient creations of cultural (and /as natural) habitats are of deeply enduring significance to affirm the biocultural diversities of living that compose the planet. Topical and timely, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and teachers of cultural theory, literary studies, philosophy, cultural geography, legal studies, sociology, history, performance studies, environmental studies, caste and communalism studies, postcolonial theory, India studies, and education.

This book focuses on the cohering elements across various texts and traditions of India. It engages with several significant works from the Sanskrit tradition and emphasizes the need to move beyond colonial and postcolonial engagements with the enduring cultural pasts of India. The chapters are grouped in three main parts: accented rhythms, dispersed mnemoscapes and inventive iterations. It addresses questions such as: what enabled cultural communication across very divergent geographical, temporal, locational contexts and among different cultural formations of India over millennia? What is this shareable impulse that pulsates across the domains of dance, sculpture, painting, poetry, dharma, music, medicine, the lore of rivers and the epics? It explains how modern Indian languages and especially their creative and reflective nodes are unthinkable without the intricately woven textures of these interfaces and their responsive receptions. This book is of interest to philosophers, humanities students, researchers and professors as well as people interested in exploring alternatives to European traditions of thought without an alibi.