How India prepared its feast of reason For most people in the West, "India" has come to mean an overblown but fascinating amalgam of kitsch, weird English, colours, call centres, religiosity and extravagant emotion, illustrated by Bollywood films and the early novels of Salman Rushdie. Hardly anybody expects to find high seriousness, literary, artistic or cinematic modernism, secular reformism, humanistic thought – in short, any of the manifestations of reason – on the Subcontinent. All that, it is implicitly assumed, is a monopoly of Western elites. The notion has been reinforced by academic exponents of "postcolonial theory". When non-Western people attempt to practise Enlightenment ideals, they, we are admonished, are merely indulging in colonial mimicry. The entire non-West has thus been pushed out of the feast of reason,...
[read full story]
Your Web Site
