DHARMA & ETHICS 5 # De-colonising the Social Sciences

22nd and 23rd January 2011

Over the last four years, the annual Dharma and Ethics conferences held at Kuvempu University around January-February has emerged as a forum where important issues, problems and texts that have shaped both the Kannada and Indian intellectual traditions are taken up for serious theoretical scrutiny and tested for their soundness, coherence, validity and relevance. Thus, we have taken up the issue of tolerance and made pundits and scholars reconstruct their views on it; we have examined texts by Nehru and Ambedkar to evaluate their “theories” on Indian tradition and social structure; and we have initiated a re-examination of the domain of “politics” by taking up important figures in the Indian national movement. For the coming year, we propose to take up the issue of the de-colonisation of the social sciences. This will allow an expert audience of scholars to subject our research findings to deep scrutiny.

Our research programme has emerged from a deep dissatisfaction with the current state of the social sciences and humanities and their descriptions of Europe and India. Until today, non-Western cultures have primarily been studied as pale and erring variants of Western culture, and this situation is in urgent need of a solid and sustained re-evaluation and a serious change. The social sciences, which are cast in the matrix of the Western cognitive framework, reflect Western experiences of  non-Western cultures and not a scientific understanding of the same. The basic impetus driving this re-evaluation is the realisation that whatever their explanatory power or problem-solving capacity, the existing social sciences do not adequately make our world intelligible to us.

This task of re-evaluation and a change of the social sciences, however, is not easy. To reject the existing conceptual frameworks, simply because we feel that they do not quite manage to do what theories are supposed to, would be naive. One of the first tasks facing us, then, is to build a vision for rejuvenating social sciences and humanities teaching and research in our immediate context. The present Conference is an occasion to reflect upon the nature of the tasks facing us today.

In this conference, discussions around Prof. S.N. Balagangadhara’s book Smriti-Vismriti: Bharatiya Samskriti (the Kannada version of “The Heathen in his Blindness…”) will be the means to arrive at an understanding of what the project of de-colonising the social sciences must involve. As Prof. Balagangadhara demonstrates, the western description of Indian society can only tell us how westerners experienced this society. For centuries, Indians too have added their own flavour and colour to these descriptions by assuming that they constitute the true description of Indian society. However, all these efforts make our social sciences rather alien to our experience and we have failed to overcome these colonial descriptions even after more than 60 years of independence. Although this problem was identified during the 1980s, there is not much clarity on how to theorise the problems of colonial description and how to search for an alternative way of understanding Indian society. The works of S.N. Balagangadhara and the Centre for the Study of Local Cultures, we propose, address this problem and show new ways of answering the questions that this situation confronts us with: How do we recognise the colonisation of the social sciences? What is its impact on our attempt to understand Indian culture? How do we make the study of a comparative science of cultures possible? The theme of the discussions in each session is structured around the work Smriti-Vismriti: Bharatiya Samskriti (Akshara Prakashana, 2010). However, we hope that the discussions that take place during the conference will cumulatively develop the project of the de-colonisation of the social sciences. We recommend that to make the discussions as fruitful as possible the participants read the following texts before the conference and come prepared with their concerns and arguments: (1) S.N. Balagangadhara’s Smriti-Vismriti: Bharatiya Samskriti (Kannada) or “The Heathen in His Blindness...”, the English version of the same (Manohar 2005). (2) The keynote presentation texts of each session. (The texts will be circulated to the registered participants by the second week of January 2011.)

Session themes and keynote presentations:

• Prof. Rajaram Hegde: Introduction to the Conference
• Prof. S.N. Balagangadhara: Is Comparative Science of Cultures Possible?
• Prof. G. Sivaramakrishnan: Making of Indian Sociology
• Prof. Sadananda J.S: Addressing the Contemporary Problems of Social Sciences
• Dr. Vivek Dhareshwar: The Difficulty of (Being) Heathen: Doing Science and Reflecting on Experience
• Dr. Jakob De Roover:  Secularisation and the Study of Western Culture:  The Contribution of The Heathen
• Dr. Dunkin Jalki: The Implications of Balu’s Smriti-Vismriti for Caste Studies

Discussants:

Prof. Sivaramakrishnan, Dr. Vivek Dhareshwar, Prof. S.N. Balagangadhara, Dr. Jakob De Roover, Dr. Sara Claerhout, Prof. Harish Ramaswamy. Prof. Ashok Shettar, Dr. Rajaram Hegde, Dr. Shanmukha A, Dr. Rajaram Tolpadi, Dr. Muzzafar Assadi, Dr. Vijay T.P., Dr. Balasubrahmanya, Dr. Chamanalalji, Dr. Sridevi, Dr. Sitaram, Dr. Ajjakkala Girish Bhat, Dr. B. Surendra Rao, Dr. M.G. Hegde, Ms. Polly Hazarika, Dr. Sufiya Pathan, Mr. Ashwin  Kumar A.P, Ms. Sushumna Kannan, Mr. Shankar Prasad, Dr. Lakshmi Arya, Dr. M.S. Nagaraj Rao, Ms. Marianne Keppens, Dr. Dunkin Jalki.

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