About

About Indian Slate

“My Swaraj is to keep intact the genius of our civilization. I want to write many new things, but they must all be written on the Indian slate.” - M.K. Gandhi

Led by Dr. Vivek Dhareshwar, Indian Slate is a research platform that takes its inspiration from Gandhi’s conviction that research on India can unearth new insights. At a time when in every domain—economics, politics, environment—it is evident that the structures erected on Western thought have brought us face to face with the ever deepening crisis that has made it difficult if not impossible to conceive of how to live, it would be tragic to further neglect what India and its traditions have to offer as an alternative. Ever since modern social scientific and humanistic scholarship began to take India seriously, the thrust has always been to show what India lacks or what needs reforming in its social structures (the few attempts at romanticizing its heritage did not take the form of understanding its forms of learning or knowledge creation). There has been a growing awareness that in many fields not only the conceptualizations of the domains but our practical, passionate doings in the domains are distorted and cramped by the dominant frames received either through the colonial past or contemporary disciplinary lenses. The distortions are all the more acutely felt in domains where there were alternative frames, where the very structuring of the lived domain was different. We see the effect of such distortions in our social world where the fine-grained practices that sustained the social and ethical world have been distorted and rendered invisible by disciplines that had no resources to understand them.

But such dissonances are common whether we take eco-cultural spheres, the built environment, or political and educational institutions. In domains as far apart as geography and ethics, but also in many other domains we encounter a problem that is both cognitive and practical. How to understand this dissonance in different domains and to practically and creatively deal with it is a question that we can no longer evade. Implicitly or explicitly the models have come from elsewhere (colonial inheritance in the case of education, politics and administration, but more generally western frames in other domains) and the implicit frame has had to assert itself obliquely, often only in the way we have had to cope with the inhospitable structures. The result often enough has been distortion, of both the imposed structures and the resistance. The task is to understand both the distortions and the superimpositions that have rendered invisible different ways of conceptualizing the domains, which may be political, environmental, ethical or aesthetic. Indian Slate seeks to bring together research attempts that radically depart from this stance that dominates contemporary academic scholarship to inquire into practices and traditions in order to make available new insights and learning that have the potential to develop an alternative to the frameworks that have brought us to the current impasse.

Indian Slate seeks to build a platform for reconceptualizing the humanities and the social sciences by drawing on the practical/experiential inquiry so central to Indian intellectual traditions. The major projects of this initiative would attempt to access and reconstruct the extraordinary understanding of the experiential world that the Indian intellectual traditions have offered humanity. They are largely inaccessible to us today (made more inaccessible by the academic disciplines such as Indian philosophy, history and anthropology), but seeking inspiration from Gandhi who theorized our cognitive enslavement to the west on the basis of his understanding of Indian thought, this initiative sets itself the two fold task of reconceptualizing the human sciences and reformulating the insights of Indian traditions to begin new inquiries into designing new sites of learning.