Global development? Alternative voices from Delhi

Alternatives

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 259-282

  Dallmayr, Fred ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21344452499     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437549602100206     Document Type: Review

References (46)

1. Compare, e.g., Irving Louis Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development: The Theory and Practice of International Stratification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
2. Regarding different models of democracy, see C. B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966);
3. also his The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
4. See Thomas Pantham, "Some Dimensions of the Universality of Philosophical Hermeneutics: A Conversation with Hans-Georg Gadamer," Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research 9 (1992): 132.
5. For a good introduction to the subaltern project, see Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies, Foreword by Edward Said (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). The first volume of studies was published in Delhi in 1982; since then, at least six additional volumes have appeared.
6. A brief introduction to the perspective and work of the Delhi Centre is provided by Rajni Kothari in "Towards an Alternative Process of Knowledge," in his Rethinking Development: In Search of Humane Alternatives (New York: New Horizons, 1989), pp. 23-43. (The book was first published in India by Ajanta Publications, Delhi.) The Delhi Centre issues periodic Research Reports, among which the most detailed and comprehensive was the report published in 1988 on the occasion of the Delhi Centre's silver jubilee.
7. Lokayan in the meantime has become an autonomous institution with its own statutes; six times a year it publishes a journal, Lokayan Bulletin (in English and Hindu).
8. Rajni Kothari, State against Democracy: In Search of Humane Governance (Delhi: Ajanta, 1988), p. 60. It should be noted that Kothari did not entirely condemn the modern state. In a progressive democratic vein, he endorsed the state provided it served as an "instrument" of democratization. Put differently: the state for Kothari was to be in the service of democracy and the people (not the other way around).
9. See Kothari, note 6, pp. 2-3, 151;
10. also his Transformation and Survival: In Search of a Humane World Order (Delhi: Ajanta, 1988), pp. 6, 170-171. In the latter text, Kothari states his vision in these terms (p. 173): "My preferred world is one in which the individual enjoys autonomy for his self-realization and creativity - what is generally known as freedom. This is my principal value. . . . The primary condition of freedom is sheer survival, a protection against violence - local, national and international violence, as well as conditions tending toward either annihilation of the properties of life or toward a deadening uniformity of all forms of behavior and social structure."
11. Kothari, Rethinking Development, note 4, pp. 3-5.
12. The chapter was first presented as a paper at a Pugwash Conference on science and world affairs held in Madras in 1976.
13. Kothari, Rethinking Development, note 4, pp. 7-21.
14. Kothari, Rethinking Development, note 4, pp. 48-49, 51.
15. The chapter was first presented as a paper at a conference on alternative development strategies held in Bangkok in 1979.
16. Compare in this context also Max Horkkeimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming, trans. (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972).
17. Kothari, Rethinking Development, note 4, pp. 50, 52, 54-55.
18. Regarding ecology, compare also the chapter "On Eco-Imperialism" (a critique of Garrett Hardin), pp. 107-117.
19. The book contains an important chapter on "Ethnicity," pp. 191-224, where ethnicity is not merely castigated (as a possible ally of xenophobic communalism), but also affirmed and celebrated as a possible source of human empowerment and as an emblem of cultural diversity (against the encroachments of globalizing uniformity).
20. Kothari, Growing Amnesia: An Essay on Poverty and the Human Consciousness (Delhi: Viking, 1993), pp. 8-9.
21. The book was published in England under the title Poverty: Human Consciousness and the Amnesia of Development (London: Zed Books, 1993). I quote from the Indian edition. As he adds (p. 26): "Quite apart from the decline in the role of the state in preserving spaces for the underprivileged and protecting peoples and cultures from globalizing trends, there is the danger of the whole normative framework of democracy being undermined. The assumption that the liberalization of the economy would lead to a more liberal policy and generate more liberties for individuals and groups is thoroughly unfounded."
22. Kothari, Growing Amnesia, note 12, pp. 17, 28.
23. Kothari, Growing Amnesia, note 12, pp. 22-23, 26, 28-29, 31.
24. Kothari, Growing Amnesia, note 12, pp. 123, 134, 149, 151. As he adds at another point (p. 90): "Basically, without the deeper cultural base, it is not possible to achieve human well-being. Even if it is temporarily brought about through some administrative or technological means . . . it will soon disappear"
25. See Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980);
26. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
27. Nandy has also been a prolific writer on the politics and culture of science. One of his early texts in this field was Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two Indian Scientists (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980).
28. Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 21, 31-35.
29. The importance of Gandhi's legacy for the future of developing societies is spelled out with eloquence and subtlety in the book's concluding chapter, "From Outside the Imperium: Gandhi's Cultural Critique of the West," pp. 127-162. In exploring therapeutic alternatives, Nandy did not postulate a latent Indian "essence" untouched by external intrusion. It is not easy, he writes at one point (p. 17), "to live with an alien culture's estimate of oneself, to integrate it within one's selfhood and to live that self-induced inner tension. It is even more difficult to live with the inner dialogue within one's own culture which is triggered off by the dialogue with other cultures because, then, the carefully built defenses against disturbing dialogues . . . begin to crumble."
30. See also Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theory of Liberation (New York: Orbis Books, 1973), p. 276.
31. Nandy, "Cultural Frames for Social Transformation: A Credo," Alternatives 12, no. 1 (1987): 113-114.
32. Nandy, "Cultural Frames," note 18, pp. 114-116.
33. Nandy, "Cultural Frames," note 18, pp. 117, 123.
34. Nandy's distrust of some key categories of Western modernity is evident in a 1988 volume edited by him under the title Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).
35. Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. x-xi.
36. Compare also Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Tokyo: Zed Books, 1986 and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
37. Nandy, note 21, pp. 1-2, 6, 87.
38. Edward Said, Foreword, note 3, p. viii. Since the time of the first Subaltern Studies volume in 1982, it is true, the Marxist and Gramscian moorings of subaltern studies have been transformed by a series of other influences, including structuralism and poststructuralism, as well as British political sociology. To this extent, Said is entirely correct in noting (p. x) that "none of the Subaltern Scholars is anything less than a critical student of Karl Marx," and that today "the influence of structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Roland Barthes and Louis Althusser is evident, along with the influence of British and American thinkers, like E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and others."
39. See Kothari, Growing Amnesia, note 12, p. 95 ("Role of the State");
40. Nandy, "Culture, State, and the Rediscovery of Indian Politics," in Interculture 21, no. 2, issue 99 (1988): 2-3, 8.
41. On the relation of culture and politics see, e.g., Margaret Archer, Cultures and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
42. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987);
43. and Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
44. Nandy, note 17, pp. 16-17;
45. Kothari, Growing Amnesia, note 12, p. 179.
46. Compare also Nandy's comment in "Culture," note 24 (p. 11): "Unlike the modernists and Hindu revivalists, those viewing Indian politics from outside the framework of the nation-state system believe it possible for a state to represent a confederation of cultures, including a multiplicity of religions and languages. To each of these cultures, other cultures are an internal opposition rather than an external enemy."