Samvada Centre for Research Resources

Samvada – The Rationale

While traditions are embodied and lived out in the different societies of our contemporary world, they need to be deeply reflected upon with a view to address the incommensurabilities and rivalries that develop between them. Therefore Samvada Centre for Research Resources seeks to make a contribution to contemporary life in our modern global societies by addressing critical issues that structure contemporary life by working with students and researchers from across the globe. Contemporary research within the Human Sciences is largely dominated by methodologies of the Natural Sciences. These methods, working out of a modernist and enlightenment epistemology of a ‘single universal frame’, focus on providing causal explanations for human phenomena through reductionism and reification of human data. These approaches, while having produced incredible results in the Material Sciences, have been unable to give appropriate accounts of human life and society. With the rejection of the scientific paradigm within the Human Sciences, new methodologies have to be evolved within the Human Sciences that are able to take seriously the indeterminacies that are constitutive of human society and human agency. Samvada chiefly focuses on addressing methodologies and conceptual frameworks that provide the ‘how’ of research programmes within the Human Sciences.

The successful functioning of any society depends on the success of its educational system, therefore education and research are the institutional vehicles through which society trains itself by theorising, modifying and transmitting the practices and knowledge that it has inherited from its past even as it engages with the practices and knowledge originating from other societies. The practices and knowledge about humans, as individuals and collectives, are generally studied under Human Sciences and particularly through the disciplines of politics, economics, religion, theology, history, philosophy, psychology etc. Therefore a healthy society necessitates the study of the Human Sciences at the highest levels.

In our contemporary world, the various social domains of most, if not all modern societies, are resourced by the modern educational system stemming out of the Western academic tradition which has been universalised within an Enlightenment understanding and has been passed on to societies around the world through the processes of colonialism and globalism. Therefore the study of the Human Sciences in any society, for example in the Indian society, is borrowed from the Enlightenment-informed Western Academia.

In the modern West, ‘protest’ against traditional religion (Latin Christianity) and subsequent quests for reforms, swung to their logical conclusion in achieving a ‘disenchanted’ worldview driven by exclusive humanism. In the new era of modernity, human life was imagined purely within an ‘immanent frame’ without reference to transcendence. Religion became bounded as irrational, mystical and private, and hence it has been displaced from pre-eminence in the public sphere. Thus the academic study of the Human Sciences in the public sphere is limited to a material understanding of the Human self and society while relegating the non-material, spiritual or religious, either to the private sphere or to a narrow bandwidth within the university. This paradigm of secularised Human Sciences has not only informed Educational Institutions in the West, but also has formed the basis for setting up modern Educational institutions in other parts of the world, such as in India. This has resulted in an exclusion of the knowledge and practices belonging to historical traditions which were termed as 'religious', only to allow them currency in the private sphere, in that they entailed an enchanted discourse without the separation of the material from the spiritual.

However, with the postmodern turn, intellectual enquiry, particularly within the Human Sciences in the Western academia, structured as it is by the ‘objectivity’ of secularity has been seriously challenged on two counts: (a) validity of material explanations for human self and society, and (b) the universalism of its objective claims. Thus, enquiry in the Human Sciences has reached an impasse through a postmodern deconstruction of the universal and secular liberalism of modern inquiry, and the insufficiency of opstmodern enquiry to provide an alternative viable proposal. Western academia is currently responding to this impasse through the proposal of a dialogical mode of enquiry within the Human Sciences, informed by the Continental philosophies of Existentialism, Phenomenology and Philosophical Hermeneutics.

However, this dialogical form of enquiry has parallels in different eras of the pre-modern West, such as in the works of Thomas Aquinas (13^th century). What is interesting is that dialogical enquiries are precisely the hallmarks of traditions of enquiry in other parts of the world such as South Asia, where intellectual enquiry has historically progressed against the backdrop of dialoguing traditions, known as Samvada - 'discoursing together'.

Samvada is a tradition of enquiry that has dialogued different intellectual enquiries such as Buddhist, Jaina and Hindu thought, with each other in South Asia. Although the Samvada tradition of enquiry is uniquely located in history, its presupposition of diverse traditions of enquiry is representative of most forms of enquiry, formal and informal, in South Asia. The Indian vāda tradition was developed in the methods used to delineate the boundaries of the discourse between the rival schools of Vedic textual exegesis in ways that clarified difference and debate.

Therefore, Samvada Centre for Research Resources will integrate modern hermeneutical tradition with a revival of the Samvada dialogical tradition of enquiry (a) to make a critical contribution to the Western academic tradition by enabling it to go beyond the modern-postmodern impasse that it is faced with currently, (b) to offer a conceptual framework to enable dialogue between traditions of enquiry arising historically from different societies, (c) and particularly to enable these societies to articulate their self-traditions within their own internal categories. This threefold aim arises out of the core beliefs of the Samvada Centre for Research Resources, which emphasises that all research enquiries must be dialogical in nature. Therefore the Samvada tradition and the modern hermeneutical tradition of the West, rather than being rival traditions of enquiry, can mutually inform each other. The researcher is required to Know oneself to identify the tradition(s) informing her view of the world, to Understand the ‘other’ within the historical traditions by which the other is constituted, and to respond Dialogically in speaking the language of another as one’s own, even as differences are clarified, paradoxes resolved and Human Sciences advanced in our predominantly global societies.

Check Samvada out HERE

A Holiday from Myself – A Walk into the Wilderness

Even before I wake up

I am already someone

Some I want to be, most I don’t

I am a father, a brother, a son

A wife, sister, mother

Roles I was born with

Promotion I didn't demand

Doctor, Architect, Lawyer

Banker, florist, cabdriver

A character in a drama

A drama I didn’t consent to play

A script I didn’t write

But time keeps turning the pages

And the story continues

Roles I am forced to play

Even when I resist and refuse

All I do

Crawl into another story

The plot again is already set

Little change I can bring

Not just the plot of the dramas I play

But the master plot, the mother of all plots

The plot of the story itself

It is tiring to play these roles

Enact all these parts

Scripts to voice

Rituals to play

Practices to perform

Tiring, exhausting, all-consuming

I need out, I need a holiday

I need a place to recuperate

But if I am the parts I play

And the roles I perform

Even if the parts and roles exhaust

How do I escape and run

I need a holiday from myself

From all parts and roles

Stories that give significance

Narratives that provide meaning

But how can that be?

How can one flee from oneself?

Even death does not provide a way of escape

As long as the story continues and the drama plays

I live on and continue to perform

Even after death in the memory of time

If even death cannot set free

How else can I fly?

Move past the constraints

Placed by the characters

Roles I am forced to play

Into the wilderness I must go

Into the wilderness I must disappear

The blackhole of narratives

The death of the story

The oblivion of meaning

I yearn for the wilderness

To strengthen, to refresh

To help me understand

To be beyond me

In order to be me

Idols: Material and Conceptual

When one thinks of idols, the image that immediately comes to mind is an image of a material thing. Hence those traditions that 'appear' not to have any material idols (I say 'appear', because on careful inspection, every tradition can be said to have its share of material idols) claim superiority over those who do. But then the question one must ask is, what is so abominable about 'material idols'? Simply put, the idea that any material form can have the arrogance to stand in place of the immaterial divine! But this view entails a certain understanding of what is material and divine respectively. This view draws a distinction between matter and spirit and holds them as mutually exclusive and thus in opposition to one another. While this view represents the best of 18th and 19th century western intellectual tradition, which exalted the matter-spirit binary, it needs to be radically updated for those of us living in the 21st century. Matter was then seen in a substantialist sense and opposed to spirit, a view which has since been discarded. 20th century Science and Philosophy has long gone past this opposition. Therefore the real critique of material idol lies in the critique of material substances that claim to stand in place of the divine who is seen as formless and non-material. This view has to be now radically challenged and updated given the contemporary critique of the matter-spirit binary. however that is not what I am particularly interested in this morning.

My interest lies in the idea of 'idol' itself which is seen in a material sense. At the heart of the critique is the view that idols limit and bound that which is infinite and unbounded. If this is what an idol is then I want to assert that not only material idols accomplish this, but equally conceptual idols. The assertion can be seen to have legitimacy because concepts too cannot escape the critique that is advanced against material idols. Concepts limit as much as material idols. One could even say that underlying every material idol there is a conceptual idol, or perhaps even argue that ultimately all we have access to are conceptual idols. But those traditions that oppose material idols do not cease to possess concepts and thus conceptual idols even if they do not have corresponding material idols. For example, the concept 'God' can be seen as a conceptual idol. But this leads to further questions about the nature of language and the delimiting function that appears innate to all language, although this view of language itself can be challenged. But that is another debate.

However, the point being made here is that the distinction that is made between material and conceptual idols is a false opposition and that the onus is particularly on those who believe they do not possess material idols, to examine the conceptual idols to which they give their allegiance. Examples of conceptual idols are identities, institutions, structures, definitions et al. If this be the case, then the larger question for us is to ask ourselves, if we can ever escape idols, and if not then how should we view idols - conceptual and material? A reasonable response could possibly be to begin (a) by accepting the reality of idols and not be naively opposed to the idea of idols. (b) But then to quickly recognize that since they are idols, they do not have the power to stand in for the divine. (c) All concepts and material idols are limited and bounded and hence are unable to represent the unbounded and the beyond, thus even the best of idols, conceptual and material, need to be held provisionally with a willingness to kiss them goodbye when encountered with a deeper revelation.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

...many in the past have attributed success to 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. Although this metaphor can be traced back to Bernard of Chartres, the twelfth-century French philosopher, it is Newton who made it a household metaphor with his 'if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'. However, as John of Salisbury noted in his Metalogicon (1159), Bernard of Chartres' use of the metaphor is fascinating and insightful - 'Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.' Therefore, according to Bernard of Chartres, the secret of success begins with (a) realizing that one is a dwarf, a dwarf without any 'sharpness of sight' or even 'physical distinction', something that some of us would rather die than admit. (b) Secondly, to know that success comes only in following after giants. This requires one to bend one's knee to climb the giant even as one submits oneself and be dependent on them. (c) But if we allow ourselves to realize our dwarf stature and diligently follow after the giants, Bernard of Chartres argues that we will 'see more than they and things at a greater distance', in other words we will become more successful than even the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Following Bernard of Chartres, Newton became both successful and a household name; maybe we too should and by that could and would...