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.

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