Colonialism and traditional forms of knowledge
then and now
pp. 239-253
in: Sharad Deshpande (ed), Philosophy in colonial India, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstrakt
By raising the question "which language do the śāstras now speak?", this essay illuminates the predicament of Indian knowledge systems in the era of colonial hegemony . It grapples with a number of issues including the very notion of colonialism which cannot be taken as referring to any historically closed period. The question that emerges in this context pertains to the complex relationship between "the colonial state of mind " and the language that the colonial mind uses for self-expression . The essay examines various formulations of this relationship such as "movement of harmonization," "East–West binary " with the alleged superiority of Eastern spirituality , the Anglo-German world-view , the policies of "dissemination of Western ideas of reason and progress of civilization," and "the structured incommensurability between the two worlds' as revealed in the program of the translation of Sanskrit texts. It is argued that we are the inheritors of this incommensurability, of a total epistemological break. This calls for a thorough philosophical scrutiny of the intercultural translation program anchored in colonialism and its repercussions.