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PROJECTS
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Situating Women in local Culture
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This was the first project initiated by Aarohi in February 2011. The project aims to
understand the issues of women in Indian socio-cultural milieu. There are varied
arguments that are articulated on position of Indian women and all of them have their
own ideological propositions too. There are some who romanticize the idea of women
in India on its historical legacy (imagined past) and some who wish to discard the idea
of Indian women and build a new argument based on modern conception (imagined
future). Both of the arguments have their own limitations and hence there is a need
to locate the contemporary Indian women in the society with the baggage of socio-
cultural stereotypes and find new pathways for emancipation. It is pointed elsewhere
that the writings on women in India are in Cartesian fashion. At least some of the
earlier writings were written by men who treated women as a subject (other) of study.
Sometimes it was also true that the women writers fell in the same trap. Hence there
is need to attempt, to revisit the idea of women in Indian thought using the concepts
relevant here and if there are silences, they need to be voiced. Other than the academic
challenge, it is also essential that the argument from women must be based on ground
reality. Considering the existing gap between the common women and the feministic
discourse, this project is one such attempt to bridge gaps as stated above and to find
answers to the question of immense importance and relevance to feminist discourse in
India.
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Understanding the idea Nature in Indian knowledge systems
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India, having a highly diverse civilizational history, has treated nature in a manner
which is entirely different from the way in which nature has been perceived in the
modern knowledge. Historically India has been a densely populated country inhabited
by a large number of indigenous groups in a landscape which is very hard to separate as
wild and habitable landscapes. Entire earth, landscapes, sea scapes, river scapes, skies,
mountains, and the elements of nature were sacred. In fact the entire landscape in the
pre-colonial India was treated sacred and there is hardly any separation of man and
nature, wild and domestic. Nature has been an integral part of the human experience,
their economic, spiritual, social and cultural endeavors. With the advent of colonial
modernity followed by post-colonial rampant industrialization there has been a new
experience that the people of India are living with. For the modern knowledge system
nature is a resource and a utilitarian object and hence can be tamed, exploited and
manipulated. This attitude in the independent India has created a large number of
exploited, denuded landscapes. Therefore, modern dominant, hegemonic knowledge
created a hierarchy of knowledge systems so that anything indigenous is substandard
and incomplete. Hence there has been a consistent belief that there was nothing that we
knew of nature that is useful as knowledge. The indigenous knowledge was completely
ignored in favour of modern knowledge because of perceived 'unutilitarian' values. In
the changing world, after understanding the conflict of knowledge and power relations
and its complex power structures, it is convincing that we must revisit our knowledge
systems. Considering the surmounting crisis of nature today due to modernization it
is right time to revisit and synthesize the conception of nature in various knowledge
traditions in local cultures. As a part of this enquiry, Aarohi attempts to understand the
idea of nature in Indian knowledge systems. |
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Review of trends in contemporary social theory in India.
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History of understanding the Indian society through modern lens is quite a new
phenomenon in Indian academia. The history of large number of these disciplines
in the Universities is sometimes less than a century. There have been a wide range
of issues that have bothered social scientists in India like caste, class, marriage,
community, freedom, justice and so on. In 20th century all these issues have been
contested intensely through the methods of sociology, social anthropology, economic
anthropology, political science and in other social sciences/disciplines. It is very difficult
to take one common point on many of these issues and the priorities of these studies
have changed over a period of time in response to changes in methods and theories
across the globe. To understand what has been addressed over a period of time at a
broad scale, DF attempts to synthesize the trends in these studies so that there is a fairly
reasonable synthesis of at least sociological traditions in India. This project does not
intend to replicate the already available attempts on similar lines rather attempts to put
them in broader perspective. |
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