Sudipta Kaviraj on The Search for Paradise

Join us for a Howison Lecture with Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. Kaviraj lecture will explore The Search for Paradise, focusing on the colonial history and social science that habituated Indians intellectuals to two questionable certitudes.

The first was the radical dissimilarity between modern social theory and pre-modern philosophical traditions of other, colonized societies. A second prejudice was the radical inferiority of pre-modern traditions in thinking of solutions to modern human life. In this lecture, Kaviraj will try to contest both these prejudices by using an analysis of two great traditions of Indian aesthetic-social philosophy: the Upanishads, and Vaisnava theology and poetry.