ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Articles by Shiv VisvanathanSubscribe to Shiv Visvanathan

Science, Nation State, and Democracy

In an attempt to go beyond the formal ideas of democracy, especially the much-vouched frameworks of electoral-ism, new lifeworlds of democracy are reimagined.

Reading Ecology, Reinventing Democracy

The Gadgil report on the Western Ghats is a major ecological tract and a significant reflection on the politics of ecology. It illustrates how a theory of nature, lives, livelihood combined with local knowledge, decentralisation, and diversity add to the dynamism of democracy. In contrast, the Kasturirangan report is an antidote to such therapeutic ecology and shows how development creates the asymmetries of injustice and representation. The article explores the implications of these two different ways of reading ecology.

Reinventing the Commons

The article makes a case for the reinvention of the commons in the social sciences. The individual treatment of rights reduces the collective to a mass of persons. Instead the commons acknowledges the inviolate place of humans as part of the cosmos. The marginal and dissenting imagination must invoke the poetry of nature as it engages the current politics and economics. The commons, in its diversity, seeks wisdom through a dialogue of knowledges, moving beyond traditional “publics,” and “time.”

 

The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Crisis of the Social Sciences

This article raises wider questions like whether the social sciences have been able to provide any meaning to the Covid-19 crisis by exploring the life worlds of body, time and nature. It also focuses on the role of policy and the connectivity between social science and democracy.

Thinking Kashmir

Waiting is so much a part of everydayness, including waiting for peace, waiting for your loved ones to come home, waiting for curfew to end, waiting for the army to go home. Between silence and waiting one can create a narrative of the Kashmir conflict. Unlike the Holocaust or partition, which have the gigantism of epic memories, the sadness of Kashmir is forged, crafted out of thousands of little memories, unwritten diaries merging quietly together. It is this alchemy of memories that is struggling against government policy, which sanitises violence and erases memory to create this strange machine that moves from violence to violence in facile amnesia.

Narendra Modi's Symbolic War

One has to ask, what was the logic called Narendra Modi and what was the nature of the campaign? Modi was a semiotic construct who went on to fight a symbolic war. The Nehruvian nation, Delhi, Development were all semiotically reconstructed in a brilliantly executed campaign. This article is a preliminary attempt at an ethnography of a brilliantly executed campaign.

The Dreams of Reason

This paper looks at Rabindranath Tagore's relationship and interaction with two scientific legends, Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist, and Jagdish Chandra Bose, and also between him and Gandhi. Each is an event on its own, but each telescopes into the other to give an intriguing picture of a multifaceted man. The letters that Tagore wrote and received from the two scientist-intellectuals are also analysed. Tagore was no ordinary nationalist and went beyond the tired categories of the modern nation state. He wanted India to smell the West, taste it and understand the differences within it. He realised that imperialism is only one phase of the West, that there were other Wests that one could talk to and conspire with.

Once There Was a CSDS

The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies completed 50 years recently. Here one former member of the faculty recounts what made the CSDS special and why it changed later.

Hazare vs Hazare: A Scenario as a Warning

As the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement moves to the legislative phase it has to rid itself of the panacea model. The Hazare group has to realise that it has no monopoly on diagnosis or the cure for corruption. The Lokpal is no magic bullet which will solve the problem of corruption. Corruption needs a more cautious and nuanced problematic and a wider set of solutions. To put it facetiously, Hazare's group should not look like an A grade version of the Munna Bhai effect. Life is like a duller form of documentary. One needs to summon history for a more fruitful understanding of this situation.

Interrogating the Nation

What is a 'nation'? What does the word 'nation state' connote? Beginning from early debates on nationalism and the nation state, the word 'nation' has shifted, coming to acquire at one and the same time, an expanding meaning and an ambivalence. Literature and the different social sciences, on the other hand, have exposed the nature of evil, depicting the nation as a genre of violence. A study of European and African works shows how the creation of nation has been fraught with a marginalisation of other groups and voices, with pain and suffering. Literature and language, this article suggests, must once again become tools to plumb the banality of evil that is inherent in the nation state. New 'thought experiments' must seek to challenge the politics of the nation, leading to a reinvention and a new beginning.

A Biotechnology Story

Biotechnology was created within a politics of anxiety and desire in India. The paper attempts to understand the social construction of biotechnology. It locates biotechnology within the wider debates on development and describes an orchestra of positions each of which captures one part of the debate.

'The Laboratory and the World'

This essay then is a tribute to a classicist scientist, a crank who wanted to reinvent democracy, a crank who saw autobiography, the laboratory and the constitution as thought experiments, a visionary who felt India could transform the current idiocies of globalisation into something life giving

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