Interpreting the Other: Intellectual History and Cultural Difference

This paper argues that higher education in India, especially in the field of humanities and area studies, continues to be a Euro-American inheritance. Even when area studies attempt to offer a critique of the post-Enlightenment construction of universal human nature by locating the human in diverse cultural specificities, the discipline is still unable to configure the ‘context’ outside conceptual boundaries of the West. For instance, studies of culture seem to take historical narrativity as a cultural universal. That is to say, even when cultures do not privilege clear-cut notions of history or philosophy, the assumption is that it should be possible to unravel the historical or philosophical impulses of these cultures by studying the kind of narratives that the cultures have produced. The primacy of the narrative as the life-giving and meaning-making source in an essentially chaotic world is grounded, it seems to me, in Western onto-theology. This narrative model is incapable of studying mnemocultures (cultures of memory) like India (and Asia), for even when the culture produces diverse and heterogenous narrative weaves like itihasa, purana and kavya, the narrative does not enjoy a privileged status in these cultural forms. These compositions have a performative significance whose meaning is not found or guided by presence of the narrative or its potential for truth and identity. This paper will show that positivist historiographic assumptions regarding cultural forms in the non-West, especially in the Indian context, are ill-equipped to engage with traditions that lie outside the heritage of the West. Such attempts to situate an ancient past as embodied in cultural forms extraneous to the Western metaphysic are really accounts of self-understanding of the latter. The receptions of Keralamahatmyam purana in modern intellectual discourses set against the existence of the purana in living traditions of performance outside the confines of the university will be used as a case in point to elucidate the incapability of existing conceptual categories in the humanities discourse to configure cultural difference.