India and its intellectual traditions : of love, advaita, power, and other things / edited by Vinay Lal.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics, as the two volumes preceding this one indicate, was an initiative in 2010-11 of a few individuals including myself who, especially with the passage of a few years, came to an understanding that, while we could not achieve a consensus on the intellectual and political scope of our work, we were very much in agreement about the kind of scholarship, intellectual inquiry, and political outlook that we wished to disavow. We knew what aspects of the modern university we deplored-the increasing turn to metrics to evaluate 'performance', the mechanical emphasis on outcomes, the rapid transformation of the university into a business, the nearly robotic invocation of the vacuous language of 'excellence', the valorization of parasitic efficiency experts, the transformation of students into 'clients', the increasing aversion to intellectual risk, and much else-but we were much less in agreement about how the collective could create a distinct and unique place for intellectual inquiry in the academic world and public sphere-primarily in India but also with an eye to other parts of the world, especially the Global South and the Anglophone world more generally. Revolutionaries, as is well known, are adept at taking a house down but find it rather difficult putting one up. It would be much too pompous to describe our coterie of academics, writers, and public intellectuals as revolutionaries, and many of us are even of the opinion that most of those who have been termed revolutionaries have been anything but that. 'A revolution is not a dinner party,' Mao famously wrote, 'or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.' Mao, along with many other so-called revolutionaries, was not going to be constrained by the consideration that far too many acts of 'insurrection' have turned out to be little more than campaigns of terror. Just what kind of revolutionaries Maoism itself bred can be inferred from the terror spread by the Cultural Revolution and is to be presently seen in the tactics of intimidation and skullduggery that are but second nature to the Chinese Communist Party. Mao, who certainly had a gift for embroidering his own exploits, may have wrought a 'revolution' but he also produced genocide. There are circumstances under which a painting, or even an embroidery, may be far more revolutionary in spirit than shouting some slogans or, as happened on 6 January 2021 in Washington DC, storming a legislative building"--