Please note that due to inclement weather, the annual Hindu View of Life lecture has been canceled, and will be rescheduled at a future date.
Dr. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad will give the annual Hindu View of Life lecture, entitled "Speaking For and Against Oneself". Dr. Ram-Prasad, a Fellow of the British Academy and Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy, will draw upon Hindu sources and his own experiences to examine the relationship between Hinduism and a multifaceted identity. Below, Dr. Ram-Prasad spoke about his work and how it relates to religious identity and intersectionality.
CSWR: Your lecture will involve a deep examination of your personal identity as a Hindu, in connection with larger considerations of identity. What inspired you to engage these ideas with such a personal focus?
CRP: At present, there is such an upsurge of identity politics, in which Hinduism in the West is an example of a particularly complex diasporic situation. In this, people on the one hand feel cultural estrangement in Western societies where increasingly narrow and often racially biased construals of national culture are spreading; but on the other hand, when they reach for ancestral resources to bolster their cultural identity in the West, they draw on ideas that in turn are themselves exclusivist and nationalistic in that ancestral context. Consequently, liberal Western scholars/commentators are concerned about the extent to which sympathy and critical attention should be directed at Hindu life. I think it is important for those who work as scholars on their own cultural background should honestly express their own view of the balance between intellectual and existential tasks, and help ameliorate the current impasse in the spuriously polarized rhetoric of insiders and outsiders.
CSWR: How does this work compare and contrast with contemporary talk of “intersectionality”?
CRP: To the extent intersectionality has been theorized largely through race and gender in American (and British) context, it has not very much been enriched by attention to a wider range of cultural and ethnic identities that mark these societies. Yet the underlying issues are common. Moreover, thinking through contemporary challenges by engaging with classical sources is relatively rare in wider discussions, whether Western or Indian, and I hope methodologically will also contribute to the question of intersectionality.
CSWR: What is your next project?
CRP: I have just embarked on a project of outlining a philosophical anthropology of emotion through classical Indian texts. I seek to find what conceptions of the human being as emotional being underlie the rich Sanskrit technical literature on aesthetics as well as, of course, Sanskrit literature's brilliant exploration of human nature. From this study, I hope to offer ideas on the relationship between the personal and the social, the phenomenal and the constructive, and between feelings and performance in the anthropology of emotion; ideas that might engage with, mutually illuminate, and perhaps even help configure Western debates, both classical and contemporary, on the nature of emotions.