---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: satchidanandan k <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Jun 29, 2008 9:20 PM Subject: FOURTH ESTATE CRITIQUE Re: [GreenYouth] Habermas & Ziauddin Zarda To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Thanks , Damodar, for reminding us of Murali.He was almost a brother, had been several times to my home at Irinjalakuda and had stayed there; we used to discuss all kinds of things, especially cultural-political theories and approaches. He was himself an RSS cadre for some time, but fascinating was the way he outgrew it and developed a profound critique of the Hindu right.We were again together at the Gramsci Institute, another ephemeral group( I have been in many such and been an initiator of many too,as you know, like The Forum for Secular Culture and transient journals like Jwala, Utharam and the first version of Pachakutira) with TNJoy, TKRamachandran, B Rajeevan and some others who had left the People's Cultural Forum and were groping for new ways and there was Gramsci with his Prison Notebooks that opened a series of new thoughts in politics as well as on popular culture) in Kerala with its headquarters in a village called Chingoli( Let no one remember OVVIjayan's Namboodiri cartoon on the naxalites: 'Lin Piao Cherplassereelo?' and ask, 'Gramsci, in Cheengoli?')He had presented many illuminating papers in seminars and was a very fine speaker, and whatever of his works have been published in collecttions and as the book, THE DISCURSIVE GEOGRAPHY OF UPANISHADS is highly original.I remembered alln this when I met his wife a month back at Rajan Gurukkal's send-off at Kottayam where I was a casual visitor.I feel cheered up (and pained at the same time at his loss)as I think of his intellectual youthfulness.... *Look at things from below. * ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:08:20 +0530 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: FOURTH ESTATE CRITIQUE Re: [GreenYouth] Habermas & Ziauddin Zardar Dear Damodar, Your post brought back to me memories of the days I spent with Murali, in the Calicut University. He was a scholar extraordianry, a friend non pareil. I first met Murali when we were going to Hyderabad for the Indian History Congress in 1979, immediately after the Emergency. He was a student of history PG in Calicut University, and I was a degree student at Malabar Christian College. He was a delegate and I had a paper to present on the leftist media in Malabar in forties. After that, we spent many days together discussing, quarelling and trying to understand each other. He came from Palakkad, the son of a right-wing hindutva thinker, and I came from a family of poor peasants frrm a remote village in Kozhiode, the first to go to a university in the entire family. But he was a great friend and when I realized that the differences that divided us narrowed, I was happy. He was close to TK Ramachandran and his group in the university, and as an SFI activist, I belonged to a group critical of TK and his group. Now after almost three decades I realize that those differences were ephemeral. Now where is the great divide, I don't find any. N P Chekkutty On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 7:30 PM, damodar prasad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On 6/29/08, Dileep Raj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: *M.Muralidharan (1-6-1958--- 1-12-1995), a great thinker Keralam has produced*, *No doubt. * ** ** Dileep, I opened mail box to crticize you on your previous mail remarks on 'framework". After reading this excerpts from the unpublished work of Dr. Muralidharan, I withdraw and keep quite. damodar . wrote with a sophistication and brilliance rare among conventional academics.The following passage is taken from his unpublished paper "Hindu Community Formation in Kerala: Processes and structures under Modernity" (1994): In recent years , the most sedate defence of modernity has been that it makes possible a communicative ethics, a sociality of ideal-speech and validations.Such attempts that point to an implicit human condition permeated by understanding and free from coercion will have to confront communities that are actually made; religious, national or ethnic. Outside the university communities in Western Europe, modernity has witnessed the shaping of such groups.Any celebration of what they free in human nature will have to be shown too be not bound up with what they chain.The ethics of ideal speech faces the paradox that in a torture cell, the right to speak becomes an obligation. On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 8:14 PM, damodar prasad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Habermas and Ziauddin Zardar Whereas Habermas is a distinguished hardcore philosopher, Ziauddin Zardar, should I describe him, as a futurist? Habermas belongs to the tradition of European philosophy; Zardar belongs to the thinking emerging in the postcolonial context. Habermas belongs to the great Frankfurt school tradition of critical theory and is located in Germany; Zardar is located at England and writes passionately about Bollywood cinema. Zardar is devout practitioner of Islamic religion; I know nothing about Habermas except the remark in MG Radhakrishnan's mail that he is friend of Pope. As I understand, ( may be there is -donno) there is nothing in common between their thinking and writings. But both concern themselves to the problem of secularism in a world increasingly determined by multi-religious or inter-religious exchanges, sometimes pleasant, some times violent. Habermas is perhaps popular to Malayalam writing since 80s, I guess because of his engagement with Marxism. Public sphere, his antithetical position on students left movement, his idea of the 'In complete project of modernity' and his dialogues with Focault are popular in Keralam. But Zardar, I think is not much popular. Habermas engagement with secularism is contextualized in European modernity and in a particular context where state-promoted multiculturalism and the created fear of "terrorism" has made the 'civilized' states xenophobic and resulting in 'irresistible' rise of new Artru Uis. I've found (with my minimal knowledge) there is a deep sense of tragedy underlying Habermas' writings. That has become his style. Though a bit 'flexible", same syntactic intricacies, conceptual complexities and semantic density can be seen in his description of "post secularism". A sense of mourning pervades his description. This can be best described in Rushdie's words "last sigh for a lost world in Moor's Last Sigh. He opens up to a new world but there is 'nostalgia' for the lost world. So I don't wonder a large gap, a widening chasm between the thinkers who live in the lost world of Nehruvian Nationalist Secularism and Habermas who wakes up to engage the emrgent context. The world of Nehruvian Statist secularism is bygone and cannot be recaptured. (and pls. don't!!) But then Zardar is refreshingly new. He engages religion and new emerging ideas of secularism as a value. He engages with a non-European world where multi-religion is a historical condition and perhaps ravaged by Colonialism and later neo-colonialism. Wriiting is full of enjoyment and a sort of pleasantness spreads through his works. Habermas is least self-reflexive. (The maximum he can be, as he states is that he is a "sociological observer") There is no "Habermas's" in his writing, where as Zardar is self-reflexive. One can engage with Habermas in a "disciplined and dispassionate (and cozy way) " keeping his 'self' in a comfortable closet (looks like a scene Bunuel's from "Phantom of Liberty). But to engage with Zardar, one has to be self-reflexive (if at all he/she is sincere). All the solidity of discipline and dispassion liquefies. This is my tentative reading, slightly undisciplined and passionate. (pls. do visit: http://www.ziauddinsardar.com/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
