Author Description

This book is a discursive intervention in reconceptualising and re-contextualizing the multifaceted impact of Western enlightenment. It interrogates, from the perspective of Indian world-views and wisdom traditions-such as that of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj-the discourses of liberation inherent in the tradition of enlightenment or post-enlightenment culture and society. The author in this book highlights the ruptures and gaps in western discourses such as those of modernity, poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, nihilism, feminism, and multiculturalism, while also addressing the anomalies within these frameworks using Indian discursive perspectives which are dhrama centric yet open ended. The author in this book uses a comparative lens to expand the scope of Gandhi's Hind Swaraj with respect to enlightenment thought in order to examine issues of equality, freedom, wealth generation- distribution, industrial society and its epistemology.