Auseinandersetzung,Colonialism and Heidegger’s Oblivion of Other Beginnings

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to enact a creative confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) between Heidegger and Sikh spirituality. Heidegger’s idea of confrontation did not stay the same throughout his career. It goes through multiple transformations. The earliest iteration of this idea in the 1930s can be linked to his ethno-centrism. In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger performs a confrontation with himself, which marks his attempts to go beyond his prior position. Later in the 1960s and 1970s, Heidegger gets a glimpse of what a different confrontation might look like. However, he fails to enact it. This failure can be located in his inability to build a profound connection between his quest and non-European traditions. The article concludes with a fleeting glance at what such a connection between Heidegger’s quest and Sikh spirituality might look like.     

Hindu nationalism in power: Making sense of Modi and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government, 2014–19

ABSTRACT

As the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance returns to power in India, it is appropriate to reflect on the coalition’s first term in office. This paper provides an overview of the government’s performance in key areas, especially vis-a-vis religious minorities, and of the competing approaches through which its policies have been understood. It argues for a need to move away from conventional explanations that have failed to predict the popular appeal of Hindu nationalism. Instead, an interpretive understanding anchored in social constructionism offers a more meaningful perspective on the seismic changes that are reflected in contemporary Indian politics.     

Guru Nanak’s sensuous metaphysics

ABSTRACT

Religion and aesthetics are demarcated as two different avenues with ‘God’ and ‘Beauty’ as their respective goals. Opposite of anesthetic, aesthetics is clearly the heightening of the senses. But religion with its focus on God dwelling in a world beyond ours mandates a negation of those very senses. Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, overturns such an antithesis. My paper focuses on Guru Nanak’s Japji, the foremost devotional hymn in the Guru Granth Sahib, to explore the way in which aesthetics and religion merge together in the unitary experience of a sensuous metaphysics.