Modalities of Otherness: A Sperpentining Tale of Enemies, Strangers, Neighdurs, Mortality, Hospitality, and Cognate Matters

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This book breaks new ground by treating matters which are broadly philosophical but leaving behind the method of linear argument. Centring on the various ways in which the contemporary world struggles with the theme of otherness, whether as enemies, neighbours or friends, the author comes to grips with the multiform dimensions of culture, alternating scholarly analysis with references to everyday life, so that the reader is constantly stimulated to fresh reflection.

Her oeuvre is moulded by ventures in various styles of writing including many studies of Gandhi's life and thought; sketches of persons and places inspired by her wide travels; recall of conversations; poems; and exchange of ideas presented in the form of letters. Her many skills as a writer now find their fullest expression in what must be regarded as a major work.

As a student Margaret Chatterjee read Modern Greats (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at Oxford where she was awarded an exhibition at Somerville College. This fostered a lifelong interest in the interrelation between the three. Opportunities for teaching at university level in several countries provided new horizons. Her experiences convinced her that otherness in diverse forms is writ large in the problems we face today, whether it be the relation between human beings and inanimate nature, animals and humans and what an earlier generation of thinkers called 'man's place in the cosmos.'

Among the archetypal images that have generated myths, inspired diverse expressions in the transforming of landscape, voiced primeval fears and haunted dreams, labyrinths, mazes and vortices immediately come to mind. The excursions in the history of ideas embarked on in the following pages follow yet another image, that of the serpentining path or stretch of water, looping forwards and then backwards, homing who knows where, if indeed homing at all, but ever tantalising and full of surprises. The method which winds through reflections on modalities of otherness runs something like this. Theory so often sweeps through particulars or curves round them, leaving behind a disconcerting sense of much being left out. But our examples and reminders from the daily round and common task seem to defy any kind of theorising. And so in the narrative offered we serpentine from incidents and encounters which are not yet illustrations of a 'case' or theory and which in fact defy the straitjacket of abstraction. Folklore jostles with sayings of the great, with personal reminiscence and with very occasional gnawing at theory. We wind not only through space, in different countries, but through different periods of time, ignoring grids and series, leapfrogging over centuries and springing back again.

If my serpentining metaphor is still obscure, here is another way of putting what I am about. Although the itinerarium idea has had rather theological overtones, there can be a very different itinerarium, not a scala of ascent or descent but an exploration uom und herum, round and about, where nothing counts as digression something frowned on by stylists and those devoted to linear thinking - and everything ramifies as much as the root systems of trees. And is this not how things are in the writings of those who ponder on the modalities of otherness, finding constant overlaps between enemy, stranger, neighbour, and friend, and wondering if today's world not only crowds out yesterday but sets up obstacles to tomorrow? So I chant the tale of 'pensée itinérante', thinking on the move, drawing on personal history, literature, music, and above all voicing the belief that the present does not trump what is past, for the past is contained in the present, and that pondering on the serpentining path of different modalities of otherness may have an intimate bearing on whether there is a future at all.

The darker side of present day living is revealed in the first set of reflections on enemies with which I begin, probing the extent to which this theme haunts so much contemporary behaviour, political and otherwise. My serpentining tale will move on, but here is my starting point.