Modern South Asian Thinkers

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The book in your hand is of encyclopaedic character and a mere work of wonder. This is a humane T act of wondering at the world of thoughts indeed, different from the way we wonder at the resplendence of Taj Mahal, the finest example of the architectural feat as well as the vyncretic value of Moghal modernity. It is also different from that act of wondering where a stranger asks Is Taj Mahal a Tejo Mahalaya? This book is an act of wondering that a child performs when s/he learns about the sun going to another part of the planet first time. This act of wondering is closer to that of an arrested adult mind that stands still while watching the crimson sun rolling down the horizon despre knowing the fact that it is a mere factual event, according to the physical sciences. Wondering thus becomes a hermeneutist's, like Gadamer, child's play in which I know what it is, yet I wonder whether there is something I am still ignorant of the book that has been given a provisional closure, and hence available in the concrete form, is a perpetual act of wondering at fluidity and endlessness, it is a consequence of wondering at the inconclusive thoughtscape. It is about accepting that I know some of these thinkers, and yet asking Do I really know these thinkers sufficiently? Can one exhaust a thoughtscape? Have I arrived at my final conclusion about the regional thoughtscape? And so on so forth, we ask these questions in wonder without any motive to deliver an answer. We ask them to realize that agnostic suspension of answer is an integral component in the act of wondering.

As a teacher, one wonders about the work one does. Whether they teach in the classroom, write for various reasons, undertake researches and everything else that comes their way as academic chores just because there is no way out? Is it an institutional compulsion alone in the backdrop of our pedagogic performances? Or there is more to it, such as enchanting individual disposition, emotive appeals of institution, and interplay of ideology and utopia(9) It often feels that we are simultaneously driven by illusionary but illuminating forces and structural imperatives, psychic stimulus and formal thoughts Therefore a pedagogic vision need not be a Doctor Freud's case of hysteria. And therefore, as teachers, many of us operate with the interface with dream and reality, personal and political, private and public, without succumbing to any sort of schizophrenia. We, thus, tend to wonder at world. Endlessly wonder and hence endlessly explore, talk, share, even though our colleagues doing biochemistry wonder at us as they say how much do you folks in social sciences talk. One wonders, and as long as one persists in wondering one works with inconclusive motives. One is creatively utopian as long as one wonders. The sense of wonder in the vocation of teaching was prominent in the all-time relevant nuggets of wisdom found in the lectures

the objective of exploring thoughts without adherence to prefixes under which the thinkers are presented, thereby venturing into the domain of thoughts which being together, inter alia, literary, philosophical and political thoughts together. But then, each thinker may manifest national and other adjectives, which cannot be completely undermined or erased. This sets a limitation in our envisaged goal of breaking this compendium entirely free from the boundaries. But there is little harm in dreaming and seeking that this book enables for.

The book seeks to introduce to the readers the life and ideas of the thinkers of South Asia which may be falling under different disciplinary backgrounds such as political science, sociology, anthropology, economics and humanities, inter alia. Our interest is not to classify thinkers in a peculiar disciplinary box despite the labels already present in the discourses. Instead, we tend to romance with thoughts in a freewheeling manner in this book, being mindful of the labels affixed to them in most of the works pertaining to intellectual history. In essence, it is an encyclopaedic volume that comprises a synoptic view of the life and works of the thinkers. The latter belong to spheres such as political, social, cultural, literary, civil society, among others. The body of thoughts comprises polemics, commentaries, literary accounts, papers, poetry and other. To meet the objectives, we have been flexible about the sources of information on the thinkers who did not write in the self-conscious guise of a thinker. They penned poetry but expressed thoughts, they hemmed stories but infused insights, they delivered speeches but fired popular imagination, and they led the masses and created nuggets of kleas. Some of these thinkers may not be deemed thinkers in the simplistic scheme of conventional thinking. The challenge was bringing together the 'not-so-thinkers' with the typical thinkers. And why all of this? To make sure that the book performs the important task of nudging us towards an inconclusive act of (re)imagining South Asia by adopting a peculiar epistemological position about which we deliberate in the following

The epistemic conceptions underlying the knowledge regarding history, politics, culture and society in South Asia are undergoing a momentous process of transformation. This change is partly diven by the growing realization in the global South regarding the limitation of existing metanarratives (which is grounded in Euro-American ethno-centricism) to explain the complexity of the non-European parts of the world. Confronted by layered challenges of dealing with the issues of modern/post-modern and the colonial/post-colonial and the need to negotiate with both ontic and epistemic histories, the global South has showed the way forward. This consistently resonates in the political spheres in the region as diverse regimes of thoughts attempt to present their trajectories of socio-cultural and political archaeologies and offer to make sense of their contemporary history. This surfaces in the form of (re)writing history in various parts of the region, with different socio-political and cultural interests. The turf for debating past loadedness. In the name of indigenous, one can perform unjustifiable inclusion and exclusion, and the consequent narrative could be a mere partisan piece. We acknowledge the political limitation with the terms such as native and indigenous, their historical determination and interface with many counterforces. No native/indigenous could be therefore defined plain and simple. But then, this does not amount to debunking the indigenous.