The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory

by Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarukkai

An enduring challenge confronts the practice of social science in India and other non-western countries. For long, the experiences of these societies have been largely described by theoretical vocabulary and methods drawn from mainstream western intellectual traditions. This has led to two kinds of asymmetries in knowledge production in the social sciences. One is the overwhelming dependence on these western theories in order to make sense of non-western experiences along with the concomitant rejection of indigenous intellectual traditions. The other is the reluctance of the western academia to draw on both non-western writers as well as their intellectual traditions. The politics of these processes is that the experiences of the non-west are dominantly being defined by the theoretical constructs of the west. Using the format of a dialogue between two authors, this book confronts these issues by first beginning with an analysis of the nature of experience followed by an argument for an ethics of theorizing. These issues about the politics of experience and ethics of theory are discussed within the context of theorizing dalit experience and conceptualizing the problematic category of untouchability, by drawing upon both Indian and Western intellectual traditons.

Genres: India, Academic

264 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2012

Reviews

[Anil]

One of the most interesting text to understand the relation between experience and theory. The book will make you to think a theorist and empiricist but I think the important question is....Can we theorize experience? If yes then how and if not then why not? However, the book is important for every social scientist in general and Dalit scholars in particular.

[Shalaj Lawania · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've started settling into a gentlemen's agreement with philosophy books. Because I find them extremely difficult (and at times convoluted), now I only evaluate them based on the weight of the questions they pose. I'm ready to forgo the writing style, book length, whether it was engaging and the overall tone as long as the ideas are powerful and they set me down a path of enquiry.

Purely for the questions it raises, this book is worth skimming for rookies like me. For the experts, I have a feeling it would be worth a lot more.