Debashish Banerji is the Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), San Francisco. His academic interests lie in postcolonial, cross-cultural and posthuman approaches to Indian philosophy, psychology and culture.
After a preparatory phase of nationalist modernism, where the assimilation of the past and the qu... more After a preparatory phase of nationalist modernism, where the assimilation of the past and the question of identities leading to the boundaries of a national subject was the cultural problematic, the decade of the 40s, with the imminent approach of independence, brought to prominence a modernism in closer contact with the West. That it arose in Bombay, on the West coast, neighboring Gujarat with its long maritime history of intimate relations with the people of West Asia, the Mediterranean and Europe, is thus no surprise. The arrival of Indian independence must be seen in the backdrop of larger world events, such as cultural modernism as a response to modernity and social dispersions as a result of World War II. Both may be seen at work in the presence of a number of European émigré Jews in Bombay at that time, particularly the trio, Walter Langhammer, Emanuel Schlesinger and Rudolf von Leyden, who seeded the artistic culture of the city with a taste for European modernism and patronized the development of an Indian modernism related to this. The Progressive Artist's Group, formed just after Independence, is a result of this new current. In keeping with its peripheral and hybrid cultural history, its founding members included the religious and ethnic minorities of India, an Indian Christian from Goa, two Muslims and a Dalit. They represented the expansive soul of India arising in the new nation, its continuing assimilation of "the outside" in a millenia-old process of engagement between monism and pluralism. It should be noted though that this spirit of expansion and adventure did not last long as a local presence in cultural politics, two of its founding members, Souza and Raza, leaving for London and Paris respectively in three years of its starting. It did not fare so well, either, in the majoritarian milieu of the rising nation, with Husain pushed to relinquish his Indian citizenship and ending his days in Doha. But whether in India or outside, the body of works produced by these artists is a testament to the psychic becoming of contemporary India.
This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore\u27s relevance for postmodern ... more This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore\u27s relevance for postmodern and postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century. The volume includes contributions by leading contemporary scholars on Tagore and analyses Tagore\u27s literature, music, theatre, aesthetics, politics and art against contemporary theoretical developments in postcolonial literature and social theory. The authors take up themes as varied as the implications of Tagore’s educational vision for contemporary India; new theoretical interpretations of gender, queer elements, feminism and subalternism in Tagore\u27s literary and social expressions; his language use as a vehicle for a dialogue between positivism, Orientalism and other constructs in the ongoing process of globalization; the nature of the influence of Tagore\u27s music and literature on national and cultural identity formation, particularly in Bengal and Bangladesh; and intersubjectivity and critical modernity in Tagore’s art. This volume opens up a space for Tagore’s critique and his creative innovations in present theoretical engagements.https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1052/thumbnail.jp
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) envisioned the exceeding of human limits in an overmental and suprament... more Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) envisioned the exceeding of human limits in an overmental and supramental being as part of our contemporary destiny. This cosmic and transcendental subjectivity, achievable by transformative praxis, was seen by him not as an escape from mainstream life but as the condition for a new kind of society, that may be thought of as utopian. However, almost 65 years since his passing, what we see more pervasively around us is another kind of Utopianism, that of technocultural transhumanism. The technical intervention infiltrates our contemporary lives to an extent undreamed of, so as to be thought an integral ubiquity, turning us into posthuman subjects through an independent destining, beyond our will. Confronted by this regime, are there any forms of praxis open to us, or is (post)human subjectivity necessarily an adjunct to a global production and consumption desiring machine? Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) was a French philosopher who theorized the co-constitution and co-evolution of human and technical milieus with relational possibilities that may provide a new language of praxis that engages the trajectory of cosmic individuation through technicity. This talk will revisit the utopian project of Sri Aurobindo in a contemporary technical key by aligning his ideas of subjective evolution and transformative praxis with those of Simondon
Contours of Modernity was an exhibition of contemporay Indian Art held at the Founder\u27s Hall o... more Contours of Modernity was an exhibition of contemporay Indian Art held at the Founder\u27s Hall of SOKA University in Aliso Viejo, CA. from Feb.1- April 1 2005. The catalog features fine prints of the 39 paintings exhibited. These paintings are representative of works from the 1970\u27s to the present by twenty leading artists from India and of Indian origin. The exhibition, the first of its kind in Southern California, displayed works by major contemporary Indian artists including celebrated founders of modern Indian art such as M.F. Husian, S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza, Ram Kumar, Ganesh Pyne, Ramananda Bandyopadhyay and G.R. Santosh, younger leading contemporaries such as Rameshwar Broota, T. Vaikuntham, Anjolie Ela Menon, Vasundhara Tewari, Surender Kaur, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Sohan Qadri, Anjan Chakrabarty,Biswarup Datta and Paresh Maity and diasporic artists such as Allan DeSouza, Sudha Achar and Amrita Banerji. The catalog carries an excellent histrorical oveview and contextualization of contemporary Indian art by the curator and biographical sketches of the artists. The text brings out the intent of the curator to promote an international dialog with modernity, with its critical dimensions of displacement of culture, technological alientation, commercialism, mass conditioning, globalization and future possibilities; and the prints stimulate an intellectual and visual experience with a sense of socio-cultural affirmation, syncretic spontaneity for life, hope and regeneration and provide approaches towards understanding new ways of being modern in a global world.https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1051/thumbnail.jp
“Evolutionary spirituality” is quite fashionable nowadays in the Bay area, and so is the idea of ... more “Evolutionary spirituality” is quite fashionable nowadays in the Bay area, and so is the idea of integral consciousness. But few people actually know the roots of these concepts in the writings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser and especially Sri Aurobindo, and Haridas Chaudhuri, co-founder and the first president of CIIS. Weaving through these personalities and the disciplines of evolutionary philosophy, transpersonal psychology and cultural anthropology, this will be a talk and open dialogue about evolution in consciousness and culture
This volume provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of th... more This volume provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of the national school of Indian painting, popularly known as the Bengal School of Art. The book argues that the art of Abanindranath, which developed during the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th/20th centuries, was not merely a normalization of nationalist or orientalist principles, but was a hermeneutic negotiation between modernity and community. It establishes that his form of art-embedded in communitarian practices like kirtan, alpona, pet-naming, syncretism, and storytelling through oral allegories-sought a social identity within the inter-subjective context of locality, regionality, nationality, and trans-nationality. The author presents Abanindranath as a creative agent who, through his art, conducted a critical engagement with post-Enlightenment modernity and regional subalternityhttps://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1050/thumbnail.jp
After a preparatory phase of nationalist modernism, where the assimilation of the past and the qu... more After a preparatory phase of nationalist modernism, where the assimilation of the past and the question of identities leading to the boundaries of a national subject was the cultural problematic, the decade of the 40s, with the imminent approach of independence, brought to prominence a modernism in closer contact with the West. That it arose in Bombay, on the West coast, neighboring Gujarat with its long maritime history of intimate relations with the people of West Asia, the Mediterranean and Europe, is thus no surprise. The arrival of Indian independence must be seen in the backdrop of larger world events, such as cultural modernism as a response to modernity and social dispersions as a result of World War II. Both may be seen at work in the presence of a number of European émigré Jews in Bombay at that time, particularly the trio, Walter Langhammer, Emanuel Schlesinger and Rudolf von Leyden, who seeded the artistic culture of the city with a taste for European modernism and patronized the development of an Indian modernism related to this. The Progressive Artist's Group, formed just after Independence, is a result of this new current. In keeping with its peripheral and hybrid cultural history, its founding members included the religious and ethnic minorities of India, an Indian Christian from Goa, two Muslims and a Dalit. They represented the expansive soul of India arising in the new nation, its continuing assimilation of "the outside" in a millenia-old process of engagement between monism and pluralism. It should be noted though that this spirit of expansion and adventure did not last long as a local presence in cultural politics, two of its founding members, Souza and Raza, leaving for London and Paris respectively in three years of its starting. It did not fare so well, either, in the majoritarian milieu of the rising nation, with Husain pushed to relinquish his Indian citizenship and ending his days in Doha. But whether in India or outside, the body of works produced by these artists is a testament to the psychic becoming of contemporary India.
This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore\u27s relevance for postmodern ... more This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore\u27s relevance for postmodern and postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century. The volume includes contributions by leading contemporary scholars on Tagore and analyses Tagore\u27s literature, music, theatre, aesthetics, politics and art against contemporary theoretical developments in postcolonial literature and social theory. The authors take up themes as varied as the implications of Tagore’s educational vision for contemporary India; new theoretical interpretations of gender, queer elements, feminism and subalternism in Tagore\u27s literary and social expressions; his language use as a vehicle for a dialogue between positivism, Orientalism and other constructs in the ongoing process of globalization; the nature of the influence of Tagore\u27s music and literature on national and cultural identity formation, particularly in Bengal and Bangladesh; and intersubjectivity and critical modernity in Tagore’s art. This volume opens up a space for Tagore’s critique and his creative innovations in present theoretical engagements.https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1052/thumbnail.jp
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) envisioned the exceeding of human limits in an overmental and suprament... more Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) envisioned the exceeding of human limits in an overmental and supramental being as part of our contemporary destiny. This cosmic and transcendental subjectivity, achievable by transformative praxis, was seen by him not as an escape from mainstream life but as the condition for a new kind of society, that may be thought of as utopian. However, almost 65 years since his passing, what we see more pervasively around us is another kind of Utopianism, that of technocultural transhumanism. The technical intervention infiltrates our contemporary lives to an extent undreamed of, so as to be thought an integral ubiquity, turning us into posthuman subjects through an independent destining, beyond our will. Confronted by this regime, are there any forms of praxis open to us, or is (post)human subjectivity necessarily an adjunct to a global production and consumption desiring machine? Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) was a French philosopher who theorized the co-constitution and co-evolution of human and technical milieus with relational possibilities that may provide a new language of praxis that engages the trajectory of cosmic individuation through technicity. This talk will revisit the utopian project of Sri Aurobindo in a contemporary technical key by aligning his ideas of subjective evolution and transformative praxis with those of Simondon
Contours of Modernity was an exhibition of contemporay Indian Art held at the Founder\u27s Hall o... more Contours of Modernity was an exhibition of contemporay Indian Art held at the Founder\u27s Hall of SOKA University in Aliso Viejo, CA. from Feb.1- April 1 2005. The catalog features fine prints of the 39 paintings exhibited. These paintings are representative of works from the 1970\u27s to the present by twenty leading artists from India and of Indian origin. The exhibition, the first of its kind in Southern California, displayed works by major contemporary Indian artists including celebrated founders of modern Indian art such as M.F. Husian, S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza, Ram Kumar, Ganesh Pyne, Ramananda Bandyopadhyay and G.R. Santosh, younger leading contemporaries such as Rameshwar Broota, T. Vaikuntham, Anjolie Ela Menon, Vasundhara Tewari, Surender Kaur, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Sohan Qadri, Anjan Chakrabarty,Biswarup Datta and Paresh Maity and diasporic artists such as Allan DeSouza, Sudha Achar and Amrita Banerji. The catalog carries an excellent histrorical oveview and contextualization of contemporary Indian art by the curator and biographical sketches of the artists. The text brings out the intent of the curator to promote an international dialog with modernity, with its critical dimensions of displacement of culture, technological alientation, commercialism, mass conditioning, globalization and future possibilities; and the prints stimulate an intellectual and visual experience with a sense of socio-cultural affirmation, syncretic spontaneity for life, hope and regeneration and provide approaches towards understanding new ways of being modern in a global world.https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1051/thumbnail.jp
“Evolutionary spirituality” is quite fashionable nowadays in the Bay area, and so is the idea of ... more “Evolutionary spirituality” is quite fashionable nowadays in the Bay area, and so is the idea of integral consciousness. But few people actually know the roots of these concepts in the writings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser and especially Sri Aurobindo, and Haridas Chaudhuri, co-founder and the first president of CIIS. Weaving through these personalities and the disciplines of evolutionary philosophy, transpersonal psychology and cultural anthropology, this will be a talk and open dialogue about evolution in consciousness and culture
This volume provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of th... more This volume provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of the national school of Indian painting, popularly known as the Bengal School of Art. The book argues that the art of Abanindranath, which developed during the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th/20th centuries, was not merely a normalization of nationalist or orientalist principles, but was a hermeneutic negotiation between modernity and community. It establishes that his form of art-embedded in communitarian practices like kirtan, alpona, pet-naming, syncretism, and storytelling through oral allegories-sought a social identity within the inter-subjective context of locality, regionality, nationality, and trans-nationality. The author presents Abanindranath as a creative agent who, through his art, conducted a critical engagement with post-Enlightenment modernity and regional subalternityhttps://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1050/thumbnail.jp
Springer, Sustainable Development Goals Series (SDGS), 2022
This volume brings sustainability studies into creative and constructive conversation with action... more This volume brings sustainability studies into creative and constructive conversation with actions, practices, and worldviews from religion and theology supportive of the vision and work of the UN SDGs. It features more than 30 chapters from scholars across diverse disciplines, including economics, ethics, theology, sociology, ritual studies, and visual culture. This interdisciplinary content presents new insights for inhibiting ecospheric devastation, which is inextricably linked to unsustainable financial, societal, racial, geopolitical, and cultural relationships. The chapters show how humanistic elements can enable the establishment of sustainable ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. This includes the aesthetic and emotive dimensions of life. The contributors cover such topics as empowering women and girls to systemically reverse climate change; nurturing interreligious peace; decolonizing landscapes; and promoting horticulture, ecovillages, equity, and animal ethics. Coverage integrates a variety of religious and theological perspectives. These include Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and other traditions. To enable the restoration and flourishing of the ecosystems of the biosphere, human societies need to be reimagined and reordered in terms of economic, cultural, religious, racial, and social equitability. This volume illustrates transformative paradigms to help foster such change. It introduces new principles, practices, ethics, and insights to the discourse. This work will appeal to students, scholars, and professionals researching the ethical, moral, social, cultural, psychological, developmental, and other social scientific impacts of religion on the key markers of sustainability.
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To enable the restoration and flourishing of the ecosystems of the biosphere, human societies need to be reimagined and reordered in terms of economic, cultural, religious, racial, and social equitability. This volume illustrates transformative paradigms to help foster such change. It introduces new principles, practices, ethics, and insights to the discourse. This work will appeal to students, scholars, and professionals researching the ethical, moral, social, cultural, psychological, developmental, and other social scientific impacts of religion on the key markers of sustainability.