Deparochializing the Global Justice Debate, Starting with Indian Political Theory
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12092 |
| Published date | 01 November 2013 |
| Date | 01 November 2013 |
| Author | Aakash Singh |
Deparochializing the Global Justice Debate,
Starting with Indian Political Theory
Aakash Singh
University of Pennsylvania
A response to ‘Overcoming the Epistemic Injus-
tice of Colonialism’(Rajeev Bhargava*)
Demographic changes in the west are contributing to
the increasing feeling of a need for social science schol-
arship to reflect more adequately the identities of the
progressively more diverse students and researchers who
are both the consumers and the creators of that litera-
ture. In political theory, which posits normative principles
or frameworks with ostensibly universal application, a
comparativist orientation is emerging that looks beyond
mainstream categories of the discipline to find conceptu-
alizations that are more apt to reflect the social or politi-
cal practices and experiences of minorities. But over the
last couple of decades, the intellectual community has
pluralized more rapidly than have its regnant frameworks
or conceptual vocabulary. Thus our intellectual commu-
nity is increasingly multicultural and demographically
diverse, while our political theoretical scholarship tends
to adhere to a set of norms viewed as representing a
monocultural, single-ethnic paradigm.
The global justice debate has emerged in parallel to
these developments. What goes largely uncommented
within the vast global justice scholarship is the way that
the global justice debate amplifies unreflexively this
increasingly discredited tendency of the wider social sci-
ences to favour the epistemology and centrality of Anglo-
American political theory/theorists, generally excluding
non-western voices from participation. Here, the term
‘global’seems to signify outward expansion from the cen-
ter; our attempt to extend our conception/demands of
justice to them. Many non-western scholars, therefore, see
the global justice debate as a recapitulation of the charac-
teristic practices and attitudes of colonial liberalism.
Within this understanding, there is of course reluctance
on the part of non-western scholars to become engaged
in the debate, even if they are invited to participate.
It is worthwhile to begin to strategize how we might
deparochialize the global justice debate, but this would
merely constitute one small part in the overarching aim
of ‘pluralizing’the social sciences. Within the latter effort,
we already stand confronted by a lacuna of high-quality
research scholarship. Why? Among the most important
achievements of Rajeev Bhargava’s article on ‘epistemic
injustice’is that it helps explain several background
causes for this deficiency from the point of view of the
postcolonial world.
Within Indian political theory specifically, a great deal
of progress is being made. A generation of thought
emerged in 1985 with the coincidental publication of
three texts: Gayatri Spivak’s‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’;
Ashis Nandy’s‘An Anti-secularist Manifesto’; and Homi
Bhabha’s‘Signs Taken for Wonders’. This rise of postmod-
ernist, postcolonial thought set off a series of new stud-
ies presenting alternative, hybridist accounts of themes
in political thought in an attempt to trouble dominant
concepts in Anglo-American political theory and to
undermine the geographies of power that they were
understood to represent. From revisionist theories of
modernity (Sudipta Kaviraj), to attempts to ‘provincialize
Europe’(Dipesh Chakrabarty) or ‘rethink democracy’
(Rajni Kothari), or secularism (T. N. Madan) or civil society
(Partha Chatterjee), this generation undertook processes
of reconceptualization, or revisioning meanings –teasing
out the inherent ambiguities of concepts and categories –
of western political thought that previously had been
assumed to be universally valid and applicable.
Not all the scholars of this generation abandoned faith
in the promise of Anglo-American political theory. Some
channeled their discontent constructively by contributing
substantially to it with a variety of corrective and supple-
mental ideas and arguments, weighing in with their
unique insights on the debates of the times, from global
justice (Amartya Sen), to civil society (Neera Chandhoke),
human rights (Ratna Kapur) and cosmopolitanism (Farah
Godrej), as well as the nature of political theory itself
(Rajeev Bhargava).
Although articulating variegated positions and compet-
ing outlooks, this generation of Indian political thought
displayed foremost concern about the interrelations
*Bhargava, R. (2013) ‘Overcoming the Epistemic Injustice of Colonialism’,
Global Policy, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 413–417. DOI: 10.1111/1758-5899.12093.
©2013 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2013) 4:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12092
Global Policy Volume 4 . Issue 4 . November 2013
418
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