Once approached primarily through a regional and historical focus on Western Europe and North America, intellectual history has in recent years come to adopt an increasingly expansive, global perspective. Scholars have begun to explore the cross-fertilization of ideas between Europe and other regions, as well as to examine the distinct methodological challenges raised in doing “intellectual” (as opposed to social, economic, or cultural) history outside the West. The aim of this workshop, sponsored by the Theorizing Indian Democracy research project, was to interrogate the place of India within current frameworks of global intellectual history. How might analyzing the formation of concepts within the geographical and cultural space of modern India give us new insights into the region’s relationship to other intellectual traditions around the world? The workshop investigated what the recent “global” turn in the history of ideas can contribute to studies of the Indian past.

Participants

Faisal Devji (University of Oxford)

Shruti Kapila (University of Cambridge)

Nico Slate (Carnegie Mellon University)

Moderator

Rama Mantena (University of Illinois at Chicago)

Speaker bios >