Sudipta Kaviraj: “The Search for Paradise”

The Berkeley Graduate Division presents a lecture by Sudipta Kaviraj, co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

About this lecture
This work is part of a decolonizing project—an endeavor that I maintain to be both collective and personal. Colonial history and social science habituated Indians intellectuals to two questionable certitudes. The first was the radical dissimilarity between modern social theory and pre-modern philosophical traditions of other, colonized societies. A second prejudice was the radical inferiority of pre-modern traditions in thinking of solutions to modern human life. In this lecture I shall try to contest both these prejudices by using an analysis of two great traditions of Indian aesthetic-social philosophy: the Upanishads, and Vaisnava theology and poetry.

First, I shall conceptualize paradise as human life without suffering, and claim there is no human world without a paradise. I shall further argue that specific, divergent conceptions of paradise have been at the center of different stages of Indic aesthetic philosophy, starting from the Upanishadic definition of wonder at the universe as comprising of two different aspects – one of cognitive curiosity and another of aesthetic enjoyment. Human access of the universe is imperfect without a complementarity of these two types of wonder which give rise to science and aesthetics. Ultimately, I hold that modern secular thinkers can find significant resources of reflection about the human condition from this tradition.

About Sudipta Kaviraj
Sudipta Kaviraj is Professor of Indian Politics and Intellectual History at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, New York. His field of research spans Indian political thought, Western political theory, modern Indian literature and Indian philosophical aesthetics. His works have studied three major aspects of modern Indian history – historical sociology of state-formation in India in the colonial and postcolonial periods, modern Indian political theory that has emerged through the anti-colonial movement, theoretical reflection on history and society in modern Bengali literature. He is also interested in premodern systems of philosophical aesthetics and explored their application to the study of contemporary political and aesthetic experience. Two of his primary interests currently are – the modification and innovation in colonial and postcolonial reformulations of Western political theory, and the exploration of contemporary relevance of premodern and pre-colonial traditions of Indian philosophical thought.

His publications include The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Indian Nationalist Discourse, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1995, Politics in India (edited), Oxford University Press, Delhi, Civil Society: History and Possibilities (edited with Sunil Khilnani), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. He has published three volumes of studies on Indian political thought and practice – on nationalism, The Imaginary Institution of India, Columbia University Press, New York, 2014; on the history of state-formation, The Trajectories of the Indian State, Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2010, and history of Indian democracy, The Enchantment of Democracy and India, Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2011. His essays on Bengali literature are collected in the volume, The Invention of Private Life, Columbia University Press, 2014. Recently, he coedited with Veena Das and Bhrigupati Singh, a special number of the journal Sophia, titled ‘Thinking from Elsewhere’ (2024). He is currently working on publishing his essays on Marx and Western political theory, and a study of problems of decolonizing cognitive modes in social science.

He also writes in Bengali on themes of political theory and literary aesthetics. In 2022, his work on the reception of Marxist theory in India was published with the title Marx O Swarger Sandhan (Marx and the Search for Paradise), Anushtup Publications, Kolkata, 2022. Kaviraj was a member of the Subaltern Studies collective.

Sponsors: Berkeley Graduate Division, Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

Admission: This lecture is free for the public to attend. Registration at the event website is appreciated.

For more information or for accessibility related inquiries, please write to Jane Fink, jhfink@berkeley.edu.