Being Different
$19.00
Being Different challenges the uncritical acceptance by both Westerners and Indians, of the process by which, Dharmic traditions have been a particular target of digestion into the West.
| Weight | 1.15 lbs |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 14.61 × 3.81 × 22.23 cm |
| Publisher | HarperCollins; 2013th edition (30 May 2013) |
| Country of Origin | India |
| Type | Paperback, Hardcover |
| No. of Pages | 488 |
| ISBN-10 | 9789351160502 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-9351160502 |
Related products
India is more than a nation state. It is also a unique civilization with philosophies and cosmologies that are markedly distinct from the dominant culture of our times – the West. India’s spiritual traditions spring from dharma which has no exact equivalent in western frameworks. Unfortunately, in the rush to celebrate the growing popularity of India on the world stage, its civilizational matrix is being digested into western universalism, thereby diluting its distinctiveness and potential.
This book addresses the challenge of direct and honest engagement on differences, by reversing the gaze, repositioning India from being the observed to the observer and looking at the West from the dharmic point of view. In doing so it challenges many hitherto unexamined beliefs that both sides hold about themselves and each other. It highlights that unique historical revelations are the basis for western religions, as opposed to dharma’s emphasis on self-realization in the body here and now. It describes the integral unity that underpins dharma’s metaphysics and contrasts this with western thought and history as a synthetic unity. The west’s anxiety over difference and fixation for order runs in contrast with the creative role of chaos in dharma. The book critiques fashionable reductive translations and argues for preserving certain non-translatable words of Sanskrit. It concludes with a rebuttal against western claims of universalism and recommends a multi-civilizational worldview.
The discussions and debate within the book employ the venerable tradition of purva-paksha, an ancient dharmic technique where a debater must first authentically understand in the opponent’s perspective, test the merits of that point of view and only then engage in debate using his own position. Purva-paksha encourages individuals to become truly knowledgeable about all perspectives, to approach the other side with respect and to forego the desire to simply win the contest. Purva-paksha also demands that all sides be willing to embrace the shifts in thinking, disruptive and controversial as they may be, that emerge from such a dialectical process.
Being Different highlights six distinct and fundamental points of divergence between the dharmic traditions and the West. These are as follows:
- Approaches to difference: The West’s pervasive anxiety over personal and cultural differences have resulted in the endless need for the appropriation, assimilation, “conversion” and/or digestion and obliteration of all that does not fit its fundamental paradigms. The roots of this anxiety lie in the inherent schisms in its worldview. Dharmic traditions, in contrast, while not perfect, are historically more comfortable with differences, both individual and collective; they are not driven by mandates for expansion and control.
- History-centrism vs. Inner Sciences: The Judeo-Christian religious narrative is rooted in the history of a specific people and place. Further, the divine is external rather than within and guides humanity through unique and irreplaceable revelations. The dharmic traditions, in contrast, emphasize a series of sophisticated techniques of meditation and related inner sciences to achieve higher states of embodied knowing.
- Integral unity vs. synthetic unity: Since the time of Aristotle, the West has assumed an atomic partitioning of reality into distinct and unrelated parts. The Judeo-Christian worldview is based on separate essences for God, the world and/ human souls. Additionally, there is an unbridgeable gap between Greek reason and religious revelation. The result has been a forced unity of separate entities, and such a unity always feels threatened to disintegrate and remains synthetic at best. In dharmic cosmology all things emerge from a unified whole. In Hinduism this integral unity is the very nature of Brahman; in Buddhism there is no ultimate essence like Brahman, but the principle of impermanence and co-dependence provides unity. Dharma and science are enmeshed as part of the same exploration. Every aspect of reality mirrors and relates to every other aspect in a web of interdependency.
- The nature of chaos and uncertainty: The West privileges order in its aesthetics, ethics, religions, society and politics, and manifests a deep-rooted fear of chaos, uncertainty and complexity. The dharmic worldview see chaos as a creative catalyst built into the cosmos to balance out order that could become stultifying., and hence it adopts a more relaxed attitude towards it
- Translatability vs. Sanskrit: Unlike Western languages, in Sanskrit the fundamental sounds have an existential link to the experience of the object they represent. This makes Sanskrit a key resource for personal and cultural development. It also implies that the process of translation and digestion into Western schemas is unavoidably reductive.
- Western universalism challenged: In the “grand narrative” of the West, whether secular or religious, it is the agent or driver of historical unfolding and sets the template for all nations and peoples. This book challenges this self-serving universalism. It contrasts this with dharma’s non-linear approach to the past and multiple future trajectories.
The very openness that makes dharma appealing, however, often makes it vulnerable to invasion, appropriation and erosion by a more aggressive and externally ambitious civilization. The book uses the metaphor of digestion to point to the destructive effects of what is usually white-washed as assimilation, globalization or postmodern deconstruction of difference. For complex reasons, which are analyzed at length, the dharmic traditions have been a particular target of digestion into the West, and Being Different challenges the uncritical acceptance of this process by both Westerners and Indians.
| Weight |
1.15 pounds
|
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 14.61 in × 3.81 in × 22.23 in |
| Publisher |
HarperCollins; 2013th edition (30 May 2013)
|
| Country of Origin | India |
| Type |
Paperback, Hardcover
|
| No. of Pages | 488 |
| ISBN-10 |
9789351160502
|
| ISBN-13 |
978-9351160502
|
Author
Rajiv Malhotra
Read More
Download Book Covers and other Assets
Endorsements
Testimonials from few of our popular readers
John M. Hobson
Author of The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics; Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield
This highly original book leads its reader on an epic journey of self-discovery especially for those of us in the West. A fitting and major response to Samuel Huntington’s position on “who are we” as the West; one that can perhaps best be provided by someone reversing the gaze on the West through a non-Western lens. This deserves to be one of the defining books of the age.
Francis X. Clooney
Society of Jesus, and Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University
This is a memorable book asking us to put aside modernity’s tired categories and lazy comparisons, and at last to take seriously the Indian perspective on history and our world today. Being Different is here a necessary virtue, essential to understanding our neighbours and ourselves. Much reflection and many a good argument should follow upon Malhotra’s unique achievement.
D.r. Sardesai
Emeritus Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles
This is the first book of its kind looking at the West from India’s dharmic standpoint, and is certain to provoke a major debate for years to come. Rajiv Malhotra’s writings have established him as a “different”, extremely original and robust thinker of our times. In the present volume, he forcefully challenges what he terms the West’s “self-serving universalism” which has been superimposed as a “template” for all nations and peoples. He succeeds in stimulating the mind, stirring the thinking and making readers sit up and join him in his alternative approaches.
Gerald James Larson
Rabindranath Tagore Professor Emeritus, Indiana University, Bloomington, and Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Being Different is a provocative and important book for two distinct reasons. First, the book is one of the few attempts by an Indian intellectual to challenge seriously the assumptions and presuppositions of the field of India and/or South Asian studies tout ensemble, including not only the work of European and American scholarship but as well the neocolonialist, postmodernist and subaltern ressentiment so typical of contemporary Indian intellectuals. Second, and perhaps of greater significance, is Malhotra’s attempt to analyse the meaning and significance of Indic culture from within the indigenous presuppositions of India’s own intellectual traditions, including the ontological claims of Indic cosmology, the epistemology of yogic experience, the unique Indic appreciation for complexity, and the nuances of Sanskritic expression. The book will be controversial on many different levels and will undoubtedly elicit rigorous critical response.
Don Wiebe
Professor of Divinity, Trinity College in the University of Toronto
Malhotra writes with passion from within an avowedly dharmic stance, undermining the attempts to domesticate and expropriate Indian traditions in a process of interreligious dialogue that is ultimately based on a Western cosmological framework. This book is essential reading for Western scholars. It espouses an “audacity of difference” that defends the distinctiveness of Indian thought and reveals the chauvinism of much Western thought in its encounters with other cultures.
Makarand R. Paranjape
Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi
This book is a “must read” for those who care about India and its future.
Cleo Kearns
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and Infinity Foundation
Honest, provocative and wide-ranging, this book gives us (westerners) a rare opportunity to see ourselves through the lens of another worldview. It cuts to the heart of the problems created by Christian beliefs about unique historical revelation, and by the West’s consistent investment in a set of linear historical narratives purporting to offer universal salvation but fuelled by particular western needs and anxieties. Informed by postmodernism, but moving beyond it, the book levels the playing field for a genuine encounter between East and West and raises issues that any serious revision of Christian theology must address.
Kapila Vatsyayan
Independent scholar and Member of Rajya Sabha
Rajiv Malhotra’s insistence on preserving difference with mutual respect – not with mere “tolerance” – is even more pertinent today because the notion of a single universalism is being propounded. There can be no single universalism, even if it assimilates or, in the author’s words, “digests”, elements from other civilizations.
Satya Narayan Das
Founder of Jiva Institute of Vedic Studies, Vrindavan
Many Indian spiritual leaders, lacking a profound knowledge of their own culture, and feeling inferior to the West, try to respond to the Western challenge by showing how Indian and Western religions are the same. Rajiv Malhotra’s work is a kind of yajna that reverses the gaze upon the West through the lens of Indian categories. This process is traditionally called purva paksha, and in Rajiv’s work it is given a new mission. Rajiv has devised the very interesting metaphor of digestion to explain how the dharmic traditions are being disassembled into parts for digestion into the belly of Western culture. Being Different shows how the West’s history-centrism drives it into claims of exclusiveness; this causes anxiety over differences which it seeks to resolve through projects of digestion in order to obliterate whatever seems challenging.
Shrinivas Tilak
Independent scholar, Montreal
What I found particularly informative and original in Being Different is the discussion on the positive role of chaos in the Indic world as compared to the West’s abhorrence of it. The book explains Hegel’s deep-rooted fear of chaos and uncertainty. He privileged order in Western aesthetics, ethics, religions, society, and politics and classified Oriental traditions into “pantheism”, “polytheism”, and “monotheism” as “world historical categories”. Hegel developed a system of equivalences to assign relative meaning and value to each culture, thereby defining the contours of the “West” and the “Rest.’ These became the conceptual tools for epistemic subjugation of the non-West in the name of order. The dharmic worldview is more relaxed about chaos, seeing it as a creative catalyst built into the cosmos to balance out order that could otherwise become stultifying.
Rita Sherma
Executive Director, Confluence School of Faith Studies; co-editor, Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought: Towards a Fusion of Horizons
With stunning honesty, Being Different alerts the reader to the grave dangers of a difference-negating “sameness” that is marketed worldwide by secular and religious streams in Western culture. This is a very important and highly accessible book in the discourse on the interaction between civilizations.
Sampadananda Mishra
Director, Sri Aurobindo Foundation for Indian Culture, Pondicherry
Being Different is a highly successful attempt in exploring the major differences between Indian and Western worldviews, metaphysics, cosmologies and philosophies which have not previously been adequately appreciated by scholars and spiritual seekers.
Madhu Khanna
Centre for the Study of Comparative Religions and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi
Being Different challenges several historical assumptions and basic perceptions that the West has cherished about itself and others. It is a book for brave hearts that is bound to change how we reframe our gaze toward the West. This extraordinary contribution opens up new terrains of discourse and should be a pre-condition of any in-depth discussion on civilizational dialogues.
Ramakrishna Puligandla
Emeritus professor of Philosophy, University of Toledo
Rajiv Malhotra richly deserves to be congratulated for making available his masterly work, Being Different: Indian Challenge to Western Universalism. With analytical clarity and systematic argumentation, grounded in documentation from the original sources, Rajiv Malhotra at once offers excellent clarification of the Dharma-traditions and thorough and unsurpassed responses to the West. This work commands an amazingly wide scholarship across Indian civilization, Western civilization, and comparative philosophy and religion. All people interested in the ongoing debate on science, religion, and civilizations will find this work most illuminating and beneficial. I know of no work on this subject which even remotely matches this.
Kapil Kapoor
Former Rector and Professor of English and Sanskrit Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Chief Editor of Encyclopedia of Indian Poetics
Being Different is an excellent treatise on an epistemic conflict that goes back to the ancient opposition between Hebraic and Vedic knowledge cultures, and between God-centred and Pagan worldviews. The six paradigmatic distinctions explained in this book underpin the absolutist tendencies of the West. A painstaking research analysis of the contemporary cultural conflict, this book will interest all those who have a stake in the future of mankind.
C. Alex Alexander
Independent Scholar, Washington, DC
With stellar originality and great clarity, Being Different adroitly demands that scholars and interfaith leaders accept the virtues of respecting the differences among religious traditions and not merely “tolerate” them in the name of interfaith solidarity. This book is a must-read for those truly interested in understanding the dharmic worldview which is distinctly different from the self-serving “universalism” of the West.
R.P. Singh
Professor & Chairperson, Centre for Philosophy, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Delhi.
Being Different’s new purva paksha tries to deconstruct the metaphysical ruptures in the Western epistemology, bringing out the discrepancies among different kinds of universals, grand narratives and logocentric positions. It is well structured, exploring not only what is different but also deconstructing the philosophical, cultural and cosmological differences that have not been adequately examined for centuries.
Shri Baba Ramdev
Shri Rajiv Malhotra is doing a stellar job of evidentially establishing the universality and scientific truth of Indian Vedic Hindu dharma on the world stage. Shri Rajiv Malhotra is the only person to have challenged the non-Dharmic forces on the combined bases of reasoning, fact, strategy and evidence and has firmly established the authority of dharma in the West. We Indians are proud of Shri Rajiv Malhotra and consider him among our finest. Our best wishes and blessings are with Shri Rajiv Malhotra and it is impossible to eulogise him in words, for words have but limited adequacy. Through your agency, may the glory of the Hindu Dharma be ever expansive!
Videos
Watch recorded discussions and talks on the book
News, Blogs & Reviews
Stay up-to-date with the news, blogs and book reviews
INTERVIEW: Rajiv Malhotra on where his work fits within the Hindu tradition
Written by AmanAugust 3, 2023
A Working Multicultural Model: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions
Written by AmanJuly 31, 2023
Vivekananda’s Ideas – Two Revolutions in Western Thought
Written by AmanJuly 31, 2023
‘History Centrism’: A Challenge to Abrahamic Faiths
Written by sivakumar9493May 11, 2023
