Genealogies -- Psychoanalysis and archaeology -- Freud in the sacred grove -- Colonial rescriptings -- War, decolonization, psychoanalysis -- Colonial melancholy -- Haunting and the future -- The ethical ambiguities of transnational feminism -- Hamlet in the colonial archive.

Deepak Sarma completes the first outline in more than fifty years of India's key philosophical traditions, inventively sourcing seminal texts and clarifying language, positions, and issues. Organized by tradition, the volume covers six schools of orthodox Hindu philosophy: Mimamsa (the study of the earlier Vedas, later incorporated into Vedanta), Vedanta (the study of the later Vedas, including the _Bhagavad Gita_ and the _Upanishads_), Sankhya (a form of self-nature dualism), Yoga (a practical outgrowth of Sankhya), and Nyaya and Vaisesika (two forms (...) of realism). It also discusses Jain philosophy and the Mahayana Buddhist schools of Madhyamaka and Yogacara. Sarma maps theories of knowledge, perception, ontology, religion, and salvation, and he details central concepts, such as the _pramanas_ (means of knowledge), _pratyaksa_ (perception), _drayvas_ (types of being), _moksa_ (liberation), and _nirvana_. Selections and accompanying materials inspire a reassessment of long-held presuppositions and modes of thought, and accessible translations prove the modern relevance of these enduring works. (shrink)

This introduction to the Madhva school of Vedanta is accessible to a wide audience with interest in Hinduism, Indian thought and in the comparative philosophy of religion.Deepak Sarma explores the philosophical foundations of Madhva Vedanta and then presents translations of actual debates between the Madhva and Advaita schools of Vedanta, thus positioning readers at the centre of the 700 year-old controversy between these two schools of Vedanta. Original texts of Madhvacarya are included in an appendix, in translation and in Sanskrit.

This article argues that psychoanalytic notions of affect – including ideas of anxiety and melancholia, as well as deconstructive concepts of auto-affection – offer a feminist ethico-politics and a notion of affect as interface. Beyond the confines of the experiential and the positivist, both psychoanalysis and deconstruction provide insights into affect as a technology that understands the subject as porous. I consider works by Derek Jarman and Shirin Neshat to demonstrate the importance of the ethico-politics of affect as interface in (...) contemporary cultural production. Both artists, in the process of considering the spectacular nature of notions of feminist and queer, use images of interface as a way of delimiting the spectacular nature of being and demonstrating the singularity of the event, the desire to fix through framing, and the parergonal nature of framing. The presence of the subject is questioned even as an auto-affection is suggestive of a spectral demand of the ethico-political. In the case of Jarman’s Blue, the denial of image as face in favour of the screen as interface is interrupted by sound and voice, which gesture toward representation as impossible but necessary. In the case of Neshat, the persistence of the photographic – the highly aesthetic self-portrait as mugshot – foregrounds face as interface, as one that questions presence through the insistence of a representational apparatus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Frames, Contexts, Community, JusticeRanjana Khanna (bio)There is a photograph of Jacques Derrida, aged about three, in a toy car at his childhood home in Algiers [fig. 1]. It is not an unusual photograph; in fact, its typicality is striking. It is the kind of photograph one might find in most family albums. Little boys are often found in toy cars, just as little girls are frequently holding a doll, (...) or dancing.1 The codes of a family album, transposed to an academic album, highlight the manner in which typicality itself tells a story of framing, of gendered gestures, of senses of belonging, of familial legend making, and of intellectual genealogy.2 And such codes provide a frame for a general contextual understanding of the photograph and therefore [End Page 11] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Photograph of Jacques Derrida aged 3. Printed in Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991) 9.[End Page 12]for what Barthes calls its studium.3 But, as Barthes remarked in his Camera Lucida, a book about photography and about his dead mother, there is frequently something else in a photograph: the punctum. It wounds a viewer, and remains in the viewer's memory when he or she looks away from the photograph. It is a singular relationality, and, for the mourning Barthes, encloses the possibility of a hopeful reciprocity. For me, however, beyond the gendered coding of this photograph, it is not the promise of a reciprocity, but the demand of something unknowable that exists potentially beyond the frame of the photograph. A rectangular void that appears to be the back window of a large car opens onto an unknown. The opening itself is a wounding of the frame.The photograph includes multiple frames, in the sense that a doubling occurs with one frame in the foreground, with Derrida in his toy car, and another frame in the background, with a real car. The child in his car is enclosed in this scene through perpendicular lines, as if framing him in a safe world. The real car is separated by these lines, as if in a square on its own. And through the rear window of this car, there is another enclosure, a rectangular opening, which alerts the viewer to an infinite regression of frames, each enclosing its own image and its own universe, each thematizing the mobility that suggests it could move beyond its immediate frame. This superimposition of a toy car onto an adult scene of mobility not only alerts the viewer to the thematic exploration of infinite generational migration and immigration but also presents us with a visual doubling and echoing, itself suggesting the excess that always exceeds the frame. The frame may appear to exist on its own terms, permitting or excluding hospitality to its hostile excess, and yet what persists in this photograph is the permeability of the frame and its necessary acknowledgment of the other at its border, which both frames and unframes.A frame both determines and supplements meaning. It is both host to meaning and simultaneously hostile to its narrow condition. This rendition of the frame visualizes both its enclosed protective nature as host, and its permeability to the outside, to a potentially hostile supplement. Derrida's thinking has explored the concepts of framing and hospitality in a manner that has often called attention to, and yet not engaged with, women as a sometimes hostile supplement. The concept of hospitality, whether political, academic, domestic, or psychical, has allowed, however, for a consideration of something that supplements this thinking, and indeed this boyhood photograph of potential mobility: the various frames in which Algerian women have been situated, and their different relation to gesture, mobility, and symbolization in the modern period. This article engages with Derrida's work on framing and hospitality in order to reach its supplement, allowing for a consideration of the political stakes of doing feminist work across borders. The stakes of the philosophical apparatus that seem pertinent to the ethical work of postcolonial feminism are permeated with questions of framing and hospitality. Academic hospitality means an openness to one's subject matter, which would include... (shrink)

The paper is an attempt to revisit Rawls’ idea of a self, which elicits the concept of justice in the liberal tradition. Justice, as understood in the social and political context, is the basic feature of a well-ordered and rationally developed society and it is considered to be a virtue of the social institution. The liberal theory believes in the basic principle that right is prior to the good, and what is most fundamental to our personhood are not the ends (...) we choose but our capacity to choose them. Hence, in Rawls’ account of the self, absoluteness of the metaphysical priority has an edge over the absoluteness of the moral priority. The idea of an unencumbered self, in the social and historical sense, is at the core of the Kantian-Rawlsian theory of justice, which is under attack by the communitarians. Communitarians like Sandel, however, questions Rawls’ claim for the priority of right over good and maintains that liberals fail to recognize the self is ‘embedded,’ in and partly constituted by communal commitments and values which are objects of choice. In this paper, I examine communitarian critiques of Rawls’ liberal self. Further, I also refer to Rawls’ turn to the ‘political,’ which works as a ‘module’ that fits into and can be supported by a variety of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Robert Zydenbos' Review of An Introduction to Mādhva VedāntaDeepak SarmaIntroductionI am grateful to the editors of Philosophy East and West for asking me to write a response to Zydenbos' review of my book, An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta. To this end, I will address four issues: typographical errors, unfounded claims about my translations, content and problems of method and theory, and the future of scholarship in Mādhva (...) Vedānta.Typographical DoṣasFirst, I wish to thank Zydenbos for pointing out the typographical errors. I take full responsibility for them and I intend to correct them in future editions. These are unintentional mistakes and should not be taken as an accurate indicator of my academic ability. I invite readers to examine my other publications on Mādhva Vedānta and to decide for themselves. Jayatīrtha (1365-1388 C.E.), a renowned Mādhva commentator, explained the reasons for such errors in his Pramāṇapad-dhati. He held that defective eyes, whether from cataract, jaundice, or the like,1 [End Page 670] can give rise to defective knowledge, and further, that if an object is too far away, too near, too small, obstructed, or even mixed with similar things, then this will give rise to incorrect knowledge.2 I knew that such errors were likely to occur (especially given the size of the fonts in the page proofs!), which is why I wrote the following in my acknowledgments: "Errors that remain in this text are entirely my own responsibility. If any are found I beg your forgiveness and hope that they inspire you to further study Mādhva Vedānta!" (p. xi). Perhaps all of the undue attention paid by Zydenbos to typographical errors (he devoted a significant portion of his review to them) will inspire further study!TranslationsI am delighted that Zydenbos found my translations to be "not badly done" and disappointed that he incorrectly "assumes" that they are not my own. Rest assured that they are mine. I was assisted by Professor Lawrence McCrea and scholars of the Pūrṇaprajña Saṃśodhana Mandiram (PPSM) and have dutifully acknowledged all of them in my book (p. xii). Zydenbos should know better than to speculate about matters he has no knowledge of.Content and Methodological IssuesThe typographical errors and accusations of plagiarism are far less interesting than the points that were raised about the content of my book. Disputes in the West about interpretations of Mādhva Vedānta are recent; it has been largely ignored in favor of Buddhism and the crypto-Buddhist school, namely Advaita Vedānta. There have been very few books on Mādhva Vedānta written by outsiders, and those few are no longer in print, are poorly written, use dated language, or are in a language that is not available to most lay Mādhvas. Interpretations of Mādhva doctrines made by their authors have remained unquestioned by Western readers given the relative novelty and obscurity of Mādhva Vedānta, while Mādhva insiders have ignored most of them. It is wonderful, then, that Zydenbos doubts my interpretations. After all, his disputes are among the first ones published by an outsider concerning the interpretation of Mādhva doctrines.3Zydenbos' skepticism is reason for celebration for it indicates that Western scholarship on Mādhva Vedānta has come of age. There are now enough scholars of Mādhva Vedānta (or, rather, scholars who claim knowledge of Mādhva Vedānta) in the West that such a debate can occur. I invite others to investigate the points of dispute and to join this expanding community!Zydenbos has also faulted me on the organizational principles of my introductory text. I have, as he correctly notes, intentionally ignored issues of contemporary politics, a topic that he finds essential. Although some historical and political issues are relevant, I find that philosophical discourse sans context is far more intellectually appealing. I am well aware of my biases and have acknowledged the limitations of my historical analysis: [End Page 671]... the history presented here is not intended to be comprehensive. Instead, it is intended... (shrink)

Situational and experiential factors provide a moral lens through which people judge the morality or otherwise of actions. The research in this volume goes a step further and illustrates that individual differences may interact with these situational and experiential factors to explain the acquisition of positive attitudes to immoral behaviour.

Emergence of the requirement of justice -- Justice's major platforms -- Justice within human rights -- Judges' balancing exercise -- The calculus of social harmonization -- Equilibrating the forces of attraction and repulsion -- Principles of justice and the reasons for their mixing -- Metrics and dialectics for a reflective equilibrium -- Social institutions as equilibrium setting tools.

Vowel phonemes are a part of any acoustic speech signal. Vowel sounds occur in speech more frequently and with higher energy. Therefore, vowel phoneme can be used to extract different amounts of speaker discriminative information in situations where acoustic information is noise corrupted. This article presents an approach to identify a speaker using the vowel sound segmented out from words spoken by the speaker. The work uses a combined self-organizing map - and probabilistic neural network -based approach to segment the (...) vowel phoneme. The segmented vowel is later used to identify the speaker of the word by matching the patterns with a learning vector quantization -based code book. The LVQ code book is prepared by taking features of clean vowel phonemes uttered by the male and female speakers to be identified. The proposed work formulates a framework for the design of a speaker-recognition model of the Assamese language, which is spoken by ∼3 million people in the Northeast Indian state of Assam. The experimental results show that the segmentation success rates obtained using a SOM-based technique provides an increase of at least 7% compared with the discrete wavelet transform-based technique. This increase contributes to the improvement in overall performance of speaker identification by ∼3% compared with earlier related works. (shrink)

Proper utilization of antenatal and postnatal care services plays an important role in reducing the maternal mortality ratio and infant mortality rate. This paper assesses the utilization of health care services during pregnancy, delivery and post-delivery among rural women in Uttar Pradesh and examines its determinants. Data from a baseline survey of UP Community Mobilization project was utilized. A cross-sectional sample of currently married women who delivered a baby 15 months prior to the survey was included. Information was collected from (...) 2208 women spread over five districts of UP. Information on socio-demography characteristics, utilization of antenatal care, delivery and postnatal care services was collected. To examine the determinants of utilization of maternal health services, the variables included were three ANC visits, institutional delivery and PNC within 42 days of delivery. Separate multilevel random intercept logistic regressions were used to account for clustering at a block and gram panchayat level after adjusting for covariates. Eighty-three percent of women had any ANC. Of them, 61% reported three or more ANC visits. Although 68% of women delivered in a health facility, 29% stayed for at least 48 h. Any PNC within 42 days after delivery was reported by 26% of women. In the adjusted analysis, women with increasing number of contacts with the health worker during the antenatal period, women exposed to mass-media and non-marginalized women were more likely to have at least three ANC visits during pregnancy. Non-marginalized women and women with at least three ANC visits were more likely than their counterparts to deliver in an institution. Contacts with health worker during pregnancy, marginalization, at least three ANC visits and institutional delivery were the strong determinants for utilization of PNC services. Self-help group membership had no association with the utilization of maternal health services. Utilization of maternal health services was low. Contact with the health worker and marginalization emerged as important factors for utilization of services. Although not associated with the utilization, SHGs can be used for delivering health care messages within and beyond the group. (shrink)

In the course of their increasingly busy lives, physicians encounter many emotions that move and challenge them. Writing is a valuable tool for self-expression and making sense of the world. Physicians are often concerned about patients’ confidentiality and not upsetting their colleagues, but writing can be one of the best ways of sustaining a healthy and meaningful career and effecting change.

Contributed research papers presented as National Seminar on Vedic Astro Sciences, organized by S.V. Vedic University on 7th and 8th June, 2008 in association with the Centre for Theoritical Studies and Research, Birbhum, West Bengal).

Study on perception in Indian philosophy.

_Education as Mutual Translation_ examines Hindu Vedantist and Yoruba philosophical concepts of self and mutuality with others, in a contemporary higher art education context. It suggests that resilient, original voices emerge more successfully from awareness of social interactions, than from individualism.

Do you have to be one to know one? Madhvàcàrya, the founder of the thirteenth century school of Vedànta, answered this question with a resounding 'yes!' Madhvàcàrya's insistence that one must be a Màdhva to study Màdhva Vedànta led him to employ various strategies to exclude outsiders and unauthorized readers from accessing the root texts of his tradition and from obtaining oral commentary from living virtuosos. Deepak Sarma explores the degree to which outsiders can understand and interpret the doctrine of (...) the Màdhva school of Vedànta. The school is based on insider epistemology which is so restrictive that few can learn its intricate doctrines. This book reveals the complexity of studying traditions based on insider epistemologies and encourages its audience to ponder both the value and the hazards of granting any outsider the authority and opportunity to derive important insights into a tradition as an insider. The first analysis of the Màdhva tradition, this work contributes to the ongoing controversies regarding epistemic authority and voice in religious studies. (shrink)

Exposition of Daśaprakaraṇa (ten minor collective tracts) on Dvaita Vedanta by Madhva, 13th cent. ; includes complete text in Sanskrit.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I shall discuss Gadamer’s interpretation of Celan’s dialogical poetry in his essay “Wer bin Ich und wer bist Du?” (“Who am I and Who are You?”). One may argue that this is Gadamer’s articulation of the problem of the self-other relationship. To understand the question of self and other, it is first of all necessary to return to the poetic word from which the question arises. Speaking is, for Gadamer, the most profoundly self-forgetful action, because when (...) one speaks, one is so deeply “within the word” that one is not turned toward the word but, rather, to what one wants to say with the word. For hermeneutics, interpreting means putting oneself on the task of the poetic text. The proximity between poetizing and interpreting emerges, also in its specificity concerning the proximity between poetizing and thinking. Such a proximity, in turn, divides itself into two extremes: the word that sublates itself, and the word that stands for itself. It is hence the uncertain fullness of language, where, unsurprisingly, both poetizing and interpreting come into themselves, which constitutes the link between the one and the other. Therefore, the interpreted word, intertwined with the poetic word does not replace what it indicates, but merely points beyond itself, to what is other than itself. Both pursue a meaning that points toward an open realm. (shrink)

On Hindu ethics and code of conduct in Hindu smr̥tis.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in bridging bodies of knowledge from introspective and contemplative traditions with modern neuroscience. By making the primary object of study an individual’s subjective experience, scientists are then confronted with the challenging problem of how to record a given mental state at a given point in time. For simple experiences, such as in facial recognition tasks, an external recording device such as a button box or computer keyboard is adequate. However, these devices pose (...) fundamental problems when attempting to record more subtle states of mind, or to do so in situations where the presence of an external input device would disturb the subject, such as in the case of studying the evolution of internal states of highly advanced meditators. Here, I suggest that variants of the mnemonic techniques used in memory competitions can be used to make measurements in experiments where an external device would be impractical to use, or would unnecessarily disturb the subject. Demographic and performance data from memory competitions suggest that these techniques can be learned by ordinary subjects participating in multi-session experiments, and that, for highly trained individuals, events can be recorded at roughly 400 millisecond intervals for timescales on the order of tens of seconds, and at roughly one-second intervals for sustained periods of one hour or longer. Finally, I discuss the relationship of the current proposal to descriptive experience sampling (DES) and the visualization techniques of the Tibetan meditative tradition. (shrink)

On semantics according to the Vākyārthamātr̥kā of Śālikanāthamiśra, fl. 780-825.

On theory of Knowledge and semantics accroding to Mimamsa philosophy.

Granthayojanā, anonymous supercommentary, on Śābarabhāṣya, commentary on the Mīmāṃsāsūtra of Jaimini; based on a rare manuscript preserved in the Adyar Library.

Study on the contribution of Citsukha, 13th century Indian philosopher, to the non-dualistic (advaita) school of Hindu philosophy.

On economic ideas of Deendayal Upadhyaya, 1916-1968, politician and nationalist leader of India.