Articles by Sasheej Hegde

The attempt here is to think with, and systematically through, Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai’s ambitious work, Experience, Caste, and the Everyday Social (2019). Addressing the two configurations of thought underlying the work—namely the focus on “sensing” as central to the conceptualisation of the social and the idea of “the everyday social”—the paper tries to capture the movement of the text and the conceptual manoeuvres underscoring it. The challenges for our attempt at theorising caste are highlighted, even as new pathways are forged for understanding the problem of caste in India.

Articulating itself in three ordered segments, this article is an attempt to think creatively with the circumstances of the life and death of Rohith Vemula. The effort is to conceptualise, through a revitalised notion of the "gift," the challenge of a life constituted as much by an inherent sociality as by a transformative radicalism of thought and action. Resituating caste sociality in a lived sense must, therefore, entail moving beyond victimhood and suffering, and encountering actively the spaces of biography and narrative history.

This response to Krishna Kumar's "Rurality, Modernity and Education" (EPW, 31 May 2014) attempts to make clear and re-thematise the double bind of modern education and pedagogy.

Some aspects of the critical discussion on the political science textbook cartoon controversy have suffered from a kind of misdirection of emphasis and even some normative distortion as a result of trying to interpret the practice of pedagogy in the light of piecemeal ideas about public reasoning and curricular change. The author of this paper outlines another way of thinking about pedagogy guided by his own experience as a teacher. He comments on the articles that appeared on the controversy in EPW in its 2 June 2012 issue, on the plausibility of addressing the textbook controversy as an "object" instead of a passing event and the difference this makes in our reasoning about the normative content of academic institutions and public accountability.

With the demise of Satish Saberwal (1933-2010), we have lost one of the most important links between the modernising phase of Indian sociology and the nonconformists. He will be remembered as a reference point for many, and as an inspiration for those seeking to actively transcend the anthropological mode of inquiry and straddle an interface with the historian's concern.