Articles by Valerian Rodrigues

What are the resources and concerns that can contribute to a substantive ethical code for the political class from the experience of the working of parliamentary democracy in India? Such a code need not put a damp squib on the ideological fervour of political parties but set them an anchor. A vibrant democratic culture is a better ground for the cultivation of social values than much preaching, be it in the classroom or in other public fora.

Existing studies on B R Ambedkar largely focus on his substantive religious, sociological, political and constitutional concerns, and not on the concepts he deployed for the purpose or modes of his argumentation. His body of work demonstrates that he formulated a number of concepts to take stock of the social reality that he confronted, and/or reformulated existing concepts by critically engaging with the body of scholarship available to him. With regard to the conception of the political, he advanced a comprehensive and consistent design of what it means to live as a public and how best to do so in a setting very different from the West.

Lower-caste mobilisation and organisation continues to inspire much of political imagination in India as being integral to processes of enablement and democratic inclusion. But there can be inclusion without enablement and, at times, attempts at enablement without inclusion. This paper is a critical exploration of one of the important experiments led by Congress leader Devaraj Urs in the 1970s in Karnataka that sought both inclusion and enablement of lower castes by deploying the resources of political power.

Written in multiple scripts ‒Roman, Nagari, Kannada, Persian-Arabic and Malayalam‒ the Kokani language today finds itself at the centre of a debate where arguments are being proposed to establish the primacy of one script over the others. The script controversy in Konkani is deeply enmeshed with issues of belonging, dignity, access to resources and the idea of nation that one wishes to cherish.

Muslim intellectuals in India share a set of specific concerns that set them apart from their counterparts in other religions. These concerns are the relationship between faith and modernity and that between revelation, plurality of beliefs and culture which have led to a number of political positions. This paper highlights the features of six influential positions through the writings of one significant thinker from each tradition. Every one of these thinkers responded differently to two overarching concerns. They either engaged with the philosophical principles of modernity, or thought that modernity as a set of skills could be grafted onto the foundational principles of Islam or that a different world could be created by picking out the principles ingrained in the Islamic tradition.