Colloquium: The Disappearing Present: Reflections on Ideology | October 16, 2020 | 3.00 to 4.30 pm

By Dilip -

 


About the Lecture

Ours is an age of ideology. Ideology is a means of submerging everyday existence into a dream-like waiting room. Ideologically-sustained life is a relentless deferral of presence on behalf of a hoped-for glorious future. Our gaze is prompted backward and forward, the future being the domain wherein the past may be rectified. If the criterion of truth is not in agreement with reality, but in agreement with the spirit of a nation, class or caste, then apparently, truth has been replaced by perspective; theory by interpretation; presence by transience; and actuality by possibility. We are left with neither knowledge nor wisdom, but recipes for endless conflict and linguistic chaos. Such are the dimensions of contemporary nihilism.

About the Speaker

Dilip Simeon taught history at Delhi University till 1994. He has been a visiting scholar in campuses in India and abroad; and is a public intellectual interested in questions of conflict, labour and communal harmony.  His publications include a book titled, The Politics of Labour under Late Colonialism: Workers,Unions and the State in Chota Nagpur, 1928-1939 (Manohar, 1995).  His first novel, Revolution Highway, was published in 2010 (Penguin Books). 

 

Webinar Link: https://youtu.be/m16ytCnXfBg

Love at work - Mahatma Gandhi's Last Struggle  (2017)

The Compass We Lost (Talk at Raza Foundation, October 4, 2019)

Bapu tujhko salaam

SECULARISM IN A HOUSE OF GOD

Anil Nauriya: The making of Gandhi in South Africa and after

Martin Luther King on Mahatma Gandhi: "My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence", September 1958

Do our leaders want to certify political assassination?

ANIL NAURIYA: Manufacturing Memory

The Supreme Court, Gandhi and the RSS

The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi: Inquiry Commission Report (1969)

The Abolition of truth

Ayush Chaturvedi: Main Gandhi ke saath hun // Samar Halarnkar: In the time of Godse, a search for Hindus who will stand with Gandhi

Rabindranath Tagore's essay on the cult of the nation

Soutik Biswas: Rare pictures of the last 10 years of Gandhi's life

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