Contributed papers presented at a seminar organized by Department of Philosophy, Budge Budge College.

Given the popularity and success of the Hindu-Right in India's electoral politics today, how may one study ostensibly 'Western' concepts and ideas, such as the secular and its family of cognates, like secularism, secularisation and secularity in non-Western societies without assuming them simply as derivative, or colonial legacies or contrast cases of Western societies? While recognizing that the dominant language of political modernity of Western societies is not easily translatable in non-Western societies, The Secular Imaginary elaborates upon an intellectual history (...) of secularity in modern India by focusing on the two most influential political leaders – M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It is an intellectual history of both idea(s) and intellectuals, which sheds light on Indian narratives of secularity – the Gandhian sarva dharma samabhava, Nehruvian secularism, and unity in diversity. It revisits this dominant narrative of secularity of the twentieth century that influenced and shaped the imagination of the modern nation-state. (shrink)

This article examines what the work of New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen brings to thinking about being a postcolonial feminist. Using images from Sen's solo exhibit in New Delhi and New York titled Half Full, I theorize on the complexities that proliferate when thinking about postcolonial feminism. Sen's images play with “an” identity to showcase the hybrid and mobile configuration of postcolonial subjectivity. Sen's provocative aesthetic urges us to rethink defining a set of conditions or tenets for postcolonial feminism. Rather, (...) her aesthetic politics propels through humor and provides a prism to constantly reimagine postcolonial feminist subjectivity by urging a consideration of maps that intersect and overlap. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: There is growing interest in the ethics of cluster trials, but no literature on the uncertainties in defining communities in relation to the scientific notion of the cluster in collaborative biomedical research. METHODS: The views of participants in a community-based cluster randomised trial (CRT) in Mumbai, India, were solicited regarding their understanding and views on community. We conducted two focus group discussions with local residents and 20 semi-structured interviews with different respondent groups. On average, ten participants took part in (...) each focus group, most of them women aged 18-55. We conducted semi-structured interviews with ten residents (nine women and one man) lasting approximately an hour each and seven individuals (five men and two women) identified by residents as local leaders or decision-makers. In addition, we interviewed two Municipal Corporators (locally elected government officials involved in urban planning and development) and one representative of a political party located in a slum community. RESULTS: Residents' sense of community largely matched the scientific notion of the cluster, defined by the investigators as a geographic area, but their perceived needs were not entirely met by the trial. CONCLUSION: We examined whether the possibility of a conceptual mismatch between 'clusters' and 'communities' is likely to have methodological implications for a study or to lead to potential social disharmony because of the research interventions, arguing that it is important to take social factors into account as well as statistical efficiency when choosing the size and type of clusters and designing a trial. One method of informing such a design would be to use existing forums for community engagement to explore individuals' primary sense of community or social group and, where possible, to fit clusters around them. (shrink)