Journal of Human Values

A venture in a less traversed terrain of Indian scholarship, this article looks at the transformation in the value regimes that go into the making of colours in the Indian milieu. At one level, this study traces the sacredness imbued in colours and at another level the article delves into the genealogy that gives rise to a complex where colour, colonial investment in the economy of colours (with an aim at capitalizing colours as commodities), values and experiential dynamics enshrined in the imageries and practices associated with colours all come together. With these entanglements, the idea is to engage with the social fabrics and the politics of colours in the Indian milieu. In this rendering, the distinction between values and forms collapses giving us in turn a field of aesthetic experience. Mobilizing a wide range of registers (written as well as pictorial, archival as well as literary), this story is narrated with key rubrics, such as, ambiguous location of colour in the discourse on visuality, social and cultural life of colours and the manner in which Western science and modernity has influenced the values pertaining to colours. However, the core anxiety is parked on the relation between colour, aesthetic experience and the question of value.

The article explores Alexis de Tocqueville’s explication of democracy as ‘civil religion’ or the new sacred of modern times. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville analyzed democracy as a political system as well as a moral value. The article begins with Tocqueville’s analysis of the religious roots of American democracy. Dissociated from the affairs of the state through the principle of ‘disestablishment’, religion became secure in civil society, whereas the concept of democracy became inviolable and ‘set apart’ as sacred. He noted that the power of the majority acquires an inviolable character in democracy that had the potential to turn against the very principles that it upholds. In the Indian context, the debate around a uniform civil code (UCC) is one such issue that captures this predicament. Working out a roadmap for Indian pluralism signposted with a constitutional commitment to equality, liberty and fraternity has proved to be a task fraught with moral and political complexities, if not impasse. The article argues that Tocqueville’s discovery of the role of religion in civil society, his mistrust of democratic majoritarianism and his emphasis on understanding the ‘practice’ of democracy have something to offer to the polarized UCC debate in India.

Popular depictions of values around care for the elderly in the media generate nostalgia for a value-rich past, in which caring practices were considered a family affair. The physical absence of family members for providing care is portrayed as a pathological symptom of contemporary society. The study, through analysis of cinematic representations, explains the cultural need for the nostalgia of virtuous intergenerational relations. Such nostalgia instils a need to reaffirm values yet at the same time in the shadows of the nostalgic trope in films, possibilities for a new value system and alternate forms of care can be gauged. These possibilities would eventually bridge the dichotomy between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ values related to ageing parents. The relevance of such a ‘nostalgic gaze’ becomes important in the context of rising elderly abuse. Society reflexively evaluates the situation of value transformation. Through the nostalgia, used in this study as an analytical tool, new definitions and practices of care, new kinds of socialities and relations are seen to emerge. In this scenario, the substance of values asserts itself in a malleable form awaiting constant, rapid modification in present times.

In current trends in cognitive sciences, the discussion on body crosses the classical divide between the body and the self in terms of nature and function. Embodiment theories have helped to bring in the importance of the role of subjective experiences to understand cognition, and place the process of knowing in a cultural and social context. This article is a critique of the growing trend in cognitive sciences, particularly in affective neurosciences, and approaches, to reduce the experiential self to a nonentity. It is shown that though the apparent goal is to highlight the inner qualitative nature of experience, what is happening in the background is a role reversal. The outer body becomes the inner self. The inner self becomes the outer body. The nature and functions of the self are founded on the body by theorizing embodiment as an alternate to neural reductionism. This article argues that one of the negative consequences of embodiment theories is that age-old concepts of freewill, character and moral choices become flimsy and fleeting in the process of embodying cognition.

How does the question of temporality get translated into the register of values in the process of constructing knowledge through ethnography? Is there a possibility of critical ethnography that tracks politics of time in the accounts of the other? By centring these questions to the domain of ethnographic endeavours in Indian anthropology, this article takes a look into the shifting locations of self and the other in the practice of ethnography with reference to the notion of temporality as value. Ethnography, once a key device of anthropological research, has become one of the significant approaches in almost all social science disciplines today and even in certain domains of humanities, management and market research. Ethnography itself has been reimagined and reshaped under different terrains of interdisciplinary approaches. But one would rarely find accounts of political and ideological manoeuvring of temporal concepts and value orientations which inform the theories and rhetoric in it. It pronounces upon the knowledge gathered from such research a discourse which construes the other in terms of a distance from the self, both spatial and temporal. Drawing upon this register of ‘time’ from the writing of Johannes Fabian, the article transposes the framework to understand the currents in contemporary Indian anthropology.

This article explores the influence of modernity in India, within the larger framework of state-led modernity and its impact on identity and locality. The discourse on modernity has retained the common thread of transience and reflexivity as two constitutive features, both of which are taken up to explain the uncertain and provisional influence of modernity on the Indian society and identity, and the radical engagement of social movements with modernity. The article studies the complex functioning of modernity in India (i) by presenting a theoretical outline on the contested nature of the concept, with an emphasis on the discussion around reflexivity, which forms one of the core attributes for the creation of multiple and alternative modernities, (ii) by reviewing state-led modernity in India and its impact on identity formation as a consequence of the numerous and variable cultural and value systems that confront individuals and (iii) by looking at the local appropriation of contested spaces to enter into a radical, value-based engagement with global modernity.

Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions, 2013, London: Penguin, pp. 433, ₹ 599, ISBN 978-0-141-97582-5.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, 2012, Princeton and Oxford, MA: Princeton University Press, pp. 184, $15, ISBN: 978-0-691-15448-0 (Paperback).

Richard Barrett, The Values-Driven Organization: Unleashing Human Potential for Performance and Profit, 2014, New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 247, ₹ 871, ISBN 978-0-415-81503-1.

Avijit Pathak, On Social Constraints and the Great Longing: An Essay on the Human Condition, 2014, New Delhi: Aakar Books, pp. 140, ₹ 395, ISBN 978-93-5002-267-2.

Romila Thapar, The Past as Present: Forging Contemporary Identities through History, 2014, New Delhi: Aleph Book Company, pp. 329, ₹ 595, ISBN: 978-93-83064-01-4.