The colonial encounter has thrown up a serious existential and intellectual challenge to the traditional Hindu in the nineteenth century.
In 1997 Partha Chatterjee stated eloquently that ‘there is no promised land of modernity outside the network of power. Hence one cannot be for or against modernity; one can only devise strategies for coping with it.’
To argue that banking cannot be done with the poor because they do not have collateral is the same as arguing that men cannot fly because they do not have wings.* – – Muhammad Yunus
The past decade has seen the introduction of a series of rights-based legislations in India, which the author calls a ‘veritable rights revolution’, with the enactment of the Right to Information Act (in 2005), the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (in 2005), the Forest Rights’ Act (in 2006) and the Right to Education Act (in 2009).
Let us begin by posing a simple question: have contemporary western democracies ceased to interrogate their political (democratic) processes? Not quite, perhaps.
At first glance, one cannot help but overlook the idiom ‘never judge a book by its cover’, and, quite rightly so. If the title of Toward a Geopolitics of Hope intrigues, the provocative stance and ideas presented throughout the tome do not fail to deliver either.
