Rethinking Cultural Studies: A Bharatiya Civilizational Response

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This book is born out of a sustained intellectual unease with the manner in which Indian culture, history, literature, and thought have been theorized, taught, and evaluated in contemporary academia. Over the past several decades, the humanities and social sciences in India have increasingly come to be mediated through conceptual frameworks imported from Western universities-postcolonial theory, cultural studies, Marxist historiography, and poststructuralist criticism being among the most dominant. While these frameworks often present themselves as emancipatory and critical, their uncritical adoption has produced a paradoxical outcome: instead of liberating Indian thought, they have frequently displaced indigenous categories of understanding, marginalised civilizational self-knowledge, and trained generations of students to view their own inheritance primarily through suspicion, negation, and ideological reduction. The present work proceeds from the conviction that no civilization can be adequately understood or renewed-through concepts alien to its own intellectual grammar. Indian civilization has, for millennia, generated its own sophisticated theories of language, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, social organization, and self-critique. Traditions of sastra, darśana, rasa, dharma, śraddhā, and sadhana constituted not only systems of knowledge but ways of life oriented toward inner transformation and social harmony. To approach such a civilization primarily through theories developed in response to European historical crises-religious wars, colonial guilt, industrial capitalism, or post-Enlightenment skepticism-is to risk a fundamental category error. This book therefore offers a sustained civilizational critique of postcolonial theory and cultural studies as they operate in the Indian academic context, with particular attention to their articulation in influential textbooks and critical writings. It does not deny the historical realities of colonialism, nor does it reject critique as such. Rather, it questions the assumption that critique must always be framed through Western theoretical vocabularies, and that Indian traditions possess no autonomous capacity for self-reflection, reform, or renewal. Thinkers who loom large in contemporary syllabi-whose language of hybridity, discourse, subalternity, power, and representation has become canonical-are examined here not polemically, but philosophically, by asking whether their categories are adequate to the phenomena they seek to explain. Alongside this critique runs a parallel effort: the recovery and reaffirmation of Indian intellectual resources that have been marginalized or sidelined in modern academic discourse. Drawing upon a wide range of sources-classical texts, modern Indian thinkers, historians of indigenous institutions, scholars of Indian poetics and philosophy, and critics of Western universalism-this book seeks to demonstrate that India has never lacked the capacity for rational inquiry, ethical debate, or social introspection. What has been lacking, in recent decades, is confidence in those capacities within the university system itself. The intention here is neither to replace one dogma with another nor to retreat into nostalgic glorification of the past. Rather, the aim is to argue for intellectual swaraj: the freedom to think through one's own categories, to engage with the world from a position of civilizational self-respect, and to place Western theories in dialogue rather than in command. Such swaraj is not isolationist; it is dialogic, comparative, and open-but firmly rooted. It recognizes that genuine universality can emerge only from the meeting of distinct traditions on equal terms, not from the unexamined dominance of one. This book is written for students, teachers, and scholars who sense that something vital has gone missing in the humanities as currently practiced in India; for those who wish to understand Indian culture without first having to disown it; and for those who believe that criticism need not entail cultural self-erasure. If it succeeds in reopening questions that have too long been settled by academic fashion, and in encouraging a more grounded, confident, and responsible engagement with India's intellectual inheritance, it will have served its purpose. My deepest thanks and gratitude for Shri Mohindra K. Vashistha, Standard Publishers (India), New Delhi for timely publication of this great book. Much obliged to Shri Mohindra Ji for his efforts and inspiration. At last, thanks in tons to all who motivated for this book by giving their best and making this mission a success.

Towards a Rethinking Cultural Studies is a sustained and original attempt to rethink the foundations of contemporary literary and cultural studies from the perspective of Bharatiya's own intellectual traditions. During the last four decades, Western critical theories such as New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Queer Theory, LGBT Theory, Disability Studies, Ecocriticism, Trauma Studies, Blue Humanities, and related approaches have come to dominate the humanities across the world. While these theories have enriched literary criticism by foregrounding questions of history, power, identity, representation, gender, ecology, and social justice, they have also tended to privilege historical contingency, political ideology, and social construction at the expense of philosophy. aesthetics, ethics, and spirituality. It engages deeply with the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Natyashastra, the traditions of Nyaya. Mimamsa, Tantra Yukti, Rasa and Dhvani theories, and the enduring concepts of dharma, parampara, samskara, and moksha. The book offers detailed and scholarly critiques of major contemporary theories and thinkers, including Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and leading exponents of recent cultural theory. Particular attention is devoted to the theories of Rasa, Dhvani, Sadharanikarana, Tatparya, and Tantra Yukti, showing how these concepts offer sophisticated methods of literary interpretation that differ fundamentally from many contemporary Western critical approaches. Bringing together literary criticism, philosophy, aesthetics, cultural history. and civilizational studies, this book will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of English, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Bharatiya Knowledge Systems, Philosophy, Indology, Sanskrit Studies, and South Asian Studies It also offers an important contribution to ongoing debates on decolonizing the humanities by demonstrating that Bharatiya intellectual traditions possess rich theoretical resources capable of engaging contemporary global scholarship on equal terms

Dr. Ramaswami Subramony is Professor and Head, Department of English, Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya (GGV), Bilaspur, a Central University of India. He was born in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala and served as Head of the Department of English at Madura college, Madurai, Tamilnadu, for two decades before shifting to Chattisgarh. A senior academic and researcher, he has more than two decades of teaching and research experience in English studies, Indian literature, and Indian intellectual traditions. Dr. Subramony's scholarship spans Sangam literature, Indian philosophy, Vedanta, Bhakti and Sufi traditions, postcolonial criticism, and comparative cultural studies. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and authored several books that explore the intersections of literature, spirituality, and Indian civilization. His work is marked by a sustained engagement with India's classical texts and their relevance to modern intellectual discourse. He has guided doctoral and postgraduate research, delivered invited lectures at national and international forums, and played a significant role in curriculum design and academic administration. As Head of the Department at GGV, he is actively involved in promoting interdisciplinary research, Indian Knowledge Systems, and the integration of classical Indian thought into contemporary English studies. Dr. Subramony's writings reflect a commitment to intellectual rigour, cultural continuity, and civilizational dialogue. positioning him as a leading voice in the study of Indian literary andphilosophical traditions.