Articles by Akeel Bilgrami

This article explores the ways in which a background of non-discursive practices that are properly describable as a “cultural commons” underlie the very possibility of law and norm in the governance of a social group. This effi cacy of these practices provides conceptual sources for a recovery of other forms of the common, such as the land or the environmental commons. The idea of a cultural commons is a distinctive ideal that stands apart from other political and moral ideals, such as liberty, equality, and fraternity. It stands apart from ideals of trust and cooperation. The article specifi es how it is related to these, and to other fundamental institutions of modernity, such as capital and the state. As such, it cannot be inserted into constitutions, or directly be the goal of politics. It is a non-optional and non-cancellable ideal, that might be identifi ed with what Marx called “unalienated” life.

As faculty who engage South Asia in our research and teaching in the United States (US), we write to express our concerns about the uncritical fanfare being generated over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley to promote “Digital India” on 27 September 2015.

It is a fond thought that literature, in giving us pleasures that are miscellaneous - rather than the satisfaction of the deep integrities of scientific and philosophical thought - is like life itself. It is natural to think that the pleasures of life are indeed miscellaneous, more like those of literature than of philosophy because literature is an outgrowth of life while philosophy is an abstraction from it. But if literature is inherently miscellaneous, and if miscellany depends on singular objects tied to qualities that pre-empt obsolescence, then life all around us seems to resist any resemblance to literature.

The "Occident" and the "Orient" have been largely judged in juxtaposition with each other. The West has been admired and even emulated for the trajectory of its advancement, while the most "modern" notions of governance, understanding and civic living are seen as legacies of the Enlightenment. This article looks at two recent writings on how the Occident has been viewed and how in recent times, the "scientific rationality" that it espouses as the key to its overweening superiority over the Orient, has appeared "thin". The reaction to this "disenchantment" with this superior yet hollow rationality appears to be a return to "older, primordial" emotions and values. For the West, as this article suggests, there is no more urgent intellectual and political task than to frame the possibilities for alternate, less confused, more secular forms of re-enchantment that might make possible a genuinely substantial notion of democracy, one that would truly integrate the world.

Its Contradictions Akeel Bilgrami AS an obligatory ritual, books and discussions about India ask the question: how is it that a country so diverse in its languages, religions, and castes, and so deeply traditional in its mores, has survived into modernity not merely intact, but with the thoroughly non-traditional apparatus of formal democratic representation and statehood Sunil Khilnani erects one familiar answer to this question into his eponymous Idea', The idea of India is apparently the idea of a nation which is at once diverse and modern in these ways,' in the face of the odds against its being so. His book raises this question repeatedly, with intelligence and with a pervasive and decent-minded commitment to the answering 'idea' being a good one. Khilnani is also a very good writer, though one sometimes wishes he was not so aware of it: after a point the accumulating phrases gleam a little too much ('solipsistic lair1, 'galactically removed'. 'talismanic moment', 'twilight world of spectacular impotence'..) and begin to sound like brassy asides.