Articles by Satish Deshpande

The Report of the Committee for Evolution of the New Economic Policy, as well as "Some Inputs for Draft National Education Policy" brought out by the Ministry of Human Resource Development are both unaware of the ground that they stand on and hence of the true significance of their own role in shaping the future of higher education. The documents seem to have only a blurred sense of the big picture.

The public university is on its way to becoming a truly democratic space. It is the only site in contemporary India where all major social groups come together in more or less egalitarian conditions. In every other social location, there are various forms of segregation, not to speak of explicit hierarchies. The public university is thus a unique and historically unprecedented space from the point of view of the democratisation of society. This is also the reason why existing social hierarchies and power centres are beginning to view it as a threat.

Kalyan Sanyal's magnum opus, Rethinking Capitalist Development, can be seen as a contribution to the project of reimagining political economy in a way that would place "unsolved political problems" at its centre. It could also be described as a response to the opaqueness of economic processes today and their apparent resistance to existing categories and frameworks. Despite the irony in the fact that it is unlikely to be read by many economists, this treatise is what every author would want her book to be - generous, fertile and good to think with.

Concerned with the ways in which "globalisation" seems to be undermining "the politics of location", this essay argues that the latter is both possible and necessary. However, a contemporary politics of location must be articulated from a "postnational" standpoint that opposes the essentialisms of yesterday without being indifferent to place. Locations matter not because some places are superior or inferior to others but because places differ. These differences do not need to be celebrated, museumised or protected from contamination, but they must be allowed to survive. If social theory is partly shaped by its contexts, then "we" - no matter who we are or where we are located - are better off with a multiplicity of such contexts.

The usefulness or otherwise of the kind of theory that Chatterjee offers is decided by its ability to offer a symptomatic reading of significant trends and trajectories. Does the essay on democracy and economic transformation in India meet this test?