Comparing India and the West

During the last two decades, I have been pursuing an unorthodox way of studying cultural differences, focusing mainly on the Indian and the western cultures. Because I believe that one can answer questions about the circumscription of the words ‘Indian’ and ‘western’ cultures satisfactorily (Balangangadhara, 1994), I will assume their intelligibility in what follows. In this paper, I want to raise a rather intriguing problem about comparing these two cultures. I shall do that without looking at other approaches to the issue and in the form of an argument. In order to come to the point quickly, let me make use of Said’s 'Orientalism.

The Heathen in his Blindness

This article argues that Balagangadhara has reinforced for the secular study of religion the awareness that the origins of the discipline are indelibly Western, and provided an invaluable service in reminding scholars they should be wary in assuming that the having of a religion or a world-view is a cultural universal. But, in contrast to Balagangadhara, the author claims this is not the consequence of imposing on other traditions the Western Christian understanding of the nature of religion in general, but of a very modern post-Enlightenment Western understanding of religion