Aesthetics of Multiculturalism

Speaker: Milind Malshe
Discussant: George Jose

June 16, 2006 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

The concept of “culture” is an essentially contested concept. The traditional notions of culture as proposed by Matthew Arnold and T.S.Eliot can be contrasted with the notions that have emerged after 1950’s and have become the foundations of the fast developing multi-disciplinary field of “Cultural Studies”. Multiculturalism involves acceptance of plurality and equality of cultures. From a philosophical point of view, William James, who titled one of his books A Pluralistic Universe (1909), argued that “Pluralism” as a philosophical paradigm is characterized by the recognition of changeability, multiplicity and the unfinished character of the world as in process. The contribution of Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, Levinas, Berlin, Wayne Booth, Lyotard and Foucault to the pluralistic paradigm is significant.

In the Indian context, the Indian heterodoxy as discussed by Amartya Sen in his recent book The Argumentative Indian (2005) can be contrasted with some of the essentialist and monistic approaches to Indian culture implicit in principles such as “Unity in Diversity”. Indian scholars in the fields of musicology and aesthetics have resisted the pluralistic view, proposing that the variety is only at the surface level, which is identified as the level of ‘technique’; at the underlying deeper level, there is a presumed spiritual or metaphysical unity. This principle can be shown to be in direct conflict with the development of the diverse traditions of literature and music in India. These issues will be discussed in the lecture with reference to the following outline:

1. What is culture?: The antinomy of Culture/cultures
2. Multiculturalism and philosophical pluralism
3. The principle of “Unity in Diversity”: Indian aesthetics
4. Aesthetics of Multiculturalism: literature and music

Milind Malshe is Professor of English, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. Malshe has authored several books in both English and Marathi and has presented papers in various universities worldwide. He has also published articles on Aesthetics, Linguistics, Translation Studies, Language Teaching and Music Criticism in various leading English and Marathi journals.