Abstract
When in 1962 Habermas formulated his theory of the public sphere as “a society engaged in critical debate” he sought to describe something he felt was unique to the modern liberal democratic Western world. Yet the creation of discursive spheres where people across lines of social difference debate questions of the common good, mutual interest, and forms of equality long predates the modern era and flourished well outside the “Western” world. This essay adapts Habermas’ influential concept to highlight the emergence of a nascent public sphere at the earliest layers of Marathi literary creation in 13th century India. At this inaugural stage of a regional language’s full shift to writing, we see traces of a debate in the language of everyday life that struggled over the ethics of social difference, a public deliberation that might presage key aspects of Indian modernity and democracy today.
Acknowledgements
This essay draws substantially from sections of my book, The Quotidian Revolution (2016). All copyright for duplicated material devolves to Columbia University Press. I thank Christoph Uehlinger, Robert Leach, and Angelika Malinar for involving me in the Adheesh Sathaye “Concepts of Religion between Asia and Europe” project in Zurich some years ago, and Whitney Cox, Shobha Kale, Sunila S. Kale, and Sucheta Paranjape for help with ideas, translations, and editing along the way.
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