Abstract

Is India’s legacy of intellectual supremacy at odds with the vast landscape of the everyday? In the context of Modernity, everything social, cultural and political is subject to interpretative filters. How do we make sense of any of these, or all of these? Several slippages of meanings, several residues, and lengthy ‘liminal’ spaces characterize the semiotic landscape of contemporary India. Do we understand negotiations, between the past, the present and the continuous of some of the significant cultural discourses in contemporary India as dialogues? Dialogue is also a genre of discourse and can be seen as the modality itself of thought The roles of the traditional postulates like ‘Maya’, ‘Dharma’ and ‘Rasa’ for example as cosmological schema, readily translatable interpretative frameworks in contemporary discourses has often been questioned by critical theory in modern India. Critics are also of the view that, in Rasa theory, the human onlooker is just a locus and not an active agent in what is a global alchemy of properties and perceptions. The same, according to them, can be said of Dharma as an inhuman theodicy that often exists over and above the movements of detection, discovery, reasoning and proof in modern methods of justice.