Cultural Practice and Communicative Action: Of Differences and Solidarity

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how cultural practice and communicative action in their diverse forms can make meaningful intervention in the problems that beset a country like India today. Sandwiched between the residues of the colonial project of modernisation, which monologically aim at casting all cultural specificities in an Enlightenment European mould, and the easy reaction to the same in an unproblematised regression to some 'authentic' and essential cultural past, the social theorist today wonders if there can be a third alternative, one that would be critical and yet not reactionary.