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Old Words, New Worlds: Revisiting The Modernity Of Tradition, Ananya Vajpeyi

History Faculty Publication Series

The Modernity of Sanskrit by Simona Sawhney ably makes the argument for an ethically vigilant, politically active, and intellectually timely criticism. Sawhney describes the crisis as she sees it, proposes a counter-challenge, and then proceeds to demonstrate how this post-Babri Masjid critical practice (to use her own point of departure) could be realised. She reads Kalidasa’s Śākuntalam and Meghadūtam, the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana and the Gītā in and of themselves, and also through 20th century writers in Hindi and Bengali, like Dharamvir Bharati, Mohan Rakesh, Hazariprasad Dwivedi, Rabindranath Tagore, Buddhadeb Bose, Jaishankar Prasad and Mohandas Gandhi (Gandhi is the odd …