Overview

This volume brings together the essays of Chitta Ranjan Das (1923-2011), a creative experimenter and writer, on literature, culture, life and the human condition. It presents a different vision and version of the post-colonial imagination and social and literary criticism which is rooted in soil, soul and cosmos. While a majority of post-colonial discourse is still predominantly metropolitan, giving us very little discussion on creative endeavours in different language spaces of India and the world, this book presents radical new pathways and creative collaborations which break conventional boundaries between the periphery and the centre, literature and life, mother languages and metropolitan languages, and East and West. It offers a new archaeology of knowledge as a regenerative archaeology of life where knowledge, action and devotion come together for new explorations and transformations. It broadens and deepens our universe of discourse on literature, philosophy and world transformations, and is a monumental contribution to alternative imagination and cosmopolitan experimentation.

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9781527545588

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The Odia intellectual Chitta Ranjan Das was a true vernacular cosmopolitan. His is a vision that is politically expansive and culturally grounded. This book should be in every library and read by readers of all intellectual backgrounds. Satya P MohantyProfessor of English, Cornell University In many places today, education is seen as a highway to arrogance and elitist conceit. By contrast, for Chitta Ranjan, education is a humble walking step by step in search of insight and social justice. Let us emulate him as a model, a faithful follower of the Gandhian practice of satyagraha. Fred DallmayrProfessor, University of Notre Dame This book is an introduction to a seminal thinker of our time, whose life and work went beyond mere concern with technique, style, method and genealogy, to embrace the cause of social, moral and spiritual transformation; who substituted understanding and realization for argument and ratiocination; who released the unsaid and unthought from what was said and thought, in both the East and West; who moved from the ground to the summit of contingent being, bhumi to bhuma, Self to the Other and back, for self-fulfilment in self transcendence. Dr Kalyan Kumar ChakravartyFormer Chancellor, National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi This book unfolds a philosophical worldview of Chitta Ranjan Das-our Chitta Bhai, as the Odias will ever affectionately remember him. The collected essays highlight a great amalgamation of literature and philosophy. In his aesthetic and moral imagination, Chitta Bhai conceptualized literature as the voice of life and philosophy as the pursuit of happiness. Professor Ananta Kumar Giri and Ivan Marquez in their dialogical creative engagement have very well brought the drusti-darshan of Chitta Bhai. Ranjan Kumar PandaProfessor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai

Author Information

Ananta Kumar Giri is a Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, India. He has an abiding interest in social movements and cultural change, criticism, creativity and contemporary dialectics of transformation, theories of self, culture and society, and creative streams in education, philosophy and literature. He has authored and edited around two dozen books in Odia and English, including Global Transformations: Postmodernity and Beyond (1998); Sameekhya o Purodrusti [Criticism and Vision of the Future] (1999); Patha Prantara Nrutattwa [Anthropology of the Street Corner] (2000); Conversations and Transformations: Toward a New Ethics of Self and Society (2002); Sociology and Beyond: Windows and Horizons (2012), Knowledge and Human Liberation: Towards Planetary Realizations (2013); Cultivating Pathways of Creative Research: New Horizons of Transformative Practice and Collaborative Imagination (2017); Research as Realization: Science, Spirituality and Harmony (2017); and Weaving New Hats: Our Half Birthdays (2019), among others.Ivan Marquez is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University. He currently works in the areas of philosophical analysis and language.

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