The New in the Old: Celebrating Fifty Years of Modernization of Indian Tradition

Abstract

The most startling feature of Modernization of Indian Tradition is that it was so ahead of its times when it appeared in 1973 that most of us missed its full import. In those years there was, in the main, a simplistic understanding of modernisation as its markers were primarily technological achievements and western lifestyles, even affectations. In this book, Professor Yogendra Singh broke away from such formulaic renditions and instead proposed a social and relational view of modernisation where the principal emphasis was on how people interacted with one another and not on prowess facility with superior technical facilities or exterior presentation. Today we can appreciate the relevance of this approach for the drawbacks of correlating modernisation with things has proved to be inadequate, when not misleading, as it gives a skewed appreciation of the subject. Consequently, Enlightenment too gets a fresh coating for it now largely centres around the conditions of knowledge generation, which includes interpersonal relationships, and not on finished products of science. A person may, therefore, be very knowledgeable yet may remain quite un-modern when interacting with others.