Retro-Modern India

For the past two decades or so, modernity has been getting re-examined by experts from several disciplines as diverse as philosophy, architecture, painting, literature, cultural studies and social anthropology, among others. Consequently, the Enlightenment and its project have been critiqued on various fronts. Some of the most serious criticisms made against ‘modern’ knowledge are that of racism, misogyny, Orientalism, colonialism, and for the past few years, Islamophobia as well. To a certain extent, the present scholarship accepts that modernity is not a universal phenomenon and it has significant limitations. What are those limitations and to what extent are many projections of modernity still relevant? Which arguments are valid, and which ones are not? Amongst the arguments advanced by modernity, which ones are worth keeping and which ones are not? Is it one singular modernity or there are multiple contextual modernities? Retromodern India (2010) tries to answer some of these tough theoretical questions of the present age. The book is an exercise in social anthropology and takes ethnography as the methodological tool. The writer, Manuela Ciotti, gives us a systematic view of the modern self of a marginal social group in India. Her position is that of understanding modernity as much a non-West phenomenon as it is Western.