This series questions and complicates what ‘reporting from abroad’ can mean in a globalized world that faces interconnected and local crises alongside forces grappling with how to liberate our beings from oppressive structures rooted in past and present (neo)colonialism and imperialism. We can take this as a chance to collectively and constructively consider both broader and different conceptions of philosophy than those more widely studied within USA institutions and culture—and the conditions that shape such studies around the globe by APA-related thinkers. We can learn how local institutions and global contexts shape the possibilities of research, speech, and our visions of philosophy.
Kranti Saran is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Ashoka University, located an hour north of New Delhi, India. He studied philosophy at the University of Delhi, where he completed an undergraduate and master’s degree before heading to the United States, where he eventually earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University. There, he subsequently held appointments as a Fellow in Philosophy and then a Research Associate. Upon returning to India he took up positions first as a Visiting Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University, followed by an ad hoc Assistant Professorship of Philosophy at the University of Delhi, before joining Ashoka University as a founding faculty member in 2013. He has been a campus visitor at the Australian National University in 2018 and will be visiting Cambridge University under the aegis of the Global Humanities Initiative in February 2023. His philosophical interests center on perception and attention, and he has a growing interest in political theory.
How did you come to be doing research in India, whether happenstance, long term goal, or a quick vital decision, for example?
It was clear I would return to India after graduate school, for many reasons. As for anyone, my experiences abroad and at home depended on advantages and disadvantages the research context, my own idiosyncrasies, privilege, and life circumstances afforded. Though I was grateful for the training and career opportunities afforded by elite North American academia, I had personal reasons to return to India, not least that I wanted to raise my young children amongst my extended family at home.
Additionally, I knew that to prepare for publishing I needed more time with less pressure, without this space being mistaken for or penalized as indolence or inactivity. The pressure to publish best suits those whose intellectual maturation unfolds quickly. The creative unfolding of one’s mind is like a satellite slowly unfolding its solar panels, getting into the right alignment to beam its signal. I needed more space for this, which I could find in India.
Furthermore, I didn’t understand how certain important parts of academia worked. Does one ask to join a research group or must one be invited? How does one get invited to invitation-only conferences? Can one ask a senior philosopher to co-author or do they have to ask? Same for editing a volume. It seemed that one was just supposed to know these things; I didn’t and was too ashamed of my ignorance to ask. I thought that in India the price of my ignorance would at least not end my career.
Finally, even though I spent formative years of my childhood in Switzerland and Indonesia, I felt most at home, alive, existentially committed to, and indebted to India; I felt I had to pay my dues in service.
What has the experience of researching been like in India and how has it contributed to or shaped your project(s)?
Christine Korsgaard once said something to the effect that to be a philosopher is to have the right—never to be forfeited—to work on anything that interests you. I took her words to heart. I felt tremendous intellectual freedom in returning to India, suddenly free of any expectations to continue working on or closely adjacent to my dissertation topic. I could work on anything I wanted to.
I felt free but also profoundly disoriented at first. Except for my friend and fellow philosopher Arudra Burra, who had returned the year before me, I had no other similarly trained philosopher to talk to in my physical vicinity. Even so, there was no shortage of philosophical stimulation, because any living culture is an ongoing conversation brimming with philosophical ideas, even if only implicitly much of the time. These conversations map out their own particular terrain of what is important and urgent in that context and of what counts as a reasonable response.
Though I initially found transitioning from one philosophical terrain to another disorienting, when I came to a point where both terrains seemed available, I could switch between the two just like code switching in language, except with intellectual visions of what’s pressing, urgent, and what count as reasonable responses.
I find myself working in three distinct terrains. First: that of contemporary ‘Western’ philosophy of mind, with my already published papers on attention, forthcoming papers on perception, and brewing work on introspection and naive realism. Second: that stemming from my immediate context, where I have published on non-theistic faith and have work simmering away on the bodily phenomenology of crossing cultural contexts, and am preparing another piece that untangles the pressure to work on certain topics related to one’s identity. Third: a terrain mapped out by my interests without regard to externally-established borders of salience and reasonableness. I have a paper that brings ideas from classical Indian philosophy into conversation with contemporary political theory. Living here in India opened up these second and third terrains for me.
Who is your intended research audience and what type of output do you intend to create (for example: one or a series of articles, a new course, contributing to a ‘real world’ project, a book, the development of a center)? How does being in India affect your process and output?
Each of the three outlined terrains has a distinct audience. I direct my work on contemporary ‘Western’ philosophy of mind to established communities in Anglo-American academia working on those topics. These papers are ‘normal science’ and let me keep one foot in mainstream professional philosophy.
I intend work stemming from my immediate context for readers who live and work in complex societies in—I don’t like this label, but it will serve—the ‘Global South.’ I aim for hermeneutical illumination by forging concepts to bring into focus and name common experiences and by constructing arguments as ladders of reason over inhibitive walls. With such papers, I aim to remove obstacles I and others have faced. This work is very rewarding as people here immediately recognize the scenarios, such as alienation from one’s body and speech when presenting work abroad due to unconsciously adjusting one’s comportment to better ‘fit in.’
Finally, there is the work where I cut loose and think without regard to any borders primarily for my own satisfaction, out of raw curiosity rather than to contribute to ongoing debates. I once thought it wasn’t worth even trying to publish this kind of work, but then a line from an essay by Claire Messud where she describes her father as having “renounced the possibility of being understood” shook me. It shows that such a retreat is a symptom either of fear or of a lack of faith in others. Not trying would also consign oneself to a cognitive prison: a trap to avoid, for who can know beforehand whether an argument will meet the right confluence of conditions to receive intellectual uptake?
What support or resources have enabled you to perform research there? How did you find and pursue these opportunities? Did you receive any training or support for this? What impact will they have on your work?
While on a temporary contract at the University of Delhi, I was fortunate to meet a remarkable group of entrepreneurs who were starting a philanthropically-funded, non-profit, American-style liberal arts university. Many conversations later, I was brought on board as one of the founding faculty members of Ashoka University. My run of good fortune continued as I was soon joined by Alex Watson, then a Preceptor in Sanskrit at Harvard. Martin Lin, visiting India on a Fulbright, joined the faculty too for our first year of instruction.
None of us had any training in how to start a university, but highly motivated people sharing a common dream and intense camaraderie backed by hard cash can work wonders. Each of us just did what needed to be done. I served—with no training but lots of help—as the Admissions Director for our founding undergraduate class. It was an adventure.
Alex and I had an incredible opportunity to shape the ethos of Ashoka’s philosophy department, and, luckily, we found we agreed on every fundamental issue. We wanted to foster an environment in which we kept alive what drew us to philosophy in the first place: wonder, awe, a thrilling intellectual adventure, more fun than fun. We wanted a non-hierarchical, transparent, and democratic department where we would strive to do things by consensus. We believed then and still do now that all members of the department should feel they have the full backing and support of the department, no matter how short their stints with us, so that they could always be ambassadors for us and our students. Unlike most other universities in India, we hired internationally, and the state of the job market and our exceptionally strong students ensured that we were able, over the years, to hire outstanding faculty. We’re only eight years old but our undergraduates have gone on to graduate programs in philosophy like University of Southern California, University of Oxford, Pitt HPS, and UMass Amherst. We’re very proud of them.
We spent a lot of time building the institution in the early years, which ate into research time. Now we’re transitioning to become a more research-focused institution. Ashoka’s support for research in the form of money for conference travel is adequate, and money for hosting conferences is available. We now have a stable core of philosophy faculty, enough to run a departmental faculty workshop series where everyone presents their work once a semester and gets constructive feedback. It’s been a lot of work, but also rewarding beyond measure.
What are the expectations and the role of philosophy in academic institutions, the culture, and/or the broader public in India? What responsibilities and expectations come along with your research in this country?
That’s a sensitive question in our context, where we can count on neither the protection of the laws nor an understanding of the value of dissent.
I imagine the government sees the role of philosophers in the public culture as foot soldiers in the reclamation of Hindu pride in our ancient and glorious philosophical tradition, spitefully ignored by a world loath to acknowledge our superiority.
I would think that any serious philosopher should want to show this to be a tissue of confusion.
Please describe any difficulties you face or have overcome, any surprises you have encountered?
I had the immense good fortune to take Cora Diamond’s Wittgenstein seminar as a graduate student at the University of Virginia. She once said that Richard Moran spent two years writing to find his voice before going to graduate school. While at UVA, I had read Moran’s “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination” and immediately thought: this is the kind of philosopher I want to be when I grow up. When I read Moran, not just the subtlety, sophistication, and delicacy of his thinking, but also of his humanity shone through. Yet when I met Moran in graduate school I didn’t quite manage to forge a philosophical connection with him, despite auditing a course of his. Something was blocking me, and I went in another direction. But what was it?! A discomfort I did not understand haunted me right from my first year in graduate school, the only clue to which was a phrase that kept popping into my head, like an earworm or perhaps a Zen koan, “Coming home to Dick Moran.” So for over twenty years, I have been trying to come home to Dick Moran, trying to understand what that even meant. I have determined that it means putting yourself together in order to enable finding and speaking in your own philosophical voice instead of speaking in an anodyne voice fuelled by fear and anxiety. I think I’m almost home now.
Kranti Saran
Kranti Saran is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ashoka University. He earned his doctorate at Harvard University’s Department of Philosophy in 2011, and has since been a Fellow in Philosophy at Harvard and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Most recently, he has been an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Delhi. You can find more information about him at http://krantisaran.net/.
His research interests span the areas of perception, attention, bodily awareness, introspection, mimicry, and how these topics are related to our moral relation to others. A common thread that runs through his research is a concern with understanding facets of our cognition: its faculties and modes (perception, attention), its embodiment (bodily awareness), its consequences for our relation to our selves and our immediate social milieu (introspection, mimicry), and finally, the manner in which these topics interact with culture and so either constrain or enable dimensions of our moral relation to others.
alicehank winham studied BA Philosophy and Theology at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, where ze is now pursuing an MPhil Buddhist Studies at Lady Margaret Hall through the Faculty of Oriental Studies soon to be renamed the ‘Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.’ Ze focuses on philosophy of logic and language and social epistemology across traditions, including classical Buddhist philosophy and its modern interpreters, feminist philosophy, and the Black Radical Tradition. alicehank is also dedicated to critical pedagogy, philosophies of transformation and liberation, and social and environmental activism, such as through mentoring programmes, publishing journals, and direct action. In philosophy, ze works on expanding our disciplinary and interpretative horizons for a more caring and considered world through oxfordpublicphilosophy.com and Philiminality Oxford. Ze also works to reflect and act upon zer values through Biblionasium, environmental activism, and Lift Economy’s Next Economy MBA.
