Shashikala Srinivasan - Shashikala Srinivasan

Education, Forms of Life, and Civilisation.

By Shashikala Srinivasan | August 28, 2026August 30, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

Education is often discussed in terms of institutions, curricula, methods of teaching, and the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Yet beneath these immediate concerns lies a deeper question: what kind of human being should education cultivate? This question cannot be answered independently of the civilisation within which education takes place. Different civilisations have embodied different conceptions of knowledge, formation, human flourishing and the good life, and these conceptions have shaped the ways in which succeeding…

Eudaimonia and the Indian distinction between Shreyas and Preyas

By Shashikala Srinivasan | August 14, 2026August 28, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

In much of modern Western thought, ethics has increasingly come to be identified with morality. It is approached primarily as a domain of rules, obligations, and judgments concerning right and wrong. Even where ethics is treated as practical philosophy, action is often understood as derived from beliefs, values, or moral principles. By contrast, in the older Aristotelian understanding, ethics concerns the question of how to live well. Oriented toward eudaimonia—often translated as human flourishing—it belongs…

Concept of a Raga – II

By Shashikala Srinivasan | July 29, 2026July 30, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

In the previous post, I ended with Mukund Lath’s central question: How do we understand the identity of an object whose very identity depends upon change? The raga, Lath argues, presents us with precisely such a case. At the heart of Indian classical music lies not the faithful or mechanical reproduction of a fixed sequence of svaras, but the unfolding of the raga as a “malleable”, “living” and “felt” musical form. Yet, this living form…

The Concept of a Raga – I

By Shashikala Srinivasan | June 29, 2026August 2, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

The concept of the Raga, without doubt, is the key to understanding Indian classical music. The core of Indian classical music, it is often said, lies in the exploration, elaboration and the unfolding of a raga in all its beauty. Hence, the great practitioners of the art have called raga “the soul of Indian music, “a way of seeing the world through sound,” and as a unique, exquisite form, “which the bandish and the tala…

Classics and Ways of Thinking

By Shashikala Srinivasan | May 21, 2026May 27, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

Initiating students into classics has long been considered central to the idea of a liberal education. These works are deemed “classics” because a tradition (or culture) confers upon them the status of greatness. Classics set standards and are taken to represent the most significant and refined reflections of that tradition. To recognize a work as a classic is also to acknowledge that it has taken part in our intellectual and cultural formation and continues to…

Why Moksha is Not “Salvation”?

By Shashikala Srinivasan | May 3, 2026May 29, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

One of the central problems within Indian tradition that scholars grapple with is moksha, often translated as “spiritual liberation” or “salvation”. Yet to translate moksha as “salvation” is a category mistake: it imports an alien conceptual framework and ultimately results in the loss of understanding of a distinct tradition with its own knowledge quest. Why is translating moksha as salvation a category mistake? Let us probe more into this question by looking at the concept…

Bhakti as Swaswaroopanusandhanam

By Shashikala Srinivasan | March 14, 2026March 14, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

We are used to thinking of bhakti as devotion to a personal God. This understanding of bhakti almost entirely determines how we discuss the concept today. That there are other ways as well in which the Indian tradition explores and discusses the concept does not occur to us. Hence, those accustomed to the contemporary associations of bhakti, are likely to be taken aback by a startlingly different understanding of bhakti in one of the central…

Two Idioms of Belonging: The Nation and the Civilization

By Shashikala Srinivasan | October 13, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

We often come across two kinds of idioms being used in our everyday political life: The civilizational and the national. Both are idioms of belonging, expressing a shared world of going about. Sometimes, the two journey along together, with the civilizational idiom feeding into the idea of nation. And there are times when the two come into intense conflict. Intriguingly, both are today seen as belonging to the political right as opposed to the grammar…

On the Ethical Domain and Bhakti

By Shashikala Srinivasan | September 14, 2025September 14, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

It has been noted that unlike the Greek culture which spearheaded thinking about the domain of ethics, there is an absence of terminology in India which is meant to encourage reflection on ethics. This has raised the question: How is it possible to reflect on and reason about the domain of ethics when there is an absence of words to talk to about the domain? I would like to argue that words like bhakti, atman,…

III – Conceptual Explorations on Bhakti

By Shashikala Srinivasan | April 28, 2025August 22, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

( with inputs from Habil. Narahari Rao) Two Strands of Scholarship There are predominantly two strands of scholarship in the current academic milieu on the notion of bhakti. One is characterized by a sociological approach that sees bhakti as an instrument of social protest against the supposed Brahminic dominance (as we saw in the previous post), the other is characterized by a search to understand bhakti as a specific concept brought about by the Indian…