Shashikala Srinivasan - Shashikala Srinivasan

The Confusion between Liberal (Arts) Education and Liberalism

By Shashikala Srinivasan | February 4, 2024April 25, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

One of the problems confronting us today is the lack of an appropriate idiom for discussing education in our times. Even our new age ‘liberal arts’ institutions that have come up all over India today do not give their students a sense of what it means to be educated in this way. One of the reasons for this is, perhaps, that our discussions on liberal (arts) education are suffused with the views of liberalism; sometimes…

A Response to Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s article on decolonization

By Shashikala Srinivasan | September 13, 2023November 20, 2025 by Shashikala Srinivasan

Pratap Bhanu Mehta has written a thought-provoking piece on the problems with the current talk of decolonisation (September, 1, 2023, Indian Express). His contention is that the current call for decolonization, though correct in its assessment that colonialism misrepresented Indian knowledge forms thereby almost blocking our access to it, is superficial. For the call for decolonization has neither been accompanied by any attempt to either “diagnose indic knowledge” or understand why the knowledge forms that…