Civilization - Shashikala Srinivasan

Part II: Tagore’s Idea of the University

By Shashikala Srinivasan | October 10, 2026October 12, 2026 by Shashikala Srinivasan

Rabindranath Tagore’s essay “The Centre of Indian Culture” gives us a compelling vision of a university rooted in India’s civilizational traditions yet open to the world. This ideal is embodied in the very name Visva-Bharati, which brings together the world and Bharat, expressing Tagore’s aspiration for a meeting of civilizations in which India’s intellectual traditions could flourish through engagement with the world. First delivered as a lecture in Madras (now Chennai) in February 1919, it…

Part I : Education, Forms of Life, and Civilisation.

By Shashikala Srinivasan | August 28, 2026October 10, 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…

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…