Culture - 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…

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…