Wisdom of Community

Essays on History, Social Transformation and Culture

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The Wisdom of Community is a compilation of essays which documents the key issues that have been pertinent in national debates in India. In some ways it takes a linear and chronological position on how the past informs us as we proceed with making sense of postmodern fluid society. It tries to understand how affected or influenced we are by colonialism, and the debates which brought us our freedom. It uses biography, symbols and narratives to piece together our engagement with literature, history, myth and legend. It presupposes that the past is contextualised through narrative production. Each essay in this collection is tuned to the greater debates, which continue today in problematized global and cosmopolitan contexts to describe the relation between town and country. The consistent preoccupation is with labour and its intended consequences. Here, climate change, law court trials and constructing parallel histories which have influenced us are drawn to tell the reader that learning from history is essential for our survival. Readers will see that the world always appears in the spaces that are produced by travel, by terror, freedom, conquest and adaptation. The coexistence of all these across history, allows for the warp and weft of narrative production to be evident as analysable and comprehensive. The reader enters this frame of interlocking essays in order to understand how significant the production of stories are, and how we may find similarities in our condition across time and space. The book consists of 12 essays which are arranged in a way that the essential problems are made evident as questions of occupation, survival, and translation of world views. It brings the world closer, just as in reality it seems to be receding, because we are afraid of what we see, and know. The method is called Learning from History. The Wisdom of Community brings to the reader the interlacing of archival, fieldwork and literary materials in order to bring to the reader the constants that inform our lives, while recognizing the past as ever-present. The essays in this collection span a period of thirty years, and were earlier published as essays in popular journals and magazines and newspapers, but also include some scholarly articles. They are divided into essays on travel, feminism, as well as activist, literary, and analytical essays. The reader will find in them the insights of three decades spanning the years of teaching and writing while living in Delhi. The link connecting these essays is time and memory, as well as the belief that we can learn from the past. The "circulation of ideas" appears as a dominant theme, in all the essays, along with the emphases on agency, and the celebration of the right to choice and the articulation of human will, since the themes of democracy and freedom are common to all.

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Susan Visvanathan is the author of Christians of Kerala (1993), Friendship, Interiority and Mysticism (2007) and The Children of Nature (2010). She has published essays in various journals, the earliest of which was 'Reconstructions of the Past among the Syrian Christians of Kerala' in Contributions to Indian Sociology (1986). Prof. Visvanathan was Chairperson of Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University (2009-2011) and Teacher-in-Charge of Department of Sociology, Hindu College (1992-1997). She has taught Sociology for thirty-eight years, of which twenty-five years were spent at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she had the privilege of working with doctoral students. She retired from Jawaharlal Nehru University, on 9 March 2022. Susan Visvanathan has edited Structure and Transformation (2001), Chronology and Event (edited with Vineeta Menon) (2019), Art, Politics, Symbols and Religion (2019), Structure, Innovation and Adaptation (2019). She collaborated with the art historian, Geeti Sen, and edited two volumes of the India International Quarterly titled Kerala (1995) and Women and the Family (1997). Susan Visvanathan is a well-known writer of literary fiction who has been included in Bruce King's Rewriting India: Eight Writers (2014). Her first novella, a collection of integrated short stories, titled Something Barely Remembered (2000) was published by Flamingo and India Ink, and was one of the 6 nominees for the Commonwealth Award, UK. It is now a text book for English Literature students in the 200 colleges of the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala. Prof. Visvanathan was Visiting Professor to the Maison des Sciences de l'homme, Paris (2004) and to Universite Paris 13 (2011). She was Charles Wallace Fellow at Ethnomusicology and Anthropology Department in Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1997. Prof. Visvanathan was Professional Excellence Award Fellow at Budapest, Central European University in 2018.