The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory

An enduring challenge confronts the practice of social science in India and other non-western countries. For long, the experiences of these societies have been largely described by theoretical vocabulary and methods drawn from mainstream western intellectual traditions. This has led to two kinds of asymmetries in knowledge production in the social sciences. One is the overwhelming dependence on these western theories in order to make sense of non-western experiences along with the concomita...