Coomaraswamy's ghost and the future of India: the fear of cultural imagination

The video is a recording of a talk delivered by Ashis Nandy at the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi on 12th August, 2010 as part of the Coomaraswamy Memorial Lecture. This memorial lecture dedicated to the Sri Lankan-Tamil art historian, metaphysicist and philosopher of Indian art, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy was titled “Coomaraswamy’s Ghost and the Future of India: The Fear of Cultural Imagination.” In this lecture the social theorist and psychologist Ashis Nandy looks at the philosophical legacy of Coomarswamy in relation to that of two other great thinkers of the early 20th century, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. The speaker turns a critical gaze at the dominance of theories of social evolution, progress and nationalism in the intellectual culture and environment of the 19th century which carried on into the 20th century which led to the rejection of such thinkers like Coomaraswamy who were champions of the village.