Professor Makarand Paranjape is an Indian novelist, poet and literary critic. He has been the Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, since August 2018. 

Professor Paranjape has been teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students for almost thirty years. His teaching career has spanned the better part of the globe. A large part of this has been spent in the United States and India, where he has lived and worked. He started his career in 1980, as Teaching Assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1999, he has been a professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, Centre for English Studies. He has published over 120 academic papers in various refereed journals and edited books within the country and internationally. In addition, he is the author of several poems and short stories, over 200 essays, book reviews, and occasional pieces in academic and popular periodicals in India and abroad. He was a columnist in Sunday Observer, Business Standard, The Pioneer, and Life Positive. He has been twice the chairperson of the Centre for English Studies, JNU, and is a member of the Board of Studies, the Academic Council of JNU, and the Vision Committee of JNU; the Coordinator for UGC Special Assistance Programme, in the Centre for English Studies, JNU from 2003 to 2008; the principal investigator of the Project on Indian Perspectives on Science and Spirituality, from 2006 to 2009. He is the General Editor of a series of reprints of rare and out of print Indian English titles published by the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. He is the founding Trustee of Samvad India Foundation, a Delhi-based non-profit, public charitable trust, and also the founding editor of Evam: Forum on Indian Representations, an international bi-annual, multi-disciplinary journal on India. He was the chairperson for the Europe and South Asia region of Pan-Commonwealth panel of judges for the 2008 and 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize; he also served as the Indian host judge for the 2010 Prize awarded in New Delhi. Recorded June 8, 2021.

Show Notes

01:36 MP on the idea of Asia as a European creation.

03:30 MP on India as the crossroads of the world and its inherent pluralism.

05:27 MP on the oft ignored scientific and material aspect of Indian culture vs its spiritual aspect.

13:50 MP on how India’s salubrious climate influenced its culture.

14:25 MP on the fallacy of setting up Buddhism in opposition Hinduism.  

15:45 MP on the lens of dharma (rather than religion) to understand the faith traditions of the subcontinent.

18:04 MP on the meaning of the word Hindu.

21:35 MP on the Gandhian view of modernity and environmentalism.

27:35 MP on the problem with imposing external paradigms on the Indian polity and China envy in India.

31:30 MP on the Indian caste system.

38:00 MP on India’s role in the changing world order.

45:30 MP on the pressing need for India to balance its idealism with realpolitik in its foreign policy.

50:20 MP on Narendra Modi as a transformational leader in Indian history.

57:57 MP on why a Western or Chinese modernity may not work for India, and the need to evolve its own version of modernity.

01:04:31 MP on his experiences fostering better understanding between India and China.

01:06:02 MP on the challenges facing classical liberalism, from cultural revolutionaries to hyper-globalization.

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