Introduction

by Esha Shah

The theme of the knowledge debates is centered around the politics of knowledge . Many of us who straddled working with different Indian and European institutions would agree that the generic nature of debates that happen within India and Europe are often significantly different. By saying that I don’t mean to say  that there are no common grounds there. In fact the purpose of these debates is to find  the commonalities between thee debates and emphasise them , bring them out more strongly and at the same time acknowledge the differences and the distinctions between both the debates in order to see how do we learn from each other, and how both the generic debates both in India and Eurpoe can be more enriched by the mutual engagement.

So these are the two aims of these series of debates that we are organizing in India.

To repeat
1. to find overarching themes, sort of common issues that we all need to debate, with respect to different knowledge issues and

2. find a dialogue across debates that are more generic to India and Europe.

These are very laudable aims to be achieved in one days deliberation. But I would say that this is just one baby step , hopefully towards a longer process, that we all will continue in our professional institutional spaces. And at the same time as I have already said we will take this debate further to different for a that we would represent.

I want to extend a warm welcome to Sastry-garu and Prof. Hari babu for taking the challenging task of chairing the morning and evening sessions respectively – for moderating the discussion and making sure that create a communitarian spirit in order to make everybody participate in this debate.

Opening Comments by Chair: MV Sastri.

The Introduction to the session has been given beautifully by Esha and the document that she has circulated earlier poses the problems quite well. She has also put together a group of very knowledgeable people - half of them from Europe  and the other half from India – a good balance.    Apart from the speakers, there are several who are active in academia, and civil society.