Changing India-West Cultural Dialectics

The changing profiles of the India-West cultural dialogue are pursued over the last sixty years. After discussing French anthropologist Louis Dumont’s mid-twentieth century “binary opposition” between India and the West as the starting anthropological point of departure, I turn to Wilhelm Halbfass, a German comparative philosopher, for a better differentiated treatment of the changing India-West cultural dialogues and dialectics. During the last decade, the topic has received a distinctly conceptually open and inclusive treatment at the hands of two Noble Laureates: Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet, thinker and diplomat, and Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and social philosopher. Both demonstrate convincingly how India-West cultural dialectics has long been historically and culturally significant, especially once it is viewed interdependently from both directions in relation to the ongoing major global historical-cultural-political changes. Lately, this has included, for example, the growing technological-cultural interdependence between “globalizing India,” unifying Europe (as the European Union), and the post 9/11 U.S.