Research

I think what makes my research unique is that it isn’t based in any particular tradition. One result is that my work brings together research on the Western and Eastern, especially, Indian, traditions. The other is that it doesn’t buy or proceed on the basis of myths created by colonization and oppression. 

It started out with a research question: why do academics simply ignore and erase all the interesting moral philosophy from a colonized tradition—the South Asian tradition? This led me to do my PhD dissertation in Western (Analytic and Continental) philosophy of language and ethics, to figure out how people mess up translation and how we can understand those with whom we do not share anything with. We live in a small world and if we cannot even accurately translate what others have to teach us, we can never understand our own cultural limitations, and we can never learn from other people’s hard work. 

But what I found in the Western tradition was rather a doubling down of the idea that our (Western) language and culture constitute the frame for the study of everything else. And so we can never be free from the prejudices of our tradition as they furnish the tools we’re supposed to use to understand others. In time I came to call this the Western tradition—the capital “W” that leans on the “est.” It’s a colonizing tradition that has roots in ancient Greek philosophy, which was founded on the idea of logos: one word for thinking and language. 

By working out an approach to translation that avoided the small mindedness and bigotry of the Western tradition (I provide the beginnings of this account in my dissertation: Translating Evaluative Discourse—the Semantics of Thick and Thin Concepts) I started translating South Asian moral philosophy, which provided resources and clues to appreciate the domineering assumptions of the Western tradition that results in bad research but also a global tradition of colonization, which has taken over all parts of the world. It also provided resources to think about how we could go about doing things correctly. This led to my clarification of a distinction between a logic based approach to research (I call explication) and a belief or attitude based approach (called interpretation in the literature) —a distinction I trace to the Yoga Sutra itself, the founding academic text of the Yoga tradition . 

This appreciation of what the Yoga tradition has to teach us turns many myths on its head. This led me to appreciate how “religion” and “spirituality”are really political inventions of Western colonization, that hide rigorous moral philosophy from colonized traditions. That religion is depicted as an area of faith, beyond the scope of rational reflection is a political construction that prevents colonized traditions from vocalizing ideas critical of oppression and colonization. Sadly, colonized people typically buy this invented depiction of their tradition, as religious or spiritual, without reflecting on the history. The reality is, no free people decide to understand themselves as practicing a religion. Religious identity is always created within contexts of oppression. This is institutionalized in what I call Secularism: the idea that the Western (no matter what) is secular, and the BIPOC (no matter what) is always religious or spiritual. I contrast this with the Indigenous (South Asian) practice of Secularism: free open philosophical debate and exploration on all philosophical controversies. 

Moral philosophy is ordinarily depicted as something only White people do, a racist myth designed to prevent us from seriously criticizing colonization via anti-oppression moral theorizing from colonized traditions.  This has in turn led me to a deeper appreciation of South Asian philosophy —not in terms of the myths of colonization, but as a deeply secular tradition interested in debate, freedom of ideas, and rigorous research. As the West begins to show its true face in terms of authoritarianism, fascism, White supremacy and colonization, we have a lot to learn from Indigenous people who had a different, logic based approach to life. 

One lesson I derive from my work is that Indigenous traditions have a lot to teach us. We dismiss them because of an Orwellian switch where we label oppressive, colonizing traditions as rational while colonized and oppressed traditions are treated as mystical or spiritual. The opposite is true. Colonized traditions are delusional, and to understand how rigorous research and discernment is possible we need to look to colonized traditions .