This is disastrous for, when brought to the notice of the West, these are naturally not taken seriously: why pay attention to second hand versions when the original is so close to hand? And in their own home they are condemned to further neglect because when real issues to which they relate grip the public mind, discussions around them tend to happen in terms of older hegemonic conception. In fact those who innovate themselves timidly pass them off as Western. However, it is a feature of living under a strong hegemon that it doesn’t allow one to notice these evolving conceptions and even when one notices them to see or proclaim their novelty and distinctiveness. At such times we can expect new non-Western conception to emerge-and this is no doubt happening.ĢYet we must not assume that such conceptions were not invented earlier. Nowadays, instead, a space has emerged of real intellectual and civilizational equality between a much-weakened hegemon and a previously hegemonized world. With this, we see the beginning of the end of what might be called the colonization of the mind and intellectual cultures, of what may be called epistemic injustice. They have clearly fallen of their high pedestal. Modern Western traditions are just ‘one among many’, with certain strengths and several weaknesses, as much-as Gandhi once put it-in need of cure as all others. We now live, as Eisenstadt said, in a world of continuously shifting hegemonies. A new historical dynamics has been set in motion in recent times that has fundamentally altered the relationship between what formerly were the centres and their peripheries. But never before in modern times has the impact of this critique been so profound as to lead to a real possibility in the transformation of the social and political imaginary of large numbers of people throughout the world. They have been viewed with suspicion and rejected, rightly or wrongly, in the past.

Ideas and practices associated with the modern West have been subjected to critique for long, both from within the West and outside it. 1The current conjuncture in the world is witness to a dramatic, almost irreversible breakdown of the hegemony of mainstream intellectual traditions of the West.

Political theory by rajeev bhargava pdf