Comment Alternative Modernities, Alternatives to Modernity or Multiple Modernities – What Else?

Authors

  • Harbans Mukhia

Abstract

The term ‘modernity’ as a received category and the host of connotations that accompany it has an inescapably West European provenance. These connotations remain predominant in the whole discourse, often even in the discourse which seeks alternatives to it. ‘Modern’ indeed leads us back into the division of historical time, itself a European construct. Historiography in Asian regions – China, Japan, India – did operate with a sense of historical time, but not one that divided chunks of history into one or another ‘period’. The birth of Islam did draw one sharp vertical line that divided history into the age of jahiliya – ignorance, savagery – and the age of Islam that had brought light of knowledge as defined by Islam. But the notion of ‘modern’ was absent from all these pursuits of history. I am not quite conversant with indigenous traditions of history writing in Africa and Latin America and am therefore unable to comment on them; but my hunch is that ‘modern’ is an importation from Europe there as well. ‘

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Published

2020-02-18