Alongside its rotating conversations, The Caravanserai curates an ongoing series on South Asian intellectual traditions as coherent, living philosophy. Not to recover, defend, or compare. But to engage with what has always existed, in its own terms.
Every South Asian who has been through university can tell you about Foucault's panopticon, Derrida's différance, or Freud's unconscious. We discuss Nietzsche's will to power and cite Judith Butler on gender performativity.
But when we ask ourselves about Bulleh Shah's theory of the self. About what Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai meant when he centered women as seekers. About Iqbal's reconstruction of selfhood. About Amir Khusro's philosophy of synthesis or Guru Nanak's spiritual egalitarianism. There is silence.
This is changing because people need thinking in categories that fit the questions they face. Climate crisis demands different relationships to nature. Wahdat al-wujud offers them. Caste and class require critiques that understand how hierarchies actually operate here. Bulleh Shah, Kabir, and Ambedkar provide them. Queer identity needs grounding beyond imported frameworks. Shah Hussain's transgressive love across religious and sexual boundaries offers it. Tagore's cosmopolitanism offers frameworks for thinking beyond nationalist boundaries in our globalized present.
The work is reconstruction, not recovery. That what we call cultural heritage is actually also intellectual inheritance. This requires reading differently. We ask what these frameworks offer for questions we face now. We build vocabulary and tools others can use. This is not about proving equivalence. This is about recognizing we have always had sophisticated thought.
We need not choose between Foucault and Bulleh Shah. But we should know both. Think with Bulleh as fluently as with Foucault. Deploy Iqbal's khudi alongside Butler's performativity. Cite Shah Latif's women as confidently as we cite Beauvoir.
What would it mean to think in categories that fit? To know our philosophers as intimately as we know theirs? The Reading Room and The Caravanserai exist for this. The futures we want require different foundations. Time to think home.