Guest lecture:
Workshop on Democracy, Multiculturalism and India:
"Multicultural Democracy and the Construction of Inclusive Imaginaries".
By Dr. Sudarsan Padmanabhan, IIT, Madras, Chennai
27. May 9:00 – 13:00; Building 1328, room 220
The necessary function of a successful political system is to establish consensus
between individuals, civil society, political hierarchy, and electoral institutions, not exclusively procedural and symmetric, but responsive to the asymmetry of human relationships. I discuss the reasons for disagreements on important issues such as affirmative action and multicultural democracy in this paper. There is a pressing need
to encourage consensus in the public sphere. Subsidiarity or mutual social relationship rather than legal wrangling is necessary for the peaceful coexistence of a diverse
society. Among scholars actively engaged in research on multicultural issues, religions,
and cultures one finds de-contextualization and essentialization of alien cultures.
The most significant de-contextualization occurs among already settled generation
of the immigrant population themselves. There is a hypostatization of imported
cultures, which are completely isolated from the dynamic developments of the native countries from which the immigrants themselves hail. More often that not, there is a
clash of cultures between the immigrant settlers and people in their countries of origin.
Biographical Sketch
Dr. Sudarsan Padmanabhan specializes in social and political philosophy, developmental ethics, Indian philosophy and culture. Dr. Padmanabhan’s research focuses on the confluence between law, democracy, and ethics in the public sphere. Currently, he is working on an understanding of an Indian social imaginary associated with politics, culture, society, language, religion and region and its relationship to the Constitution of India. Dr. Padmanabhan joined IIT Madras as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in Fall 2007. Dr. Padmanabhan was a Visiting Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, USA during 2005-2006 and an Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida during Spring 2007. Dr. Padmanabhan graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA in May 2005 and the title of his dissertation was Two Models of Consensus which analyzes how and whether consensus could be achieved in liberal, communitarian, and multicultural societies. Dr. Padmanabhan also has another Doctoral degree in Philosophy from Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, India and the title of his dissertation was Jürgen Habermas’ Rational Theory of Social Action which he completed in 1998. Dr. Padmanabhan is also the Prinicipal Investigator in the European Union funded project for Contemporary European Study Centres in India, a two-year programme, the Centre for Comparative European Union Studies (CCEUS) that was inaugurated at IIT Madras on January 20, 2010. In the CCEUS, Dr. Padmanabhan will also be one of the coordinators of the Democracy and Development stream that deals with concepts like citizenship, multiculturalism, secularism, consensus, liberalism and the evolution of social and political institutions within a comparative Indo-EU framework.
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