ABSTRACT
Writing this chapter afforded me the rather rare space for reflexive retracing of a professor's own academic practices of research. I began my academic career as an avid “moderniser” of India, transmitting Western knowledge and identifying closely with the founding vision of the institute. Yet my ethnographic meanderings into the hinterlands and the attendant emic identification with “lived” business life of economic actors whom we do not usually meet at an IIM led me into the pangs of dwelling in the chasm between what I increasingly started viewing as the proselytising disciplinary knowledge of the West and the “lived life” or the “civilisational discourse (in ancient texts)” of Bharat. While I recognise the debt of Western management scholars, from whom I learnt robust methods of ethnography and hermeneutic analysis of texts and benefited from their practices of sincere and critical reviews of research papers, I attempted to displace (and decolonise!) the theoretical constructs of the Western disciplinary discourse through an attempt to autonomously identify the points of departure of the case of India, or may I say Bharat, in my own discipline.
