ABSTRACT
Given the presence of both tradition and modernity in modern India, there is a need to use Western philosophy to understand modern India. This is in addition to the use of classical Indian philosophy. There have been two kinds of uses of philosophy from the West by Indians in India. One is those who taught philosophers from the West without calibrating with the institutional spaces in India, like universities. This led to a mismatch between the intellectual size of these philosophers from the West and the intellectual space where they sought to be inhabited. Others tried to bring concepts from these philosophers into Indian education. This posed the problem of making sense of these concepts outside their context. Against this backdrop, the book proposes an alternative, suggesting that philosophers from the West can be bent without breaking so that they can be both managed and made meaningful use of. This task of bending requires the need to know what is in India, and what is not in India, and how to use what is borrowed from the West in India. This book undertakes the task of calibrating the following philosophers from the West: Rousseau, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Bergson, and Vaddera Chandidas.
