The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh / Hyderabad News : Wrong epithets for tribal cultures flayed

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Friday, Feb 15, 2008
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Wrong epithets for tribal cultures flayed

Special Correspondent

— Photo: Mohd.Yousuf

Esteemed faculty: Vice-Chancellor of University of Hyderabad Seyed E Hasnain along with Mrinal Miri, member of National Advisory Council in Hyderabad on Thursday.

HYDERABAD: Noted philosopher Mrinal Miri has regretted the use of all kinds of unfortunate adjectives to describe tribal cultures of India.

Words as “primitive, prehistoric, savage and uncivilised” were being used, he said delivering the first Ramachandra Gandhi memorial lecture on the topic ‘The spiritual and the moral’ at the University of Hyderabad on Thursday. Gandhi was a philosophy professor at the university.

Dr. Miri, a former Vice-Chancellor of North Eastern Hill University (NEHU), said it would be an interesting exercise to locate the place of tribals in the intellectual history of the 19th and early 20th century India. The world of tribesmen was seamlessly continuous between the inanimate, animate and the human. They were ensconced in the contingencies of time and space. Self-knowledge for the tribesmen must be bound by these contingencies.

Emphasising that every language was a distinct way of lighting up the world, Dr. Miri said self-knowledge was necessarily articulated in language. University Vice-Chancellor Seyed E. Hasnain also spoke.

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