UNDERSTANDING AND IMAGINATION A Critical Notice of Halbfass and Inden* S.N. BALAGANGADHARA Rijksuniversiteit Gent Introduction During the last decade or so, a new restlessness has begun to disturb the calm facade of the social scientific academia. As yet, it has no name. Better said, it has many names: from ’reflexive’ to the ’post-modem’. The ferment is not widespread, but the voices of discontent are coherent and articulate. The critical voices indicate the many kinds of dissatisfaction they have with the status and nature of social sciences. Even though most dissenters cannot be grouped as representatives of any one tradition, many of their writings stand a cut above the rest. Two such authors are Wilhelm Halbfass and Ronald Inden; each has written a book that is worthy of attention and respect. It is easy enough to identify the context that has brought forth the dissatis- faction of these two authors: the indological discourse and the manner in which Indian culture and civilization has been made into an object of study and description over the centuries. Thematically, the ground for their restlessness is one of ’representational inadequacy’: the extent to which accounts of other cultures capture the otherness of their object. As a theme, during the last decade or more, it has come into prominence in many fields and in many guises: in philosophy an attack against the notion of knowledge as a representation of the world has been remounted by Rorty; in anthropology it has taken the form that the anthropologist does not describe the other culture he meets with but writes some kind of a psycho-biography instead. Whatever one’s stance with respect to these emerging disputes be, it does not take away the fact that, say, * Wilhelm HALBFASS, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1988. $ 19.95 (Paper), $ 60.50 (Cloth). Ronald INDEN, Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. £ 39.50 (Cloth).