Introduction

Genealogies of Virtue: Ethical Practice in South Asia was an Exploratory Workshop funded by a grant from the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia awarded to Principal Investigator Anand Pandian, Anthropology and Institute of Asian Research.

Recent scholarship in numerous fields has renewed attention to the subject of ethics, understood as a concrete practice of self-fashioning rather than a simple collection of moral rules or abstract judgments. We intended to contribute to this vital conversation by means of an international workshop on the subject of ethical and moral traditions in South Asia. These traditions of virtuous practice have either been celebrated in South Asian nationalist writings as the mirror opposite of Western modernity, or easily derided in scholarly prose as idioms of religious or political ideology and social oppression. A serious interdisciplinary engagement with the many textual, historical, and everyday answers to the question "How ought one to live?" in South Asia is still missing.

We invited a number of leading international scholars from the fields of social and cultural history, cultural anthropology, historical sociology, literary history, religious studies, and political philosophy to share papers and contribute toward a published volume on the subject of South Asian ethical thought and practice. Our approach addressed these ethics in their historical and contextual specificity: in relation to social processes such as class and caste formation, political developments such as nationalism and state building, and moral horizons such as legal codes and religious doctrines. We examined the moral and ethical traditions of South Asia in all their historical diversity, contemporary vitality, and uneven resonance with those of the West, with the conviction that they may cast a new light on the intractable problems of a troubled global present.