Browsing by Subject "urban"

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Open Access
Empathy: A Rule of Social Relations
(University of North Bengal, 2022-03) Roy, Sinjini
In the social science circle, it is widely claimed that modernity and the liberal ideology have brought a high degree of individualism, social differentiation, fragmentation and atomization in societies across the globe. The neo-liberal social order makes life highly competitive and insecure and creates new social hierarchies while promoting fetishized consumption, a false sense of consumption-based happiness while adding wind to the process of atomization. The inevitable casualty of this is the erosion of the collective social spirit based on fellow-feeling and attrition of compassion or empathy for the fellow members. Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Claude Levi-Strauss and many other social scientists have lamented this turn of events and given a call for rediscovering “pity” or “empathy” in social life and social management. Many social scientists are now echoing this need of the hour while drawing support for their discourses from the Buddhist philosophy and streams of modern Western philosophy. Broadly, the discussions on empathy or compassion as a social rule encompasses the question of morality and humanism in social praxis. This paper is an attempt to understand how empathy is conceived by some philosophers and social scientists and how it works in different shades in the life of the modern middleclass people in the urban Indian context.
Open Access
Understanding the ‘mofussil’ and the ‘ditch’ in early colonial India
(University of North Bengal, 2018-03) Roy, Varun Kumar
At the beginning of the 19th century, the term Mofussil meant 'outside the limits of Calcutta' since the limit was for a while the Maratha Ditch dug around Fort William in the 1740s. Europeans (missionaries, merchants and planters) who lived in Calcutta they were called ditchers and those who lived outside the Maratha Ditch were known as Mofussilites. However with the passage of time the meaning of the term got changed and it could be studied in juxtaposition to rural-urban dichotomy. In this research article, the origin of the term Mofussil is investigated and how the original connotation has changed with the passage of time in the early 19th century. Mofussil always stood in contrast to bigger cities like Calcutta but it was always linked to the cities through the Zilla Sadar towns.