The research centre grew out of the research programme Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap (Comparative Science of Cultures), initiated by Prof. Dr. S. N. Balagangadhara at Ghent University, Belgium.
This research programme was born in the 1980s, from a dissatisfaction with the then existing descriptions of, and theorizing about, Indian culture and other Asian cultures. To find out what was problematic about this body of descriptions and accounts, it was necessary to turn to the larger frameworks that produced them: the theories and sets of concepts that are dominant in the existing social sciences and humanities. And this, in turn, led to the next step: examining the culture that had brought forth the theoretical frameworks that continue to dominate the social sciences and humanities, namely, Western culture.
Currently dominant descriptions of Indian culture and society in the social sciences and humanities provide us with a unique entry point to study the culture that produced them. They reflect the way in which people whose thinking and acting is shaped by Western culture have made sense of another culture and society. This would not be a problem, if these descriptions were taken for what they are – accounts or reports of the experiences that people from one culture have had of another culture and society. But that is not the case. They are presented and reproduced as though they are veridical descriptions offering knowledge of Indian culture and society.
More generally, the current social sciences and humanities present themselves as knowledge of human beings and their societies and cultures. Still, many of the currently dominant theoretical frameworks tend to mistake a Western cultural experience for a universal human experience and, consequently, reduce other cultures to variants of the West. One of the challenges, then, is to understand Western culture by looking at its accounts of Asian cultures and traditions. One of the subsequent challenges is to understand Asian cultures and traditions in a new way. How have they understood human beings, societies, and cultures? Can their theorizing generate new insights leading to alternative theories in the social sciences and to a renewal of our thinking about human beings and societies?