Srinagar, Aug. 13 -- Among other things, Western modernity, which may be roughly dated to the West's Reformation and Renaissance, constituted the primacy of reason, and thereby the human, over anything else.

The sovereignty of the human meant that reason was fetishized. It was the ultimate yardstick against which history, human progress and so on were measured and benchmarked.

Interestingly, modernity's onward march, buttressed by absolute certainty in it, was complemented by the First Industrial Revolution. This was also the high tide of capitalism. Both modernity and capitalism came to be conjoined twins.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, modernity became the handmaiden of imperialism and colonialism.

This found an echo at the beginni...