make a comparative study of Renaissance movement and the Reformation movement in India
Answers
The renaissance was not an event, it was a process and its attributes underwent changes whenever major shifts took place in society and the economy. As similar relations cannot be reproduced for a second time, it is also not possible that the values of the first renaissance could be recaptured in the changed conditions generated by capitalism and neoliberalism. Not because those values have lost their relevance, but the social context has changed and, accordingly, their content has to be refurbished. Instead of attempting to recapture the values of the first renaissance, which occurred in a colonial-feudal era, the Left has to reinvent the renaissance from the viewpoint of the oppressed, the exploited and the marginalised. Socialist humanism not only aims at an egalitarian socio-political order, it also envisions cultural and intellectual freedom. The violence and intolerance rampant in society today is not so much the failure of the first phase of the renaissance as the inability to transform its values in accordance with the demands of the present. The material world is changing, but the cultural-ideational climate remains stagnant, if not deteriorating. The way to stem the increasingly declining values in society is to rethink the relationship between culture and politics in a manner in which culture is spurred by politics and politics is refined by culture.