Vernacular Discourse as Politics of Liberation : An Interview with Professor G.P. Deshpande

Can you elaborate more on how you distinguish between the vernacular modernists and the English-oriented modernists? English-oriented modernists were well-intentioned people, good old liberals, and tried to reform religion, get rid of sati practice and so on. They were essentially reformists, not revolutionaries. However, our writings in English treat those upper-caste and English knowing liberals as revolutionaries, and  reduce others to reformists! I’m not saying that whatever the liberals did was rubbish. Those were times when the societal forces were going upside down, so you required all these people. In fact, some of them were themselves conscious of it. For example, Tilak’s contemporary Agarkar, a very famous brahmin, took a very strong position against the brahmanical practices. Yet his appeal was limited to brahmins. He himself accepted it.