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On Alternative Modernities Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar o think in terms of “alternative modernities” is to admit that modernity is T Tinescapable and to desist from speculations about the end of modernity. Born in and of the West some centuries ago under relatively specific sociohistorical conditions, modernity is now everywhere. It has arrived not suddenly but slowly, bit by bit, over the longue durée—awakened by contact; transported through commerce; administered by empires, bearing colonial inscriptions; propelled by nationalism; and now increasingly steered by global media, migration, and capi- tal. And it continues to “arrive and emerge,” as always in opportunistic fragments accompanied by utopic rhetorics, but no longer from the West alone, although the West remains the major clearinghouse of global modernity. To think in terms of alternative modernities is to recognize the need to revise the distinction between societal modernization and cultural modernity. That dis- tinction is implicated in the irresistible but somewhat misleading narrative about the two types of modernities, the good and the bad, a judgment that is reversible depending on one’s stance and sensibility. Some of the essays in this volume were initially presented at two conferences on Alternative Modernities that I organized at Northwestern University (April 1996) and the India International Cen- ter, New Delhi (December 1997); my thanks to the School of Speech at Northwestern University, the India International Center, and the Center for Transcultural Studies for funding those two conferences. My thanks to Rajeev Bhargava, who was coorganizer for the New Delhi conference, and Pratiba Public Culture 11(1): 1–18 Copyright © 1999 by Duke University Press 1