The Asiatic Society of Bengal was founded in 1785 by British civil servants working for the East India Company. They came with their enlightenment attitudes that this is culture too and did a lot to save Sanskrit texts. This kind of universal education enabled them to see India as another high culture, which they had to not only respect but immortalise.
What really divides the left and the right? To answer this question, Intelligence Squared brought together two giants of British intellectual culture for an ideological reckoning: Terry Eagleton, literary critic and long-time hero of the radical left, and Roger Scruton, right-wing philosopher who has written on everything from economic theory to literature, and architecture to wine. What we heard was two two irreducibly different views of the world, where each tries hard to understand the other’s view.
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