Excerpt from CSDS website:
The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, also called the CSDS or informally, just the Centre, is a premier institute of India in the social sciences and humanities. The Centre provides a unique institutional space which seeks to nurture intellectual interests outside the entrenched boundaries of academic disciplines. This simultaneously gives the Centre a sense of intimacy with and distance from universities. Therefore, the Centre has deliberately chosen not to duplicate the structure of university department. This also allows the Centre to support and nurture interdisciplinary modes of enquiry. Over the years, the Centre has also managed to generate and utilize a productive tension between rigorous scholarly work and social movements, between academic commitment and political practices. It has been frequently engaged with contentious contemporary issues which have shaped its academic programme and contributed to struggles for dignity, livelihood and creative self expression. At the same time the CSDS zealously and meticulously guards its own space of reflective distance, theoretical work and research which has no obvious visibility in the public domain.
Since its inception in 1963 the Centre has been a space for new intellectual ideas generated not only by interaction among the faculty but much wider exchange with activists and scholars from India and abroad.
Since its inception, the Centre has been known for its skepticism towards any one conception of modernity and received models of development and progress and has sought ways to make creative use of local traditions in the making of multiple and alternative modernities ... The CSDS has always promoted conversations between and within cultures. It has tried to delink cultural resources from violent expressions of political identities and promoted the idea that dissent is crucial for creative conversation between cultures and societies.
The Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, also called the CSDS or informally, just the Centre, is a premier institute of India in the social sciences and humanities. The Centre provides a unique institutional space which seeks to nurture intellectual interests outside the entrenched boundaries of academic disciplines. This simultaneously gives the Centre a sense of intimacy with and distance from universities. Therefore, the Centre has deliberately chosen not to duplicate the structure of university department. This also allows the Centre to support and nurture interdisciplinary modes of enquiry. Over the years, the Centre has also managed to generate and utilize a productive tension between rigorous scholarly work and social movements, between academic commitment and political practices. It has been frequently engaged with contentious contemporary issues which have shaped its academic programme and contributed to struggles for dignity, livelihood and creative self expression. At the same time the CSDS zealously and meticulously guards its own space of reflective distance, theoretical work and research which has no obvious visibility in the public domain.
Since its inception in 1963 the Centre has been a space for new intellectual ideas generated not only by interaction among the faculty but much wider exchange with activists and scholars from India and abroad.
Since its inception, the Centre has been known for its skepticism towards any one conception of modernity and received models of development and progress and has sought ways to make creative use of local traditions in the making of multiple and alternative modernities ... The CSDS has always promoted conversations between and within cultures. It has tried to delink cultural resources from violent expressions of political identities and promoted the idea that dissent is crucial for creative conversation between cultures and societies.