Contemporary Indian philosophy
ANURADHA VEERAVALLI
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Surveys Indian philosophy both within the discipline and outside it.
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DEBATES IN INDIAN PHILOSOPHY — Classical, Colonial and Contemporary: A. Raghuramaraju; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001.
Rs. 475.
This book discusses the state of contemporary Indian philosophy, lamenting the fact that its rich classical heritage of debate and rigorous argumentation has faded away for reasons both internal to it, and external factors such as colonialism. He takes on the colossal task of surveying the contemporary scene both within the discipline of philosophy and outside it and the conclusion he comes to is grim: "This means, that we cannot even articulate our philosophic concerns, except via the classical Indian and contemporary Western philosophy. There cannot be a more nihilistic view about the philosophical possibility of us as a people facing challenges that call for intensive thought."
This is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Raghuramaraju makes no attempt to seriously consider the actual content or method of these modes of philosophising before dismissing them as not laying the basis for "intensive thought". Even the Jaipur and Rege experiments that were carefully structured and controlled experiments, he dismisses with no intellectual scrutiny, simply using the irrelevant fact that they afforded only a couple of more meetings of scholars and pandits, as a sign that nothing came out of them. The `Svaraj in Ideas' debate (in the special Volume of the IPQ, Vol. XI, no.4, 1984) and the `Tradition, Modernity and Svaraj' (Vol.1, 1990) that addressed the very concerns that Raju addresses, of course, don't even figure perhaps because no second step came out of them. Surely one needs to arrive at an intellectually rigorous diagnosis as to why these attempts failed, if they indeed did, before one ventures to take yet another first step.
Space for debate
There is some truth in his complaint that there is a "psychological craving" in contemporary Indian thought to explain or wish away difference and highlight commonalities. It is, however, not a psychological but an epistemological consensus, of the `secular scientific community' simply to accept the evolutionary model of the progress of knowledge which is that debates must be settled, not nurtured, to be able to make progress.
Nevertheless, Raghuramaraju thinks a possible space for debate will be created through an articulation of differences and he sets up three test cases, which form the main body of the book. The real question, however, is how fundamental, and therefore worthy of debate are these differences. The three modern Indian oppositions he looks at are: Gandhiji and Vivekananda on state and civil society; Savarkar and Gandhiji on politicising religion and spiritualising politics; and Aurobindo and Krishnachandra Bhattacharya (KCB) on science and spiritualism.
He sees Vivekananda's advocacy of materialism to eradicate poverty in India as representing the modern Indian state and Gandhiji as representing pre-modern villages and communities in his otherwise "radical" critique of modern civilisation. The author erases the sheer flashes of clarity he achieves in parts of the book by crowding it with classificatory terms, used loosely with no attempt to develop a consistent vocabulary for analysis. The inclusion of "pre-modern" to characterise Gandhiji's position, to say that Gandhiji and Vivekananda are thinkers who are "not systematic" because they were responding to different contexts and were "field-level thinkers", are only few of the many such loaded terms that go unexplained and un-discussed.
Science, politics, religion
Thus despite his brilliant analysis equating Savarkar's Hindutva programme with the presuppositions of the European Enlightenment and the modern secular state that according to Raghuramaraju, reject pluralism in favour of homogeneity, he easily lapses into descriptions of apparent and superficial differences that mislead and fail to grasp real issues. He therefore ultimately locates the difference between Gandhiji and Savarkar as lying between politicising religion and spiritualising politics rather than in the fundamental conflict between the presuppositions of civil society and the state.
Then he constructs a superficial Gandhiji-Vivekananda opposition as relating to civil society and the state while they are, in fact, divided on the issue of the relation between science and spiritualism (or religion). Vivekananda, Savarkar and Aurobindo share their simultaneous appreciation of Western materialism on the one hand and Hindu tradition on the other. Vivekananda wants materialism and science for society, Savarkar wants it for the power of religion (Hindutva) and the religion of power (the modern state), and Aurobindo (and Tagore) for the love of `scientific spirituality', a mechanical "amalgamation" of matter and spirit in a synthesised evolutionary progress from matter to spirit, without experiment in society.
Subject-object dualism
Therefore again, there seems to be no real debate between KCB and Aurobindo except that the former is self- conscious and rigorous about the method of philosophy and science while the latter is loose and well meaning. The key lies in KCB's assertion that science and philosophy, "Both deal with the object understood as what is believed to be known in the objective attitude as distinct from the subjective, enjoying or spiritual attitude." (Emphasis mine.) Raghuramaraju completely misreads KCB's analysis as an approach where "science denies philosophy." He misses the point about their common approach that lies in assuming the distinctness of the subject and object of knowledge or of matter and spirit that is the basis of Western philosophy's brand of analytic rigour. It is Gandhiji alone who recognised that this dualism of the subject and object of knowledge was the crux of the problem, the real basis of modern civilisation, its systematic philosophies, vivisectionist science and imperialist politics.
In the midst of the cacophony about independence, poverty, nationalism, colonialism, materialism, spiritualism, East, West, Left and Right, tradition and modernity, he therefore conducted his systematic experiments in the non-dualism of subject and object in science, religion and politics thus forging a new tradition and modernity. Note his careful choice of the subtitle for his autobiography, `The Story of My Experiments with Truth' (as against `Reform of the Indian Reality'), recording his experiments from non-vivisectionist healing and vegetarianism to satyagraha and sexuality; to reduce it to merely a movement for `spiritualising politics' is a real pity. The real puzzle/debate then is why Raghuramaraju, along with Sudhir Kakar, Partha Chatterjee and other contemporary Indian thinkers does not find Gandhiji systematic, scientific or technical enough!
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