Explorations in Indian Philosophy E-Book

Rajendran Chettiarthodi

• Herausgeber: D.K. Printworld
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 212

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Any discourse on Indian philosophy has to be taken out of the box in which it was confined for ages using obsolete methods for evaluating thinking patterns. In the traditional way of analysing Indian philosophy there was an inimical approach to each other between the philosophers and the philologists, and between the Sanskrit tradition-oriented philosophers and modern English/vernacular-based philosophers. This friction is evident in the hesitation of the traditionalists in giving philosophers like Daya Krishna and K.C. Bhattacharyya their due share.
The twelve essays in this volume address many a question about the characteristics of Indian philosophical traditions and Indian-ness. Indian philosophy is essentially not Sanskrit based alone, there is a significant contribution to it from the South Asian languages and English, and the cultures of the subcontinent. It attempts to provide provocative insights in sharing the author’s penetrative acumen both in his traditional and modern approaches to South Asian intellectual systems. It therefore addresses the prejudice between the East and the West, and traditional and modern, and the concerns of South Asian diaspora in the Western countries.
As far as this anthology is concerned, the icing on the cake is the Foreword by Dr Mrinal Kaul, who critically analyses the major developments taken place in the realm of Indian philosophy in the last few decades, critically appreciating the contents.

Leseprobe

Explorations in

Indian Philosophy

Explorations in

Indian Philosophy

Rajendran Chettiarthodi

With a Foreword by

Mrinal Kaul.

Cataloging in Publication Data — DK

[Courtesy: D.K. Agencies (P) Ltd. <[email protected]>]

Rajendran, C. (Chettiarthodi), 1952- author.

Explorations in Indian philosophy/Rajendran

Chettiarthodi ; with a foreword by Mrinal Kaul.

pages cm

Includes passages in Sanskrit (roman).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9788124610350 (Hb)

1. Philosophy, Indic. 2. Hindu philosophy. I. Title.

LCC B131.R35 2020 | DDC 181.4 23

ISBN: 978-81-246-1129-6 (E-Book)

ISBN: 978-81-246-1035-0 (Hb)

© Rajendran Chettiarthodi

First published in India in 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior written permission of both the copyright owner, indicated above, and the publisher.

Printed and published by:

D.K. Printworld (P) Ltd.

Regd. Office : “Vedaśrī”, F-395, Sudarshan Park

ESI Hospital Metro Station, New Delhi - 110015

Phones : [phone], 2546 6019

e-mail : [email protected]

Web : www.dkprintworld.com

Foreword

Mrinal Kaul*

During my recent research visit to Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune I met a bright young Sanskrit student who had just submitted his doctoral thesis on Advaita Vedānta. After a couple of discussions he was really keen to show me his thesis. The thesis was a newly edited Sanskrit text along with translation and annotations and some philosophical discussion about the content of the text. It was a good work, however I was not too happy to see a two-page bibliography in an almost three-hundred page thesis. When I asked the student why he had not considered reading or referring to some crucial secondary sources, for instance, what Bina Gupta or Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad ventured into or what Stephen H. Phillips or Jonardon Ganeri were “doing” or what a certain Michael Comans or Sthaneshwar Timalsina thought about the problematics of the Advaita Vedānta, he showed complete disdain saying he was not interested in their works. In a somewhat shy, but audacious tone he said he was interested in the Sanskrit text alone. Incidentally, a certain other student who also sounded well trained in Sanskrit pedagogy and was wanting to pursue his doctoral research in Indian philosophy also called me a couple of weeks before I was in Pune. In a relatively longer conversation when I asked him – “have you read Daya Krishna?”, he replied that he was not interested in “that kind of stuff” with a somewhat derogatory tone. I immediately got transported to my own student days in a department of Sanskrit in a university in India where we were trained to feel proud being the custodians of a heritage that one was supposed to protect, preserve and preach, but never apply “contradictory thinking” to it. It was only after half a decade that, when I discovered the writings of Daya Krishna and other thinkers like him on my own, I began to ask myself why was I not made aware of his writings when I was specializing in “Indian philosophy” in a department of Sanskrit. I thought it was an injustice done to me by my teachers. I should also have been introduced to fresh critical writings on Indian philosophy irrespective of the fact whether my teachers or I agreed or disagreed with Daya Krishna’s viewpoints. But my shock intensified recently when I discovered that even my teachers who taught me Indian philosophy are still unaware of the writings of Daya Krishna and K.C. Bhattacharyya. I have been wondering why should that be the case! I have heard a large number of philosophers (who are not interested in philology) accusing philologists and I have also witnessed ample number of philologists (who may also be interested in philosophy) blaming philosophers (who may also be interested in philology). Each time I have been appalled with a certain bizarre audacity with which either of these camps might dismiss each other. Unfortunately, over a period of time this is what has created an alarming gulf between the two methodological approaches that are otherwise supposed to go hand-in-hand. This should allow me to elaborate upon what I have wanted to say. (For more on such questions see Raghuramaraju 2006: 13ff and also Coquereau-Saouma 2018 in Coquereau-Saouma et al. 2018).

In this Foreword I have purposely meant to be critical of the author of this book by attempting to displace the fossilized discourse on “Indian philosophy” and at the same time greatly appreciating his insights within that set discourse. On the one hand I strongly believe that the discourse on Indian philosophy is to be completely taken outside the box within which we have confined it for a longer period of time, breaking the age-old chains of obsolete methods used for evaluating thinking patterns, on the other hand, I am firm on the opinion that the Indian philosophical discourse studied only through Sanskrit sources also has to be displaced. This has to be done by asking uncomfortable and provocative questions that someone like Daya Krishna was not tired of asking. And this has also to be done, at the same time, by not neglecting the uncomfortable and provocative questions that traditional Sanskrit paṇḍits are asking, even if done only through oral discourses; their questions often do not catch our attention only because they are very often not recorded.

One might pose a certain valid question – why one more book on “Indian philosophy” when there are already so many others available to us. Indeed there has been no dearth of sound scholarship on “Indian philosophy” particularly in the past couple of decades. Certainly it is because of the assiduous efforts of many of my learned colleagues that the classical and contemporary discourses on philosophy in South Asia is gradually finding a global platform. In fact, the state of affairs of Indian philosophy in the higher education system of India itself seems to be rather dismal. Nonetheless, there is hope lingering at many levels. One hope is certainly a book like this that is written by an eminent scholar asking many questions and complicating many ideas closely rather than only either attempting to write another history or another introductory book on “Indian philosophy”. Having said that we have also witnessed some very important introductory books on “Indian philosophy” in the recent past those have made every effort to bring critical insights, neither just introducing them nor repeating the old narratives about proven facts (see Gupta 2012; King 1999a; Perrett 2016 to mention only a few). But this is not as easy as it may sound. In fact, it is much more challenging in the case of South Asia. Let me explain.

First of all the term “Indian” itself is very complex and complicated, and thus it needs to be problematized. Here I am referring to the term “Indian” breaking it down, as a Naiyāyika would do, to the abstract notion of “Indian-ness”. As A.K. Ramanujan (1999: 34ff) questioned – what is this “Indian-ness” and how do we make sense of it and thus engage with whatever it may mean? This is important for me as I write this Foreword for a book on “Indian philosophy” I do need to draw attention of the readers towards what one may mean by “Indian-ness” of philosophy. How does philosophy or any academic discipline become Indian or American or Japanese, etc.? Or how does a particular way of thinking become Indian or Iranian or Pakistani? Or, to take another example, how is Indian Buddhism different from Tibetan Buddhism, or different from American Buddhism, or from Thai Buddhism, or from the ancient “Afghani” Buddhism that was being practised in what is today’s Afghanistan. Or how is purely political Buddhism of B.R. Ambedkar in the twentieth century ce different from all these Buddhisms? Is “Indian-ness” merely the geographical territory or the nation state idea? We, in fact, know and understand why Allama Iqbal “is” not an “Indian philosopher”, at least not in the Indian discourse within India. Thought patterns embedded in thinking consciousness are no slave of the ideologies of a certain nation state, be it ancient or modern. Yes, of course, the geopolitical situation of a certain nation state may give rise to a specific political philosophy in a particular region. Thus the political and social philosophy as it develops over a period of time in Kashmir may have altogether different concerns than the concerns it may develop, for instance, in Kerala or Bengal. But the “Indian” in my passport is not the same as the “Indian” in “Indian philosophy” even though both are referring to the same territory.

I may be allowed to make absurd assertions to complicate it further: Is someone like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak an Indian or a Bengali or an American or a subaltern theorist/scholar/philosopher? An ethnic Bengali, holding Indian nationality, teaching in an American university theorizing subaltern – is her philosophy Indian just because she is an Indian national or is her theoretical approach Indian just because she is making use of a number of Bengali works or does it become simply American since she is teaching in an institution that is located in a country called America? Her theoretical approach can neither be called Indian, nor American. At a certain abstract theoretical level, I do agree that the binaries of East and West do cease to exist. In that case if someone might ask – does that mean someone like Śaṅkara was not an “Indian” philosopher? Of course, he was, but the point I am making is that one needs to understand what was “Indian” about him as a “philosopher”. It cannot be simply reduced down to the fact that he was an Indian philosopher just because he was born in ancient India or because he was writing in Sanskrit or he was reviving Vedānta even though all of these elements would form a part of his “Indian-ness” as well. Or one should even ask what was the idea of “India” in Śaṅkara’s time. Or was Śaṅkara even bothered about whatever the idea of “India” or “Indian-ness” would have been? And if we go by the nation state idea, then the ancient Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini was an Afghani or a Pakistani considering he belonged to Śalāturīya that historians have located somewhere between today’s Afghanistan (ancient Gandhāra) and Pakistan. So as Bina Gupta would maintain, we are not talking about a geographical territory or a nation state idea when we talk about “Indian” in the context of “Indian philosophy”:

It is indeed anachronistic to give a geographical adjective to a mode of thinking, unless one agrees with Nietzsche’s statement that Indian philosophy has something to do with the Indian food and climate, and German Idealism with the German love of beer. There must be some way of characterizing a philosophical tradition other than identifying such contingent features as the geographical and historical milieu in which it was born, some way of identifying it by its concepts and logic, the problems, the methods, and other issues that are internal to the tradition under consideration.

– Gupta 2012: 3

So what is the characteristic of “Indian” philosophical traditions that is so specific about it or is internal to it? Whatever it may be, this much is clear that “Indian-ness” cannot be defined as a certain homogeneous category – this is evident from the history of this tradition as it has developed in South Asia. This term needs to be defined in its heterogeneity. In fact, one should be sceptical about calling Śaṅkara a Keralite or Malayalee and designating Abhinavagupta as a Kaśmīrī unless one is referring to their ethnic origins taking recourse to the popular traditional beliefs. Kerala and Kashmir are no homogeneous categories either. We have to be aware of this and yet we do have to bring out the contribution of these varied cultural zones as the learned author of this book has done (see the Chapters 7 and 8 in this book). But before we ask any further questions or before we problematize the questions asked by A.K. Ramanujan or Bina Gupta further, we need to ask the fundamental question – in what sense has this term been used in history? What is Indian philosophy and who is an Indian philosopher? What is this label used for? Why does every book on Indian philosophy focus on whatever is available in Sanskrit sources alone? Is “Indian” and Sanskrit synonymous? What is “Hindu” about this philosophy? Can we use “Indian” and “Hindu” interchangeably? How do we solve the problem of “classical” and “contemporary” in case of “Indian philosophy”? Should we use the label “classical Indian philosophy” because often the term “Indian philosophy” does not refer to what one may label as “contemporary Indian thought”. But then what is contemporary Indian thought and what relationship does it share with the classical thought in the case of South Asia? Do the labels “traditional” and “modern” solve the problem for us? Are the “traditional” and “modern” categories representing the writings in Sanskrit and English respectively? Is this distinction merely temporal? If someone writes a philosophical text in Sanskrit today, for instance, will it be understood as a traditional or a modern text? Or will it be considered a text belonging to contemporary Indian thought written in a classical language using traditional style? Or will that text be referred to as “original” just because it is written in Sanskrit? Now, taking another instance, if I write a book on Indian philosophy in English, what will that be called? A modern text on traditional philosophy or a traditional text in a modern style? This should allow us to problematize a number of categories those are often taken for granted. All these categories are problematic and they should not be ignored.

Why is it that whatever is called “Indian philosophy” today usually only refers to philosophy in South Asia in its classical sources as if South Asia never moved ahead of the classical age or as if people stopped thinking after the classical age. For instance, as pointed out by Bhushan and Garfield (2017), why is it that we have never paid attention to post-classical philosophical discourses in South Asia? Why have we not examined medieval intellectual histories in non-Sanskritic sources and why have we not analysed the anglophone philosophers writings on “Indian philosophy” in colonial period in South Asia? But this is not the sole issue. In that case, what do we understand by contemporary or modern Indian philosophy? It is very often the case that when one uses the category “modern/contemporary Indian philosophy”, we invoke the names of Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Aurobindo Ghosh, B.R. Ambedkar and others. To add more to this, it is also not very uncommon today to find only Osho or J. Krishnamurty in the sections of “Indian philosophy” in a few popular bookshops in India. Are they modern Indian philosophers? In the contemporary South Asia, who are the practitioners of “Indian philosophy”, both traditional and modern?

It should certainly be asked why we have refrained from engaging with the critical insights of K.C. Bhattacharyya about the idea of Absolute when we make an attempt to understand Śaṅkara’s concept of Brahman? Is it because K.C. Bhattacharyya is not writing in Sanskrit? Or is it because since he is writing in English and thus he is not seen as a part of the tradition that Śaṅkara or Dharmarāja belonged to? Ironically enough, even if Swami Vivekananda did not write anything much in Sanskrit (except a few hymns in praise of his teacher), he is often made to represent “Indian philosophy” globally, and, in fact, there are only a handful of Sanskritists or contemporary Indian philosophers who are even aware of the solid contribution of K.C. Bhattacharyya to Indian philosophy. Indian philosophy certainly has been subjected to very vague generalizations on the basis of the popular culture. One of the best examples of this is how Śaṅkara’s rigour of making sense of empirical through epistemological investigation has been reduced down to a simplistic and dismal notion of māyā. Or how Swami Vivekananda made use of many Vedāntic textual sources to appropriate his quest for ascetic nationalism even though he was not at all unique in doing so. Indian intellectual history, written either in vernacular or cosmopolitan languages like Sanskrit or English, unfortunately, has largely been shaped by the popular discourse. Many such questions resonate in the concerns of Bhushan and Garfield (2017) and also in the anthology edited by Sharad Deshpande (2015).

Invoking another question posed by A.K. Ramanujan “Is there an Indian way of thinking?” would then mean asking if there is a linear way of thinking that can be called “Indian”. This sounds like an oxymoron in itself. In any given culture there can never be only one way of thinking, but there can be only one way of representing it because of certain historical trajectories. The ontology of the concept of culture is heterogeneity. In case of South Asia this heterogeneity has been strongly practised at the linguistic level as well. I think we have never taken the language question as seriously as we should have in the context of “Indian philosophy”. This problem is not related to Sanskrit, Persian and English alone, the problem is related to all the linguistic mediums of intellectual pursuit in South Asia. After all, philosophy in South Asia, for instance, to involve the instrumentality of languages, was not written in Sanskrit alone. It was, as Jonardon Ganeri (2017: 1, Introduction) would maintain, also “written in many languages including Pāli, Prākr̥t, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Persian, Kannada, Punjabi, Hindi, Tibetan, Arabic, and Assamese. From the time of the British colonial occupation, it has also been written in English.” Or to go a step ahead and ask the question why is it that every discourse or any textbook on “Indian philosophy” ends up introducing or examining the Sanskrit sources alone as if there were no “patterns of thinking” being discussed in other South Asian languages. Even within the domains of each one of these linguistic cultures, there has been heterogeneity of thought, subject matter and approach. It is not that the Sanskrit sources “are” hegemonic as they are often said to be, but we have supplied this hegemony to them very generously. And we have also done this rather by neglecting the non-Sanskrit sources for too long. In fact, the Sanskrit sources themselves are hardly explored properly and many a time terribly misinterpreted in the popular discourse as mentioned above. One of the important examples of this negligence is that except P.V. Kane no one has really seriously studied socio-political thought in pre-modern South Asia and brought it on the table for critical evaluation. Much of the unpopular Dharmaśāstric literature still lies in the dismal dungeons of manuscript libraries in India. And may I add Tāntric literature to this league. Indeed there is Sanskrit literature that is treated as subaltern, that at least needs to be gazed at in order to look at the Indian intellectual history afresh.

Another important issue is that we have hardly even explored the meaning of this “Indian-ness” in all its differentiated forms. It is again very recently that scholars have begun to explore the philosophy of aesthetics in South Asia or what it means for various cultures in different times, or where at least in pre-modern South Asia lay the distinction between what is literary and philosophical. In other words what is qualified as literature or what is constituted of philosophy? Or to ask if there was at all a stark distinction between the two categories! How were the logical–epistemological structural paradigms, as pointed out in several chapters by the author in this book, not only influencing the discourse on poetry and poetics, but also shaping them up very subtly (see the Chapters 4, 9 and 12 in the present book). To use the structural terminology – how Buddhist concepts helped shaping Hindu ideas and how Hindu ideas influenced the Buddhist concepts, or how both added up to form new structures or concepts altogether (see the Chapters 10 and 11 in the present book). Citing Ganeri (2017: 2, Introduction) it is also important to ask if, in pre-modern South Asia there was no “important philosophical thinking among mathematicians and medics, in the poets and the pilgrims, while studies of philosophy in sūfī India, secular India and stately India, of India’s impact on global philosophical movements, and their effects on India all fall within the remit, not to mention the way Indian philosophical ideas migrate and transform in diaspora, in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, China, Japan, Central Asia and into the Persian and Arabic worlds and on to the West.” This cannot be ignored. In fact, it is only recently that scholars have started to explore the non-Sanskrit philosophical traditions of South Asia. One only needs to take an example from Perso-Arabic sources or the interaction thereof with Sanskrit. As Ganeri (2017: 8, Introduction) further says:

Three important Islamic trends in India emerge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: first, the Perso-Indica project of Dārā Shikuh and others involving a wide-ranging translation of philosophy from Sanskrit into Persian; second, the sūfī philosophy of Muḥibballāh Ilāhābādī, a prolific author in Persian and Arabic and defender of the Andalusian Ibn ‘Arabī; and third, the debate between Avicennans – notably including the influential philosopher Maḥmūd Jawnpūrī – and Illuminationists. Meanwhile, Muḥibballāh al-Bihārī’s Sullamal-‘ulūm is a milestone seventeenth-century Indian textbook in Arabo-Islamic logic. We still have only the most rudimentary understanding of the nature of intersections between nodes of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic philosophical scholarship during this profoundly innovative era of early modernity in India. Nor at present do we have much insight into the dynamics of philosophical activity in Indian vernacular languages in the period.

The above questions need to be asked – they need to be asked because they are unasked questions and we need to develop “new formulations of old insights”. One should stop making claims and begin asking questions. Not that older philosophers and scholars did not, but looking into the background of these questions and question the question itself? (see Daya Krishna, pp. 29ff in Bhushan and Garfield 2011) “So, one not only has to question the traditions but question the old ways of questioning them.” Or to quote Arindam Chakrabarti:

To anticipate our conclusion, it would transpire that the real novelty of philosophical thinking lies in seeing new – in the epistemic sense of hitherto unperceived – connections between apparently unconnected conceptual questions or muddles, rather than in creating new concepts.

– Chakrabarti (p. 5) in Bhushan and Garfield 2011

But apart from this what also needs to be asked is – is there only one way of approaching Indian philosophy? Can any thinking pattern function in cultural isolation, no matter how rigid it has been over the course of its development in history. Is it not going to influence the social or political or literary or linguistic practices outside its own domain one way or the other or will it not itself get influenced by these practices other than its own irrespective of the fact whether it does or does not ever come in a very close proximity with parallel thinking practices elsewhere in the world owing to various historical trajectories? Who can prevent this? Or why should one prevent this at all? Should this change be considered as a creative development in that thinking tradition or should it be considered interfering with the pure nature of it? Who should get to decide it? And the most compelling question – are we as the meaning makers not a part of this project, i.e. is the understanding of reader/listener/receiver of such traditions also not a part of this thinking tradition?

In the South Asian context it is not at all difficult to observe a fathomless void between its past and its present (see Raghuramaraju 2011). Was this fathomless isolation manufactured by the presence of colonialism? Tradition and modernity, complex terms as they are in the South Asia context, do possess a significant contrast. This contrast needs to be carefully understood. One layer of this contrast is the dichotomy of spiritual and material, and these terms are artfully synchronized with Eastern and Western philosophies respectively. As if, as Daya Krishna would say, no one thought about “matter” in the East or there was no spirituality in the West. On the one hand I have been saying that we should learn how to create a narrative that is beyond the dichotomies of the East and the West, yet at the same time this is also true that a book on Western philosophy does not necessarily need to be approached through post-colonial method (see Richard King 1999b). This, on the other hand, would be absolutely important in the case of “Indian philosophy”. And this has to be done for a number of reasons. These pre-modern traditions are to be strictly understood on their own terms, but at the same time meaningful and serious comparative interaction cannot be ruled out. In the world we live in today, we cannot afford to be frogs in the well. We have to be able to bring in the large picture of South Asian intellectual cultures on a wide canvas where we can portray its universal picture in comparison to various other grand intellectual cultures of the world. This cannot be compromised for any other petty concerns those of, either insiders or outsiders, the discipline may hold.