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Modern India

At the Mughal court, in 1655, the prince Dārā Shikōh, a Sufi, finished The Mingling of the Two Oceans (Majmaʿ al-Baḥrayn). Having learned “the true religion of the Sufis”, he “thirsted to know the tenets of the religion of the Indian monotheists”, and after “repeated intercourse and (continuous) discussion” with their teachers “he did not find any difference, except verbal, in the way in which they sought and comprehended Truth” (tr. Mahfuz-ul-Haq). Two years later he had fifty Upaniṣads put into Persian.

From around 1800 Indian thinkers took up the European word “philosophy” and asked what in their own tradition answered to it. In Hindi and Bengali the usual equivalent became darśana, “view”, or darśanaśāstra; Marathi preferred tattvajñāna, “the knowledge of truth”.

The first answers came from religious reformers. In 1817 the Vedāntacandrikā attacked Rammohun Roy’s imageless monotheism as a “new Vedānta” (abhinava vedānta). Keshab Chandra Sen addressed Europe: “the Lord has blessed thee with scholarship and science and philosophy … Add to these the faith and intuition and spirituality of Asia.” For Vivekananda, philosophy was the core of religion: “In every religion there are three parts: philosophy, mythology, and ritual. Philosophy of course is the essence of every religion”, and “religion without philosophy runs into superstition; philosophy without religion becomes dry atheism”. On spiritual questions, he held, “the lowest peasant in India is better informed on these subjects than many a so-called philosopher in other lands”.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan wrote in Indian Philosophy (1923): “Philosophy in India is essentially spiritual … The spiritual motive dominates life in India. Indian philosophy has its interest in the haunts of men.”

K. C. Bhattacharyya asked what philosophy itself is. In “Svaraj in Ideas”, an address to his students given around 1928–31 and published in 1954, he names “a subtler domination exercised in the sphere of ideas by one culture on another”: “There is cultural subjection only when one’s traditional cast of ideas and sentiments is superseded without comparison or competition by a new cast representing an alien culture which possesses one like a ghost. This subjection is slavery of the spirit.” Its remedy is philosophy, for “it is through philosophy that we can methodically attempt to discover” the soul of India, and the method is confrontation: “If the Modern Indian Mind is to philosophise at all to any purpose, it has to confront Eastern thought and Western thought with one another and attempt a synthesis or a reasoned rejection of either.” He also sets a limit to the comparison: “Thought or reason may be universal, but ideas are carved out of it differently by different cultures … No idea of one cultural language can exactly be translated in another cultural language.”

In “The Concept of Philosophy” (1936) Bhattacharyya begins: “An explication of the concept of philosophy appears to me more important than the discussion of any specific problem of philosophy”, since “the possibility of philosophy as a body of knowledge distinct from science is nowadays called in question”. His answer: “Science alone speaks in genuine judgments”, while philosophy “deals with contents that are not literally thinkable and are not actually known, but are believed as demanding to be known without being thought”, and “there is no question of philosophy progressing towards a single unanimously acceptable solution. All philosophy is systematic symbolism and symbolism necessarily admits of alternatives.” His son Kalidas Bhattacharyya opened Alternative Standpoints in Philosophy (1953): “In modern times the first business of Philosophy should be to justify its own existence.”

The spiritual picture was contested from within. The reduction of Indian philosophy to a “spiritual” or mokṣa-centred endeavour “simply enraged” Daya Krishna, as Daniel Raveh reports, pointing to his “Three Myths about Indian Philosophy” (Diogenes 14, no. 55, 1966), and B. K. Matilal wrote in Perception (1986): “Too often the term ‘Indian philosophy’ is identified with a subject that is presented as mystical and non-argumentative … A corrective to this view is long overdue.” In Indian Philosophy: A Counter Perspective (1991) Daya Krishna traced the picture to “the interests of Western Indological studies, combined with the search for a spiritual self-identity in the face of overwhelming Western superiority in all fields of knowledge”, and set himself to “reestablish a living continuity with India’s philosophical past”.

His way of doing it was dialogue. From 11 to 16 July 1983, in Pune, pandits trained in the classical schools and philosophers trained in the Western tradition met to discuss Russell’s theory of the proposition, put into Sanskrit for the occasion. Daya Krishna’s preface to the record, Saṃvāda (1991), notes that “few, even in India, are aware that the tradition of active philosophizing within the classical frameworks … is not dead”, and that “Sanskrit is still the living lingua franca of traditional scholarship in India”. Later meetings on Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā and Kashmir Śaivism closed by asking “what are the deficiencies in the system as handed down to us and how should we try to develop it further”; the very asking, he writes, set the traditional scholars’ minds in a different direction, “turned from the past to the future”. His co-editor M. P. Rege gave the aim: the Indian schools “have developed over centuries through continuous and incisive dialogue with one another. Surely the time has come for them to extend the scope of the dialogue by admitting western philosophical schools to it.”