History of Indian Philosophy

Analysis of Contemporary understanding of the Classical through Colonial

Abstract

Classical Indian Philosophy is characterised with astonishing conceptions such as – being ‘captured by the West’ (Kalidas Bhattacharya), ‘gone into backwaters’ (S. Radhakrishnan), ‘blanketed by the West’ (Michael Dummet), ‘structurally altered’ (Raghuramaraju) and damaged, stunted and defaced (Aurobindo) and ‘frozen and mummified’ (Dayakrishna) – in the contemporary period. This papers attempts to explicate the presuppositions and background of these conceptions. These ‘contemporary conceptions of the classical’ presuppose that there is a body of knowledge called Indian philosophy that is available as a monolithic structure to be understood, interpreted and commented in its entirety. This monolith is characterised by certain essentials characteristics such as spirituality, pessimism, mystical and intuitive, Soteriological and otherworldly, static and unprogressive etc. which depicted an epistemic distinction between India and the West. Roots of the analysis of the ‘contemporary conceptions of the classical’ would take us not to the Classical period which is far away, but to the recent past i.e., colonial period. It is the recent past that shapes the present conceptions of the remote past.

This paper attempts to investigate the recent past to explicate the reasons for the ‘contemporary conceptions of the classical’. It analyses various shifts that took place in the recent past in the study of Classical Indian Philosophy.