The Selves in the World

Research Context: Contemporary Indian philosophy constitutes a uniquely hybrid genre, as it is written in English with Sanskrit concepts, merging European and Indian traditions. Unlike the recent development of postcolonial, intercultural and comparative philosophies as disciplines in their own right, post-Independence Anglophone Indian philosophy remains rather absent from the curricula and is generally not acknowledged as a research area inside and outside of India. It remains largely unexplored. Hypotheses and Objectives: The first aim of this project is to map the field of contemporary Indian philosophy. To do so, I hypothesize that the increasing use of the concepts humanism and anthropocentrism in the second half of the twentieth century reveals an unnoticed philosophical shift around which a coherent picture of the field can be drawn. Whereas modern Neo-Vedantin reduction of Indian philosophy to a transcendental non-dualist conception of the Self (atman) still prevails in the understanding of Indian philosophy today, contemporary Indian philosophers have been challenging this reduction by reintegrating plural selves in the world. Approach: This shift is also evident in the post-colonial evolution of Indian philosophy, which I analyze in three approaches. First, I scrutinize how the postcolonial hybridity of Indian philosophers having to integrate incompatible systems inherited from different Indian and Western traditions fostered an epistemological pluralism. Second, by focusing on dharma and intersubjectivity I question the ruptures and continuity of Indian classical traditions in contemporary times, with the need to critically reinterpret classical Sanskrit concepts to ground todays political and moral philosophy. Third, by highlighting an understudied dialogue between Neo-Vedantin and contemporary philosophers, I study how the latters substitution of liberation from the world (moka) for freedom with others in the world challenges classicist and anticolonial spiritualist approaches in Indian philosophy. Innovation: The crucial neglect of contemporary Indian philosophy in global academia calls attention to the remaining absences within intercultural and postcolonial philosophies. It also points at the necessity for the latter to go further than critically investigating Eurocentrism in the Western canon. Reintegrating the voices of contemporary Indian philosophers into an ongoing history of world philosophy highlights an underrepresented continuity between the classical, the modern and the contemporary, and reclaims the conception of Indian philosophy as dynamic, creative and dialogical, just like any other tradition. Primary researchers involved: Nalini Bhushan and Jay Garfield (Smith College), Bhagat Oinam (Jawaharlal Nehru University), A. Raghuramaraju (IIT Tirupati), Georg Stenger (University of Vienna).

Contemporary Indian philosophy constitutes a uniquely hybrid genre, as it is written in English (and vernacular languages) with Sanskrit concepts, merging European and Indian traditions. Unlike postcolonial, intercultural and comparative philosophies, post-independence Anglophone Indian philosophy remains largely absent from curricula and unacknowledged as a research area in India and abroad. Its materials are often out of print and scattered. The first aim was to map the field of contemporary Indian philosophy. I spent twenty months in Delhi, worked in libraries in Varanasi, Kolkata, Mysore and Chennai, and observed a shift of emphasis marked by the increasing use of 'humanism' and 'anthropocentrism' after independence, which I call a worldly turn (in which 'human' is not opposed to nature but to 'otherworldly'). Whereas the modern Neo-Vedntin reduction of Indian philosophy to a transcendental conception of the Self (tman) still prevails in the understanding of Indian philosophy today, the philosophers of this turn challenge this reduction by reintegrating plural selves in the world: a return towards the historical, relational and embodied person, without abandoning the classical vocabulary in which they also think. I analyse this shift through three dimensions. First, the postcolonial hybridity of holding together incompatible systems inherited from Indian and Western traditions fostered an epistemic pluralism that makes thought historical: positions rest on presuppositions unquestionable from within the systems they ground. Kalidas Bhattacharyya's logic of alternation meets Daya Krishna's objection that any scope containing the alternatives is itself singular, and Ramchandra Gandhi's counter-objection that erasing singularity erases plurality. Second, intersubjectivity makes the person relational: against both the isolated Cartesian ego and the Advaitic tman that has no other, philosophers such as N. V. Banerjee took the ultimate datum to be not the 'I' but the 'we', challenging the separation of 'I' and 'you' and the epistemology behind it. Third, an understudied dialogue with their Neo-Vedntin predecessors makes liberation embodied: freedom is no longer thought as independence (svarj) or liberation (moka) from others but as freedom with others in the world, which challenges classicist and anticolonial spiritualist approaches. Against the renunciant who seeks liberation alone stands the classical jvanmukti, which Banerjee rewrites as a person's discovery of himself as bound up with others. The absence of this philosophy also marks a limit of intercultural and postcolonial philosophy, which must do more than criticise Eurocentrism. Reintegrating these voices into a continuing history of world philosophy highlights an underrepresented continuity between the classical, the modern and the contemporary, and reclaims Indian philosophy as dynamic, creative and dialogical, just like any other tradition. Published so far: an open-access study of R. Sundara Rajan and chapters on plurality, understanding others and the limits of reason. The monograph The Selves in the World is in preparation.