I began this work by distinguishing between two kinds of philosophy: one that is related to reality, and the other that is not. I chose to follow the path of the former and identified the problems related to the existing practices of Indian philosophers when dealing with Western philosophy. I have argued that while recognising the need to borrow from the outside, or even the compulsion to borrow from the outside due to the politics of colonialism, they did not reflect either on the predicament or on the options that were available to them. In contrast, I have reflected on both using the idea of borrowing and highlighting such questions as what, from whom, and how much to borrow. Further, I have looked at how to use the concepts borrowed and perhaps equally significantly, how to repay the lender. With this reflection in the background, I have gone on to highlight the problems in the practice of using Western philosophy in an unreflective way. This method thus reduces the issues that arise from the mismatch between the size and quantum of what is borrowed and the places where it is received and used.
I have suggested a specific method of borrowing that allows us to ‘bend’ Western philosophy without breaking it. Alternatively, I have proposed deflating issues/ideas in the West and inflating them after transporting them to India, to use a metaphor. I have both identified and justified choosing Rousseau, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Bergson from the West for this discussion; I have excluded others such as Plato. In this context, I have kept other possibilities open, including bending Indian philosophy for the West.
Chapter 1 presents a new way of reading Rousseau that is different from the existing readings. I have shown how the existing scholarship on Rousseau pays disproportionate attention to and was indeed carried away by the radical political ideas inherent in his work. These works, I allege, failed to recognise both crucial and even foundational ideas that form the frame of his political philosophy. In this context, I have shown the fundamental importance of the term ‘inquire’, which appears in the very first sentence of The Social Contract. This term is foundational for understanding the new path introduced by Rousseau. However, it was the dominant politics that attracted readers towards this text, and the basic idea eluded their attention. I have claimed that not recognising the idea of inquiry compromised our understanding of Rousseau’s radical political project. In addition to highlighting fundamental ideas in Rousseau that escaped the attention of Western scholarship, in this chapter I have shown for the first time how his form of individualism that equates the individual with the adult human person consequently and necessarily led to the foundation of a new modern social institution called the old age home. I have distinguished between choosing something and embracing the unintended consequences, and pointed out how the modern West faces the latter. I suggest that Indians could learn from this experience and avoid unintended consequences by undertaking the task of reflection, thereby converting the unintended into deliberated choice.
Having made this small but seminal connection between Rousseau from the West and India, I move on in Chapter 2 to distinguishing between the spoken and the written word. Using textual analysis from Derrida, this chapter distinguishes Socrates’s legacy of the word spoken in dialogue with other human beings from Plato’s written one. I connect Socrates, who spoke and never wrote, and others in the dialogue to the non-Western, such as India. India, alleges Rousseau, is largely known for speaking, and not writing like the West. Derrida approvingly cites this allegation. This chapter, thus, introduces the fundamental distinction between two forms of the word, that which is orally communicated and that which is set down in writing. Following Rousseau, who identified the West starting from Plato with the written word and the East with the spoken word, it makes a further move to group the speaking Socrates from the West together with the speaking East or India. This step thus reduces the philosophical terrain of the West and increases that of the East or India. While the previous chapter makes a small though significant case for India in the context of discussing Rousseau, the second chapter makes an additional move and enlarges the philosophical domain of India.
Chapter 3 embarks on a journey seeking to bend Deleuze and Guattari, to transport them eastwards, and then to re-inflate them to be used in India. This philosophical move to bend philosophers from the West, without breaking or distorting them, centers on the relationship between minor and major literatures in Deleuze and Guattari’s work and the Indian freedom movement. Closely scrutinising the three characteristics of the relationship between minor and major literatures, I have reconfigured how minor and major are both minor, when seen within the pervasive and dominant domain of modernity that disinherited the pre-modern. I have demonstrated that literature and art that were created in the West subsequent to the advent of modernity sought to reclaim in an imaginary realm that which had been rejected by modernity, the reality that is the pre-modern. In the context of refiguring the relation between art and literature as minor and the modernity as major, I have asked, given the association of the Renaissance with modernity, why the art of that period did not include in its contents images and symbols of modernity. That is to say, Renaissance paintings and literature are replete with themes from the pre-modern, be it from the Christian religion, the countryside, or nature. The question is: why did the Renaissance artists not paint modern instruments and objects like telescopes, or concepts like gravitation or electricity? Instead, they focussed on such images as the Last Supper, David, and the Madonna. Writers were enamoured of daffodils and brooks.
The pervasive presence in the modern discourse of the Renaissance of the themes from nature and the pre-modern religion and culture not only intrigued me, but also looked to me to be a scandal. Having identified this enigma with regard to the relation between modernity and modern art and literature, I go on to claim that the other two characteristic features of Deleuze and Guattari’s relation between minor and major – namely, how the former is collective and political – are not true in the modern West. I have argued that literature during the modern period in the West largely remained effective at the individual level. It has not culminated into the collective movement. In presenting this critical account, by way of bending them without breaking, I have, however, demonstrated how both of them are useful in India. That is, this is a case where what is not useful in the original context is, however, useful in the transplanted one. This is demonstrated with the discussion of the national movement in India and the role played by individuals like Gandhi.
Gandhi, I have pointed out, was influenced by literary figures like Tolstoy, Ruskin, and Thoreau, all dissenters in relation to the modernity of the West. While these inspirational thinkers themselves were unable to make major political interventions within the West, their influence on Gandhi ultimately caused him to bring in a vital political movement in the form of the Indian freedom struggle against British imperialism.
Gandhian intervention is both collective and political. This development is unlike the scene in the West. Chapter 3, thus, as it progresses shows how the works of philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari that are not useful in the place of their origin, the West, are indeed useful in a transplanted context, like in India.
Having made this progress, enlarged the non-Western domain in Chapter 2, and decreased the Western domain in Chapter 3, the next chapter goes beyond Deleuze’s reading of Bergson on the question of non-being. While Bergson tries to trace the roots of non-being to negation, there are two problems with this approach. One, he makes negation to depend on intuition, thus making it vulnerable; and two, he fails to outline further stages in this direction, such as how negation makes permanence possible. After extensively engaging with philosophers from the West, identifying them, making an appropriate selection amongst them to be used in India, and making significant interventions, I have in Chapter 4 turned to Indian philosophical texts. During my extensive research on various texts from India, I have found an extraordinary original metaphysical work that was not noticed by philosophers earlier. In fact, following Bertolt Brecht’s lines in his famous play Life of Galileo, I can say that any mortal except Kalidas Bhattacharyya, who discovered the text, did not read this philosophical text by Chandidas. I am the second who read it seriously. (The exact lines from Brecht about Galileo referring to his discovery are: “What you are seeing has been seen by no mortal except myself. You are the second” [2014: 23]). This neglected philosophical work is by Vaddera Chandidas, a modern philosopher from India. I have researched on this book for about two decades before writing a full-length book on it (2009a). The presence of texts like Desire and Liberation by Chandidas further enabled me to make use of what is borrowed from the West more meaningful.
This chapter goes on to show how permanence is further identified with pre- and post-existence. This form of permanence is contrasted with Existence and Being, which are identified with change. Thus, Chandidas shows how it is negation that makes permanence possible, and that it is a mere projection of the intellect. Totally rejecting the primacy of permanence, which is made possible by negation, Chandidas proposes contradictoriness as the pulse of reality. Extending Chandidas, the chapter argues that it is permanence that makes hierarchy possible, which in turn makes inequality possible. Thus, this view provides a philosophical base to the political discussion regarding equality and inequality. My aim in this book, therefore, has been to calibrate Western philosophy for effective use in India by proposing various ways of bending it without breaking it.
In this text, I have avoided the unreflective use of philosophical texts from the West that pervades academics in India today. I have also avoided the temporal and proportional imbalance committed by earlier philosophers. Instead, I have ventured to borrow from the West through the method of bending without breaking, thus avoiding the dangers of relapsing into provincialism.
In this context, let me clarify that I do not agree with thinkers like Daya Krishna and others who allege that Western philosophy has ignored Indian philosophy. I am of the opinion that it is not the strong Western philosophy that kept Indian philosophy outside. Philosophy in the West, with the advent of modern science, found itself defensive – and as part of its survival started clearing up and sanitising its own subject. For instance, this is the task undertaken by logical positivists. They not only kept Indian philosophy outside – albeit, at times sheltering it in their departments of theology and religion – but also excluded many of their own earlier philosophies as non-philosophical. Against this background, instead of demanding that they too include philosophies from places beyond their shores, like India, a better plea would be to sanitise the philosophies from India using modern protocols and tools. This task is what I have undertaken in Chapters 2, 3, and 4.
Some find my engagement as being not part of the discipline of philosophy. I am happy about this conclusion, as it takes me away from the center and places me near the border. This situation I find challenging. On a lighter note, I am reminded of Bertrand Russell’s example about the present king of France. He claims that this statement is neither true nor false, as there is no present king of France. Similarly, if I claim that I am doing philosophy, then someone can reject that statement. I do not want to make any such claim, so the statement that what I am doing is not philosophy is neither true nor false. Of course, I do not mean to insinuate that there is no philosophy today in the sense that there is no king of France today.