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Sikh Formations
Religion, Culture, Theory
Volume 15, 2019 - Issue 3-4
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Book Reviews

Hegel’s India: a reinterpretation, with texts

by Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra, New DelhiOUP India, 2017, x and 324 pp., Rs. 1570 (hardback), ISBN 9780199468270 and 2018, 336 pp., Rs. 550 (paperback), ISBN 9780199487509

 

Notes

1 (Prasad Citation1999) is a particularly good example of this. Indian religio-philosophic concepts, such as varnadharma, niskama karma and jivanmukti, are subjected to a rigorous technical examination by a highly skilled analytic philosopher. The result is that they are seen to be ethically valuable in a general sense, not just elements of Indian ‘blind faith’. The tone of the work can be seen in a quotation from the ‘Preface’: ‘We have not so far used classical Indian ideas creatively because almost all writers on them have been mostly reportive and not critical or reconstructive’ (p. x). The ongoing richness and creativity of Indian philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in spite of the experience of colonization, is well-documented in the excellent Bhushan and Garfield (Citation2017).

2 Anekanantavada was very much part of an emerging post-Independence identity as India tried to distinguish itself from the West, and a certain amount of sentimentalization did occur. However, classical texts, such as Vimaladasa’s Saptabhangi-tarangini, are technically very sophisticated and have a great deal to offer to modern philosophers anywhere. Jain (Citation2008) intersperses the Sanskrit original, paragraph by paragraph, with an excellent English translation. Mookerjee (Citation1995) is a good modern study of anekantavada.

3 The Khalsa Consensus translation is the one used. SGGS, 7: ‘kaytay pavan paanee vaisantar kaytay kaan mahays … kaytee-aa karam bhoomee mayr kaytay kaytay dhoo updays … kaytee-aa khaanee kaytee-aa banee … ’

4 The reference to Deleuze is to a famous essay: ‘Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’ or ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ in English (Deleuze [Citation1990] Citation2003, 240–7, Citation1997, 177–82). While certain post-structuralist concepts, such as disjunctive synthesis and the hegemonic master narrative have been used to explore the gap between Hegel and Indian philosophy in this review, there has also been an attempt to show that Indian philosophy may offer a rather deeper critique of Hegel and Western bourgeois liberalism than a philosopher such as Deleuze.

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