Abstract
The book Gyan ki Rajneeti: Samaj Adhyan aur Bhartiya Chintan can be considered an attempt to deconstruct our cherished pattern of thinking, rooted in the binary logic of modernity. Manindra Thakur, the author, strives to bridge the gaps that exist between different knowledge systems, which emanates from a de-totalised logic (epistemic frame rooted in binary thinking). It can be argued without an iota of doubt that the work is a creative exercise in unravelling the subterranean politics of knowledge that shrouds modern social science discourse and Indian philosophy. It can be described as a call for creative thinking that entails criticality and concomitantly an appeal for democratic dialogue across tradition. The book is divided into six chapters with a coherent structure that binds all the chapters.
The first chapter initiates a dialogue with Indian philosophy that challenges the perceived notion within humanities that philosophy is a western enterprise and Indian thought lacks criticality and can be considered religious and not philosophical. It goes into intricacies of the debate of what constitutes the core of Indian thought and the context in which Indian intellectual tradition, which has a totalised conception of human nature and reality, was perceived as religious in nature. The other chapter delves into the concept of human nature and its applicability to social sciences. This is where the author goes deep into the debate surrounding human nature and how different western thinkers have forged the paradigms of social science solely on one unique aspect of human nature. This process led to a distorted understanding of social ontology.
The author discusses the varied flaws of this conceptualisation and contends the insidious nature of this paradigm. He elaborates on diverse methodologies used in social science research and their innumerable flaws. He also criticises the model of methodological individualism employed to fathom the nuances of social reality, especially in the Indian context. The lack of engagement with Indian philosophy in contemporary social sciences and its implications are also deliberated thoroughly by the author. Thakur elaborates on the need to engage with Indian philosophy and how certain philosophical traditions and their knowledge gets manifested as collective consciousness in different regions of the country. For instance, the dominance of the Nyaya philosophical tradition and its inclination towards perception and reason as the basis for knowledge is seen as the manifestation of the same collective consciousness. This analytical schema encapsulates an idiosyncratic perception of viewing the question of social ontology. The author creatively engages with philosophers such as Roy Bhaskar, Karl Marx, Carl Jung and Daya Krishna and delves into the debates on human nature as exist in the discipline of psychology and philosophy.
The book explicates the conventional Indic concept of Purushartha and Vikar as vital tools in the context of theorising human nature. The author elucidates its role in theorisation of a universal human knowledge that acts as a sine qua non for creative social research. Following Gandhi, Thakur envisages the intellectual possibilities embedded in the concept of Purushartha and Vikar in theorising not just human nature but also society, economy and polity. The author asserts that numerous writers have theorised four purushartha, which are Dharm, Arth, Kama and Moksh, but failed in conceptualising six Vikars (disorders), namely lust, anger, infatuation, greed, jealousy and items. These four Purushartha and six Vikar along with time and space are required for a better analysis of not just human nature but also society, economy and polity. All these regulate human nature and fathoming them is essential to grasp human society and economy. He elaborates on this analytical schema and argues that Dharm is not synonymous with religion and explicates the politics of translation that underlies such comparison. Dharm has been theorised as a natural order that takes cognizance of the context and contingency of time and space.
This dynamic aspect of Dharm differentiates it from religion, which is a western concept based on the notion of the centrality of ‘God’. He also discusses the other three purushartha like Artha, which challenges the modern notion of greed that forms the pivot of modern idea of capitalist economy. On the deliberation on Kama and Moksh, Thakur describes Kama as the idea that affirms sexuality as part of our being this notion sort of resonates with modern psychoanalytic insights. Concerning Moksh, the author distinguishes it from a simplistic notion of salvation, which is about transcendence. The author contends that Moksh is not only a transcendental concept devoid of immanence; rather it should be perceived as a notion for the transformation of the existing structures that impedes our potentialities as human. Here, it is important to draw a parallel between Thakur’s conceptualisation of Moksh as both immanent and transcendent and philosophers such as Roy Bhaskar and Jean Luc-Nancy’s idea of meta-reality and trans-immanence. The idea of meta-reality by Bhaskar and transimmanence by Nancy are an existential and metaphysical concepts about open-immanence that transcends the dichotomy of immanence and transcendence. The epistemological framework developed by Thakur resonates with the work of these aforementioned thinkers. The chapter on religion is a critical analysis of religion manifesting as community or identity and religion as apolitical spirituality.
It can be argued, albeit the author has not made it apparent that this dialogue strives to bridge the gap between new left politics and new-age spirituality. In the same chapter, author explicates the most productive way of engaging with religion. He argues that traditionally there have been two kinds of perspectives on religion. One view perceives religion as false consciousness; this view forms the cardinal principle in some Marxist circles and comes within the secularisation project. The other view is about principle distance giving cognizance to the phenomenon of religion, but completely ignores the logic of internal criticism that plays an important role in many religious traditions. The author explicates the logic of immanent critique of religion and acquiesces that immanent critique of religion is the most fruitful way of engagement with religion. The author envisages a political theology entailing liberation philosophy.
This view fathoms religion as consciousness, which is not false and certainly not an equivalence of opium but is transformative in nature. He discusses the importance of literature as a tool of analysis due to its perceptive nature to get into the layers of human psyche and society and also deliberated important novels such as Anamdas ka Potha by Hazari Prasad Dwivedi and autobiography of Professor Tulsi Ram to explain the importance of literature and phenomenal experience in doing creative social research. Another chapter on Indian democracy and its impasse delves into the contemporary debates of Indian politics and democracy. The author calls for a method of inquiry that transcends the platitudes of secular-religious debate and another kind of tropes used to understand contemporary political reality. The author has not elaborated on the process and agency required to implement the varied creative engagements explored in the work, perhaps this can also be its limitation. The other aspect that demanded more engagement was the dialogue on the logic of capital and how a certain kind of capitalism in contemporary times impedes creative engagement. Lastly, one can contend that the work is without doubt an avant-garde intervention to unlock multifarious potentials embedded in Indian philosophical tradition.