A SUBALTERN/POSTCOLONIAL CRITIQUE OF THE COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY

OF RELIGION"

PURUSHOTYAMA BILIMORIA

Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

1. MA~4GALAM (PREAMBLE)

In a larger project dubbed 'Indologism and its Other' I have been sketching a textual-historical background to the discur- sive pattern in the works of early orientalists-indologists in the field known as Indology, particularly in relation to the growth of Indian philosophy and (comparative) religion in the modern era. The aim there has been to discern key European Enlightenment presuppositions that have haunted the career of Indologism; more especially the universalizing, historicizing and theodistic tendencies attenuated by their refractions in Western philosophy, as well as the quasi-ratio- nal pressures of "scientific" methodology, various imperial and neo-colonial imperatives; we must consider in addition the subject-positions galvanized through Judeo-Christian conceptions, and a domesticated social reformist rhetoric. The general claim being tested is that each moment in the modernist onslaught structurally contributed to the suppres- sion of indigenist insights, i.e. an earlier or native rationality, the pluriform of worship or ritual discourse, a rich tapestry of iconography, diverse moral practices, customary legal or jurisprudential traditions and a magical cosmology under- girding much of these. The junction of European-instigated Indological research and British colonialism at times led to immensely fruitful outcomes (as Halbfass among others have shown in their work connecting Europe with India); but it

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also resulted in producing a philosophic culture marked by - what Homi Bhabha in the broader postcolonial cultural con- text has termed - ambivalence and hybridity) Just to note one instance, the 'law of karma' when confronted with the (Western) scholastic 'problem of evil' evoked an utterly "fatalistic" interpretation and ambiguous apologia for the Indian moral life-world. This amoral trope proved even more alarmingly antinomous for those theodicies that gave no place or prominence to an all-loving, all-forgiving Supreme Deity who might have had some well-intended purpose in creating the best of all possible worlds but with 'evil' as part of its ontological fabric, than reducing this palpable recogni- tion to a form of suffering, as a vain consequence or psychic and ontic trace-effect (ap~rva) of human action or lapsed sac- rifices, as was discovered to be the case in Buddhist thought and the Hindu Mim~ms~ respectively. 2 Likewise, the Buddha's First Noble Truth on the existential facticity of suf- fering stands ironically transformed into the axiomatic edict: "That there is Evil, compounded with Suffering"!

Staying for a moment with the more general points, before moving to the threaded arguments in seven s~tras- steps, there is no dearth of literature on post-colonial reap- praisals of European imagings of the Orient or the East, the hermeneutic interaction between Europe and India, and the marked difference in the kinds of Orientalism (both benign and civilizing types) that were played out in the different regions and within the liberal-scholarly disciplines generated or impacted upon in the studies, through which the West attempted to represent, contain and where possible mould or control its 'other'. Again, I have been eager to philosophical- ly apply - without a prior background as such in that spe- cialist field - the observations of a handful of postcolonial Indian writers (Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Gyan Prakash, Tejaswari Niranjana) 3 that asymmetrical translations and transcreations of non-Western texts displace the indigenous

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understanding by re-framing and re-encoding the signs pre- cisely within Euro-centred imaging of the world whose cog- nitive claims are derived from historical experiences of European (modernist) cultures. Such a thesis, which draws upon Said's overly celebrated work on Orientalism (inspired jargonistically by Foucauldian suspicion about the ruse of power in all epistemic con-quests, and tempered by Barthesian de-positioning of the auctor (author), trearfully with Derridean-Caputo critique of Western "logocentricism", and so on) has yet to be fully tested in the context of transla- tions or readings of non-Western philosophy of religion in both its comparativist and home-spun modalities. I am less concerned about exclusion as about what gets represented and by what voice of authority or authenticity precisely in the

inclusions or invaginations. Here I present some selective vignettes or reflections from this investigation, and I begin with the beginning of the historicization of world-time to trace the location of the East or Asia at large in the Enlightenment Western imaginary. While I confine my main analysis to comparative philosophy of religion, there are doubtless ramifications and implications for the mainstream classical and contemporary Philosophy of Religion as we know it in the modern academe.

PART A.

2. APURVA (BEGINNINGS) A visionary named Joachim of Fiore in 12th century (1135- 1202) had proposed that history moves through three phases or epochs (not unlike Hindu yugas, only in the reverse), namely the Age of the Father (or of Law, identified with the Old Testament), the Age of the Son (or of Grace, exemplified in the New Testament) and the Age of the Spirit (ecclesia Spiritualis), the 'Third Age' which would usher in the age of John the evangalist outstripping the church. There is a higher

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order of ascendancy as each Age passes into the next, the last of which escorts history into its apotheosis. Joachim was of course condemned as a heretic, although he continued to be revered by others as a saint. His ideas on the inexorable movement of history continued to be influential from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and even after. Spectacularly, the night before the Holy Roman Empire fell to Napolean's thumbing wellingtons at Jena in September 1806, Hegel completed his Phenomenology of the Spirit. The mas- sive tome ends, appropriately, with a scheme reminiscent of Joachim of Fiore's announcement, of a New Age of the Spirit to complete the Ages of the Father and the Son. And like Goethe, Hegel concluded that the irreversible event signalled the end of the Middle Ages (Curiously this is stated in his Introduction which he wrote last.). Hegel takes over this idea and presents it as the central doctrine of the Incarnation, which represents, in Burbridge's rewording, "the divine ini- tiative as passing through three stages that reproduce the first, the second, and the third negation. In the first, God limits himself and becomes finite - an individual man specifically located in space and time. In the second, this individual dies; his finitude is cancelled. In the third, the negative force of his death is dissolved, and he becomes universally present as the resurrected Christ. "4 History has an inner determination that moves it dialectically through certain necessary phases; in his- tory Hegel discerns a deeper spiritual regularity underlying various national and folk cultures.

Now unlike earlier Christian visionaries, Hegel turned to provide a detailed account of the location and status of other people and their cultures in his schema of past and future movement of history. Why? Because Hegel was moved by a universal teleology. For this Hegel owed a debt to Herder. The relative stage of development of the Spirit through the mechi- nations of Reason (Vernunft), in each culture, as collective of individuals in a given environ, is reflected inevitably in their

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respective productions, i.e. their thinking, literature, religion, magical practices, social institutions, and the maturity or lack thereof of the apparatus enabling self-determination or free- dom in political and civil life. The task of philosophy, as he elaborates in The Philosophy of Right, is not to build a 'plas- tic' world out of ideal imagination but to understand reality and be reconciled with all its aspects and diverse manifesta- tions. This much is well known and meticulously rehearsed in Western scholarship on Hegel; but what is not often acknowl- edged or recognized is the theoretic implications and impact of such a philosophy of history/culture on relative perceptions of the cultural 'other' and in the constitution, internally as it were, of their own identity, location, and topoi vis-a-vis the West. Let us explore this thesis in a little more detail.

But for Herder's curious interest in the learnings of other cultures, especially of the ancients, among whom he valued most the by-gone heritage of the Indo-Europeans, Hegel's his- tory of philosophy would have remained confined to provid- ing a genealogy of ecclesia spiritualis centred entirely on its life-currents in Western history with its origins in the Greek polis. Contra early Said, in Herder the East or what came to be identified as the Orient does not begin as the West's or Occident's 'other', its distant enemy and so on; rather the for- mer marks the historical condition for the possibility of the latter in a dialectical space created by his idea of aufheben (negating and synthesizng), the necessary movement of the infinite over the finite. Temporal cultures are not necessarily marginal to the present; they may even be central to it; it is only that their memory has receded from sight, along possi- bly with all its artifacts,. These were rather exciting times for Europe, with its 'Re-discovery' of the East. From the late 17th century onwards, philologists and linguists had begun to dis- cover Indo-European family of languages, that rivalled the Semitic lingua in its dating or antiquity, inclusiveness, range of dialects, literary output, and affinities with the European

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speech. Sanskrit drew the greatest attention, in view of its his- torical links with Ancient Greek, Latin, Old German, Old Lithuanian and even English. But so also for the vast amount of texts and literature of the East that had suddenly reached the doorsteps of the West, where scholars were now training themselves in Sanskrit, after the fashion of the East India Company (English and Dutch) administrators posted in India. The Romantics, and here we speak of Herder, Novalis, and Bouvard, in particular, were impressed by the worthy contribution of Indo-European to the whole history of human thought. So there was a new-found scientific self-con- sciousness based on the linguistic importance of the Orient to Europe. But an Orient only of the long-gone past, as Herder was to pronounce, and decidedly not of the present-day cor- rupted Asia or parts of North Africa, and certainly not the more recent Islam (forgetting that it was Arab scholars who had preserved Aristotle's texts, taught philosophy to the pagan Middle Ages, and developed among the first scientific instruments). Nevertheless, Herder, and Voltaire too, com- mented on the profundity of Brahmanism, interpreting it though as pantheism, with the world seen as a manifestation of a single spiritual reality (the Brahman) - which Hume later mused upon in his cute imagery of the emanation of the spi- der's web. Their elevation of India or the Orient on the world-stage of Universal History challenged the unity of Christian theological history, and attracted the attention of the minority Deists towards a possible alternative.

These were provocative discoveries, and in turn invited a strain of Eurocentricism with the emergence of Kant's ahis- torical pure critiques, Spinoza's rationalist ethics disjuncted upon his pantheistic monism, and the pan-logicism of classi- cal German schools, in Hegel's former friend Schelling, but especially marked in Hegel's own system where it gets spread across the entire procrustean bed of human history. Kant mocked Herder's admiration for the happy, carefree inhabi-

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tants of Tahiti who were better off not been lured by the lib- eral-civilized pretensions of the Europeans, no more than he saw any purpose in the natural lives of New Hollanders (Australian Aboriginess) and the painted man from Tierra del Fuego or Hawaii or Neuzealander. In the same vein Kant had simply ignored Asian thought which in any case he thought was riddled with papistry, and therefore of no particular rel- evance to analytical European thinking; but then Kant was not interested in the history of thought as such and had him- self set about challenging Christian speculative thinking, even of the most serious kind, as evident in his rejection of the Ontological Argument and most varieties of Transcendentalism and pretensions of all (ultimately failed) theodicies. To be sure, in part Hegel also embodied the Romantic reaction provoked by the bleak rationalism of Kant and the stifling monadism of Leibniz; in this be is closer to Spinoza and Schelling, and indeed absorbs their ideas into his own master narrative. Hegel is thus crowned, by Croce early this century, singularly as the terminus point to the "whole philosophical development up to his own time, from the Hellenic, even from the Oriental world" (my emphasis).

3. RAJ DARSHAN (IMPERIAL SIGHTINGS).

I turn now to the background horizon against which Hegel formed and articulated his views on the East and its direct impact on early colonial moorings. In the long chain of direct and indirect judgments about the history, place or location and worth of Asian cultures in the speculative inquiries, stand out French and German writers, notably Dupperon, brothers Grimm, and Humboldt (who wrote a commentary on the Bhagavadg[t~ on which Hegel was later to write his own hav- ing learnt of it from the English Colebrooke). 5 The British ori- entalists for their part had the added advantage of being post- ed in the India (as East India Company officials or resident

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judges, British civil servants or Christian missionaries, etc.), working to establish research libraries while drawing liberal- ly upon the vast learnings of pand. its, scribes and native schol- ars, who, however, never enjoyed much prominence in the new academies. With astounding energy the expatriate schol- ars and their novice scribes brought together extensive collec- tions of manuscripts, epigraphical, archaeological and archival resources. Significant works in English on ancient and classical material ensued from the pens ofJ Wilkins (who issued in 1785 the first-ever English translation of the Bhagavad GttcT), William Jones, Colebrooke at the turn of the 18th century (1780s and 90s), 6 in Calcutta, followed in the 1800s by other leading names like Ballantyne (who wrote Christianity Contrasted with Hindu Philosophy Madras 1860). 7 Thibaut translated the commentaries or bha's.yas on Brahmas~tras of Sa~kara and Rdmdnuja, while Arthur Venis edited numerous epistemological works of Vedanta. Griffith and Cowell, Pargiter (in Calcutta), worked away at other seminal texts, with Gough, Hall, Hodgson, Hoernle, Growse, Roer and T Foulkes (The Elements of Veddntic Philosophy, Madras 1860). 6 William Jones in his Presidential discourses to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta circa 1786 on the Hindus bold- ly drew a common thread linking Sanskrit with Greek and Latin, Hindu gods with Ionian and Greek poly-deism, and Vedanta with Pythagerous and Plato, (and which Max Miiller merrily cited alongside 'Schopenhauer' and 'Euthanasia' in his own 1894 lectures on Vedanta to the Royal Institution). s

Consider therefore the enormous impact that German- romanticism-Wissenschaft 9 through its forays into Sanskritic learning and philological discoveries was to have on images of India, or the "eternal Orient", and on Indian thinking. Frederick Schlegel published the famous tome 'Language and Wisdom of India' in 1808, in which he speaks of Sanskrit as "the mother of classical languages"; and his brother August Wilhelm Schlegel became the first Professor of lndology in

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Germany in 1818. Franz Bopp took up the Schlege! claims to lay the foundations for "scientific Indology", with its quest for the Indo-European base language. August Schleicher took this a step further through his parallel constructions of the Indo-]kryan and Indo-Iranian 'tree of languages'. With the evolutionary spectre of Darwin and Spencer hanging over them, by 1872 Johann Schmidt completes the historical link- ages of Sanskrit with Indo-European or Indogermanistic lan- guages, indicating the movement of both linguistic forms and ideas, achieving subsequent sophistication in their progress Westwards) ~ This morphology is linked indeed to the "Aryanization" of Indo-European mentalit~ - or a conver- gence, as Frauwallner was to put it as late as 1944, of the "scientific character of Indian and European philosophy", 11 but which sadly has left its reverberations in India to this day, in the 'post-colonial~Independence' periodicity re-appropriat- ed by a strident Hindutva revivalist nationalism. However, what does one mean by "Aryanization" in this, albeit lin- guistic-literary and philosophical, contexts? 'Aryan', the new signal term contrived, itself comes from Sanskrit ',~rya' mean- ing 'the noble' (as the Buddha was also called), but it is taken up by Herder & Co to signify the mythic descendents and lin- guistic predecessors of the original Indo-European inhabi- tants, possibly somewhere in Central Asia, now confined to Europe. Curiously, the derivative Aryan (in modern English phonetics "airyan") from being a designation for a linguistic family resemblance in the discourse of philology, the mor- phological paradigm is transposed on to a racial-cultural type within a specific location. Hence also is born the myth of the Aryan race, which via Herder, Schlegel brothers, and possibly Hegel survived for its appropriation two centuries later in the ideology of the Reich or Nazism.

The analysis enacted in the writings of the German Romantics, fed interactively into Britain's own self-image as a

primordial 'village community' now matured to its own civi-

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lized, liberal, parliamentary system. The European or 'Germanistic' romantics were less sanguine about drawing the direct line of development, as for them it was history that played a critical role in organizing the world around them, and it was through history, albeit a by-gone moment there for recalling, around which the Europeans were constituting their still rather fractured and fragmented national identity. But here, or there in the recovered margins of the world, i.e. in the jaded icon of the Orient, was a unifying simulacrum that was itself complete, for it indeed signified - if not also symbolized - history as a messianic embodiment, k~las~ar-~rdvatdra (Incarnation in the Body of Time).

To sum up this sketchy s~tra, European intellectuals owing their influence to the burgeoning indological-philo- logical forays into the literary productions from a remote region, which they recaptured and brought home to roost, as it were, thought they could uncover the mythic descen- dants and linguistic predecessors of the original Indo- European inhabitants, possibly somewhere in Central Asia, now long since transformed into the Europe of the day. Hegel, again, is the classic fount of this speculation in the opening decades of the nineteenth century: coupled with a strong belief in historicism and the dialectical movement of the Spirit from abstraction to concreteness, in his philoso- phy of history and philosophy of religion (which includes theology). He gives measure to the total contribution of the major Oriental traditions to this march of reason and the concomitant evolution of the Geisteswelt. He evinced little real acquaintance with the metaphysics of the Upanishads, that Schopenhauer at least was concerned to bring into Western thought, and Hegel dismissed Buddhist dialectical reasoning as "naivety of emptiness". 12 At the same time, he felt a strange affinity for India, and the Brahman of Indian religion appeared to him to be a kindred of the infinite Absolute: a mere speculative abstraction, an identity with-

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out difference. As the "universal substance" Brahman nev- ertheless remains the indeterminant (unmediated by self- reflection and self-othering). As such, Brahman is a superfi- cial transcendence which has not found concretization as true subject. And Hegel notices an embarrassing hiatus between this metaphysical idea of "abstract unity without determination", "dry and barren spiritless substance ''13 and the proliferate polymorphic perversity of the cultic Hindu polytheism with its myriads of "supersensuous" gods, "voluptuous" goddesses in their "wildest sensuality"; which occurs when the purely subjective "substantial i ty" (Substantialitiit) is made the object of worship and devo- tion, and is evoked via the mythic-phantasmagoric repre- sentation as the many-headed, multiple-armed cosmogenic Brahm~ (masc.), to grasp all of which the uncharted aber- rations of pure aesthetics would not be sufficient. TM In this respect the experience of 'being-in-itself', predicated on the creation, through religious practice of the "emotionless, will-less, deedless pure abstraction of mind, in which all positive content of consciousness is superseded" is not unlike the wondrous dreamy state of a mother just given birth to the child, or indeed to a state of dreaming, or phan- tasy, in which the subject is fully absorbed in or immersed with the object, and the subject is not grasped as subject because its egoity is not differentiated from the objective. (Even Freud and Lacan would recognize the workings of the collective unconscious in this symbolic articulation.) So daz- zled were the Hindu philosophers that they were stirred to pronounce, possibly in the state of semi-somnambulism: 'I am Brahman" (not that Brahman is and I am experiencing It, etc.), or (correcting the Indian deist-logician, Udayana, anticipating Descartes, with a parody on S'a~kara): "I think self therefore I am Brahman'. But philosophy cannot let the divine "float away in feeling or in the mists of devotion." And indeed contemporary philosophy would not.

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4. VISHVA VIJ~,ZNA (WORLD PHILOSOPHY, AND ITS DETRACTORS)

Hegel nevertheless realized that his world-picture (Weltbild) would not be complete unless he came to terms with the his- tory and philosophy of however much older, and seemingly primitive phases of extant civilizations, especially of Asia, which for him is the real theatre of unfolding drama, is But a history that is at once the philosophy of history. It was this commitment to the necessity of history and the universality of intellectual culture, albeit in different and muted stages of development and determination, that virtually compelled Hegel to give serious consideration to the history, thought and culture of the East. At least references to India, China, or Asia did not fall deafly upon his philosophical ears; for even today these words are taken to designate regions of exclusive interest for geographers, regionalists, maybe social scientists, but not for thinkers on the new frontiers of disciplines such as critical theory, cultural studies, feminist thought, even envi- ronmental and applied ethics, not to speak of the David Lewis' so-called 'plurality of worlds' (i.e. only of the modal not yet lived worlds). At the close of 19th century Max Miiller, the classic patron of British Indology, was still dis- covering Europe "in this cradle of the human race, the native land of the highest philosophy". 16 But the recovery of the old disclosed an 'idealism', a happy blending of religion (i.e. the "Hindu Bible of Vedas") and philosophy (of the Upanishads) in the "Science of Religion", which, like medieval theology, enriches our 'new world' but is not equal to its modernist challenges. It is in part a legacy of this dialectic of the recon- figured intellectual periodicity that trumps the superiority of the Greek (Hellenic) origins of Western philosophy (which is echoed again and again from Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, to Richard Sylvan despite his welcome openness to Jaina logic) and the disjuncted world (read, 'New World') culture, or Rorty's denigration of any philosophy's claim to distinc- tiveness (for "a Martian wouldn't notice the difference"), that

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in part accounts for why philosophical interest in Asian reli- gions (for a comprehensive philosophy of religion) has remained enclosed and emasculated within the province of various specialist discourses (the languages, civilization and area-studies, religious studies, and marginally in theology or divinity schools), and withdrawn from the domain of serious philosophers who thus need not feel obliged to engage with the 'non-Western' world on its own conceptual or philosoph- ical terms. And where it makes a slight mark beyond the mar- gins, it had taken on yet another form of exoticism, the intel- lectual hubris and orientalism of the 1990's, as in the 1890s.

One exception to this exclusivist trend was in the inclu- sivism of Schopenhauer (who is making something of a come- back in the Western academy but for his Eastern connec- tions), although that too has its problems from the point of view of a postcolonial critique. Concerned about Kant's mute 'thing in itself" without a will, Schopenhauer had turned to the Indian tradition to find some tangible support for this dis- quiet. He claimed having experienced the vitality of the 'will' and noted his new insight in this words: "The world as the thing in itself is a great will which does not know what it wants; for it does not know but merely wills, simply because it is a will and nothing else. "17 But this insight itself owed something to his encounter with Indian thought. This is an important general point which perhaps has not yet been fully absorbed - even by critics of Orientalism, such as Said and Spivak. That is, the growth and innovations of mainstream European philosophy in the 19th century may owe much more to non-Western sources delivered over by the European 're-discovery' and subsequent political and intellectual con- quest of the Orient than many defenders of the tradition would be willing to acknowledge. Schopenhauer died extolling the virtues of the Br~hmanic Upanishads while decrying the impact of Jewish culture on the European soil, suffering from an anti-semitic bout not uncharacteristic of his

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time. Schopenhauer had learnt from and relied on the trans- lations somewhat from the original Sanskrit of a little known philosopher, Karl Christian Frederich Krause.

By the time he wrote his third volume of the World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer had moved distinctly closer to Buddhism, even as he became more pessimistic and, in Nietzsche's assessment, uttermost nihilistic. In Schopenhauer's mind the optimism and high moral transcendence of the Upanishads were to slowly give way to the despair and sor- row-stricken world of Buddhism, and Schopenhauer acknowl- edges the 'close agreement' between his own doctrine and that of Buddhism? 8

However, Schopenhauer's splendid achievements and positive attitude towards Indian thought can only be mea- sured against the more negative assessment made by Nietzsche both of Buddhism and of Schopenhauer's increas- ing pessimism which seemed to grow in direct proportion to the latter's growing involvement with Buddhist thought. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Wagner stood as the arch rep- resentatives of modern decadance. 19 Schopenhauer had indeed established himself by now as an authority on Vedanta and Buddhism among the scholarly circles of his time, while Nietzsche remained more circumspect and ambivalent towards India. Nietzsche saw Schopenhauer as abetting a sys- tem of thought that was at heart not only escapist, nihilistic, and pessimistic, but also one that denied the will to live. Nietzsche was sceptical of the personal identification that Schopenhauer made of the Upanishadic tat tvam asi ('thou art that') as the ethical basis of his system and also of his erratic affiliations of the Will as thing-in-itself with the Highest Reality of the Upanishads (i.e. Brahman). Nietzsche rightly questioned Schopenhauer's tendency to allow several different metaphysical doctrines to run together - the Brahman of the Indians, the Ideas of Plato, the World- Redeemer of Christianity, the thing-in-itself of Kant, the law-

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forces in the sciences, and the Will of Schopenhauer's own philosophical system - to yield a seemingly unruptured and trans-cultural metaphysical whole - the grandest narrative if there was one. 2~ The otherwise eloquent Schopenhauer had also begrudged being beaten by the stammering Hegel, who perhaps in the long run had a more direct influence on mod- ern Indian thinking, especially via T H Green, Bradley, McTaggart and other neo-Hegelian Kantians. An insufferable pessimist, yet his early ruminations on the Upanishads yield- ed a more balanced treatment of Indian philosophy of reli- gion than we have seen with Hegel. But Nietzsche remained sceptical about the wild speculations and generalizations that Schopenhauer went on to draw from Indian thought. Even while declaring himself to be "Europe's Buddha" Nietzsche continued his denigration of the historical Buddha, the ener- vating asceticism and denial of the pleasures of human embodiment in Indian religious philosophy... Nevertheless, it was all grist to misty mill of the "comparative science of reli- gioN comparative theology". Such platitudes, again, rein- forced Indian attraction to the idealisms of neo-Hegelians like T.H. Green and of Bradley in due course.

As we have seen, while Hegel was wrestling with the Orient and Schopenhauer 21 was confidently proclaiming that "Indian wisdom is flowing back into Europe and it will pro- duce a fundamental change in our knowing and thinking", Nietzsche steps back and urges 22 that it was time the West tied the Gordian knot again, regained its Greek integrity and dispelled the magic of the East. He cautioned that certain dangers lay in wait for those who made the detour away from the safe harbour of their own way of thinking. 23 Heidegger seems to have taken this message to heart in his attempt to think the Greek 'more Greek', transcend the Greek through Greek, and to find a new way out of the destiny of nihilism that emerged out of the Greek beginning. 24 Heidegger, towards the closing years of his life, did turn his atttention a

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little more towards the non-Western world, but this was because he feared the menace of the inexorable 'Europeanization of the earth' and the consequences of the nihilating power of technology and of desacralized moderni- ty which countries like Japan had lately entered. And

Heidegger was the last of the metaphysicians of this ilk, after Nietzsche, as Rorty is insistent upon.

The ferment and excitement in Europe over Indian thought and its possibilities as well as the negative downside for metaphysics, natural theology and philosophy, and aes- thetics, were to profoundly shape an 'Indian renaissance', beginning with Raja Rammohan Roy [rai] through the long chain of modern Indian philosophers, to the present-day lacu- na by which there are virtually no departments for the study of religion and hardly much interest in philosophy of religion in Indian universities. J L Mehta narrates how even before the infamous 1835 Minutes on Education of Lord Macaulay, Rammohan Roy in 1823 protested against a government Sanskrit College in Calcutta on the grounds that this would encourage perpetuation of ignorance, of a sort of pre- Baconian Dark Age. 2s While Rammohan Roy mingled freely with British orientalists (he was acquainted with Jeremy Bentham and the Mills), he drew up his own agenda for the "modernizing of India" that drew philosophical, religious, social and political sustenance more from a "bloodless cos- mopolitanism" than it did form indigenous sensibilities. 26 Among the set of "creeds" promulgated by the Brahmos, poly- theism and idol-worship are definitely denounced, and "faith in the doctrine of karma and rebirth [made] optional". 27 Bankimchandra Chatterjee, and Meghnad Madhusudan, two noted Bengali lyricists, through their writings, would "purify" the linguistic habits of the natives (or bring back ordinary lan- guage from its vacation), and together with Keshab Chunder Sen's 'flaming enthusiasm' for the marriage of Eastern and Western religiosities, herald in a New Dispensation, modelled

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for all intents and purposes on (European) "classical" theism and its supporting ecclesia. Even to the ardent critics of their time, the linguistic monstrosities and the neo-Hindu congre- gation (Brahmo Sam-aj) looked more like a Protestant- Calvinist reworking of Hindu JSstras into a rationally prag- matic-systematic worldview, and its philosophic theology san- itized of all the arcane non-magical, mystical, numinously rit- ualistic and aberrant and superstitious tendencies of yore. In his numerous confrontations with orthodox and lay Hindu opponents, Ram Mohan Roy used standard argumentative style and appealled to reason and Enlightenment morality to defend his own hybrid theology. This tradition of an articulate Hindu defence was already rife and mastered by Maharasthrian pand.its, like Vishnubawa Brahmachari, in aggressive counterattacks against Christian doctrines in open confrontations with Christian missionaries like Dr John Wilson, 2s or the views of Ruskin in circulation after the 1857 Mutiny, dismissive of Indian philosophy as "childish" or "restricted in their philosophies and faith"; echoed elsewhere as pathetically illiterate, idiot-like, God-intoxicated, tantric aberrations, 29 a sure sign of "the grossest fetishism," as J Murray Mitchell was wont to suggest. 3~ But on the other hand, these fervent symbols, insights, arguments, and tropes also served as prolegomena for the patriotic stirrings and the nationalist struggle rising on the horizons.

In 1917 Beni Madhab Barua became the first Indian to earn a D.Litt degree from University of London and a year later published a treatise, Prolegomena to a History of Buddhist Philosophy, 31 in which he perpetrated a myth that "Divine Philosophy" had chosen two separate countries as "her sacred homesteads of which the earlier one was India" (p. 5). He went on to show the "decadence of Buddhism" which resulted from an excessive-Yavana or Greek influence on the Indian mind. This subverts the German philological-philosophical ideology of the 18th-19th century which saw its roots in Greek origins,

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as distinct from Latin and Hebrew antecedents, to which it seeks to return. But it is also arrogant in staking such high puri- ty for Hindu philosophism. Other Bengali or short-term Calcutta-based savants who made their early careers on this rising tide of the rationalist followed by the nationalist dis- course that impacted, wittingly or unwittingly, on the 20th cen- tury philosophy of religion coming out of India, emerged and immortalized themselves, among whom were Akshay Sarkar 32 Sri Aurobindo (whose works in this context are legendary), S.N. Dasgupta (who was drawn to deist possibilities and pub- lished in 1954 a book on Religion and Rational Outlook), the very upright Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (busily saving appearances in Plato's academy), 33 and an underrated Jadhunath Sinha (with his tomes on Indian philosophy and psychology). The logical theism of Udayana, a medieval Ny~ya scholar, came increasingly to the attention of Indian philoso- phers because he offered "proofs" that more resembled the Five Ways of Aquinas; Georg Chemparathy spent a good part of his academic-Christian life in Utrecht translating and com- menting on Udayana's theism for a Western theological inter- est, as did Indian Jesuit scholars in Poona. 34

But what do we gain from such messengers, other than the glory of the medium? Do we need, for instance, to be told that Advaita Vedanta could be considered as a strong metaphysical system (on a par with McTaggert-Bradleyian idealism, etc.)? Little wonder that the late and beloved Professor Bimal Matilal, who underwent a full classical training of a Sanskrit pandit-scholar (before he encountered Radhakrishnan in his own Sanskrit College and subsequently Quine and Ingalls at Harvard), was inspired to offer a through-going logical (mean- ing epistemological and linguistic) defence of "mysticism" in his inaugural lecture in Oxford as he ascended to the Spalding Chair in All Souls of the Faithful Departed. 3s The imperative to show that Hindu philosophy was equal if not superior to all other philosophies in as rational terms as possible, and that

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belief in some form of the Absolute (whether monistic, deistic, monotheistic, dualistic, fideistic, pantheistic or the qualified variations in between) gained increasing momentum, to the neglect or undermining of those schools or systems that ques- tioned the coherency of such beliefs.

Thus, the Mi'mhms~ hardly received more than a passing mention in the works by Indologists of the more philosophical or theological bent. Dismissed as having "no philosophical doctrine, "3s trading in exegetic-scholasticism and ritual- hermeneutics, the Mi'mfims~ remained - as Kumarila Bhatta back in the 10th century had complained - "reduced to the sta- tus of Lok~yata, or C~rvaka-dars"ana, of naturalistic material- ism with its patently hedonistic ethic" (Slokavgrrttika I.i.#10). Yet, M~m~/msg presented a profound scope for an articulated critique of all theodicies, alongside the philosophical doubts of Guanilo, Hume, Kant, Bacon and the logical positivists about the reality of a supremely divine being, and about the absolutes of metaphysics. Its predisposition towards the deconstruction of "onto-theo-logos" of the kind that had emerged from the historical Indian tradition, was further crushed when in 1923 one Pasupathinath Sastri, invoking Max Muller, mounted a vehement defence of the Mimamsa's apparent theism or "belief in God" for which he [mis]took belief in the supremacy of the Vedas (dstikatua) to be the necessary and sufficient conditions. (So it follows that those who do not believe in the Vedas - Buddhists, but also Chrisnans, Judaists, Muslims - cannot then be said to have legitimate belief in God!)A profound category mistake that committed a theory of Authorless Testimony to an unabashed theodicy. This apologia went unheeded. It was not until the early 1990's that essays such "Hindu Doubts About God: Towards a M~m~ms~ Deconstruction ''37 began to appear, showing that the key M~mams~ protagonist, Kum~rila BhaFa, was possibly a Humean indisguise who hounded crypto-Hindu theists and deists a few centuries before Hume was to upset the cart of philosophical theology in the West.

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PART B.

5. P~RVAPAKSA VISADA (THE POST-COLONIAL ANGST AND THE 'SUBALTERN' THEORY)

In the now legendary article: 'Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice '38 Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak writes of the "epistemic violence" enacted by the colo- nial administrators and their legal scribes as they set about instituting shifts within the already established, local, cultural discourse. Hitherto the discourse had grounded certain social practices in some purported traditional authority (by which the powers adjudged whether the practice conformed to dhar- ma or to adharma, its antithesis). Now this discourse sudden- ly finds itself subjected to the demands of the propositional clarity, certainty and finality of the statutory Black Letter law, which codifies (in the absence of a recognizable system of cod- ification) such practices as - the example Spivak uses for her illustration - sati ('suttee') under English common law as a felony or crime, later modified to 'voluntary culpable homi- cide' (on a par with suicide; but the incoherency of this con- cept was quickly noticed and thus exploited by the native apologists). Although the disquisition is over the specific treat- ment in discourse (qua theory and its representation in text), Spivak is clear on the specific problematic of sati ('suttee'), in respect of the forever deferred voice of the twice condemned "good wife" (once by the community in this gendered expec- tation and the second time by the law). This is not a comment on the morality or immorality of the practice as such (about which Spivak the radical feminist has strong views indeed); rather in raising this rhetorical question ("Can the Subaltern Speak?"), her intention was to underscore the degree to which an abstracted, extraneous judgment denies history (i.e. the his- torical antecedents), concrete structures (i.e. cultural, textual and institutional forces shaping it) and the positioning of the subject (i.e. the "victim" as object of speculation, or of idol-

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ization) in the construction or grammatology of the practice qua cultural artifact. Without appropriate attention to these factors, the judgment in fact obscures the practice and disables a common ground - as it did in colonial and post-Independent India - on which to understand and rationally deal with the moral issues at stake in the practice. We see that sort of judg- ment crossing the Atlantic over onto another mutation, in Mary Daly's generalization that "suttee" is yet another mani- festation of a monolithic conspiratorial "Patri-Evil" which pervades all unmitigated religions. 39

It is the overall strategy rather than the discomfiture with the particular judgment that has become of great con- cern, from the perspective of the so-called post-colonial/post- orientalist scholarship; and even more of an angst (vis~da) for the critical genre derivatively aligned to it known as Subaltern Studies, or subalternism. This critique calls for a complete rewriting of anything and everything touched by the hands or pens of colonial writers, imperialist philosophes and their ~lite representatives or native informants well into the post- Independence era.

The term 'subaltern'is taken from the Prison Notebooks of the Italian Marxist Antionio Gramsci. It began as a descrip- tion for a certain rank in the military, but Gramsci used the term in a somewhat deprecating sense to identify a group or groups (such as the sub-proletariat) dependent on another hegemonic group or order, but which is not aware of its sub- ordination or subjugation and the possibilities ('agency') of its own autonomy until a "permanent victory" in the formation of the State that helps break up this asymmetrical relation. But until then supremacy of the "intellectual and moral leader- ship" of the "dominant" group is marked and even emulated within the subaltern groups themselves as each rises to stake its hegemony over another group. 4~ The context is very much Italian and it has none of the heavy economic-class baggage that the "monists" Marx and Engels brought to their analysis

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of the bourgeois condition; hence also its attraction to those working on colonial (and increasingly nativist) history, because the "subaltern" does not fall squarely within strict class analysis, nor so neatly into caste categories either.

The term was spectacularly appropriated by a handful of mostly Bengali historians led by Ranajit Guha (then based in the Australian National University), beginning with a confer- ence circa 1985. This band of scholars announced a project, internationalized by Spivak as an extension of Said's de-orb entalization polemic, to recapture the submerged and mostly forgotten "voices", i.e. doings of the peasants and workers as the colonial subalterns who had led their own struggles against the imperial regime and had on occasions even run counter to or ahead of the mainstream nationalist movement of the Indian Congress headed by Gandhi. 41 The added chal- lenge was to overcome the persuasiveness of the official, 'objective' historiographies owed to the English canon of his- tory-writing whose hallmarks were, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, "causal or analytical narratives strongly anchored in 'commonsense', 'facts', wit, and a strong resistance to any- thing that smacked of speculative philosophy or 'theory'. ''42 While half the subalternist circle has been busy demonstrat- ing that communalism, nationalism, and the idea of the 'nation-state' - exemplified in the constitutional preamble 'India that is Bhfirat', etc. - are themselves historicist con- structs of or from the colonial epoch; the restless other half has moved out of the lucrative industry of writing critical his- tory as it were "from below" to questioning the very idea or possibility of "history" itself. It is claimed, in the spurs of the Frankfurt-Foucauldian school, that history was an "artifact" that the emergent nation-state needed - much in the spirit of Hegel's need for a totalizing philosophy of history. And to the extent that the knowledge called 'history' is privileged, preju- diced, incomplete, hegemonic or oppositional to the unwrit- ten/ unspoken, and where its telos was one of abetting a cer-

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tain power relationship between the ruler (who controls pro- duction of the knowledge), and the subject, positioned in the ranks below, but whose story it nevertheless is(fromwhich she remains alienated in the 'knowledge'), to that extent the dis- cipline stands self-deconstructed. When applied to other dis- ciplines beyond the excesses of Indian historiography, there are ramifications here for the comparative history of philoso- phy and history of religions that focus on non-Western textu- al, so-called oral, and reconstructed pre-modern textualities of the 'other'.

6, NANUVADA (DISCLAIMER)

Not being born a privileged member of any of the bhadralok

studies clubs, 43 nevertheless, my own purpose in setting up the debate (and the symposium ensuing from it) is intended as a heuristic backdrop against which I wish to ask: if indeed philosophy of religion, especially when such a discipline is touted upon unsuspecting non-Western traditions in its com- parativist guise, has not been guilty of similar epistemic crimes or philosophic 'evil' as we have been told in respect of the history of British India? But what would it mean even to attempt to think in terms of the "postcolonial/subaltern cri- tique" in the context of Indian philosophy of religion and of the broader cross-cultural enterprise? One can become equal- ly restless here and rush into making judgments about the Eurocentricism, hegemonic and homogenizing tendencies in much of the standard practice of philosophy of religion. 44

Still, I am interested in exploring this judgment and cri- tique in one area of its practice - to whit, the 18th - 19th model of philosophy of religion as it emerged in India - and that has been the focus of the historical sketch I began with (1-4). I want to understand how this 'comparative' model might have been linked with the overarching colonialist dis- course, in what way it could be said to be interventionist and

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what impact it has had on thinking about problems of reli- gion in the writings of Indian philosophers to the present day.

Of course the relation of European-colonial philosophy with Indian thought generally has been examined by J L Mehta, J N Mohanty, Arapura, Halbfass, Inden, and with Buddhist thought by Almond, Tuck, Lopez among others, and they all bring very helpful insights; however, the more specific terrain of a 'deep orientalism' or colonialism operat- ing within comparative philosophy of religion remains to be investigated. 4s

For a more systematic inquiry, such a move may begin simply with a quibble from some quarter within, say, tradi- tion A about the way in which a supposed 'truth-claim' is represented in a first-order adjudication of its apparent con- flict with truth-claims in traditions B, C, D etc., but it could go on to champion a theoretical critique to the problematic of framing and privileging with the intent of grading truth- claims in the first instance. How many truths are we to admit, even if provisionally? Whose truth(s)? Whose miracles? Whose ontology? How one positions oneself, then, in philos- ophizing with or on behalf of the other, must indeed be a crit- ical question (I am tempted to say, 'the' critical issue for cross- cultural philosophy of religion). These questions are supple- ments rather than substitutes for the central concerns in mainstream philosophy of religion, but they would con- sciously displace the erstwhile preoccupations and ill-formu- lated questions within the field of comparative philosophy of religion modelled on or instigated by the once-popular enter- prises of comparative philosophy, the aligned {or conversely, much maligned) philosofi perennis {perennial philosophy), phenomenology of religion, the comparative study of reli- gions or its other name, the History of Religions. This point needs elaboration.

When P. Masson-Oursel in 1923 articulated the disci- pline of comparative philosophy, from which arose compara-

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tive philosophy of religion, he was arguably thinking of com- paring existing and known systems of thought broadly with- in Western civilization, with possibly some perfunctory refer- ence to comparable or analogue traditions in the distant past of the Christian West, most notably Arabic Islam. The com- parative thrust has had more of an impact in the study of reli- gions and cultures than it has had in philosophy as such, although those more inclined towards non-Western thought have taken rather fervently to the comparative enterprise than have their counterparts in the Western philosophical enclaves. Philosophy of religion as a mainstream pursuit within the dis- cipline of philosophy has always remained aloof, inward- looking, and immersed in its own Judeo-Christian roots, or occluded by the terms defined mostly since medieval scholas- ticism, and for large part remained totally closed to possible responses and analysis that other traditions and cultures might have on the 'big questions' it wants desperately to solve or resolve.

7. DRISHZ4NTA (EXAMPLE, FROM ELSEWHERE).

Digressing a little away from India for a moment to a neigh- bouring colony, I shall give a very brief example from a study of Australian Aboriginal culture. Kenneth Maddock, a lead- ing researcher on Aboriginal religion, commenting on earlier anthropological work on Aboriginal culture, notes that because Aborigines were "passive recipients of unmotivated gifts" that come through the powers of the All-Father/All- Mother in accordance with laws set clown in the Dreamtime, they were morally denying "the creativity which is truly theirs". Thus he adjudges this as "false consciousness", in contrast to the "true consciousness" which hermetically rec- ognizes that "individuals are vehicles of their society's tradi- tions". This "false consciousness" or unfounded beliefs of the Aboriginal people "abstracts imaginatively" what is "actual-

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ly human creativity" as being "powers standing over and against men" according to Maddock. 46

This amounts to saying that the Dreamtime is a figment of Aboriginal imagination from the general premise that the idea of and belief in non-human powers (perhaps other~ than an almighty, free-will respecting God) stems from imaginative abstractions, as Hegel would have put it. Hence the All- Father/All-Mother, Rainbow Serpent of ambiguous or uncer- tain gender, and the 'Law' they promulgate, merely provide a bridge between the imagined spirit ancestors and totems below (p 22). Note that Maddock has here locked himself into a "true-false"/"transcendental-totemic", "belief-myth" dichotomy. This is not unlike Durkheim and Eliade remain- ing trapped in the "sacred-profane" oppositional binary, or Otto being unable to go past the holy numinous ideation delimited by his non-inclusive categories of mysterium, tremendum et fascinans. Conversely, R C Zaehner who was insistent on the irreducibility of belief in a monotheistic God, whether encountered as the transcendent differentiated entity (Omni-God, the theophanic Krishna, spirit worlds, poly- heno-panentheism) or the transcendent existing in the centre within ('soul', dtman, pudgala, totem, fetish). 47 Or, for that matter, the suggestion that there has to be an uncompromis- ing rational ordering of the world. But it augurs even less well to read into these beliefs fideist assumptions that renegade Swanseans like D Z Phillips would want to import into the non-naturalistic theory. (A telling example of a fideist thesis is the following: Religious beliefs cannot be affected by person- al, social or cultural events. 48)

Radcliffe-Brown had known better that religious belief qua belief in Aboriginal Australian religion by themselves were of lit- tle significance when seen within the context of the larger mythological and cosmological picture - 'worldview' in the sense in which Ninian Smart has championed is probably clos- er to their predilection. Clearly then, the Aboriginal conscious-

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ness in Maddock's Malthusian characterization is no more "false" than it is "true" (or even "false") that the alien Martians have green skin, or that if my Tibetan-shitshu dogs were to con- ceive of the supremely transcendent in the dog-world that than of which no larger herder can be conceived that it will be a Super-Dog (fido absconditus notwithstanding). Must the ratio- nality of the belief be dependent entirely upon or be modelled on the soundness of theistic or proto-theistic and ontologi- cal/metaphysical arguments (again, as in Anselm, or in Aquinas, Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Swinburne and so on)? Now here is a sound argument: "If 2+2 =4, then God exists; 2+2=4, therefore God exists". 49 Do people anywhere seriously base their beliefs on such arguments? Alternatively, need it even admit of the Barthian possibility, namely, that the religious belief is properly basic: i.e. it is rational to accept without accepting it on the terms of any proposition or belief at all? But then Nagarjuna, the second century (C.E.) Buddhist dialectician, with a little help from J N Findlay, could argue that belief in the non-existence of omni-God is properly basic; or Hartshorne stretching Rigvedic insights on asat or Non-being, to justify Whiteheadean process- panentheism, s~ Need they, however, defer to any kind of ratio- nal justification- as necessary, essential, or basic? Wittgenstein, who became fond of Tagore's writings, chided at both Bertrand Russell and the parson for trying to win the argument either way, lamenting that these (post-War days) were indeed "a sorry time for the philosophy of religion in the English-speaking coun- tries. ''sl But simply because Wittgenstein refused to look for philosophical foundations and justifications for religious belief, it does not follow that theology and its fragmented reincarna- tions in comparative religion should unrepentantly transmigrate to far-off colonies! One wonders therefore if looking for the soundness of either theistic or non-theistic (i.e. atheistic and agnostic) arguments is any longer a tenable enterprise. In other words, such beliefs as we are concerned with need not be viewed as first-order truth-claims but rather located as part of a com-

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plicated "language-game" built up through accepted cukural experiences, or of a normative 'form of life', as Wittgenstein would put it.

Kant and Wittgenstein of course denied the possibility of personal experience of the transcendent in terms of the cate- gories acceptable to empirical and rational understanding, insisting that all our knowledge of the transcendent remains highly symbolic: the inarticulateness of the unconditioned, or that all our talk can only be talk of the Sublime, in supplemen- tal discourses (as in the Third Critique). But in those systems or traditions where personal experience of the transcendent is admitted, it is not intended to grant universal legitimacy to a particular cultural frame of reference and belief system. Rather one learns to negotiate different transcendent beliefs by inter- preting them within a self-reflective epistemic discourse without the constrains of a limiting universal paradigm, s2 It is important to pause for a moment at this juncture and really ask how do concepts like essence, necessity, universality, analyticity, a prior- icity, ens realissimum, the transcendent and transcendental, enter into Western philosophy (and impact gradually on philos- ophy of religion)? It might not occur to many that each has a root in an earlier theological, even biblical term expressive of notions such as eternity, immutability, distinguishing mark, pre- destined, never before revelation (akin to Sanskrit ap~rva), iden- tity of likenesses, God's will for the natural, and of heavenly, etc. Whence they become sui generis concepts with fixed significa- tions and assume a life all their own in propositional and logi- cal formulations is something of an enigma, but we get some clues from St Anselm's so-called ontological preoccupations and Augustine and Aquinas deferring to the ghosts of the philoso- phers, namely, Plato and Aristotle, Philo, among others.

So the founders of natural theology, the precursor to clas- sical and contemporary philosophy of religion, were ill-aware that they had placed themselves in the half-self-deprecating subaltern position, as Gramsci might put it, and in this way

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invited subordination of their own inner passions, cultural sen- sibilities, etc. But simultaneously this onto-theo-logy instilled in them the desire or mission to civilize, uplift the moral and intel- lectual conditions of the near and remote pagans, barbarians, heathens, depraved, etc. The transcendent affirms his existence in and through arguments. Or perhaps natural theologians pre- supposed that omni-God would like theistic arguments to suc- ceed and non-theistic ones to fail. Even a disengenuous premise introduced stealthily into a prayer to stifle the Fool - as in Anselm's famous reducio: that what is in re is greater than what is simply in intellectu - would be pleasing to omni-God. But would an omni-God true to His [nongendered] ethical form be more on the side of dishonest theists than on the side of honest non-theists s3 (like J N Findlay, J J C Smart, J L Austin, J L Mackie, J L Mehta, J L Nehru, J N Mohanty, J Krishnamurty, Jay-la Garfield, Jai Bilson, and other J's!)? And it matters little what kind of omni-God these arguments clinch "proofs" of - the God of classical philosophers, of traditional Christianity, or the revisionist rational reconstructivists (Alston, Hartshorne variety) and secularists in spite of themselves (like Hicks, Braithwaite, D Z Phillips), or of the Hindu theistic advocates (like Madhva, Caitanya, Krishnaism; Dasgupta, Basham, Sharma; or Hindutva of some modern-day rugurus).

~iRAT~ (CONCLUSION)

At the conclusion of this disquisition one must say that Indian and comparative thought fell into the lure of the concepts and abstractions, in the Hegelian fashion; or after Kant with the idea of rationally ordering the world; and the quest for perfec- tion, ontological demand inscripted by Anselm; goodness of the transcendent, and so on, all of which chalk out an inter- minable project, for the urge is to come up with stronger, unas- sailable conceptions of which no greater there can be. Moving to the 'cross-cultural' field, as the legacy of the earlier 'corn-

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parative' enterprise following Max MUller and company should remind us, more often than not provokes resentiment, followed by a zeal to reform, and an even more sterile response from the appointed native informants of the other tradition as a means of overcoming the very othering entailed in this process. This has been a welcome insight of postcolonial and subaltern studies scholars. The subaltern critique, therefore, on the margins of comparative philosophy of religions must remain, like the symbol of the goddess in mainstream culture, a "disturbing presence", begging to differ and defer.

ENDNOTES

Apart from the said AAR Symposium, a central part of the paper was also earlier presented in the Philosophy Department Colloquia, in the University of Melbourne; and it has benefit- ed from my research in the Gibson Library as a Senior Fellow in the Department. I note gratitude also to my #259 col- leagues, Dr Guy Petterson and Patrick Hutchings for help with research and/or comments on various excerpted drafts from the evolving work. And to many friends who have heard my wailings on this problematic across the Tasman-Pacific- Indian-Atlantic waters.

See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, c.1995. My own response to Bhabha will be appear in 'The Locution of Culture' (future supplement); see also Andrew Irvine's discussion of Bhabha in the preceding article. For recent discussions, see, P. Bilimoria, 'Duh.kha & Karma: the problem of evil and God's omnipotence', Sophia, vol 34, no 1, 1995 (100th issue), pp. 92- 119. See Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, In Other Worlds; and issues of Public Culture.; Gyan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography', Comparative Studies in Society & history vol 32.1 1990 pp. 383-408. Michael Dutton discusses Niranjana's critique in a paper, Michael Dutton, 'Translating Theory: Orient-ing Postcolonialism ~(draft paper, courtesy of author).

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.

5

.

7.

See also, Raymond Schwab The Oriental Renaissance Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (Columbia University Press, New York, 1984). P.ostcript.'Subalternity',and 'Postcolonial' in their excess do however come under severe censor in Spivak's more recnt writings, which is better left for discussion of her 1999 book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Harvard University Press. J W Burbidge Hegel On Logic & Religion, SUNY Press 1992 p.126 See Paul Tillich's classic work in this area: The Culture of Theology. Said's Culture and Imperialism is a more helpful book in this context also than his Orientalism. G.W.E Hegel The Philosophy of History Translated by J. Sibree (Dover Publications, New York, 1956) p. 199. See G W F Hegel On the Episode of the Mahabharata known by the name Bhagavad-Gita by Wilhem von Humboldt Berlin 1826, Edited and translation by Herbert Herring, Indian Council of Philosophical Research Delhi 1995. Humboldt was influenced by Bopp and worked in Sanskrit around 1819-1822. Colebrooke was in India c. 1782. V. Raghavan, Indological Studies in India Motilal Banarsidas, 1964, pp 24-26. Even a Latin treatise was written on Vedanta by F H Windischmann, Sancara sive de theologumenis Veddnticorum, Bonn 1833) which became models for German writings on VedSnta, e.g. Paul Deussen, Das System des Veddnta, Leipzig, 1883; Rudolph Otto, West-ostliche Mystik, Gotha, 1926. See also, Natalia Isayeva, Shankara and Indian Philosophy, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1993. William Jones, Discourses on the Hindus, Presidential Address to the Asiatic Society. Calcutta, 1786. The ultimate 'Renaissance' man. For Max Muller, see his Three Lectures on Veddnta Philosophy Chowkhamba Publication 1967.p 8.

See also Max Mu'ller's The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy Selected Works of Max M~ller, XIX Longmans, London 1928. The ingenious feat through which Miiller, the scholar-entrepreneur, succeded in contracting Oxford University Press to undertake publication of the monumental multi-volumed Sacred Books of the East, is a story in itelf. For it says something apart how Indology is in part a business con- struction intended to impress the suddenly awakened Anglo-

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literati and their industrial patrons: The Empire had to be written, for which the antiquarian "babblings" of the East provided at best the alphabet, maybe some semantics and a good deal of myths, but no syntax and deeper meaning that awaited European minds to fathom and re-produce in texts.

9 Sheldon Pollock, 'Deep Orientalism Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the R~j', Asian Studies 1990. Also cited in Yadav Bibhuti's paper.

10 Manfred Mayrhofer, Sanskrit and the Language of Ancient Europe Two centuries of the couterplay of discoveries and errors (Sanskrit und die SprachAn Alteruropas...) Vandenhoeck and Rurecht, Gottingen. trans by Bob Slonek with Guy Petterson (Melbourne, 1995); W Halbfass, "Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer and India" in Zietschrift fur Kulturaustauch vo137 no 3 1987 pp. 423-33 (trans by Slonek and Petterson). p2.; see also Haibfass, 'Indian and the com- parative method' Philosophy East & West vol 35 no 1 1985 Jan, pp. 3-15 (points out that the term 'comparative philoso- phy' was actually not invented until after 1923 publication of P Masson-Ourset's 'La philosophie compare'e'), although AI- Burini was practicing this art as well as the 19th "Renaissance" philosophes without mistake.

11 Pollock, op tit. p 94 12 But see Dale M. Schlitt Dwine Subjectivity Understanding

Hegel's Philosophy of Religion (University of Scranton Press, London and Toronto, 1990), Section on 'Determinate Religion'(II. 3) where Schlitt refers to Ignatius Viyagappa's G. W E Hegel's Concept of Indian Philosophy (Rome, 1980). Viyagappa shows that Hegel closely analyzed some of the Upanishads and came very close to the essence of their mean- ing. Both Jaeshcke, editor of the new German edition of the Hegel lectures, and Peter Hodgson, the editor of the English translation, have paid close attention to Hegel's use of sources.

13 Wilhelm Halbfass. India and Europe An Essay in Understanding (State University of New York Press, Albany, 1988) p. 87-89; See Ch. 8 'Hegel, Hinduism and Freedom' in Merold Westphal Hegel, Freedom and Modernity (State University of New York Press, Albany, 1992)

14 Citations are from Halbfass Ibid. p. 89; Westphal ibid; W. T. Stace The Philosophy of Hegel (London, 1924) p. 497 cited in Halbfass. p. 9; cf. G.W.EHegel Introduction to the Lectures

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on the History of Philosophy Translated by T.M.Knox and A.V.Miller (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985) p. 149; Mehta on Heidegger, Hermeneutics and Indian Philosophy (ed. William Jackson, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1992)

15 G.W.E Hegel The Philosophy of History Translated by J. Sibree (Dover Publications, New York, 1956) p. 99.

16 'Lectures On Vedanta', op cit. p 10. 17 Riidiger Safranski Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of

Philosophy Translated by Ewald Osers (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massuchusetts, 1990) p. 63; p. 199 includes Schopenhauer citation from A. Hiibscher (ed) Der handschriftliche Nachlass (Frankfurt/Nachdruck, 1968-1985) Vol. I p. 169

18 Padmasiri de Silva Buddhism and Freudian Psychology (Singapore University Press, 1978, 2nd ed) p. 185 n. 3

19 Friedrich Nietzsche The Case of Wagner (1888) p. 4 cited in Freny Mistry Nietzsche and Buddhism Prolgemenon to a Comparative Study (Walter de Gruyter, New York, 1981) p. 4

20 Paul Deussen Die Elemente der Metaphysik (Aachen, 1877) cited in Mistry ibid. p. 13 n. 15

21 Ibid pp. 45-49 22 See Mistry, op cit; and note 23 below. 23 Jung was later to voice very similar concerns in view of the

twentieth-century interest in Eastern religions and a subse- quent loss in belief in Western intellectual achievement; but he was more than most dilettante's responsible for gross distor- tions, mystification, expropriation and bastardization of Indian thinking.

24 Johann Figl 'Nietzsche's Early Encounters with Asian Thought' (pp. 51-63) in Graham Parkes Nietzsche and Asian Thought (University of Chicago Press) 1991, p. 52: "Again in the context of the question of fate Nietzsche comes to speak of two basic documents on Indian literature and religion, the MahdbhcTrata and the Ramayana. These two epics are men- tioned in a draft Nietzsche made of an essay for school dated December 8, 1862 (BAW 2, 445 Nachbericht)." Figl's essay deals primarily with this early period of Nietzsche's encoun- ters with Asian thought - his 'high school' years at Pforta (1854-64)as well as his years at the University of Bonn (1864- 65). Mistry notes (op. cit. p. 43): "It is essentially in opposi- tion to Christianity tha Nietzsche appreciates Buddhism,

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25 26

27 28 30

though paradoxically, and for the most part, he polemises[sic] against both religions conjunctly." This comment leads us to suspect that Nietzsche was not so much concerned with a comparative investigation as such, pitting one faith against another, but was rather invoking, and no doubt provoking, the great faiths in the course of a search for his own fate, a search which leads to the Ubermensch, and the metaphorical term, 'Europe's Buddha' carries traces of the destinies through which he passed in his tortuous conception. The frustration which Nietzsche felt with the ostensible passivity and 'nihilism' of Buddhism is well brought out in chapter IV 'On suffering' of Mistry's book where Nietzsche's insistence of the existential need of suffering and the creative outcome of the experience of misfortune is highlighted. See pp. 116-123. See also, Joan Stambaugh Nietzsche's Thought ol c Eternal Return The Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore and London, 1972) p. 18 J L Mehta on Heidegger... op cit p 146. P Bilimoria, 'The Renaissance Reaction to Sruti' in Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Reserahc Institute, Poona 1984 Vol LXV pp 43-58. The theosophical movement which erupted in the Indo-Anglo and American world shortly after this should also be mentioned in this context. Ibid, p. 47 Mehta, op cit p 156. For a fascinating account, see Frank F Conlon, 'The Polemic Process in Nineteenth-century Maharashtra Visnubawa Brahmachari and Hindu Revival', in Kenneth Jones (ed.) Religious Controversy in British India(SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1992,) pp 5-26.17. I have a copy of a book published by John Wilson India Three Thousand Years Ago in which he dis- cusses the "social state of the ~lryas... in the time of the Vedas", written in 1858; he boasts of the European learning and European ingenuity, with partial assistance from the natives of India, for securing the manuscripts and translating them (p 17). But it is entirely derivative of the works of Miiller and H H Wilson. Fifty or so years later Cowell put together a collection of essays by various British writers on themes cov- ering "Ancient India", which was a vast improvement, but again the clear linkages with ancient Greek and European ancestral cultures are evident.

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29 First part cited in D P Singhal, India and World Civilization vol II Rupa & Co, Delhi, p 249; second part in Partha Chatterjee, Subaltern Studies vol VII, Delhi: Oxford University Press, c.1992 pp.42-45; and Mehta, op cir. p.106.

30 Hinduism Past and Present, The Religious Tract Society, London, 1885, p 258; see also two little books by F B Jevons, The Idea of God in Early Religion and Comparative Religionboth Cambridge 1913 which together has one index entry only on 'philosophy' and that too in the context of dis- cussing Buddha's substitution of philosophy for psychology!

31 Calcutta University Press, 1918; second edition 1974 (reprint) by Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi.

32 Tapan Raychaudhuri discusses this intellectual in his Surrendra Paul Lecture 1995 (Calcutta Ramakrishnan Institite for Culture) 'Transformation of Religious Sensibilities in Nineteenth Century Bengal', (circulated).

33 His idea of the playful Absolute (Hiranyagarbha) was half- way between Brahman of gafikara and the Concrete Absolute Spirit of Hegel. For passing discussion see, S. Gopal, Radhakrishnan: A Biography, Oxford University Press, Delhi 1989, and P. Bilimoria, 'Saving Appearances in Plato's Academy: Radhakrishnan on Philosophy' in S S S Ramarao Pappu (ed.) New Essays on Radhakrishnan Delhi, Satguru Publications/Indian Books Centre, 1995.

34 John Vattanky's Ga~ge~a's Philosophy of God, also comes to mind.

35 See P Bilimoria and J N Mohanty (eds.) Relativism, Suffering and Beyond Essays in Honour of Bimal K Matilal, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997; and Matilal's Collected Papers due out from Oxford University Press in late 2000.

36 Murray Mitchell, op cit. p 201, p 217. 37 P. Bilimoria, published in; International Philosophical

Quarterly vol xxx no 4 issue 120 Dec 1990: 481-499); See also, Daya Krishna, Indian Philosophy. A New Approach (Delhi: Satguru Publications) 1997

38 'Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice' in Wedge 7/8. Winter/Spring, 1985; re-printed in Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (MacMillan Education, London, 1988), pp. 271- 313. pp, 281,297.

39 See more in-depth discussion and review of critiques in, P

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Bilimoria and Renuka Sharma, 'Where Silence Burns: Sate_ ('suttee') in India, Mary Daly's Gyocritique, and Resistant Spirituality', in Mary Daly Re-Writing the Canon (Festschrift). Susan Hoagland and Marilyn Frye (eds), University of Penn State Press, Summer 2000.

40 Prison Notes, (trans. Q Hoare & G N Smith), N. Y. 1971, pp. 52-57.

41 For example, see, Ranajit Guha (ed). Subaltern Studies. Writings on South Asian history and society, vols -VII1 Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1982-1994. There have been around eight volumes published since, with a few more in the pipe- line. See also, Spivak, Subaltern Studies A Reader with Foreword by Said and Introduction ("Deconstructing Historiography") by Spivak. NY: Oxford University Press, 1987.

42 'Trafficking in History and Theory: Subaltern Studies', Paper read in Melbourne, History symposium.

43 See Bibhuti Yadav's staunch reservations in the first paper in this Symposium, with Surin's more balanced response; and an outsider's concerns in Ramachandra Guha (no relation), 'Subaltern Studies and Bhadralok Studies', Economic and Political Weekly August 19, 1995, pp 2056-2058. Ramachandra Guha has since joined and started a branch near the imposing Bangalore Club (at Koshy's, below the British Library of the Max Mffller Bhavan).

44 Some of these issues have of course been visited by a number of authors in Thomas Dean (ed.) Religious Pluralism and Truth: Essays on Cross-cultural Philosophy of Religion. SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1995.

45 To name just a few instances J L Mehta, J L Mehta on Heidegger, Hermeneutics and Indian Tradition (ed. by William Jackson) Leiden: E J Brill, 1992); J N Mohanty, Essays in Indian Philosophy Tradiional and Modern (ed. by E Bilimoria) Oxford University Pres, 1993, 1995; J C Arapura has published several papers on Cross-cultural Hermeneutics; Halbfass's Indian and Europe (SUNY Press, 1992) is quite well-known., as is Ron Inden's Imagining India (Chicago), Phillip Almond's work on the British Discobery of Buddhism (Cambrdge), Andrew P Tuck, Comparative Philosophy and the Philosophy of Scholarship On the Western Interprettaion of Nagarjuna (OUP N.Y. 1990); Donald Lopez, Curators of

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the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago University Press, 1995) shows how European colo- nial powers promoted a particular image of the Buddha as

championing simple ethical philosophy based on reason and restraint and which was opposed to ritual, superstitition and sacerdotalism. 'Deep Orientalism' is Pollock's phrase, op cit.

46 See K. Maddock's articles in Encyclopedia od Religion, Vol 1:566-570, 'Australian Religions: A History of Study', and 'All-Father' Vol 1: 212-213; also see 1971; reproduced in Charlesworth et al (eds.) Religion in Aboriginal Australia (Queensland University Press, 1992).

47 R C Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane, 1957. On Durkheim and Weber's intrusions into India see,

Romila Thapar, 'Durkheim and Weber on Theories of Society and Race Relations to Pre-colonial India' in R Thapar, Interpreting Early India (OUP Delhi, 1993)

48 D Z Phillips, Belief, Change and Forms of Life, MacMillan, 1986, p. 15

49 Mark T Nelson Sophia 35, no 2, 1996, notes. 50 On alternative strands in Indian thought derived from the asat

or Non-being thesis since the Rigvedic insight, see Antonio de Nicolas (1986) Avatdra The Humanization of Philosophy Through The Bhagavadg~td. Stony Brook, N.Y.:Nicolas Hay.

51 cf D Z Phillips 1986 p 1. Wittgenstein had blamed both "Russell and the parson" for the immense damage done to philosophy of religion. See Roy Monk Ludwig Wittgenstein The Duty of Genius, Vintage, (Paperback) pp 410-415 where Ludwig narrates about the virtues of a play by Tagore, 'The King of the Dark Chambers' which he translates. Ludwig is happier that God remains unknown but yearned for. Note also Schopenhauerian influence on the youthful genius, dis- cussed in Monk. That would make Ludwigian theology amenable to Buddhism, at least to the first three Nobel Truths.

52 See S. Akhtar, cited in Kai Nielsen 'Perceiving God', Faith, Scepticism & Personal Identity in Honor of T Penelhum, p. 11)

53 Mark T Nelson Sophia 35, no 2, 1996, notes. N.B. They need not all be atheists either; a few are perhaps better described as metaphysical agnostics; is there a better or more viable alter- native?

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