A Brief History of Disbelief in India
A Srinivas Rao
1st October 2011
Recently I watched Jonathan Miller’s presentation of his television series on Atheism a History of Disbelief on the BBC and was quite impressed by the programme while being rather disappointed by Richard Dawkins ‘Root of All Evil’ another serial on atheism on the same channel. It was not just that disbelief tends to verge on the polemical as was the case with Richard Dawkins (who seemed to claim that religion by corollary was incapable of any good), but that it tends to be as fanatical in its dismissal as the assertions of centuries and legions of theists. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins over the last decade by adopting their polemical stances seem more antitheists than atheists. It is not in the content and assertions of indefensible beliefs that the understanding of atheism comes from. They come from the motivations deep within the human breast, of the need to make sense of the great uncertainties of life which are death disease and decrepitude. Anthropologists have maintained that the origins of belief lie in random interventions of unseen beings or forces that are pliable to mischief, placation and propitiation; not in the contesting portrayals of monotheistic patriarchal (and senescent) deity who intervenes in the trajectories of our lives. These rather early hypotheses that uncertainty in our daily lives are caused by extra empirical forces/beings/agency and that they can be mitigated by placating them is the beginning of science and religion. They no longer are scientifically valid but belong to the realm of myth which is a domain of early attempts to model the workings of the world and its diverse inhabitants. They were in other words ‘working hypotheses’. Neither can we dismiss belief altogether as it is not belief but the content of them which is subject to interrogation. We cannot survive without belief which is shorthand of our mental models of our ethical and political assumptions that underscore our social behaviour. It is only certain kinds of beliefs that are beyond the pale of our modern faith in empiricism that are held suspect, as they suffer from their un-verifiability by independent inquirers; whose converse is the touchstone of thinking in our times.
One must bear in mind that atheism in our times seems to be largely a reaction to the contesting Semitic (one wonders why the sons of Ham and Japheth fought less over this) visions of a wrathful and jealous patriarch of the Old Testament with those of the alternative vision of the New Testament and that of the revelations unto a more recent prophet of the Qurayash in Arabia. Not only were these textual contestations convergent in some sense but they were geographically concentrated around the contentious Holy Land. It was not the patriarchy but the institutionalisation of their respective belief systems into an organised faith and their consequent corruptibility that bred the notion of atheism. With the end of the dark ages, and the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman atheists beginning with Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, including speculations of Aristotle; thanks to Muslim scholars of Constantinople, refined models of heliocentrism, and naturalism took hold. With the rise of Darwinism, the early stirrings to atheism which was called Deism (that needed God to start the machine- as actus primus and vanish) were happily discarded with no reference to God in their new hypotheses. That creationism and intelligent design continue to flourish in the Bible belts of the world is testimony to conservatism in jettisoning a traditional belief system with a newer one and the inertia of institutional investments in belief.
Asian thinkers would often wonder that until their own encounters with the West and subsequent fashioning of themselves as the ‘other’, that atheism was always part of their portfolio of hypotheses and thus religiously valid. In ancient India atheism had a happier antiquity and a greater openness to inquiry and understanding than the loose theism that is modern Hinduism. In Vedic cosmology the less orthodox (not recited by the Brahmins at ceremonies) “Nasadiya Sukta” rivals its more popular Purusha Sukta the hymn of creation in an elegant skepticism. Nasadiya means non-existent and the poem speculates
None knoweth whence creation has arisen:
And whether he has or has not produced it
He who surveys it in the highest heaven,
He alone knows, or haply he may know not.
It begins by paradoxically stating “not the non-existent existed, nor did the existent exist then” and then states "then not death existed, nor the immortal". It proceeds "breathing without breath, of its own nature, that one" "from great heat was born that one" who "found the bond of being within non-being with their heart's thought". This single flight of antiquated poetry would compensate the tomes of textual sectarianism that sadly followed.
In Indian thought the notion of creator God was always held in doubt. It was owing to their theory of causation that maintained that a material cause is different from an intelligent cause and both were needed to produce an object. It was only in the case of God that it maintained that there was a contradiction if the two were held separate, as it would posit two eternals and goes against the aesthetic notion of a unity in godhead. The early Vedic speculation hypothesized that the capricious forces of nature are probably amenable to propitiation but did not reduce the multitude of the forces to one omnipotent overseer; choosing rather to keep the absolute (Bhrahman) as an idea untainted by quotidian demands. The Indian term for atheism is nastika and its original meaning was one who did not hold the revelation of the Veda as a valid means of knowledge. It did not mean whether one held belief in extra empirical agency or forces, as it hardly mattered to most of the thinkers then. It is perhaps fallacious to consider that Indian philosophy was too preoccupied with spirituality. The dominance of a theistic and spiritual world view came rather late and probably after the 6th -8th century CE.
Indian philosophy consciously fashioned itself around spirituality only after the challenge of the shramana (the strivers) or heretical faiths around 500 BCE who laid emphasis on asceticism and withdrawal. What was truly ironical was that all the shramanic faiths were atheistic in a new sense that they all denied agency and intercession and held that a spontaneous cosmic order was the ground of being for all life. Salvation to them was born of self effort and not an external agency, rejecting the supernatural (adrishtavada). What was more remarkable were the shramanic beliefs in karma, transmigration of the soul and the denial of the efficacy of ritual and prayer and rejection of the caste system. Over time the doctrines of karma and rebirth suffused into Hindu thought from the shramanic. The problem of evil as envisaged in the West is formulated as “how one reconciles a benevolent God with the existence of evil which he can possibly prevent?” It elicits a hypothesis of indifference that supernatural beings are either indifferent or don’t exist to prevent evil. As long as we admit human free will, the problem of evil sits uncomfortably with a just God and justice deferred to the day of judgement. The Indian view was the result of a belief in a cosmic order Rta or a natural law that also informs the moral order. The free will of human beings is reconciled with a law of causation or Karma which distributes justice with no reference to a supernatural being or claims to his interventions through propitiation. Thus it did not demand a strong theism to intervene on evil and justice. The law of Karma was insufficient to explain away the anomalies in the incidence of evil and suffering and distributive justice would demand that Karma had to extend itself to longer periods of many life times. This mitigated the anxiety of death and the problem of justice by reincarnation and cycles of rebirth through the cumulative baggage of karma.
Shramanic faiths were not united in their atheism but were a varied set of contradictory belief systems. Some of the famous shramanas almost all of who were contemporaries of the Buddha and Mahavira (both also shramanas) were all atheistic. They included Purana Kassapa an amoralist who denied any reward or punishment for good or bad deeds, Makkhali Goshala who rejected free will and propounded an extreme fatalism though with no reference to an author of destiny, Pakudha Kacchayana who held that there are seven irreducible, uncreated, stable un-interacting substances which include the five elements, pleasure, pain and soul, Sanjaya Balatthaputta an agnostic who claimed that we cannot determine the exact nature of reality, and who was derided as a slippery eel. Finally there was also Ajitha Keshakambalin the first true materialist and probable founder of the Lokayata School. Keshakambalin (the wearer of a blanket of hair- was often derided as uncouth and foul smelling) propounded the doctrine of death as annihilation (Ucchedavada). He boldly maintained that with death the body returns to the five elements and that good and evil, charity, compassion were irrelevant to a man’s fate. Later the Lokayata was renamed Charavaka (argumentators) and had a text the Brihaspati Sutras which has been irretrievably lost with only a few unreliable quotations in the 14th Century CE text Sarva Darshana Sangraha. Kautilya in his Arthashastra (probably 4th Century BCE) clubs this school of Lokayata with Yoga and Samkhya as the three logical philosophies (anvikshiks). Of the orthodox Indian schools the earliest the Purva Mimamsa (or the early analysts) did not bother themselves with God but did believe in heaven and a plurality of supernatural agents. The other two schools Nyaya (Logic) and Vaisheshika (atomism) only nominally stated any belief though they came close to defining a prime mover or first cause. It was the highly influential Samkhya (enumeration) under the influence of shramanas, Buddhist and Jain thinkers who discarded God or Ishwara as a requisite principle in the universe. By the 14th century CE when Indian philosophy was presented systematically by Madhava Acharya in his text referred to above the Sarva Darshana Samgraha the prejudice was obvious; Charavaka was the first chapter followed by Buddhism and ending in Advaita Vedanta as the final and ultimate sixteenth chapter.
The intellectual ferment of the times of the shramana faiths were such that they contested two sequential streams of thought. The first was the contest between what was called the accidentalism versus agency {“yaddrchhavada” or animittavada (accidentalism) versus adrishtavada (supernatural agency)}. Accidentalism was a position that the world was a mere chance and assumed order is merely accidental or that order was mere operation of chance and not causation. This stood elegantly opposed to a more primitive idea of supernatural agency. While the idea of accidentalism seemed rather unsatisfactory against the idea of a cosmic order of the Veda, this mutated into what was called swabhavavada or evolution. This theory held that matter is endowed with the necessary causation to teleologically evolve into diverse forms and objects. In other words purpose and design are built into nature and unfolded with time with no reference to an agent as creator or sustainer. This was well systematized by the Samkhya School. However the elegant formulation was later appropriated by Shankara and represented as a contest between two theories the Brahma Parinamavada or the idea of the evolution of the absolute and contested it against Brahma Vivartavada or the theory of apparent change of the absolute. Needless to say by such a representation he had converted a dualist position of the Samkhyas into an absolutist position of his own. Not merely that but Shankara claimed that all orthodox schools were absolutist in belief. The Samkhya believed that an effect preexisted in a cause and was latent in the cause (satkaryavada), and that real transformation is based on time (one may note that it was Buddhism that added contingency to temporal transformations in promoting evolution). Sankhya thus claimed natural evolution Prakriti Parinamavada. This elegant idea of evolution was discarded in favour of the apparent transformations of the absolute of Shankara; transforming a rather proto-scientific notion into a spiritual one.
It is rather unfortunate that science, art and architecture were all held hostage quite like the Dark Ages of the West after the 10th Century CE in India and a defensive outlook prevailed with Theism gaining hold of popular culture. Until the influence of Islam the arts were under the thrall of theistic Hindu traditions than independent in vision. Theism emerged not from the Vedic traditions but popular and folk elements that lay in “hero worship” (vira), where stone memorials of dead local heroes were propitiated (quite like the Pabbuji worship in Rajasthan today). The worship of Vasudeva probably emerged from the five hero (pancha vira) worship popular in Western India in the early centuries CE and included Sankarshna, Pradyumna, Samba and Aniruddha apart from Vasudeva. This was the beginning of the Vaishnavite sect. The Shaivite sect had probably older and antiquated origins in local phallic cults and fertility rites, and soon with the Pashupata sect, ithyphallic (erect penis) representations became more common in iconography. The worship of Lajja Gowri in Western India or the woman of the pot (kalasha) which represented a squatting female deity with exposed genitalia and a flower for a head was the prototype of early icons in fertility rites that worshipped nature as the sacred feminine. The emergence of early Tantra and its practices drew from such local forms of worship and formed the basis of early Hindu theism. These misty antiquated local origins were later embedded as a distinct mythology for each deity with the writing of the Puranas between 4th to 12th Century CE (including the famous Bhagavata in the 10th Century CE). These were the origins of theism in India that were distinct from the naturalistic conception of the Veda (and also its absolute-monist positions). With the advent of Islam and its strongly monotheistic conception, Hindu theism fashioned itself imperceptibly as ‘the other’ and became even more reactionary and rigid in its beliefs. The British dominance while bringing in the values of the European Enlightenment saw the uneasy accommodation with Hindu thought as humorously described by A K Ramanujam about his father of holding together in one brain both astronomy and astrology in two lobes; “I looked for consistency in him, a consistency he didn’t seem to care about or even think about”. Indeed it has also been pointed out that the late nineteenth century saw some of the prominent Hindu thinkers especially Swami Dayananda and Vivekananda make early attempts to fashion the diverse unbridled and energetic religious practices under a new monotheism. Some of them went to the extent of fashioning it close to the Western Church idea of One God, One Book and One Church. Though they did make a serious attempt, the Indian mind resisted such a reductionism.
In the ferment of political and social thought in Europe in the early part of the 20th Century, many in India were following the revolutions and upheavals and became vicarious participants of a new world order within whose trajectory was probably hidden the theories and movements that might animate India. With a new academic fashion of being Left inclined many scholars in the last century like Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya and DD Kosambi have attempted to reconcile the early Lokayata thought with dialectical materialism of Marx to find a natural though elusive bridge between the two. A strong moralist atheistic movement was founded by Goparaju Ramachandra Rao (Gora) in the late 30s at Vijayawada in India and was described as Positive Atheism which combined personal responsibility and with atheism and soon found a small but widespread following. Beyond that Atheism in India was more a personal creed than the espousal of any definitive position and sat as distinct to but indifferent to any theism or agnosticism.
Like the ancient Indian theory of accidentalism (yadracchavada) chance is probably the only condition that delivers justice. The idea of an interventionist God would seem not just benign but capricious. Like the early Deists it made sense that even of one did believe in God he should have in the name of justice disappeared from the scene after creation leaving the seething humanity to the operation of chance. The whole must always be indifferent to the individual. Yet chance also operates with contingency and necessity though not necessarily transparent to us. And hope and hopelessness weigh equally in the human breast regardless of the individual’s beliefs. We may never know a God if there was one; if we do not even know ourselves. Probably all we can aspire to is to know ourselves or perhaps not.
A Srinivas Rao
1st October 2011
Recently I watched Jonathan Miller’s presentation of his television series on Atheism a History of Disbelief on the BBC and was quite impressed by the programme while being rather disappointed by Richard Dawkins ‘Root of All Evil’ another serial on atheism on the same channel. It was not just that disbelief tends to verge on the polemical as was the case with Richard Dawkins (who seemed to claim that religion by corollary was incapable of any good), but that it tends to be as fanatical in its dismissal as the assertions of centuries and legions of theists. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins over the last decade by adopting their polemical stances seem more antitheists than atheists. It is not in the content and assertions of indefensible beliefs that the understanding of atheism comes from. They come from the motivations deep within the human breast, of the need to make sense of the great uncertainties of life which are death disease and decrepitude. Anthropologists have maintained that the origins of belief lie in random interventions of unseen beings or forces that are pliable to mischief, placation and propitiation; not in the contesting portrayals of monotheistic patriarchal (and senescent) deity who intervenes in the trajectories of our lives. These rather early hypotheses that uncertainty in our daily lives are caused by extra empirical forces/beings/agency and that they can be mitigated by placating them is the beginning of science and religion. They no longer are scientifically valid but belong to the realm of myth which is a domain of early attempts to model the workings of the world and its diverse inhabitants. They were in other words ‘working hypotheses’. Neither can we dismiss belief altogether as it is not belief but the content of them which is subject to interrogation. We cannot survive without belief which is shorthand of our mental models of our ethical and political assumptions that underscore our social behaviour. It is only certain kinds of beliefs that are beyond the pale of our modern faith in empiricism that are held suspect, as they suffer from their un-verifiability by independent inquirers; whose converse is the touchstone of thinking in our times.
One must bear in mind that atheism in our times seems to be largely a reaction to the contesting Semitic (one wonders why the sons of Ham and Japheth fought less over this) visions of a wrathful and jealous patriarch of the Old Testament with those of the alternative vision of the New Testament and that of the revelations unto a more recent prophet of the Qurayash in Arabia. Not only were these textual contestations convergent in some sense but they were geographically concentrated around the contentious Holy Land. It was not the patriarchy but the institutionalisation of their respective belief systems into an organised faith and their consequent corruptibility that bred the notion of atheism. With the end of the dark ages, and the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman atheists beginning with Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, including speculations of Aristotle; thanks to Muslim scholars of Constantinople, refined models of heliocentrism, and naturalism took hold. With the rise of Darwinism, the early stirrings to atheism which was called Deism (that needed God to start the machine- as actus primus and vanish) were happily discarded with no reference to God in their new hypotheses. That creationism and intelligent design continue to flourish in the Bible belts of the world is testimony to conservatism in jettisoning a traditional belief system with a newer one and the inertia of institutional investments in belief.
Asian thinkers would often wonder that until their own encounters with the West and subsequent fashioning of themselves as the ‘other’, that atheism was always part of their portfolio of hypotheses and thus religiously valid. In ancient India atheism had a happier antiquity and a greater openness to inquiry and understanding than the loose theism that is modern Hinduism. In Vedic cosmology the less orthodox (not recited by the Brahmins at ceremonies) “Nasadiya Sukta” rivals its more popular Purusha Sukta the hymn of creation in an elegant skepticism. Nasadiya means non-existent and the poem speculates
None knoweth whence creation has arisen:
And whether he has or has not produced it
He who surveys it in the highest heaven,
He alone knows, or haply he may know not.
It begins by paradoxically stating “not the non-existent existed, nor did the existent exist then” and then states "then not death existed, nor the immortal". It proceeds "breathing without breath, of its own nature, that one" "from great heat was born that one" who "found the bond of being within non-being with their heart's thought". This single flight of antiquated poetry would compensate the tomes of textual sectarianism that sadly followed.
In Indian thought the notion of creator God was always held in doubt. It was owing to their theory of causation that maintained that a material cause is different from an intelligent cause and both were needed to produce an object. It was only in the case of God that it maintained that there was a contradiction if the two were held separate, as it would posit two eternals and goes against the aesthetic notion of a unity in godhead. The early Vedic speculation hypothesized that the capricious forces of nature are probably amenable to propitiation but did not reduce the multitude of the forces to one omnipotent overseer; choosing rather to keep the absolute (Bhrahman) as an idea untainted by quotidian demands. The Indian term for atheism is nastika and its original meaning was one who did not hold the revelation of the Veda as a valid means of knowledge. It did not mean whether one held belief in extra empirical agency or forces, as it hardly mattered to most of the thinkers then. It is perhaps fallacious to consider that Indian philosophy was too preoccupied with spirituality. The dominance of a theistic and spiritual world view came rather late and probably after the 6th -8th century CE.
Indian philosophy consciously fashioned itself around spirituality only after the challenge of the shramana (the strivers) or heretical faiths around 500 BCE who laid emphasis on asceticism and withdrawal. What was truly ironical was that all the shramanic faiths were atheistic in a new sense that they all denied agency and intercession and held that a spontaneous cosmic order was the ground of being for all life. Salvation to them was born of self effort and not an external agency, rejecting the supernatural (adrishtavada). What was more remarkable were the shramanic beliefs in karma, transmigration of the soul and the denial of the efficacy of ritual and prayer and rejection of the caste system. Over time the doctrines of karma and rebirth suffused into Hindu thought from the shramanic. The problem of evil as envisaged in the West is formulated as “how one reconciles a benevolent God with the existence of evil which he can possibly prevent?” It elicits a hypothesis of indifference that supernatural beings are either indifferent or don’t exist to prevent evil. As long as we admit human free will, the problem of evil sits uncomfortably with a just God and justice deferred to the day of judgement. The Indian view was the result of a belief in a cosmic order Rta or a natural law that also informs the moral order. The free will of human beings is reconciled with a law of causation or Karma which distributes justice with no reference to a supernatural being or claims to his interventions through propitiation. Thus it did not demand a strong theism to intervene on evil and justice. The law of Karma was insufficient to explain away the anomalies in the incidence of evil and suffering and distributive justice would demand that Karma had to extend itself to longer periods of many life times. This mitigated the anxiety of death and the problem of justice by reincarnation and cycles of rebirth through the cumulative baggage of karma.
Shramanic faiths were not united in their atheism but were a varied set of contradictory belief systems. Some of the famous shramanas almost all of who were contemporaries of the Buddha and Mahavira (both also shramanas) were all atheistic. They included Purana Kassapa an amoralist who denied any reward or punishment for good or bad deeds, Makkhali Goshala who rejected free will and propounded an extreme fatalism though with no reference to an author of destiny, Pakudha Kacchayana who held that there are seven irreducible, uncreated, stable un-interacting substances which include the five elements, pleasure, pain and soul, Sanjaya Balatthaputta an agnostic who claimed that we cannot determine the exact nature of reality, and who was derided as a slippery eel. Finally there was also Ajitha Keshakambalin the first true materialist and probable founder of the Lokayata School. Keshakambalin (the wearer of a blanket of hair- was often derided as uncouth and foul smelling) propounded the doctrine of death as annihilation (Ucchedavada). He boldly maintained that with death the body returns to the five elements and that good and evil, charity, compassion were irrelevant to a man’s fate. Later the Lokayata was renamed Charavaka (argumentators) and had a text the Brihaspati Sutras which has been irretrievably lost with only a few unreliable quotations in the 14th Century CE text Sarva Darshana Sangraha. Kautilya in his Arthashastra (probably 4th Century BCE) clubs this school of Lokayata with Yoga and Samkhya as the three logical philosophies (anvikshiks). Of the orthodox Indian schools the earliest the Purva Mimamsa (or the early analysts) did not bother themselves with God but did believe in heaven and a plurality of supernatural agents. The other two schools Nyaya (Logic) and Vaisheshika (atomism) only nominally stated any belief though they came close to defining a prime mover or first cause. It was the highly influential Samkhya (enumeration) under the influence of shramanas, Buddhist and Jain thinkers who discarded God or Ishwara as a requisite principle in the universe. By the 14th century CE when Indian philosophy was presented systematically by Madhava Acharya in his text referred to above the Sarva Darshana Samgraha the prejudice was obvious; Charavaka was the first chapter followed by Buddhism and ending in Advaita Vedanta as the final and ultimate sixteenth chapter.
The intellectual ferment of the times of the shramana faiths were such that they contested two sequential streams of thought. The first was the contest between what was called the accidentalism versus agency {“yaddrchhavada” or animittavada (accidentalism) versus adrishtavada (supernatural agency)}. Accidentalism was a position that the world was a mere chance and assumed order is merely accidental or that order was mere operation of chance and not causation. This stood elegantly opposed to a more primitive idea of supernatural agency. While the idea of accidentalism seemed rather unsatisfactory against the idea of a cosmic order of the Veda, this mutated into what was called swabhavavada or evolution. This theory held that matter is endowed with the necessary causation to teleologically evolve into diverse forms and objects. In other words purpose and design are built into nature and unfolded with time with no reference to an agent as creator or sustainer. This was well systematized by the Samkhya School. However the elegant formulation was later appropriated by Shankara and represented as a contest between two theories the Brahma Parinamavada or the idea of the evolution of the absolute and contested it against Brahma Vivartavada or the theory of apparent change of the absolute. Needless to say by such a representation he had converted a dualist position of the Samkhyas into an absolutist position of his own. Not merely that but Shankara claimed that all orthodox schools were absolutist in belief. The Samkhya believed that an effect preexisted in a cause and was latent in the cause (satkaryavada), and that real transformation is based on time (one may note that it was Buddhism that added contingency to temporal transformations in promoting evolution). Sankhya thus claimed natural evolution Prakriti Parinamavada. This elegant idea of evolution was discarded in favour of the apparent transformations of the absolute of Shankara; transforming a rather proto-scientific notion into a spiritual one.
It is rather unfortunate that science, art and architecture were all held hostage quite like the Dark Ages of the West after the 10th Century CE in India and a defensive outlook prevailed with Theism gaining hold of popular culture. Until the influence of Islam the arts were under the thrall of theistic Hindu traditions than independent in vision. Theism emerged not from the Vedic traditions but popular and folk elements that lay in “hero worship” (vira), where stone memorials of dead local heroes were propitiated (quite like the Pabbuji worship in Rajasthan today). The worship of Vasudeva probably emerged from the five hero (pancha vira) worship popular in Western India in the early centuries CE and included Sankarshna, Pradyumna, Samba and Aniruddha apart from Vasudeva. This was the beginning of the Vaishnavite sect. The Shaivite sect had probably older and antiquated origins in local phallic cults and fertility rites, and soon with the Pashupata sect, ithyphallic (erect penis) representations became more common in iconography. The worship of Lajja Gowri in Western India or the woman of the pot (kalasha) which represented a squatting female deity with exposed genitalia and a flower for a head was the prototype of early icons in fertility rites that worshipped nature as the sacred feminine. The emergence of early Tantra and its practices drew from such local forms of worship and formed the basis of early Hindu theism. These misty antiquated local origins were later embedded as a distinct mythology for each deity with the writing of the Puranas between 4th to 12th Century CE (including the famous Bhagavata in the 10th Century CE). These were the origins of theism in India that were distinct from the naturalistic conception of the Veda (and also its absolute-monist positions). With the advent of Islam and its strongly monotheistic conception, Hindu theism fashioned itself imperceptibly as ‘the other’ and became even more reactionary and rigid in its beliefs. The British dominance while bringing in the values of the European Enlightenment saw the uneasy accommodation with Hindu thought as humorously described by A K Ramanujam about his father of holding together in one brain both astronomy and astrology in two lobes; “I looked for consistency in him, a consistency he didn’t seem to care about or even think about”. Indeed it has also been pointed out that the late nineteenth century saw some of the prominent Hindu thinkers especially Swami Dayananda and Vivekananda make early attempts to fashion the diverse unbridled and energetic religious practices under a new monotheism. Some of them went to the extent of fashioning it close to the Western Church idea of One God, One Book and One Church. Though they did make a serious attempt, the Indian mind resisted such a reductionism.
In the ferment of political and social thought in Europe in the early part of the 20th Century, many in India were following the revolutions and upheavals and became vicarious participants of a new world order within whose trajectory was probably hidden the theories and movements that might animate India. With a new academic fashion of being Left inclined many scholars in the last century like Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya and DD Kosambi have attempted to reconcile the early Lokayata thought with dialectical materialism of Marx to find a natural though elusive bridge between the two. A strong moralist atheistic movement was founded by Goparaju Ramachandra Rao (Gora) in the late 30s at Vijayawada in India and was described as Positive Atheism which combined personal responsibility and with atheism and soon found a small but widespread following. Beyond that Atheism in India was more a personal creed than the espousal of any definitive position and sat as distinct to but indifferent to any theism or agnosticism.
Like the ancient Indian theory of accidentalism (yadracchavada) chance is probably the only condition that delivers justice. The idea of an interventionist God would seem not just benign but capricious. Like the early Deists it made sense that even of one did believe in God he should have in the name of justice disappeared from the scene after creation leaving the seething humanity to the operation of chance. The whole must always be indifferent to the individual. Yet chance also operates with contingency and necessity though not necessarily transparent to us. And hope and hopelessness weigh equally in the human breast regardless of the individual’s beliefs. We may never know a God if there was one; if we do not even know ourselves. Probably all we can aspire to is to know ourselves or perhaps not.
Sir, look at Madhyasta Dharsan/ sahastitvavad. It is presented as an alternative to idealism and materialism. I am presently studying it and think that it is the most amazing literature i have read. Himansu Dugar
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