Abstract
Standard scholarships, particularly those of postcolonial school, have passably underlined the Eurocentric or Orientalist underpinnings in Hegel’s writings on India. This downbeat assessment becomes even more intense when Hegel himself deploys dismissive adjectives to describe the Indian thought. Aakash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra’s book Hegel’s India carries an assortment of Hegel’s original writings on Indian art, religion and philosophy, along with a critical yet constructive reassessment of Hegel’s India in a more sensitive and contextual manner.
Hegel’s India seeks to transcend the standard interpretations by examining Hegel’s writings on Indian art, religion and philosophy to discern the nature of his engagement with India (though often marked by arrogance, ignorance and Eurocentricism) and how, if at all, it helped Hegel to enrich his own philosophical projects. Unlike the standard interpretations, Rathore and Mohapatra strive to argue that Hegel’s engagement, in more than 80,000 words, with India is more than a mere Oriental project; it is provocative in some crucial ways, and the further appreciation of reassessment of Hegel’s India has the potential to evolve. Thus, they claim; ‘Hegel was not just othering, he was bothering… [Which] the standard interpretations fail to account for…’ (p. 25). Interestingly, Hegel attributed more time and space to Indian thought than to the Greeks which certainly suggest that this fascination merits attention.
Hegel’s India contends that the examination of Indian art, religion and philosophy allowed Hegel to achieve a certain kind of refinement in his own philosophy. But how does Hegel attempt to achieve this refinement? Hegel’s India becomes more comprehensible when we situate India in his larger philosophical framework, as the book suggests. Hegel does this in two ways. The first is the idea of freedom as a pivot in Hegelian philosophy which leads Hegel to produce a scathing critique of India’s caste configurations. The second is dialectical mediation, which he finds inadequately manifest in Indian thought. In the light to these goals, Hegel finds Indian thought as essentially static, iterative and lacking content. Thus, if Indian art, religion and philosophy don’t seek freedom and are not dialectical in stringently Hegelian terms, they obviously fall outside the contours of philosophy and history. The overall reinterpretation in the rest of the book seems to hinge on these motifs, or which serve, in author’s creative phrase, as ‘a ladder to the Hegelian system of philosophy’ (p. 6).
Undoubtedly, Hegel had no first-hand knowledge of India or its languages. He rather relied mostly on the works of Western Indologists or missionary reports. It is often said that Hegel’s ignorance of non-Western knowledge systems and his magisterial judgements on them makes him a precursor of racist scholarship. In standard interpretations, as identified by Rathore and Mohapatra, several theses are advanced to account for Hegel’s characterisation of Indian thought as ‘pre-historical’. One is that Hegel’s writings on India can simply be polemical in so far he was responding to his contemporaries. Indian thought served as a crucial material for Hegel to ridicule German romanticism that was much in vogue during his own time. Moreover, Hegel could have been simply outwitting his contemporaries while using his ‘knowledge’ of the Oriental world. Rathore and Mohapatra don’t squarely side-line these accounts, but rather note that Hegel is more receptive and less prejudicial towards non-Western knowledge in comparison to contemporary academic scholarship powered by more accurate sources and information. Hegel didn’t just pass domineering judgements on Indian religion and philosophy but committed himself to examine them rigorously. They, therefore, suggest that our understanding and assessment of Hegel’s India might evolve if we take Indian philosophy as painstakingly as Hegel did. Interestingly, such a call for serious engagement with Indian philosophy resonates with other works by Aakash Singh Rathore over the past few years.
Hegel’s other lesser known writings include fragments such as Oriental spirit, logic and right. Hegel’s treatment of India, its art, religion and philosophy is, quite apparently, explained by the cardinal method that undergirds his magnum opus Phenomenology of Spirit. In it, Hegel unfolds his method of dialectics involving a progression between contradictory sides, in which one set of forces negate the other set, giving rise to a third set of forces which don’t nullify the previous forces but essentially preserve what is best in them in a way to reach to the next higher end. This progression is at the heart of Hegelian conception of philosophy and history. It is from this standpoint that Hegel argues that the Indian pantheistic systems such as the Hindu conception of trimurthi (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva) don’t feature speculative or dialectical elements adequately. Even though the three manifestations appear to be separate, they are not entirely disparate or determinate. In a standard dialectic, the third element should intercede the universal and the particular, but in this case, it doesn’t come back to the first, thereby failing to complete the circle. It rather ends in annihilation. For these reasons, Hegel dubs Indian thought as essentially static, lacking rational objectivity, self-consciousness and freedom. Its Absolute (Brahman) emanates from religion, in the absence of real civic rules and institutions; it ends in the divine, ‘with no rights for individual personality’.
The book rekindles what is, by and large, taken as ‘obviously settled debate’. Orientalism and Eurocentric bias conspicuously shaped Hegel’s reading of Indian systems of knowledge, but as editors submit quite convincingly, such factors didn’t entirely determine Hegel’s writings on India. He does engage with India, sometimes robustly, all of which cannot be boxed into racism and Eurocentrism. Interestingly, authors seem to hint that Hegel’s India writings offer windows into his own system of philosophy. On several occasions in the text, Rathore and Mohapatra lament Hegel’s ignorance of India’s pluralistic experiences given his reductive focus on Brahmanical India, but they fail to come clear on ‘experiences’ that were ‘autonomous’ from Brahminical hegemony. It seems that Rathore and Mohapatra are desperate to ‘compel’ Hegel to be sensitive to ‘plurality of Indian experiences, systems, and politics’, even when Brahmanism was essentially hegemonic and was conditioning almost all other experiences. Notwithstanding, this book is potently argued, which might inspire more research in this area.