India's Debt to the West in Philosophy

Abstract

EVEN A FEW GENERATIONS ago Indians who knew only their own philosophy, and little or nothing of the West, believed very confidently that philosophy, and perhaps spirituality and culture in general, belonged to India--just as many Western people, ignorant of the East, think about their own philosophical and cultural traditions even today. But this complacency of Indians was gradually shattered, chiefly by nearly two hundred years of British rule, the British system of education through English destructive preaching by Christian missionaries, and the phenomenal achievements of the West in science and technology. Those who studied at the British type of universities, such as Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay (started around 1850), could study only Western philosophy, the courses being deductive and inductive logic (in the preliminary college classes), psychology, ethics, metaphysics, natural theology, history of philosophy (Greek, medieval, and modern), and some special texts (or translations) of Western philosophical classics. Though during the last thirty years or so, with the increase of Indian teachers, Indian philosophy (mostly in English translation) has begun to be introduced, even today, ten years after political independence, it does not occupy more than a fifth or a fourth part of the entire course. The only places where Indian philosophy continued to be studied were the indigenous Sanskrit academies, but these went on languishing with the spread of Western education. Consequently, a rather unnatural situation has arisen which most Western scholars fail to realize, namely, that for about a hundred years philosophy graduates of Indian universities have been studying mostly Western philosophy, adopting its problems, its theories, and its ways of thinking as their own. Only a few inquisitive scholars, after finishing their university education, have tried to study the original abstruse Sanskrit texts with the help of the teachers of philosophy at the indigenous academies. It is by such private study that S. Radhakrishnan, S. N. Dasgupta, K. C. Bhattacharya, R. D. Ranade, and other modern distinguished philosophers and writers came to acquire scholarship in Indian philosophy. Indian philosophy is thus