Sri Aurobindo and Krishnachandra Bhattacharya on Science and Spirituality

Abstract

The antagonistic relationship between modern science, understood as materialism, and religion, or spiritualism, existing in the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provided a challenging background to the contemporary Indian thinkers. Some of them passively accepted this dichotomy; some were ignorant of it; some either accepted materialism or spiritualism; and some thinkers tried to negotiate this antagonism between matter and spirit. A long braid of thinkers beginning from Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya to Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and S Radhakrishnan attempted to make some significant changes though working within the Oriental categories rightly explicated by Edward Said. Inserting into this dichotomy their political programme of making a case for Indian independence, they maintained that materialism (available in plenty in the West) is important but it alone cannot suffice. Spirit (the spiritualism that is available in the East, particular in India) needs to be added to it. Some aspects of this formulation fall outside the Saidian formulation. That is, though they worked within the parameters of Orientalism, the modifications they had implemented (some of them at least) fell outside it – particularly their attempt at converting what was dichotomous into continuous. My paper will discuss these various aspects involved in the modificatory nature of this relation. To dispel the impression that all Indian thinkers have embarked on this convergence, I will discuss a counterinstance available in the writings of Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya, who repudiated contemporary Indian philosophers' attempt at making the continuous relation between matter and spirit without necessarily endorsing the antagonistic relation as available in the West.