In the essay's first section, A.K. Ramanujan uses the Stanislavskian approach and asks a few questions, emphasising different words in each question. The first question is, ‘Is’ there an Indian way of thinking? Here, ‘is’ is given emphasis. The answer he provides is there was an Indian way of thinking, but now there isn’t any. The thinking was there with pundits, the vaidyas, and the old texts. However, he also states that, on the contrary, India never changes according to modern contexts. Indians are naturally traditional and still think in terms of the Vedas.
In the second question, Is there ‘an Indian way of thinking? Emphasis is given to ‘an’. The answer is there is no single way of thinking in India. There are different ways. There are a few traditions, such as ancient and modern thinking, rural and urban thinking, classical and folk thinking, etc. So, under the apparent diversity, there is unity. Nehru calls this ‘unity in diversity’.
In the third question, Is there an ‘Indian’ way of thinking? The emphasis is given to the word Indian. Ramanujan answers that what we see in India is nothing special to India. India is a confluence of different cultures and traditions. Many new cultures came here; we received them and made them our own. There were a lot of borrowings in Indian culture. So, there is no Indian way of thinking.
In the fourth question, Is there an Indian way of ‘thinking’? The emphasis is on the word thinking. Ramanujan's answer is that Indians don’t think at all. Real thinking is materialistic and rational in the West. He explains that Indians have no philosophy, positive science, or psychology but only religion. In India, matter is subordinated to spirit and rational thought to feeling and intuition.
Thus, in the 1st part of his essay, Ramanujan states how India is perceived differently at different stages by different people and from various perspectives.
Instance from Personal Life
In the second part of the essay, Ramanujan uses a frame from his personal life about his father to show the inconsistency in Indian thinking. He states that his father’s clothes and lifestyle also represent his inner lifestyle. He was a South Indian Brahmin who wore dhotis and white turbans. But over his dhoti, he used to wear Western jackets and even Western shoes instead of Indian sandals. He wore his shoes to the university but took them off while entering the inner quarters of his house. This personal anecdote is a striking example of the contradictions that characterize Indian thinking and behaviour.
His father was a mathematician, astronomer, Sanskrit scholar, and expert astrologer. He was visited by English mathematicians, American scholars, local astrologers, and orthodox pundits. He talked religiously about the Bhagavad Gita but with the same tongue used to talk about Bertrand Russell and Ingersoll, the modern philosophers. Ramanujan describes that such contradictions are at the heart of the Indian way of thinking. It is both exclusive and inclusive.
Inconsistency in Indian Thinking
In the next part of his essay, Ramanujan points out that both English and modern Indians have been dismayed and angered by this kind of inconsistency. They agree on the Indian trait of hypocrisy. Indians do not mean what they say and say different things at different times. He uses the concept of ‘Karma’ to explain this hypocrisy. Sheryl Daniel found that Indians used Karma and Thalavidhi (handwriting) to describe the events around them. Karma implies the self’s past determines the present. It is an iron chain of cause and effect. But Thalavidhi is one’s fate inscribed arbitrarily at birth on one’s forehead. It has no relation to one’s prior actions. Some thinkers believe that it happens because Indians have not developed a notion of ‘data’ of objective facts. It is all about subjective facts in India. Henry Kissinger and Sudhir Kakar also allude to this view.
Zimmer praises Indians for not spending much time on objectivity, distinguishing self from non-self, interior from exterior, etc. Naipaul calls this as a ‘defect of vision’. Another proof of inconsistency is the ability to distinguish self and non-self. Ramanujan gives an instance from Manusmriti and Kantian philosophy. Manusmriti lacks universality. ‘Man shall not kill’ is a universal law. But Manusmriti suggests different punishments based on caste and jati. A Kshatriya and Vaisya can escape punishment by paying a fine, while a sudra shall suffer corporal punishment.
Context-Free and Context-Sensitive Cultures
In the next part of the essay, Ramanujan discusses context-free and context-sensitive cultures. In Indian culture, context sensitivity is the preferred structure. Baudhayana enumerates the context-sensitive nature of Indians. He explains that the Brahmins of the North and those of the South are different and have aberrant practices. In the north, the southern ways would be wrong, and vice versa. For Indians, each addition is a subtraction from any universal law.
The author states that he doesn’t know any Indian texts that discuss values like Plato's works. In Plato’s Symposium, he discusses finding beauty in every object and not concentrating on only one. He says no Indian texts came without a context until the 19th century. The work will tell the reader about the benefits they will get after reading the text. In other ways, they contextualise it. He gives the example of ‘Nadisastra’, which offers anyone their personal history.
In India, texts may be dateless and anonymous but have explicit contexts. The Ramayana and Mahabharata open with episodes that tell us why and under what circumstances they were composed. Every story is encased inside a meta-story. Within the text, one tale is a context for another.
Even in space and time, the universal contexts in India are not uniform or neutral but have properties that affect those who dwell in them. In India, it is believed that the soil in a village, which produces crops for the people, affects their character. The houses here have mood and character. It could change the fortune and moods of the dwellers. Time, too, has been separated in India. Certain hours of the day, days of the week, etc, are auspicious or inauspicious (rahu kala). Specific units of time (yugas) breed certain disorders—Eg, Kali yuga.
Arts in India even depend on time and obey time’s changing moods and properties. For instance, the ragas of both north and south Indian classical music have their prescribed appropriate times for recitation. Thus, all things, even so-called non-material ones like space and time or caste, affect other things because all things are ‘substantial’ (dhatu).
Ramanujan exhorts that contrary to the notion that Indians are spiritual, they are material-minded. They are materialists, believers in substance. There is a constant flow of substance from context to object, non-self to self.
Contradictions
In the last part of the essay, Ramanujan states that all societies have context-sensitive behaviour and rules. However, the dominant ideal in every culture is to be context-free. Protestant Christianity believes in both the universal and the unique and insists that any member is equal to and like any group member. Yet, counter-movements tend to be geared towards context-sensitive situations in predominantly context-free societies. In traditional cultures like India, where context-sensitivity rules, the dream is to be free of context. So ‘rasa’ in aesthetics, ‘moksha’ in the aims of life, ‘sannyasa’ in the life stages, ‘photo’ in semantics and ‘bhakti’ in religion define themselves against a background of contextuality.
The author points out that kama, artha, and dharma are relational in their values and are tied to place, time, personal character, and social role. Moksha is the release from all relations. If brahmacharya is preparation for a fully relational life, grahasthasrama is a full realisation of it. Vanaprastha loosens the bonds, and sannyasa cremates all one’s past and present relations. The last of the great Hindu anti-contextual notions, bhakti, differs from the above, denying the need for context.
In conclusion, Ramanujan makes a couple of observations about modernisation. One might see modernisation in India as a movement from the context-sensitive to the context-free in all realms. It is an erosion of contexts in principle. Print replaced palm-leaf manuscripts, making possible open and equal access to knowledge irrespective of caste. The Indian constitution made the contexts of birth, region, sex and creed irrelevant, overthrowing Manusmriti. But every context-free situation in India becomes a context in itself.
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