Written by Pratap Bhanu Mehta | Updated: February 11, 2017 1:08 am. Hegel's India: A Reinterpretation with Texts, Akash Singh Rathore, Riminia Mohapatra, Oxford. The introduction gives a tour d ...
The second explanation is Hegel’s critique of German Romanticism. It had elevated Indophilia to new heights, and his attack on India was really an attack on German Romantics like Schlegel who, rather than understanding the processes of modernity, were retreating into flights of fantasy. The useful introduction by Akash Singh Rathore and Rimina Mohapatra to their usable anthology of Hegel’s writings on India does not dissent from this explanation, but hints that there must be something more to the matter. After all, Hegel is constantly revising the material he incorporates on India, whether it is in his lecture cycles on history and religion or the material in his encyclopaedia.
For Hegel, Indian philosophy and religious practice, for all its versatility and imaginative power, are reflections of the fact that the realisation of freedom is not possible in society. The only way in which an individual can attain unity with divinity is, in the final analysis, by depriving oneself of both activity and a sense of subjectivity. We may baulk at this characterisation but it does throw up a challenge for all Indian intellectual history. What is the relationship between Indian ideals of freedom and rational perfection and modes of social organisation? In the end, are the high ideals of India culture a form of displacement, to be realised outside of the forms of social organisation, while social and political life continues in its freedom-denying vein?
Pratap Bhanu Mehta is president, Centre For Policy Research, New Delhi and contributing editor to The Indian Express
[Please find attached a web-banner and a link to Facebook event page: Hegel's India: A Reinterpretation, with Texts] https://t.co/R76fUC6wWA
HEGEL'S INDIA: A REINTERPRETATION, WITH TEXTS
March 29, 2017 - 6:30 PM - LIBRARY MUMBAI | BOOK LAUNCH
von Aakash Singh Rathore und Rimina Mohapatra
Programme:
von Aakash Singh Rathore und Rimina Mohapatra
In his writings on India, Hegel characterized Indian thought as "fantastic," "subjective," "wild," "dreamy," "frenzied," "absurd," and "repetitive." If Indian art, religion, and philosophy were so inadequate, what explains his lifelong fascination with India? This unique volume brings together Hegel's reflections and argues that Indian thought haunted him, representing a nemesis to his own philosophy.
Shedding new light on Indological and Hegelian studies, this book systematically presents all of Hegel's writings on and about India for the first time, including translations of his lesser-known essays on the Bhagavad-Gita and the Oriental Spirit, along with a substantive reinterpretation and a bibliography.
Book launch in collaboration with Oxford University Press and University of Mumbai.
