Ramkrishna Bhattacharya North-South Divide The story of Agastya, a north Indian sage, crossing the Vindhya hills and visiting south India (never to return), is well known. It has given rise to a proverb, Agstya-yātrā in Bangla and maybe in other north Indian languages. Like all legends it is without date. So, it has been interpreted…
Ram Puniyani Past is used by communal politics for their present political agenda. In India on one hand we have the use of medieval history where the Muslim Kings are presented as ‘aggressors due to whom Hindu society had to suffer’, on the other now we are witnessing the distortion of ancient history being marshaled…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya 1. Introduction The course of philosophy all over the world did not follow a single pattern. Yet it is interesting to note how the sixth/fifth century BCE threw up several socio-political ideas and philosophical doctrines, both materialist and idealist, in faraway places, unrelated and almost unbeknown to one another. D.D.Kosambi, the mathematician-turned-Indologist, once…
Normal 0 T.A.P Aryaratne When we speak of Buddhism we mean the doctrine set forth in a certain collection of compositions, chiefly discourses, orally transmitted over a period of some five centuries before the Christian era began, and committed to writing towards the close of that period. From this fact we cannot justly conclude that…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya The book that has come down to us under the title Dialectics of Naure is strictly speaking not a book but an edited version of four folders containing miscellaneous notes and jottings left unfinished by their author, Frederick Engles. The material was never published in Engles’s life time although parts of it were…
DD Kosambi The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Chuang (830 A.D.) saw images that had sunk into the damp Indian soil, and was told local prophecies to the effect that thereligion of the Teacher would vanish completely when the image had sunk out of sight altogether. Shashanka, king of Bengal who had systematically destroyed Buddhist religious structures,…
Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Both D. D. Kosambi (1907-66) and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (1918-93), two leading Marxist thinkers in India, discussed at length the teachings of the six heretics and of the Buddha during the sixth/fifth century BCE in their seminal works, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (1956) and Lokāyata (1959) respectively. It will be…
M N Roy As the composite outcome of all the positive elements in the whole previous history of Indian thought, Buddhism shook the very foundation of the hoary edifice of Brahmanical orthodoxy. It disputed the authority of the Scriptures; vigorously condemned the sacrificial rites and rituals of the Vedic Natural Religion; it denied the existence…