Is There An Indian Way of Thinking by A K Ramanujan - Part 3 - Summary and Analysis

                                             In the third part of the essay, Ramanujan dives deeper into his interrogation of the concept of inconsistency and he goes beyond the experiences that he had with his father and takes larger context into consideration. In the beginning, he talks about the concepts of ‘karma’ and ‘talaividi’. ‘Karma’ as Ramanujan puts it,  implies a person's past as determining the present and the future. It is an ‘ironic chain’ of cause and effect and ‘Karmic philosophy’ or the philosophy of the concept of Karma is a written one, on the other hand, ‘Talaividi’ or ‘head writing’ as it is called focuses on destiny and it is a part of the oral tradition.

 

          In the later part of the essay, Ramanujan asserts that India as a country is yet to develop the notion of ‘data’ and 'objectivity' and this also has to do with the Western construction of the Orient (India). Later, Ramanujan emphasises the difference in belief systems between India and the Western world. He quotes Sudhir Kakar who says that in the oriental world, there is no clear difference between self and non-self, and this, according to Ramanujan, brings about inconsistency.

 

           Ramanujan then talks about the universality of the Indian way of thinking. He says that there is no concept of universality in India. He says that Indian society is traditional and constitutes inconsistency and hypocrisy. Ramanujan adds that because Indian society is traditional in nature, therefore its approach toward the entire society is not secular or open-minded.

 

           Ramanujan quotes Zimmer who explains that Indians can imagine a time in history without man. That is, Indian thought is impersonal or is not based on the concept of individuality. In the Indian context, the priority always goes with the larger context and larger scheme of events. Whereas in Western thought, the individual takes center stage, and all the theories and value systems are largely framed according to it. And based on these reasons  Zimmer says, that Western thought is egoistic in nature and it cannot possibly imagine a time in history without man.

 

           Coming back to the debate about universality, Ramanujan says that the West has universality and India on the other hand has subjectivity. And by subjectivity, Ramanujan is referring to vast the social and cultural context that India has. He calls India a context-sensitive society. The understanding of reality in India is always context-sensitive and never context-free. To further explain the deep-rootedness of this context sensitivity, Ramanujan gives examples of the criminal laws in the West and India. He says that a man killing somebody is a crime in the West and it is of course a universally accepted fact there. But in India, if a man kills somebody, the punishment is often decided on the basis of the caste and class of the person who committed the crime and the person who was the victim of the crime. Hence, the universal rules that are applied uniformly to everybody in Western society, the same rules cannot be applied in a society like India which is so context-sensitive and as Ramanujan calls it, an inconsistent society. To back his argument on the comments regarding the caste system, Ramanujan quotes the much debated Hindu religious text, “Manu Smriti”