Is There An Indian Way Of Thinking by A K Ramanujan - Part 6 - Summary and Analysis

                 In the last part of the essay, Ramanujan explains how India is experiencing a shift towards context-free situations. He says, with modernisation, there has been a movement in societies of India from context-sensitive to context-free at least in principle. He says, with the help of modern means and technology, people now can listen to any raga at any point of time, sitting in any corner of the world, unlike earlier when it was prescribed to be listened to at a particular time and place.

                 Ramanujan acknowledges the fact that new thoughts and behaviors, and habits are being borrowed from the West and our habits and lifestyle are surely influenced by the West, but these influences do not replace religious ideas ingrained in the minds of the people. Ramanujan says, although the influence of the West is quite strong and increasing with each passing day, it still has not managed to replace the religious ideas and beliefs of Indian society.

                 And when these foreign ideas fail to replace the existing religious practices prevailing in India, they get incorporated with the existing tradition. Ramanujan gives an example of "Ayudhpuja" to explain this phenomenon, he says, now in Ayudhpuja even computers and typewriters are worshipped instead of weapons. (Perhaps, in Ayudhpuja there was a tradition to worship weapons, as in earlier days the weapons were used to hunt and cut wood and it were the means of earning livelihood for the people. But with the advent of modernisation and the arrival of office jobs computers, and typewriters became the means of getting livelihood. But the Indian society, instead of getting rid of the practice of worshipping weapons, as they were no longer useful to them. They continued the tradition by starting another tradition of worshipping computers and typewriters as these have become the modern means of earning livelihood.)

                                   Ramanujan concludes the essay by saying, no matter how hard we (Indians) try to move to become a context-free society, the result is that the context-free nature ends up becoming yet another context i.e. the "modern" context.