📕 M.N. Roy, Materialism in Indian Philosophy

02 Oct, 2023

Materialism in Indian Philosophy, published by Critical Quest reproduces Chapter III of a larger work by Manabendra Nath Roy, Materialism: An Outline of the History of Scientific Thought, written between 1930 and 1933, while the author was imprisoned. The Selected Works of M.N. Roy Volume IV, published by the Oxford University Press in 1997 includes Chapters III and IV of the text, and the complete work was most likely published as a single volume in 1940 by the Indian Renaissance Institute, Dehradun, and it is from here that Critical Quest reproduces the third chapter.

Roy’s intent is clear from the outset; he is writing an account of materialist thought in the riverine plains and mountainous regions north of the South Asian peninsula (formerly, Gondwanaland) gleaned from its earliest intelligible literature. For Roy, as it did for the nationalists of the time, this literature represented “Ancient Indian Philosophy” — it was part of an unbroken tradition of thought that influenced the foundations of the nascent nation state of India. For the less idealistic among us, this simply refers to the texts of the Vedas and Upanishads in the forms that survived into the 20th Century. Survival is key here, as Roy notes, for the texts that he draws from have been poorly preserved, and the records of materialist thought doubly so — they are only accessible to the contemporary reader in fragments, in the outrage of its orthodox opponents.

Thus, we find that an account of materialism in the riverine region north of the South Asian peninsula is built on an absence, from the arguments launched against the ancient materialists by their detractors, who may or may not have misrepresented their opponents’ thought for their own rhetorical ends. Regardless, from the surviving texts two schools can be identified, namely the Vaisheshikha and Sankhya schools of thought that emerged in the periphery of the composition of the Upanishads. Roy’s account begins in the dissolution of the Vedic age, which was promulgated by schools of thought that delved deep into nihilism in their attempts to challenge the religious metaphysics of the Vedic texts. This is recovered in the refutations of nihilism within mainstream the metaphysical and religious texts. From these refutations, we learn that the nihilists largely believed that all beings that perished — that is, all beings — were false. This however, was only one of the schools of thought, and Roy states that materialism in Vedic philosophy can be traced right back to the Rig Veda, if only as a record of heresy.

Now, there is nothing particularly spurious in tracing materialism to the ancient subcontinent. Many forms of thought can exist in tandem with one another, the persistence and preservation of specific modes of thinking, are of course, a function of power. The use of the term nihilism seems a little out of place, for modern notions of nihilism emerged in the 18th Century, though a case could be made that the heretical thinkers of the ancient subcontinent made similar claims. However, at one point Roy states,

“As in ancient Greece, so in India also, the first attempts of human intellect to explain nature in natural terms gave birth to philosophy. That means, in India also originally, philosophy was materialism.”

— Materialism in Indian Philosophy

In her 2016 book Science in Saffron¹, Meera Nanda talks about how the BJP appropriates modern scientific concepts and projects them into the past in order to fabricate an image of scientific Hinduism. Philosophical concepts are similarly historically situated, the motion that Plato and Aristotle speak of is not the motion that Newton describes, similarly, the materialism of the Upanishads is not quite equivalent to modern forms of materialism, despite Roy’s best attempt to represent them as such.

Now, it would be incredibly disingenuous to liken Roy’s discussion of materialism in the ancient subcontinent to the BJP’s fascist project, it would be more apt to say that Roy is a practitioner of an earlier method of exploring the history of thought; a method where the researcher compares a historical mode of thinking with modern paradigms of scientific and philosophical thought. The disciplines of the history and philosophy of science have long discarded this method and opted instead to interrogate a mode of thought within its own logic and historical frame.

But Roy is writing in the 1930s and his adherence to this older method of studying the history of science is quite visible when, while discussing the materialism of the Vaisheshikha system, he explains that the deference to an unseen cause in Kanada’s atomism is not unlike the “homage” the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton concede to the “prejudice about God”. The thinkers cited are strewn across a wide time frame of European history, giving rise to a certain degree of anachronism. All is not lost however, Roy does speak of how the Vaisheshikha School was contemporary to Hellenic materialism, and makes a reference to Democritus, if only to proclaim that Kanada’s atomism was more self contained than the former’s since Kanada did not take up the question of action at a distance. As for the Sankhya system, Roy compares its meditations on the internal and external world to the point of departure from which Descartes surmised Cogito, ergo sum. The reference is only in passing, but the intent is clear: India had Cogito, ergo sum before Descartes did.

Next, Roy speaks of materialism in early Buddhist thinking, which drew its arguments from earlier schools of thought, such as the two schools described prior. Here, Roy makes his most radical statement, that Buddhism was perhaps the first form of truly philosophical thought developed in the ancient subcontinent. This is significant, because Roy refuses to ascribe philosophical authority to the Vedas and Upansihads, citing them as religious texts, rather than philosophical ones. However, his explanation for the fall of Buddhism is severely lacking; according to Roy, the proof of Buddhism’s materialist foundation comes from its brahminical opposition, spearheaded by one Sankaracharya, and that its materialist philosophy was completely undone by nirvana, a concept that perfectly contradicted the foundations of the Buddhist school of thought, and transformed it into idealism by dissolving Buddhism’s material basis. It was this theoretical blunder that allowed Sankaracharya to reject Buddhism completely, and thus led to its ultimate downfall. The historical persecution of Buddhists² by brahminical regimes in the ancient subcontinent had nothing to do with the fall of Buddhism at all apparently.

But despite Sankaracharya’s best attempts to disprove materialism, he was beset once again by the materialism of Jain thought, and against these onslaughts, Sankaracharya’s appeals the brahminical texts were quite useless, because with every refutation of materialism, Sankaracharya’s philosophy came closer and closer to becoming a mirror of the very materialism he sought to destroy. This is perhaps the point of Roy’s diatribe, that brahminism, despite all its faults has always been reluctantly materialist, that there is no contradiction between the oppressive regime of brahminism and the establishment of communism in India. It’s not the most materialist position to take up, to say the very least.

Roy’s glaring lack of materialism, within this text at least, is most palpable in the final section of Materialism in Indian Philosophy, where the author muses about the reasons for the failure of materialism in India. In Roy’s view, materialism was defeated in the ancient subcontinent due to the weakness of the mercantile classes, who faced great persecution by the brahminical classes. This is also cited as the reason why the resurgence of materialism failed to take place within the region. Now, the author is very clearly attempting to make excuses for the lack of the development of bourgeois class in the subcontinent, without the intervention of a colonial power. Roy was a prolific Marxist, and he, no doubt, had read that authentic nation states developed only from societies with an established bourgeoisie, and nation states that developed in semi-feudal societies were generally ahistorical. This particular assertion was a short-sighted one, stemming from the misinterpretation of the early work of Marx, and would only later be rectified in the writings of the late Marx, and Lenin, who would transparently extrapolate on the crucial relation between socialism and the project of decolonization.

But the analytic background of these musings are very clear; Roy had accepted, at some level, the myth of nationalism in a colonized nation, the myth of a once great civilization that fell from grace, and were now owed a resurgence based on its former glory. This is the weakest part of Roy’s argument, and accordingly, has aged poorly. Another great weakness of this analysis is the lack of materialism found in the glaring omission of any reference to caste within the entire text. Any explanation of repression in the ancient subcontinent, if materialism be its basis, ought to refer to the material circumstances of its times. Even in the ancient subcontinent, brahminical repression was carried out through the violence of caste, and Roy does not even speak of it once. In fact, Roy simply collapses the concept of caste into the concept of class without so much as a second thought. He denounces brahminism profusely, but he never addresses the material basis of its production and reproduction, opting instead to focus solely on philosophical matters, as if they were utterly independent of the mode of production that gave rise to it. It makes one second guess Roy’s place in the hallowed halls of materialism in modern Indian philosophy. Further, Roy does not explore materialism in the eras that follow the Vedic and Post-Vedic, he doesn’t chart a history of materialism in Christian and Islamic thought within the subcontinent, which is strange, as if the history of Roy’s imagined India abruptly ended before any non-brahminical or non-shramanic faith entered the region. This is historically inaccurate of course, because the first church in India was said to have been established in 52 A.D.³, contemporary to the production of a number of the canonical texts of brahminism. Perhaps this shortcoming may be attributed to the truncated character of this particular reproduction of Roy's original text; it is only Chapter III after all.

These arguments may paint a very poor picture of M.N. Roy’s work, but it would be too reductive to dismiss Roy’s work entirely. Roy does, quite meticulously, chart the moments where ancient subcontinental philosophy posed real, palpable threats to the religious doctrines of the Vedas and Upanishads, but he is quite biased towards the arguments that rise from within brahminism, than from without. In doing so, Roy paints a picture of the ancient subcontinent that has no hope of escaping the brunt of brahminical repression, and this is quite a pessimistic reading of subcontinental history. Materialism in Indian Philosophy was written in prison, and while it does provide a useful description of materialist currents in brahminical and shramanic thought, it makes a better argument for prison abolition, because confinement may have affected Mr. Roy’s analytic abilities.

#book review #marxism #philosophy #south asia