World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

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in the later development of Indian philosophical systems, such as in the Ved?nta philosophy, we go from one to many; in Vallabha Ved?nta, we go from many to one; in S?nkhya and Ny?ya-Vaisesika systems, we go from many to many and in Buddhism, we go from nothing, i.e. svabh?va shunya to many. The pluralistic nature of Indian society is manifested in various ethnic identities, community structure, linguistic identities, different nationalities, languages and so on. This plurality, however, does not imply that there is complete fragmentation as has been proclaimed by Karl Marx, "A country not only divided between Mahommedan and Hindoo, but between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste; a society whose framework was based on a sort of equilibrium, resulting from a. general repulsion and constitutional exclusiveness between all its members. Such a country and such a society, were they not the predestined prey of conquest?...India, then, could not escape the fate of being conquered, and the whole of her past history, if it be anything, is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society. The question, therefore, is not whether the English had a right to conquer India, but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton."
I wish to contest and repudiate this position. Behind the plurality in Indian philosophy, there is an underlying unity and collectivity which rejects individualism. It may be illustrated with such acts of philosophizing as purva paksa, khandan and uttarpaksa, dialogue opposed to commandments, vad, vivad and vitanda, councilling aspects of Indian culture. Of course Karl Marx had never stepped foot in India. But it was a temper of the times. A white man was always preferred for such intellectual tasks over an Indian, even though the subject was India. In this context, an analysis of power, its relation to knowledge and culture/ cultural community becomes sine qua non for fruitful investigation.
The relationship between power and knowledge is central to what Foucault (1926-84) calls "genealogy." Eschewing a top-down model that conceives of power as a monolithic force imposed by dominant social/ cultural groups, Foucault posits power in terms of various articulations of force circulating throughout the social - cultural body and shaping people's understandings of themselves and their relations to the world in which they act. So for Foucault power is force, not a substance-a force that is fluid and productive, and not merely coercive. Power cannot be conceived except in terms of its relations, relations that range from the microphysical to the global and that can be traced in terms of the strategies, techniques and practices within which such relations are enacted. As a matter of fact, Foucault wrote little about philosophy in terms of epistemology, ontology and so on,
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