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Is there an Indian way of Thinking?

Browsing through this book, I came across this essay whose title caught me.
It turned out to be a very perceptive argument that the western concept of
equality before law may not be acceptable in Indian thought.  Men are
fundamentally different, and their circumstances must be treated
differently.

This puts the entire ethic of democracy and so many other institutions at
risk.  But we already are unequal in so many ways - we try to help others who
have obvious, physical, iniquities.  And even under law, you can establish
mental sickness and you will be treated differently; only Manu says that
states of excessive emotion - anger, fear etc - may also deserve special
treatment.  Perhaps what is being said here, while startling, may not be far
from what is practised anyway.

Universalization

[The concept of universalization] - putting oneself in another's place - it
is the golden rule for the new testament, Hobbes' "law of all men" - "do not
do unto others what you do not want done unto you." The main tradition of
Judeo-Christian ethics is based on such a premise of universalization - Manu
would not understand such a premise.  To be moral, for Manu, is to
particularize - to ask who did what, to whom and when.  - p.426

[LATER, quotes Blake]
"one law for the lion and the ox is oppression." -435,

[also]
Gandhi quoted Emerson, that consistency was the hobgoblin of foolish
minds. [436] The highly contextualized Hindu systems are generalized into 'a
Hindu view of life' by apologues like Radhakrishnan for the benefit of both
Western and modern Indian readers. [436]

[Even truth may be relative - leading to western, and 'modern' Indian
assessments of hypocrisy among Indians - e.g. Kissinger ]

    An untruth spoken by people under the influence of anger,
    excessive joy, fear, pain, or grief, by infants, by very old men,
    by persons labouring under a delusion, being under the influence
    of drink, or by mad men, does not cause the speaker to fall, or as
    we should say, is a venial not a mortal sin. [Gautama, paraphrased
    by M\"uller 1883] - p.426

[Manu:] A king who knows the sacred law, must imagine into the laws
of caste (jAti), of districts, of guilds, and of families, and [thus]
settle the peculiar law of each' - p.407

baudhAyana enumerates aberrant practices peculiar to the Brahmins of
north and those of the south.  [Reminiscent of Borges?]
The most important and accessible model of a context-sensitive system
with intersecting taxonomies is, of course, the grammar of a language.
And grammar is the central model for thinking in many Hindu texts.  As
Frits Staal has said, what Euclid is to European thought, the
grammarian pAnini is to the Indian.  Even the kAmAsutra is literally a
grammar of love -- which declines and conjugates men and women as one
would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, modds and aspects.
Genders are genres.  Different body-types and charcter-types obey
different rules, respond to different scents and beckonings.

In such a world, systems of meaning are elicited by contexts, by the
nature (and substance) of the listener.  In the br^hadAraNyaka
upanIshad, adhyaya 5, brahmana 2, Lord prajApati speaks in thunder
three times: "DA DA DA": When the gods, given to pleasure, hear it,
they hear it as the first syllable of damayata, "control".  The
antigods, given as they are to cruelty, hear it as dayAdhavam, "be
compassionate".  When the humans, given to greed, hear it they hear it
as dattA, "give to others".  (Hume, 1931)   - p. 434

Even space and time, the universal contexts, the Kantian imperatives,
are in India not uniform and neutral . . . Certain yugas breed certain
kinds of maladies, politics, religions (e.g. kaliyuga).  A story is
told about two men coming to YudhiShThira with a case.  One had bought
the other's land, and soon after found a crock of gold in it.  He
wanted to return it to the original owner of the land, who was arguing
that it really belonged to the man, who had now bought it.  They had
come to YudhiShThira to settle their virtuous dispute.  Just then
YudhiShThira was called away (to put it politely) for a while.  When
he came back the two gentlemen were quarrelling furiously, but each
was claiming the treasure for himself this time!  YudhiShThira
realized at once that the age had changed, and kaliyuga had begun.
	 - p. 432

[In Indian writings] the Levi-Straussian opposition of nature-culture
makes [little] sense; we see that the opposition itself is
culture-bound.  There is another alternative to a culture vs nature
view: in the Tamil poems, culture is enclosed in nature, nature is
reworked in culture, so that we cannot tell the difference.  We have a
nature-culture continuum that cancels the terms, confuses them even if
we begin with them.

Such container-contained relations are seen in many kinds of concepts
and images:  not only in culture-nature, but also god-world,
king-kingdom, devotee-god, mother-child.  Here is a bhakti poem which
plays with many such concentric containments:

	My dark one
	    stands there as if nothing's changed
	after taking entire
	into his maw
	all three worlds
	the gods
	and the good kings
	    who hold their lands
	    as a mother would
	    a child in her womb --
	and I, by his leave,
	have taken him entire
	and I have him in my belly
	for keeps.
	    	     Tiruvaymoli 8.7.9 [430-431]
		     [name in Nammalvar: My Lord, My Cannibal]

Indians are materialists, believers in substance: there is a
continuity, a constant flow (the etymology of saMsAra!) of substance
from context to object, from non-self to self . . . [432]

[FEELING] In the realm of feeling, bhAvas are private, contingent,
context-roused sentiments, vibhAvas are determinant causes, anubhAvas
are consequent expressions.  But rasa is generalized, it is an
essence.
[MEANING = sphoTa] In the field of meaning, the temporal sequence of
letters and phonemes, the syntactic chain of words, yields finally a
sphoTa, an explosion, a meaning which is beyond the sequence and
time. [435]

One might see 'modernization' in India as a movement from the
context-sensitive to the context-free in all realms: an erosion of
contexts, at least in principle.

The new preferred names give no clue to birth-place, father's name,
caste, sub-caste and sect, as all the traditional names did:  I once
found in a Kerala college roster, three "Joseph Stalin"s and one "Karl
Marx." [436]

author bio

Poet, translator, and folklorist, A.K. Ramanujan has been recognized as the
world's most profound scholar of South Asian language and culture. This book
brings together for the first time, thirty essays on literature and culture
written by Ramanujan over a period of four decades. It is the product of the
collaborative effort of a number of his colleagues and friends. Each section
is prefaced by a brief critical introduction and the volume includes notes on
each essay as well as a chronology of Ramanujan's books and essays.