Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Obituary

The Observer of Business and Politics, May 1993
The man who showed the rainbow
Debiprasad Chattopadhyay wrote profusely on materialist and atheistic trends in Indian philosophy and their link with the history of science in India.
Shivanand Kanavi
PROFESSOR Debiprasad Chattopadhyay who passed away on May 8, 1993 at the age of 75, belonged to a generation of Marxist scholars like D D Kosambi who tried to apply the Marxist method to study Indian history, philosophy and culture. This was both his strength and weakness.

Professor Chattopadhyay was a prolific writer. Besides a large number of research papers in academic journals he also wrote a number of monographs for the layman. His style though repetitive at times, was very lucid to the reader. The enthusiasm of a new discovery by the author was clearly visible. His Lokayata: a study of ancient Indian materialism blended scholarly research into this ancient materialist trend in Indian philosophy with readability. Particularly significant were his insights into tantra as having originated in magical rituals with naive materialist intent in primitive agricultural society.

His monumental work History of Science and technology in ancient India Vol I and II were again scholarly and could be read with profit if the reader had a little patience. His discovery of the scientific method in the approach of the ancient sage Uddalaka Aruni mentioned in the Chhandogya Upanishad is conveyed with great enthusiasm and thoroughness. He also argued that Uddalaka’s approach to scientific method was much more mature than the ancient Greeks like Anaxagoras (510 BCE-428 BCE) and who should hence be considered as the father of modern scientific method. He battled continuously against Euro-centric prejudices of many a science historian. He also traced the later development of Uddalaka’s method in the atomists of Nyaya-Vaiseshika and still later in the great Ayurvedic traditions of Charaka and Sushruta.

Indian Atheism, What is living and what is dead in Indian philosophy, In defence of materialism in ancient India were the more popular expositions of his views on Indian philosophy. In these books he battled against the dominant view among orientalists and Indologists from Max Mueller to Radhakrishnan that Indian philosophy is basically spiritualism and Vedanta is the last word. He tried to show the rainbow in Indian philosophy and in fact made the startling assertion that not only Lokayata but Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa, Samkhya are also atheistic besides Buddhism and Jainism. Though this looked as a swing from the traditional orientalist view to the other extreme, he argued his thesis with great care and conviction as he realised that his views will not be easily accepted. The main weakness in his thesis was not that these trends in Indian philosophy were atheistic, at any rate in their origin, but the explanation for the fact that they either vanished later or changed their form to some sort of theism. Professor Chattopadhyay’s argument that the social strictures passed by law givers like Manu etc led to the disappearance of Lokayata is highly unsatisfactory. It fails to look at the weaknesses in the mechanical materialism of Lokayata itself which become more obvious when we see the success of Bhakti much later in gaining widespread acceptability while fighting against social injustice, casteism and absolutist dogmatic attitude towards scriptures. It is clear that Bhaktas had a far more dialectical outlook towards the times they lived in as opposed to the mechanical materialism of Lokayata.

Though Chattopadhyay was a soldier for atheism he did not fail to recognise the role religion played in what V Gordon Childe called the ‘first urban revolution’ – the rise of colonies of artisans and priests – the cities and the use of religious superstition to appropriate surplus from peasants so that technology can grow! His book, Religion and Society that came out of a series of endowment lectures he gave in Calcutta University has argued this case eloquently. He along with D D Kosambi tried to do to ancient Indian history and philosophy what Gordon Childe and Needham and George Thomson had tried to do to the ancient Babylonian, Mesopotamian, Chinese and Greek Societies.

His interpretation was refreshing in an atmosphere where religiosity, reverence and subjectivism were more dominant than objectivity. More so, when students of ancient Indian history face the uphill task of reconstructing it with hardly any reliable sources. His bold questioning of certain theses of Orientalism will always find him a place in Indian intellectual milieu. The weakness in his approach as in most other Indian Marxists is the mechanical approach without looking at Indian Darshanas holistically, a task which sadly is still unfinished.

At the time of his death he was editing a eight volume series called Global Philosophy for Everyman. As usual his style in this series was polemical and accessible to the general public. He was deeply disturbed at the growth of communalism and obscurantism in Indian polity. All those interested in Indian Philosophy would dearly miss him. 

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