What are the Two Ideas of India?
““In India, the two ideas co-exist and have to be approached from different perspectives and use different methods of inquiry... they have to be given equal importance.””
In the 2003 Mind and Life meeting on “Investigating the Mind”, Stephen Kosslyi, then-Chair of the Harvard University psychology department, started his presentation by saying, “I want to begin with a declaration of humility in the face of the sheer amount of data that the contemplatives are bringing to modern psychology”. In recent times there has been an increasing acceptance of this method inquiry to make sense of the world, and is called contemplative science.
In India, this contemplative science was developed from the experiential findings of detailed investigations of the working of the mind over the past 2,000 years. A large number of people have devoted their whole lives to this form of contemplative science. The source of Idea 1 of India arises from one such branch of contemplative science and once can say that the famed Indian way of life is based on this science.
In this way of making sense of the world, information is organized in one’s self and used to interpret incoming information in relation to oneself, using one’s self-idea as a background. Here, direct experience of an individual is key to understanding and describing the world.
The reliance on direct experience to make sense of the world has undergone a change as brought out by Professor Balagandhara in his book Reconceptualizing Indian Studies. The world is understood by placing a framework in-between people and their direct experiences. This prevents people from accessing their own experiences. Sometime a theory developed in the west was used to twist out of shape the direct experience or make light of it.
An example of theory being placed in-between Indians and their experience is found in the book Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. The author, Jeffery Kirpal, did his doctorate under Wendy Doniger. Kirpal used Freudian theory to explain Ramakrishna’s religious life in terms of sexual trauma and unconscious sexual desires and came to the finding that Ramakrishna’s life consisted of a set of pathological symptoms. These findings were examined by Professor Balagandhara and he concludes that by explaining Ramakrishna’s religious life in terms of sexual trauma and unconscious sexual desires, Kirpal has “… den(ied) the experience his followers have of the saint”.
Such placing of frameworks in-between people and their own experiences to modify them forms the bedrock of Idea 2 of India. The framework is a way of being and doing in the world, and acts as a kind of filter by selecting some aspects of the Indian experience and focusing on it, while disregarding other parts of the experience. So, in Idea 2, an individual’s direct experience is transformed by someone else’s experience of the world.
The problem arises when Idea 2 attempts to insert the frameworks between oneself and one’s own experience in a way that prevents individuals from accessing their own experiences. This becomes worse when it leads to feelings of shame about their own culture and the conviction that they are backward, and have to learn from people using Idea 2 of India. The generation of such a consciousness by colonialism is brought out distinctly by Albert Memmi in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized.
Thus, Idea 1 and Idea 2 of India are anchored in two alternative, possibly rival, traditions of knowing and doing things. Science tries to understand reality by training the mind to grasp complex reality relationships and breaking down systems into smaller and smaller components. The scientific endeavor is directed towards the outer world rather than the inner world. In this way, one can call it a “third-person approach”. On the other hand, the object of inquiry in contemplative science is the mental apparatus of people, and the analytical tool is introspection. A large number of people have devoted their whole lives to this form of self-referential approach, in which the focus is on first-person perspectives.
In India, the two ideas co-exist and have to be approached from different perspectives and use different methods of inquiry. In order to properly understand the relation of mind to knowledge in the Indian reality, they have to be given equal importance.
