Atir Khan/New Delhi

Dr Maninder Nath Thakur teaches Indian intellectual traditions at the Jawahar Lal Nehru University. The Voice Editor-in-Chief Atir Khan spoke to him about the significance of intellectual traditions and how they could be used to bring about social harmony.

Do you think that we Indians have paid enough attention to our intellectual traditions?

I think we have started ignoring intellectual traditions of late. If you look at the anti-colonial struggle, our great thinkers were very much engaged with Indian intellectual traditions, right from Gandhi and think of any name of those times all were trying to go back to the Indian intellectual tradition to find out resources for the political struggle.

But in the post-independence era, our universities did not take cognizance of them carefully. So, the knowledge traditions were reduced to linguistic traditions. Sanskrit as a language was being taught not as the source of knowledge tradition, but seen as a language and was being taught, but not as a reservoir of huge knowledge tradition. So that was a problem. I think we ignored these traditions after Independence.

How can we use our traditional wisdom to find solutions for problems of the present day?

See, there are many ways, and many resources available. I'll give you one example. There is a philosophical tradition called Nyay. It is about debating, and it has a good number of resources to resolve conflict. There are three forms of debate I suggest- debating to know, debating to win, and debating to destroy the debate. So, there are three forms, Vadh, Vivadh, and Vithri. Now, how you debate to resolve a problem is something that it teaches you.

When you are engaging in a dialogue, what are the steps of the dialogue? We can learn from that. I give you another example. There's a concept in the Indian tradition of Purvpaksh and Uttarpaksh. Now, if you take two conflicting parties and tell them that in the first half. A will have Uttarpaksh and B is Purvpaksh. And then you change their sides and allow them to now argue from another point of view and see how conflict can be resolved. I mean, I've used it several times, and that has helped us.

So, conflict resolution, for instance, can be modeled around one of the great philosophies of Jainism, called unekantvad, Gandhi was an unekantvadi. And it is from where he drew his idea of Satyagraha. So, there are enough resources in Indian intellectual tradition where you can find such models to resolve conflict. And why I am saying this?

Asia has always been a multicultural, multi-linguistic multi-religious society, and we have no history of major wars. How could we manage that? Because we have a good number of techniques and methods to resolve these conflicts. Look at the Sufis. Look at the bauls from Bengal. Yes. They all have different kinds of techniques for resolving conflict. So, I think we have enough resources.

After the British colonial period, we have seen that that stream of traditional intellectual thought was disrupted. What is your take on this?

True. You know, if you look at Indian history, the history of Indian knowledge tradition, you will find that there are several phases where such dialogues have happened. You can begin with the 6th century B.C., where Jain philosophy produced unekantvad.

At that time, there was a big conflict between philosophies and philosophical traditions. And they resolved it through this kind of dialogue process. Then you come to the Greeks coming here. Alexander. And there was a conflict. But at the same time, a lot of dialogue happened.

Similarly, during the fourth century A.D., you find the dialogue to trade and all. So, all through, you will find several forms of dialog taking place, including the Mughals, who came and started reading about Indian traditions. You know, this famous book called Yog Vashishthas been translated by many Mughal kings. And it was a compulsory reading for the princes of that time.

So, this kind of dialogue was always there. With Dara Shikoh it reached the climax. And after that, it declined after his killing. But by the time it could regain the ground the British came. And the British were not interested in this dialogue. They differentiated and divided. They connected knowledge with identity.

They told the colonized people that you do not know, they only had superstition and religion. We know. So, for the first time in the history of knowledge tradition, people started associating knowledge with identity. And that became a problem. That was a big crisis. That is why after that, you find such problems emerging again and again. I think identity should not come in the way of understanding the intellectual traditions of our country. For instance, if you say physics is Christian.How ridiculous it would be. Or if you say Nyaytradition is a Hindu tradition.

I think all these traditions are produced by human beings in different contexts, to resolve their crisis, to solve their problem. And these knowledge traditions are a resource for humanity as a whole.

And therefore, all of us have a right to that. So intellectual property rights. Of one country or one community on any knowledge tradition is just not justified.

How can we use our intellectual traditions to promote interfaith dialogs among Indian communities?

The two things are there. One is, to see when communities come together. And the process of coming together communities most of the time is not very smooth. There's a conflict. And that conflict and that woundedness that it produces that goes into the subconscious of the communities.  So, the first task is to initiate a process of healing.

Where we sit together and talk about it, not hide it. So, the anxiety that we have should be properly discussed and worked out. That is the first condition of initiating a dialogue. The second thing is treating religion a little differently in the sense of considering four different elements of religion and engaging in a dialogue. One is ritual. Rituals are geographically conditioned. If there is a lack of water, the rituals will be connected with water resources. So, first is ritual. The second, thing is social law. Who will marry whom? Who will not marry whom? All kinds of property, inheritance, and all that. The third thing is morality. What is good? What is bad so on and so forth? Fourth is philosophy. I think the dialogue should be done at the level of philosophy.

On these three things, we have to accept them as part of cultural content. And we should be ready to change according to changing circumstances. In the new world, you can't hold the old morality.

No point in attaching our identity to that. But at the level of philosophy, we must engage. It is very important to understand that human beings cannot have complete knowledge of reality. So let knowledge flow from everywhere and let us sit down and debate and dialogue about the philosophical content of our religion. So, if we can do this kind of dialogue, then probably we will find out new parts of living together peacefully. Living together is something that is going to be the most crucial thing for humanity in times to come because we have developed instruments of mass killing. So, if we don't know how to live together, then we will destroy each other. This is what is happening after all in both the wars happening in the world today, who are being killed? They are human beings.

How important is religion for the society?

See, religion, I think, is extremely important for human beings and also for society. You know, one of the tragedies with social science is that we understand religion through three great thinkers from the West- Marx, Webber, and Durkheim. They had deep experiences of a society where religions were born.

We are living in societies where religions are born. Right? There are three kinds of societies. Where religions are born, religions have transmigration and religions have been transported.

So European society is where religion is transmigration. And Russia was a society where religion was transported. We are a society where we have produced several religions. So, it is deeply in our consciousness. Therefore, if you read Ambedkar, if you read Iqbal if you read Tagore, if you read Gandhi, nobody says that religion is not important. All of them see religion as very, very important. But then they redefined religion. What is religion?

Religion is deliberative. If religion is not liberating, it cannot be religion. The purpose of religion is not to humiliate human beings. Not to demolish humanity, but to produce humanity, to create a society that could be good for living. In that case, what is religion? And I think, to me religion is a knowledge system.

What kind of knowledge system? A system that tells us not only about the material world but also our spiritual dimension. The problem with modern philosophy is that it does not take cognizance of the spiritual aspect. So, religion takes cognizance of the spiritual aspect. And therefore, religion is extremely important for us.

You're not critical of the Western intellectual traditions. Should we Indians entirely rely on our traditional wisdom or should we also accommodate Western thought systems as well?

Relying only on traditional wisdom would be disastrous. Look, despite having huge scholarships available in India, they could not tell us what was happening when colonialism came to India. The first person who could tell us that we were being colonized, and our resources were being taken away was Dada Bhai Naoroji. So, this is very important to understand. The way the world has grown, our intellectual traditions may not have the resources to understand the new developments. Therefore, knowledge, and traditions in the West are not to be criticized, not to be attacked. What is to be attacked is when they say that this knowledge tradition is the only knowledge tradition. And you don't have a knowledge tradition.

Do you think that we have addressed the religious differences in our country in the manner they should have been since Indian independence?

No, I think what happened in the middle class, which took charge of intellectual activities in India, became so-called. And for them, secular meant don't engage with religion. Look at the Indian universities. You won’t find any department of study of religion that influences our individual and collective life so much, our political lives so much. There's no study of that. So, I don't think we did that carefully.

Instead, I would be really happy if you study religion, engage with that, and engage with the communities on the grounds of religion. There's no harm in doing that. But that is what is infringing on our life. And that would have transformed us. Now, many of my colleagues who have been advocating secularism for a long, they are suggesting that one mistake they have committed is that they do not try to understand religion. Without understanding, they try to ignore that. And in fact, jokingly, I say to my couple of professors who have been writing on secularism that you kept writing on secularism and people kept becoming communal. So, I think this is something that we have to understand after independence, our universities the middle class, and the intellectuals did not give enough attention to the issue of religion and the issue of inter-community relations. The anxieties that communities have, these anxieties are available for political groups to use. Since we do not resolve the anxiety, therefore some political groups can easily exploit it.

What is the concept of secularization of religions in India? You often talk about it.

Let me talk about two things. One, I want to emphasize on this point that how this identity has become so prominent today, and how it is we see everything in terms of identities today. You know, the reason is that capitalism today is passing through a deep crisis. Gradually, scholars are suggesting that capitalism has abandoned the idea of the common good that it had when it started. And now gradually also you will see human beings pushed out of the labor process. Because of the total dependence on the machine. There will be a crisis. So how will capitalism manage itself? Capitalism uses identity politics. So, what I'm saying, the separation of religion I agree with Gandhi, who says that there's should be a study of religion, and who will teach religion? He says not the maulvis or the pundits. Let the Englishmen teach Hinduism and Islam. So let secular people teach Hinduism and Islam. Let’s take those texts as a knowledge text. Not only the faith text. All knowledge All religious traditions are also knowledge traditions.

But they're ecumenical knowledge by human beings. Right. At that time, you do not have a language of science to accumulate ideas. So, they are knowledge traditions. Let us engage with them as knowledge traditions so that we see them as secular knowledge. Also, not only due to faith that you are believing that something is happening in nature. But let us examine that. So, reading all different religious traditions, is the first aspect of secularism, second, taking spirituality seriously. Third, questioning irrational elements within religion. When I'm saying irrational.That doesn't mean rationality. Hardcore Western rationality. But rational means, including the spiritual aspect. We know logic cannot explain this.

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So, we are trying to kind of build an argument that when you look at a conflict, communal conflict, you don't only look at the conflict. You should also look at the cooperation between the communities during the conflict.