SRI NARAYANA GURU- PHILOSOPHER OF THE SUBALTERN INDIA
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62656/wngbcj92Abstract
The history of the Philosophy (darshan) in India has been dominated by partisan descriptions of alien narratives made both by the Indologists and also by Indian scholars. It is depicted that the intellectual and epistemological contribution of the Native Indians consisting of the major chunk of the population was negligible if not zero before the advent of the Aryan language speakers around 1500 BC. It is curious to observe that the Harappans or their predecessors in and around the Indus or their expansive presence in the subcontinent had no knowledge systems to reckon with in the mainstream representation of Epistemology. How could a population that had built cities and even dry docks on the West coast and remnants of trade found with Romans on the East Coast in the prehistoric period endured without any knowledge however rudimentary it could be? Scholars like D.P Chattopadhyay, N.N. Bhattacharya and others have written treatises on the contradictory nature of Veda and Tantra, the latter being an extension of the dualist philosophy of Sankhya. The epistemology of Tantra or the Asura View of life is the original thinking process with its own metaphysical elucidations as noted in Tantra and other practices and creations. There are parallel systems of thought in India representing the tiny or creamy layer of dominant alien thought and the subaltern thought of original people of the land called Native Indians suppressed, appropriated, giggled as superstition and marginalized. But, the Native tradition continued at the grassroots and in the every day practices of the so called lower caste people despised as untouchables. Buddha, the historical person, Nagarjuna as his follower, Vasubandhu , Dignaga , Dharmakirti and the Nalanda intellectual circle created sufficient ontology and epistemology drawing from the natives and expanding it as Vajrayana and other sects till the time of Kabir, Ravidas, Nanak and others can be considered as rival tradition to Brahmanism or Hinduism after 19th century.
