A.K Ramanujan (1929-1993): Is there an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay, Detailed Explanation

A.K. Ramanujan, "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" – Comprehensive Analysis

A.K. Ramanujan, "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?"
Comprehensive Analysis

About the Writer

Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan (1929–1993) was one of the most distinguished Indian scholars, poets, translators, and folklorists of the twentieth century. Born in Mysore, Karnataka, Ramanujan embodied a remarkable synthesis of Eastern and Western intellectual traditions that profoundly shaped his scholarly work.

Early Life and Education

Ramanujan earned degrees in English literature from the University of Mysore and later pursued a graduate diploma in theoretical linguistics from Deccan College in Pune. His intellectual journey took a transformative turn when he received a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States, eventually earning a PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1963. This period marked his flowering as a poet and thinker in the free academic atmosphere of American universities.

Academic Career

In 1962, Ramanujan joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, where he played an instrumental role in developing the South Asian Studies program. He held joint appointments in the Departments of South Asian Languages & Civilizations, Linguistics, and the Committee on Social Thought until his untimely death in 1993. His interdisciplinary approach and insightful analyses contributed immensely to South Asian Studies and Cultural Studies.

Recognition and Legacy

Ramanujan's extraordinary intellectual gifts earned him significant recognition. The Indian Government honored him with the Padma Shri in 1976, and he became one of the earliest recipients of a MacArthur "genius" grant in 1983. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. His work continues to influence scholars across disciplines, and the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies awards the A.K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation in his honor.

Multilingual and Interdisciplinary Approach

Ramanujan wrote and worked in five languages—English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit—but was especially fond of his "two mother tongues," Tamil and Kannada. His scholarly output encompassed poetry, translations, folklore studies, and cultural theory. His translations of classical Tamil and medieval Kannada poetry, as well as U.R. Ananthamurthy's novel Samskara, are considered classics in Indian literature.

Background of the Essay

Origins and Publication

"Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay" was initially delivered as a keynote address at the 1980 annual conference of the Society for South Indian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. It was later published in Contributions to Indian Sociology in 1989. The essay was subsequently included in the influential anthology India Through Hindu Categories (Marriott, 1990) and posthumously in The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Intellectual Context

The essay emerged during a period of intense scholarly reflection on cultural identity and post-colonial theory. It was part of a broader effort within Euro-American academia, spurred by post-World War II interest in "area studies," to understand other cultures in their own terms and acknowledge the assumptions rooted in Western intellectual tradition that had unconsciously biased previous inquiries.

Ramanujan's approach was influenced by structuralism (de Saussure, Levi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung), linguistics (Chomsky), and post-structuralism (Derrida). However, he was never doctrinally bound by any single theoretical framework, preferring to borrow and blend disparate ideas according to his needs.

Personal Inspiration

Ramanujan dedicated the essay to his father, whose life and worldview profoundly shaped his thinking. He later reflected that "this essay was inspired by contemplation of him over the years." His father represented a living embodiment of the cultural synthesis and apparent contradictions that Ramanujan sought to understand—a mathematician and astronomer who was simultaneously a Sanskrit scholar and expert astrologer, a man who seamlessly blended Western and Indian attire and intellectual traditions.

Controversy and Significance

Ramanujan was unafraid of challenging conventions, even when it meant stirring controversy. In January 2012, his essay "Three Hundred Ramayanas" was withdrawn by an academic body in Delhi University after it "incensed" right-wing groups who objected to his discussion of multiple versions of the Ramayana tradition. This controversy underscores the ongoing relevance and provocative nature of Ramanujan's scholarly interventions.

About the Essay

Central Thesis

The essay proposes a fundamental distinction between two modes of thinking: context-sensitive and context-free. Ramanujan argues that traditional Indian thought is predominantly context-sensitive, where rules, meanings, and ethical judgments depend heavily on specific circumstances, relationships, and social positions. In contrast, Western thought, particularly since the Enlightenment, has idealized context-free universal principles.

Ramanujan's answer to his titular question is nuanced: he suggests that there was a distinctive Indian way of thinking rooted in context-sensitivity, but that modernization represents a movement toward context-free modes. However, he also argues that India's traditional way of thinking—with its emphasis on particularism, inconsistency, and contextuality—continues to shape how Western ideas are received and transformed in the Indian context.

Scope and Methodology

The essay demonstrates Ramanujan's remarkable range of knowledge, drawing upon:

Indian classical texts (Manu's Dharmashastra, Brihadaranyaka Upanishad)
Literary traditions (Valmiki's Ramayana, Tamil Sangam poetry, bhakti poetry)
Folklore and oral traditions
Western philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein)
Social theory (Geertz, Weber, Dumont)
Linguistics and semiotics (Peirce, Saussure)
His own personal experience and family background

Rhetorical Style

Ramanujan's essays are characterized by a distinctive blend of scholarly rigor and accessible, conversational style. His prose is interwoven with wit, irony, humor, and polyphony, enabling him to condense several perspectives into a few aphoristic phrases. As Vinay Dharvadker observed in the preface to The Collected Essays:

"Ramanujan designed and wrote his essays so that they would work upon his readers as much by allusion, echo, and suggestion, as by the force of explicit argument... This 'ripple effect' was a function of Ramanujan's poetic style as a writer of critical prose."

His essays are compact and multi-layered, constructed much like poems, showing more than they tell, suggesting more than they reveal, and echoing more than they acknowledge.

Detailed Explanation of the Essay

Section I: The Question Explored

Ramanujan opens with a reference to Stanislavsky's exercise for actors, who were asked to say an everyday sentence forty different ways. He applies this exercise to his central question: "Is there an Indian way of thinking?"

By placing stress on different words, the question yields four distinct interpretations:

Is there an Indian way of thinking? – This asks whether such a thing exists at all, or existed in the past but no longer does.
Is there an Indian way of thinking? – This questions whether there is a single, unified way of thinking, or multiple ways.
Is there an Indian way of thinking? – This asks whether what we see is uniquely Indian or merely characteristic of pre-industrial, agricultural societies.
Is there an Indian way of thinking? – This challenges whether Indians engage in "thinking" at all, or whether they prioritize religion, feeling, and intuition over rationality.

The answers are equally varied, ranging from claims of India's unchanging nature to arguments about its perpetual transformation, from celebrations of Indian spirituality to laments about its alleged irrationality.

Section II: The Problem of Inconsistency

Ramanujan introduces the problem through the image of his father, a South Indian Brahmin gentleman who embodied apparent contradictions. His father wore traditional Indian turbans and dhotis with English serge jackets, Tootal ties, and polished leather shoes. He was both an astronomer and an astrologer, reading the Bhagavad Gita religiously while appreciating Bertrand Russell and Ingersoll.

When Ramanujan, influenced by Russell's "scientific attitude," questioned how his father could hold together astronomy and astrology, his father replied: "You make the necessary corrections, that's all" and "the brain has two lobes." This response revealed a way of thinking that did not demand consistency—a context-sensitive approach that allowed seemingly incompatible beliefs to coexist.

Ramanujan observes that both Englishmen and "modern" Indian intellectuals have been dismayed by such inconsistency, often labeling it as hypocrisy. He cites a survey in The Illustrated Weekly of India where modern Indian intellectuals agreed that Indians "do not mean what they say, and say different things at different times."

Section III: Concepts of Karma, Fate, and Truth

Ramanujan explores the apparent inconsistency in Indian thought through the concepts of karma and talaividi (head-writing). While karma implies an iron chain of cause and consequence—the self's past determining the present—talaividi suggests arbitrary fate inscribed at birth with no relation to prior actions.

Ramanujan found that in 2,000 Kannada tales collected over twenty years, not a single tale used karma as a motif or motive, despite being told by Brahmins and Jains who elsewhere readily used karma in their explanations. Furthermore, Sheryl Daniel independently found that a Tamil village used karma and talaividi interchangeably as explanations for events, despite the two notions being inconsistent with each other.

This leads Ramanujan to challenge Western stereotypes about India. He quotes Henry Kissinger's claim that cultures "which escaped the early impact of Newtonian thinking have retained the essentially pre-Newtonian view that the world is almost completely internal to the observer." He also cites Sudhir Kakar's psychoanalytic observations about Indians having a "different relationship to outside reality," where "the Indian 'ego' is underdeveloped."

Ramanujan distinguishes himself from such views by arguing that this apparent lack of objectivity is not a defect but a different epistemological approach. He praises Heinrich Zimmer, who saw Indian "defect of vision" as "vision itself"—a view that does not privilege the ego or separate self from non-self.

Section IV: The Context-Sensitive Rule

Ramanujan introduces his central analytical framework: the distinction between context-free and context-sensitive rules, borrowed from linguistics. Context-free rules apply universally regardless of situation, while context-sensitive rules vary according to specific conditions.

Traditional Indian thought, Ramanujan argues, is characterized by context-sensitive rules:

"In cultures like India's, the context-sensitive kind of rule is the preferred formulation."

He demonstrates this through multiple examples:

Manu's Dharma: Unlike Kant's universal moral imperative, Manu's laws explicitly depend on caste, stage of life, and emergency situations. Manu says a king "must imagine into the laws of caste, of districts, of guilds, and of families, and [thus] settle the peculiar law of each." Even truth-telling is not unconditional—falsehood is permissible when life is in danger or loss of property is threatened.

Ramanujan contrasts this with Kant's categorical imperative: "Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature." For Manu, to be moral is to particularize—to ask who did what, to whom, and when. This leads to what Ramanujan calls a "logic of classes" (jati), where each class has its own laws, not to be universalized.

Literary Texts: No Indian text comes without a context until the 19th century. Works are framed by phalashruti verses telling the reader what benefits will result from their act of reading. The Ramayana and Mahabharata open with episodes explaining why and under what circumstances they were composed. Stories are embedded in meta-stories—inner tales illuminate outer ones and vice versa. The Nala story within the Mahabharata serves as a microcosm of the whole epic, providing context and meaning to Yudhishthira's plight.

Tamil Poetry: Classical Tamil lyrics are dramatic monologues that imply the complete "communication diagram"—who said what to whom, when, why, and who else overheard. They depend on a taxonomy of landscapes, flora, fauna, and emotions, where "to describe the exterior landscape is also to inscribe the interior landscape."

Time, Space, and Substance: Even time and space in India are not uniform and neutral but have specific properties that affect dwellers. Certain hours, days, and ages (yugas) are auspicious or inauspicious. Musical ragas have prescribed times. Medical diagnosis and prescription depend on contextual appropriateness (ritusamya). Indian thought, Ramanujan argues, is "material-minded" rather than spiritual—there is continuity of substance from context to object, from non-self to self.

Philosophical Systems: Indian philosophy confines itself to class-essences (jati) and never raises the question of universals in the Western sense. Qualities and relations are considered particulars, though they may be instances of universals.

Grammar as Model: Grammar, especially Panini's system, is the central model for thinking in Hindu texts. 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, moods and aspects."

Section V: The Dream of Freedom from Context

Ramanujan observes that in highly context-sensitive cultures, there is a counter-movement—a dream of being free from context. He identifies several "anti-contextual" notions in Indian thought:

Moksha: Release from all relations, in contrast to dharma, artha, and kama, which are all relational and context-bound.
Sannyasa: Renunciation cremates all past and present relations.
Rasa: In aesthetics, bhavas are private, context-roused sentiments, but rasa is a generalized essence beyond specific contexts.
Sphota: In semantics, the temporal sequence of letters yields a meaning beyond sequence and time.
Bhakti: Devotion defies all contextual structures—caste, ritual, gender, stage of life. Bhakti poetry challenges the entire system of homo hierarchicus.

Ramanujan cites Dasimayya's 10th-century poem to illustrate bhakti's anti-contextual stance:

"Did the breath of the mistress have breasts and long hair? / Or did the master's breath wear sacred thread? / Did the outcast, last in line, hold with his outgoing breath the stick of his tribe?"

He notes parallel counter-movements in the West: Plato's rebellion against Athenian democracy, Blake's attack on egalitarianism and abstraction, the rise of minute realism in the 19th-century novel, and various indexical movements in modern art. He quotes Blake's slogan of all context-sensitive systems: "one law for the lion and the ox is oppression."

Section VI: Modernization and Cultural Borrowing

Ramanujan concludes by examining modernization as a movement from context-sensitive to context-free modes in all realms:

Time: Gandhi's watch replaced the almanac's context-specific time.
Knowledge: Print replaced palm-leaf manuscripts, enabling egalitarian access irrespective of caste.
Law: The Indian Constitution made birth, region, sex, and creed irrelevant, overthrowing Manu.
Names: Traditional names gave clues to caste and origin, but modern names do not. Ramanujan notes finding "three Joseph Stalins and one Karl Marx" in a Kerala college roster.
Music: Ragas can now be heard at all hours and seasons; the Venkatesasuprabhatam can wake up anyone who tunes in to All India Radio, not just the Lord of Tirupati at dawn.

However, Ramanujan also shows that cultural borrowings undergo interesting accommodations to the prevailing system. Western items are converted to fit existing context-sensitive needs:

English fits into the Sanskrit slot as a pan-Indian elite language.
Modern science, business, and technology are "compartmentalized" and coexist with older religious ways.
Computers receive ayudhapuja (worship of weapons) as weapons of war once did.
The "modern" becomes one more context.

Similarly, Indian concepts borrowed by the West are generalized and freed from their original contexts. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" borrows the DA DA DA passage from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad but makes it individual, introspective, and universal.

Ramanujan concludes with the Buddha's parable of the Raft—a context-free system that becomes a burden when carried too long—as an ironic comment on the dangers of absolutizing either context-free or context-sensitive modes.

Key Themes and Contributions (in short)

1. Context-Sensitive vs. Context-Free Thinking

The essay's central contribution is the distinction between two modes of thought. Traditional Indian thought is predominantly context-sensitive—rules, meanings, and ethics depend on specific circumstances, relationships, and social positions. Western thought, especially since the Enlightenment, idealizes context-free universal principles. Ramanujan argues that this difference explains many apparent contradictions in Indian culture.

2. Critique of Western Stereotypes

Ramanujan challenges Orientalist stereotypes (from Kissinger, Kakar, and others) that portray Indians as irrational, underdeveloped in ego, or incapable of objective thinking. He argues that what appears as "inconsistency" or lack of objectivity is actually a different, equally valid way of organizing knowledge—one that prioritizes context over abstraction.

3. Inconsistency as Cultural Logic

Rather than seeing inconsistency as hypocrisy or intellectual failure, Ramanujan argues it reflects a cultural logic where multiple, even contradictory, frameworks coexist. The example of karma and talaividi (head-writing) being used interchangeably shows that Indians operate with a "tool-box" of ideas rather than a single consistent system.

4. The Role of Grammar and Classification

Ramanujan emphasizes that grammar—particularly Panini's system—serves as the central model for Indian thought. Even the Kamasutra is structured as a "grammar of love." This reflects a broader preoccupation with taxonomies (jatis) of all kinds: landscapes, emotions, seasons, tastes, and social groups.

5. Anti-Contextual Movements Within Tradition

Indian thought contains its own critiques of context-sensitivity: moksha (release from relations), rasa (generalized aesthetic essence), sphota (meaning beyond sequence), and bhakti (devotion that defies caste and ritual). These represent the "dream of freedom from context" within a predominantly context-bound culture.

6. Modernization as Context-Erosion

Modernization is described as a movement from context-sensitive to context-free modes—Gandhi's watch replacing the almanac, print replacing palm-leaf manuscripts, the Constitution overthrowing Manu's particularism. However, this is not a simple replacement but a negotiation where Western ideas get "compartmentalized" and accommodated to existing frameworks.

7. Cultural Borrowing and Transformation

Ramanujan shows that both Eastern and Western borrowings undergo transformation. Indian concepts become generalized when exported to the West (e.g., T.S. Eliot's use of the Upanishads). Western ideas become recontextualized when imported into India (e.g., English fills the Sanskrit slot, computers receive weapon-worship rituals).

8. Interdisciplinary Methodology

The essay exemplifies a remarkable synthesis of linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism, philosophy, and personal reflection. Ramanujan moves seamlessly between ancient texts, contemporary social science, and autobiographical observation.

9. Cultural Pluralism Without Essentialism

Ramanujan avoids both essentialist claims (India is this) and the dismissal of cultural difference. He argues for recognizing a "definite bias" toward context-sensitivity in Indian thought while acknowledging that no culture is exclusively one mode or the other.

10. Translation and Interpretation

The essay implicitly argues that understanding another culture requires recognizing its own categories of thought, not measuring it against Western norms. This has profound implications for anthropology, comparative philosophy, and the politics of knowledge.

Core Insight

The essay's lasting contribution is the framework of context-sensitive vs. context-free as a tool for understanding cultural difference—a framework that avoids both Orientalist condescension and romantic essentialism, while acknowledging genuine, systematic differences in how cultures organize knowledge, ethics, and meaning.