What is the Indian way of thinking?

Is there a special Indian way of thinking? Yes, says the Indian writer and researcher A. K. Ramanujan. For many years he had wondered at his father’s frequent alternation between different modes of thought. While his father swore by a strict scientific logic in his work as an engineer, this went completely by the board in his hobby as an amateur astrologist. Others who have conducted research on Indian culture also emphasise this switching between extremely different ways of thinking. Advocates of a more Hindu-dominated India may often feel like sending the country’s Muslim minority as far away as possible, but this hardly stops them from seeking religious services from the leaders of Muslim communities. Likewise, Marxist politicians in India can fight for a social structure based on equality while at the same time exploiting underpaid servants and avoiding physical contact with untouchables. According to Ramanujan, Indians have such watertight bulkheads between their activities that they can alternate between quite different and often contradictory ways of understanding the world without batting an eyelid. In contrast to the context-free mode of thinking we are familiar with from Europe and the USA, Indian thinking is therefore dependent on the context in which it is incorporated. But is our own mode of thought really so context-free and devoid of inconsistencies as Ramanujan maintains? Such differences can often only be described as differences of degree.

Another feature that it has been maintained is typical for Indian thought is the emphasis given to disparity rather than equality. While equality is a basic value in the western world (and particularly in the Nordic countries), hierarchy and differences between people dominate Indian thought. According to the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, the caste system could hardly have survived unless those who were lowest on the ladder were followers of the religious ideology that justifies this system. “Rubbish,” say his critics, who claim that the caste system is quite simply about power and suppression. Still others add that the caste system is not even as Indian as many assert it to be: there is in fact much to show that it was far less rigid before India was colonised by the British.

Whether we try to understand the Indian way of thinking through aspects such as hierarchy or dependence on the specific context, we must handle the issue of a distinct type of Indian thought process with the greatest of care. The population of India is so numerous and diverse that we cannot maintain that all Indians think in the same way, and we may also fall into the trap of exaggerating the features of India that are most different from those valued most in ourselves. India deserves better than to be presented as a distorted picture of our own society.