Abraham Kovoor’s Case Diary: Submarine Telepathy

Abraham Kovoor

On September 17^th 1963, the 'DAILY SKETCH' (London) carried an article by one Leslie Mallory, headed 'NEW SCIENCE BACKS THE MIND-READER', dealing mainly with the claims of the Russian Professor Leonid Vasiliev, who regularly put men and women to sleep by telepathy and awakened them at set intervals". But the professor, we are told, "links these with the ones carried out in the US nuclear submarine NAUTILUS". A similar article appeared in the 'PSYCHOLOGY' magazine (London).

The description about the submarine E.S.P. test went on thus:

USS Nautilus SSN571

It was on July 25^th, 1959, that a mysterious passenger boarded the atomic pow­ered submarine Nautilus, which immediately put to sea and cruised for 16 days in the 'depths of the Atlantic ocean'. Once aboard, the passenger shut himself up in a cabin, and only the sailor who brought him his food and Captain Anderson "had ever seen his face". Twice a day the passenger handed a slip of paper to Captain Anderson, bearing the typical zenor card symbols. Both the passenger and the captain signed each sheet, the captain then placed it in an envelope which was closed and officially sealed with the date and the words: "Top secret, to be destroyed in case of imminent capture". It was then locked up in the safe.

During the 16 days the experiment lasted, closed up in a room which he never left, Smith, a student at Duke University - the university immortalized by the doyen of E.S.P. experiments, Professor Joseph Banks Rhine - would sit twice a day before an automatic c~d-shuft1ing device. In a drum thousands of cards marked with signs of cross, star, circle, square and three wavy lines, were shaken up. Twice a day the appa­ratus, operated by clockwork, would eject a card, completely at random, at one minute intervals. Experimenter Smith fixed his gaze and tried to concentrate intensely on this card.

At precisely the same moment, 1,200 miles away and hundreds of feet under the ocean, the mysterious passenger - Lieutenant Jones - tried to guess which card Smith was looking at. He marked down the result, and had the document countersigned by Captain Anderson.

On Monday, August l0th, 1959, the submarine landed at Croyton, and "Lieutenant Jones entered an official car which, under military escort, let him off at the nearest airport (?) A few hours later his plane landed in a town in Maryland. An automobile was standing by to pick up the passenger. It drove him to a building which bore the inscription – “Westinghouse Special Research Center. No Admittance to un-authorised personnel”.

The passenger asked for Colonel William Bowers, Director of Biological Sci­ence at the U.S.A.F. Research Office.

Colonel Bowers was waiting in his office. "Sit down, Lieutenant Jones", he said. "You have the envelope?" Jones handed over the envelope to the Colonel, who walked to a safe, opened it, and took out the envelope identical except that the seal it bore was not marked "submarine" but "Research Center X, Friendship, Maryland".

Colonel Bowers opened the two envelopes and took out some packets of smaller envelopes which he proceeded to unseal. Silently the two men matched the slips of paper that bore similar dates. Then they compared them. With more than 70 per cent accuracy, the symbols not only corresponded, but were placed in the same order on the two sheets bearing the same date.

"We have reached a turning point in history" said Colonel Bowers. "For the first time ever, under conditions that precluded trickery, and with a precision great enough to open the way to its practical application, human thought has been transmitted through space, without any intermediary, from one brain to another. It has opened a way even for submarine communications".

The study of parapsychology (E.S.P.) had, we are told finally entered a scientific age.

This widely publicized story first appeared in a French best seller, LE MARTIN DES MAGICIENS, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier and was later summarized in the American magazine THIS WEEK, for September 8^th, 1963. Instead, however, of taking the story on its face value, as Mr. Mallory and a number of English journal­ists have done, THIS WEEK did a little private investigation.

When asked for proof of the story for which they had been the 'main source', Messrs Pauwels and Bergier told THIS WEEK "that they had elaborated on reports they had heard but not verified”.

They had for example, given the submarine a name. "It could not be just an atomic submarine", wrote Pauwels in response to THIS WEEK’s ques­tions, "but the NAUTILUS is best known to French people".

THIS WEEK next showed the story to Captain William R. Anderson, first skipper of the Nautilus, and now retired from the U.S. Navy. His comment was thus:

"Although the NAUTILUS engaged in a very wide variety of activities, certainly these did not include experiments in telepathy. The report by Messrs Pauwels and Bergier is completely false ... During that time NAUTILUS was in fact high and dry in dock at Portsmouth, undergoing her first major overhaul".

It is still more interesting to note that during the relevant period the submarine Nautilus was not under the command of Captain Anderson, but Commander Lando W. Zech Jr.

Colonel William Bowers of the U.S. Air Force, whose participation in the ex­periment and whose remarks about "the turning point of history" are mentioned above declared:-

"The experiment in which I was alleged to have participated never took place ... I have never been assigned to the Westinghouse Laboratory. In fact, on Ju1y 25^th 1959 I was assigned to duties in the Air University, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, which were i~ no way related to extra-sensory investigations".

In short, as THIS WEEK commendably makes clear, the NAUTILUS E.S.P. story was a big hoax. But that will not prevent it from staying around for quite a time. (Freethinker, Oct 4^th, 1963).

(Exposing Paranormal Claims - Abrahama Kovoor, Published by B. Premanand, Indian CSICOP)

(Here is another article on this subject available on the web giving further details: The-Great-Nautilus-Hoax)

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Abraham Kovoor’s Case Diary: Extra-Sensory Perception

Abraham Kovoor 

Perception is the process by which an organism becomes aware of its environment. Normally perceptions are of five types - all of a stimulus-response pattern. The five sensory stimuli in man and other highly evolved animals are the senses of touch, smell, sight, taste and hearing. In some animals like the homing pigeons, bees, migratory birds, dogs, ants, moths etc., a sixth sense - the sense of direction - is present. Like the five senses in man, it has been experimentally proved that the sense of direc­tion also is a response action to certain stimuli.

Zener cards used in the early twentieth century for experimental research into ESP

Dogs, bees, moths and ants are able to trace their paths making use of their highly developed sense of smell. An ant is able to follow the same path taken by another ant which has gone before, by smelling an abdominal secretion left on the path by the leader ant. It is regarded that the sense of direction in the case of birds is the result of magnetic orientation. If a small piece of magnet is attached to the head of a homing pigeon, and let loose away from its home, it will fail to find its way back.

Occultism 

Unlike the lower animals, the cogitative mind of the primitive man was not content with the five senses he possessed. They did not help him to know his own future and what was in the minds of his own friends and enemies. His latent desire to know about things he could not perceive with the help of his five senses, made primi­tive man dabble in the occult. This led to the crafty ones among them resort to char­latan practices. These crafty men fraudulently claimed to possess mysterious powers to obtain information from gods, deities and the minds of other persons near or far, dead or alive. Occultism became a lucrative profession.

Theyyam, Payyannur, Kerala

In later years occultism gave rise to witch-crafts, priest-crafts and temples. It was customary in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, as in other countries, to seek the help of gods and occultists for predictions and prophesies... The most famous of all pagan oracles was that of Apollo in Delphi. Cleopatra is said to have consulted this oracle and known about Ceasar's assassination ahead. Sacrifices were offered to Apollo, and he replied through the lips of the priestess. In order to maintain the reputation of the oracle the priestess purposely avoided giving direct answers to the questions asked. The answers were often so cleverly worded as to be interpreted suitably after the incident.

The present-day kattadiyas, light-readers, astrologers, palmists, card-readers, spirit media, kappuralas, priests, devales, kovils, temples, churches and other so-called sacred places and persons are the modernized remnants of occultists and oracle of old.

Psychical research

Widespread belief in the supernatural prompted many scientists in England to establish an institution for conducting scientific research on psychic phenomena. Thus in 1882, the Society for Psychical Research (S.P.R.) was established with Professor Henry Sidgwick as its first president. Later a similar one was formed in America. The sole purpose of the S.P.R. - though not of course, the sole purpose of all psychical researchers - is to discover and explain, whatever they may be, claims of supernatural phenomena.

Most of the early investigators of the S.P.R. like F. WH. Myers, Edmund Gurney, Frank Podmore, H.F. Saltmarsh, Oliver Lodge, Arthur Connon Doyle, Harry Price, Hereward Carrington, Madame Blavatsky, Rev. Drayton Thomas, J. W Dunne, Henry Sidgwick, Madame Sidgwick, Lord Charles Hope and many others have written vol­umes giving positive evidences to establish the reality of psychical phenomena such as spirit materialization, table rapping, haunted houses, spirit photography, polter­geists, spirit writings, ectoplasmic images, apparitions, spirit media, spirit messages, spirit drawings, precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis etc.

But, most of the later investigators who were and are eminent scientists of the twentieth century, like WH. Salter, Trever Hall, Antony Flew, Spencer Brown, JR Sturge, Theodore Besterman, Richard Hodgson, S. J. Davy, Fred Barlow, JBS. Haldane, H. Cutner, Bertrand Russell and many others have condemned and severely criticized the earlier writers for arriving at hasty conclusions without adequate and foolproof investigations. They were accused of having given undue credence to anecdotal evi­dences to justify their own beliefs. It is not the method of science to construe argu­ments for making a thing reasonable and fitting to prove what is in the investigator's conditioned mind. Fraudulent media also contributed in a large measure in mislead­ing gullible investigators.

The following passage from one such writer - Hereward Carrington - will show how utterly gullible some of the earlier investigators of the S.P.R. were:-

"The writer's father, who lived in India for some ten years, told him that it was common knowledge that the natives were discussing in their bazaars events which had just transpired upcountry, hours before the official news were received. This was in the days before radio or even telegraph. As we have said before, practically all visi­tors who have come to know the natives will believe that such abilities are exercised by them - even though the majority of anthropologists as yet refuse to believe them".

Is there any truth in the above statement? We, who are of the East know what utter nonsense this story is. It is this type of silly anecdotes of some Europeans who have made temporary sojourns in the East that has given to the people of eastern countries the undue credit for being more 'spiritual' than those of the West. Instead of saying more spiritual, it would be more correct to say that the people of the Orient are more crafty and hypocritical than those of the Occident in claiming spiritual powers. Our Sadhus and Sanyasis are the living monuments of such deceptions.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

In 1884 Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, visited England and gave to the principal workers of the S.P.R. evidence that some Theoso­phists in India had produced apparitions of themselves to other people, and that tele­kinetic phenomena, such as are said to happen in the presence of psychical mediums, had also being occurring there.

Mr. Richard Hodgson was sent out to India by the S.P.R. to investigate it on the spot. He returned to England with a most damaging report concluding thus:-

"I finally had no doubt whatsoever that the phenomena connected with the Theo­sophical Society was part of a huge fraudulent system worked by Madame Blavatsky with the assistance of Coulombs and several other confederates, and that not a single genuine phenomenon could be found among them all". (Proc. S.P.R. Vol.III, P.2I0)

S.J. Davy and Richard Hodgson exposed that' spirit-writing', which was claimed to be inexplicable by normal methods, could be produced by conjurer's tricks. Fred Barlow and Major W Rampling exposed the trick of 'spirit-photography' with par­ticular reference to the work of one practitioner who had won great reputation among the gullibles. (Proc. S.P.R, Vol.XLI).

Very few people are aware that among the early writers, Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore - co-authors with F. W.H. Myers of "Phantasma of the Living" - gave up in later years their beliefs in the existence of spirits. Their skepticisms in spiritual­ism are expressed clearly in their later writings. Henry Sidgwick the first president of the S.P.R. also has shown his changed views on spiritualism in his later publications.

E.S.P

Though for many years the work of the S.P.R remained in the anecdotal and observational phase, it entered the experimental stage only during the second quarter of the twentieth century. In 1927 Dr. J.B. Rhine, a Biologist, in collaboration with his wife Dr. Lousia E. Rhine and Dr. Helge Lundholm conducted some research at Duke University, North Carolina, under the world-renowned psychologist Professor Will­iam McDougall on the so-called extra-sensory perceptions (E.S.P.) such as telepathy, clairvoyance (the power of knowing things which are not normally perceptible), pre­cognition (fore-knowledge of future events) and psychokinesis (material motion ef­fected by thought). Later Dr. Rhine became the Director of the Department of Para­psychology at Duke University.

JB Rhine

Dr. Rhine in his books 'New Frontiers of Mind', 'The Reach of Mind', 'Extra­sensory Perceptions', 'My Thirty Yeats {)f Psychical Research', 'Telepathy and Hu­man Personality', and his numerous articles in the 'Journal of Parapsychology' con­firmed the occurrence of psychic powers in some 'gifted' persons; and his writings are authoritatively quoted by credulous believers in the supernatural.

Stimulated by Rhine's experimental claims thirty - odd universities in Europe, America and other places started conducting researches in 'parapsychology'. Before long Rhine got ardent supporters in persons like Whately Carington, S.G. Soal, G.N.M. Tyrrel, RH. Thouless, N.V. Peale, JW Dunne, I. Stevenson, B. Wiesn, C.D. Broad and recently in Professor Leonid Vasiliev of Leningrad University. These sensational claims created a big stir among scientists allover the world; and it led to many more scientists take up research on E.S.P.

Humanity as a whole is indebted to the researches on E.S.P. conducted by some of the eminent scientists of today. Renowned scientists like Dr. Eugene Adams, Dr. G.R. Price, Professor Kennedy, Dr. John E. Coover, Dr. Christopher Scott, Dr. Denys Parsons, Dr. Dennis Hyde, Dr. Helmholtz, Professor 1. Scame, Dr. E. Roux, Dr. Anita Kohsan, Professor Antony Flew and numerous others have severely criticised, con­demned and even challenged Rhine's experiments and findings. The opinions of a few such contemporary research scientists are given below:-

Dr. Christopher Scott: "Dr. Rhine's techniques are riddled with loopholes: the striking positive results reported must be discounted completely". (Proc. S.P.R., Vo1..XLIX, pp.16).

Dr. Denys Parsons: "A mechanical device for investigating E.S.P. under condi­tions of telepathy and clairvoyance has been devised. No evidence of E. S .P. was found in 24,000 trials". (Proc. S.P.R., Vol. XLVIII, pp.3l).

Dr. Dennis Hyde: "Duke University experiments were repeated, but succeeded only in detecting a hitherto un-noticed source of error". (Proc. S.P.R., Vol. XLVIII).

Dr. Margaret Knight: "The facts revealed by Dr. J.B. Rhine are so odd, so appar­ently chaotic, in a sense so trivial and yet so difficult to organize within the accepted scientific framework, that an acute intellectual discomfort is the feeling they arouse". (Science News, No.18, pp.9).

JB Rhine testing his subjects using Zener Cards

Dr. H. Helmholtz: "Neither the testimony of all the Fellows of the Royal Society, nor even the evidence of my own senses wi11lead me to believe in the transmission of thought from one person to another, independently of the recognised channels of sensation". (The Logic of Liberty).

Dr. E. Roux: "When such 'paranormal' persons discovered by an investigator, were subsequently tested by other investigators, they almost always failed to produce anything unusual ... With the new-fanged E.S.P. go all other and older marvels of the séance rooms and the rapping tables. The so-called psi -phenomena are anecdotal, not scientific. Mrs. X. the great medium can no longer perform except in a sympathetic atmosphere". (The Case Against Parapsychology).

G.L. Simions: "The study of telepathy can rightly belong to science ... Perhaps it is significant tllat to date their results appear to be negative. Rhine and his colleagues at Duke University - from whom we hear very little nowadays - will be the first to admit this". (Psychical Research and Secularism, Freethinker Jan. 1964)

C.E.M. Hansel: "Collusion between the subject and the agent might result in just the kind of results obtained in Soal's experiments and this collusion might de­ceive the experimenter who did not realize how the trick was done". (Experiments in Telepathy. The New Scientist, Feb. 1959).

Anita Kohsen: “Dr. 1.B. Rhine whose writings, in my opinion, are entirely devoid of either scientific or scholastic merit...” (New Approach to Psychical Research)

Collin McCall:  "Dr. Rhine was hopelessly unscientific ... We cannot take a word of Professor Vasiliev, however distinguished a physiologist, any more than we can take the word of Professor Rhine ... In dealing with accounts of E.S.P., we are dealing with human testimony and often with human gullibility... Telepathy is contrary to scientifically-established laws". (Freetllinker, Oct. 11 til 1963).

Professor Antony Flew. "This work indicates that E.S.P. tests by a really compe­tent, conscientious, skeptical researcher will only yield negative results ... E. S.P. guess­ing is so different from the operation of legitimate senses, that it should not ?~ thought of as a species of perception at all. It is ludicrously unreliable. The precognitive effect surely rules out all possibility of explanation in terms of radiation. Mediumistic talk of 'the vibrations', waves and so on, is simply empty mystification. .. Still we cannot say that even the most significant results prove E. S.P ... Most scandalous of all, pre­cognition conflicts with our scientific assurance that what will happen later cannot affect what happens now. It makes no sense to talk of future causes having present effects". (New Approach to Psychical Research, pp.67, 113, 114, 119, 123, 126).

Dr. Eugene Adams: "I have completed a series of 30,000 individual tests of the card-guessing sort that Dr. Rhine has conducted at Duke University. My tests were designed to test clairvoyance, telepathy, and the two in combination. My results were negative". (The Amazing World, pp.258).

Dr. G.R Price: "Dr. Rhine's so-called psychic experiments have to be condemned severely". (Science, Aug. 25^th 1955).

Dr. John E. Coover: "After 10,000 tests I obtained no better than chance results. No trace of any objective thought-transmission was found". (Experiments in Psychic Research, Stanford University, pp. 123-4.)

Prof. John Scarne: "All the evidences submitted by Rhine designed to prove the existence of psychic phenomena is a lot of humbug ... It is an established fact that at one time or another every prominent psychic researcher had been duped by fallIng for some amateurish trick performed by a trickster operating under the guise of being psychic, Rhine's E.S.P. and psychokinesis are nothing but errors ... Let us stop kid­ding ourselves. If Rhine had one subject who possessed extra-sensory perception, he and/or that subject could win an enormous fortune in short time". (The Amazmg World, pp.266.)

Professor Kennedy of Stanford University. "One of the scientific demands on truth is that when experiments are repeated in laboratories, results similar to the original shall be obtained. One hundred students were used in our experiments, and our results did not correspond to those of Dr. Rhine". (The Amazing World, pp.258.)

Theodore Besterman. "We conducted three series of experiments: first with a group of S.P.R. members aged about 45-50; second with a collection of Oxford under­graduates; third with Mr. Dunne himself. The results were unimpressive". (A New Approach to Psychical Research, pp.148).

CWK. MundIe. "The fact that in precognitive phenomena the nature of the earlier event seems to be casually dependent on that of the later event, makes it tautological. …In order to explain precognition it seems necessary to suppose that they are due to casual influence by future events ... I am extremely reluctant to accept this. To accept this would be to revise the conception of 'cause and effect', "(A New Ap­proach to Psychical Research, pp.126-28.)

This is the first of a series of essays written by Dr Abraham T Kovoor (1898-1978) that we are planning to upload on to our website www.carvaka4india.com

This is a lecture delivered by Abraham Kovoor at Rotherfield Psychological Society (The date and year of the lecture is not available with us).  This essay is taken from the book Exposing Paranormal Claims published by B. Premanand for Indian CSICOP

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The Heterodox Schools of Indian Thought

Donald H Bishop

Donald H Bishop wrote this essay as an introduction to the section, The Heterodox Schools, of the book Indian Thought – An Introduction, edited by him and published in 1975. At the time of the publication of the book, the author was with College of Sciences and Arts, Washington State University.

We upload this essay as part of our effort to bring together the writings on Carvaka philosophy.

The three heterodox schools of Indian thought are Carvaka, Buddhism and Jainism. The time of origin of the first cannot be fixed exactly as no early Carvaka works are extant. According to some authorities the Carvaka School had developed before Buddha. Brihaspati is accepted by some as the founder and Carvaka his chief disciple. Others say that Carvaka is the name of the originator. Still a third claim is that Carvaka is not the name of a person but a word signifying pleasure. As to why Carvakism came into being Chandradhar Sharma writes that: 

"It must have arisen as a protest against the excessive monkdom of the Brahmana priests. The externals of ritualism which ignored the substance and emphasized the shadow, the idealism of the Upanishads unsuited to the commoners, the political and the social crises rampant in that age, the exploitation of the masses by the petty rulers, monks and the wealthy class, the lust and greed and petty dissensions in an unstable society paved the way for the rise of materialism in India in the post-Upanishadic and pre-Buddhistic age."

 The basic characteristic or "the essence of Carvaka's thought" is its materialism. Its metaphysical claim is that matter is the only reality. Matter consists of four elements-earths, water, fire and air -mixed in various ways and proportions and in terms of laws in­herent in them to form objects. Since ether can only be inferred, not seen, its existence is rejected. The mind is simply a particular combination of the four elements. Consciousness is an outcome of matter, a result of a certain combination of the elements. It is an epiphenomenon or by-product of matter.

The Carvakist believes that perception is the only means of true knowledge. He rejects inference as invalid. Carvaka epistemology is very much like that of David Hume and contemporary positivism. A further similarity is its atheism. God as an inference from the material world is not acceptable. Moreover God is not necessary to account for the world and its operations. An internal explanation is sufficient. The early Carvakists are said to have believed religion to be an "opiate of the people" given by the priesthood to retain their preeminent position in society.

Its denial of the soul and immortality leads the Carvakist to place a major emphasis on this world and life and thus to propose a hedo­nistic ethics. Like the British utilitarians, he asserts the good to be whatever is useful for maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Sensual happiness is considered the supreme good and goal of life. Values are man-created, and have no a priori existence or theistic grounding. Kama (pleasure) is the end of life and Artha (wealth) the means of realizing it.

As to the extensiveness of materialism, it is generally agreed that it never became a dominant philosophy in India. C. Sharma declares: " ... materialism in Indian Philosophy has never been a force" and "Materialism as metaphysics has never found favour with the Indian philosophers." Its major contribution has been that it " ... saved Indian philosophy from dogmatism to a great extent" by introducing an element of scepticism or agnosticism into the Indian philosophical stream. The major cause of its downfall in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., Sharma declares, was its "denial of all human values which make life worth living." Jainism and Buddhism, he asserts, " ... arose immediately and supplied the ethical and spiritual background which ejected Materialism. "

Changes in contemporary India brought out a renewed interest in materialism. Indian society, as elsewhere, has become more secular in the sense of a greater emphasis on and justification of material values. The rise of science and technology has stimulated thinking and investigation into ways in which science mayor may not be reconciled with philosophy and religion. Are they inevitably opposed to each other or can the presuppositions of each be harmonized? Hopefully, new insights will result from the raising of questions such as this.

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Bridges for Harmony

Ram Puniyani

Life is full of paradoxes, and not all of them are intriguing. Some of them give a pleasant cozy feeling too. Recently (25 March, 2012) people saw the Pakistan’ Deputy Attorney General, Muhammad Khurshid Khan, Polishing the shoes of devotees in Gurudwara Rakab Ganj Delhi. This work is part of Seva (service) in Gurudwaras. This particular tradition is part of Sikh Gurudwaras.  Kurdhid was doing this to atone the sins of Taliban’s that have tormented the Sikhs in many ways. He also was doing it to heal the wonds of minorities who have suffered the violence. Taliban’s had abducted three Sikhs, had demanded ransom and one of the Sikhs was killed. Khurshid felt the Taliban’s have done something inhuman, which is against Islam. Pained by this he started this mission of bring peace and amity amongst religious communities.

One is sure there may be enough conservative, fanatic elements who will criticize this humane and touching gesture on the part of Khurshid. One knows that Taliban’s with their particular version of Islam, which got a boost in the indoctrination of Madrassasas set up in Pakistan by US to counter the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, is the extreme intolerant variety of Islam, something is against the basic tenets of that religion. Same Taliban’s had destroyed the Bamiyan Buddha statues, they had also imposed Jazia on Sikhs and had also come up to implement with the color code for dress for people according to their religion. South Asia has been in the grip of sectarian violence where minorities in each of these countries has been the major victim of politics in the name of religion, a politics which takes cover under the identity of religion and spreads hatred against the ‘others’ the one’s belonging to other religions. 

This politics also accentuates the divides amongst the followers of same religion as it also breaks them in to further narrow sects. Surely, while Christians and Hindus nave been a major victim of violence in Pakistan the smaller sects of Islam, Ahmadiays, Kadiyanis have also faced the wrath of dominant sections of society. In India during the rise of the communal violence during last three decades while Muslims and Christians, the  religious minorities, have faced the major brunt of sectarian violence; at the same times dalits and Adivisis have also been a substantial victim of the violence.

The politics in the name of religion operates on the foundation of identity of religion and undermines the moral values of that religion. It constructs a history where the Kings of a particular religion become the ‘icons’ of that religious community, while the kings belonging to other religion become the villains of the piece. The interactive culture of the communities is undermined in these narratives and the religious communities are made to stand against each other as the opposite parties. The reality is that the amity of people had been more along economic lines, the landlords on one side the laboring masses on the other. While the ‘clergy’ stood at the service of the affluent ruling class, the saints expressed the sigh of the oppressed sections of society. The Landlords–Kings allied and fought with each other for the sake of power and wealth while the laboring masses interacted with each other, rubbing shoulders while visiting the sufi dargahs, or paying respect to saints of the genre of Kabir, cutting across religions.

The colonialists were more interested in plundering the South Asia, which as a continent came under British rule in the main. The British promoted the declining sections of landlords and Kings, recognizing them as ‘representative’ of their religious community. This laid the foundation of Communal politics, Muslim League on one side and Hindu Mahsabha and RSS on the other. These communal streams picked up the version of History, centered on the religion of the kings and tried to preserve their vested interests in the language of religion. This interpretation looks down on the syncretic traditions of people who found as much solace with the likes of Bule Shah or Nizamuddin Auliya as with Ramdev Baba Pir or Satya Pir as with Dadu, Raidas or Tukaram.

The highest point of success of British policy of ‘divide and rule’ was the partition of the country or rather carving out of Pakistan in the name of religion, while the remaining part upheld the values of freedom movement to come up as a secular democratic nation. Overall, the major culture and traditions of South Asia, India-Pakistan-Bangla Desh are mixed one’s the syncretism of their religious tradition being its high point. During last three decades the sectarianism has surged due to many a local factors which have been further boosted by the rise of Global Emperor, US, who devised the religious language, demonized Islam to quench its hunger for oil. The result has been the wounds of partition, the wounds of communal strife of the past which were slightly cooling down have been exacerbated and the communal forces have become stronger in all the South Asian Countries. These communal forces have at one level similar value, opposition to democracy and abolition of human rights of weaker sections of society. At surface they present it as a battle against the ‘other religious community’.

In this dismal scenario, it is people like Khurshid who are braving it out and despite the sure opposition from fundamentalist forces are keeping the torch of amity alive. While Talibans, Zia Ul Haque and RSS type formations have been on rampage, the forces like those presented by Khurshid are also silently singing the songs of peace. The efforts in this direction have been slowly but surely percolating and trying to appeal to the humane aspects of community living. These elements know that while at one level the victim groups have to get their rights by their struggle against injustices, they also know that the progress of society is possible only by overcoming the sectarian divides which try to trample our democratic values. Democratic ethos are the base on which the struggle for human rights and better society is possible in the short and long run. All the efforts which bring communities together for interaction, celebration are building the bridges which not only will overcome the sectarianism but with lay the foundations on which peace with justice will be possible. Three Cheers for the likes of Muhammad Khurshid Khan!

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Marx and the Materialist Tradition in Indian Philosophy

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya

The title of the paper may sound odd to some, for Marx, in spite of his encyclopedic learning, was not at all conversant with the Indian philosophical tradition. Yet there are a few points in Marx’s works that may be of use in relation to the reconstruction of the materialist tradition in Indian philosophy. The reconstruction of the materialist tradition in Europe owes something to Marx’s own doctoral dissertation on the difference between the Democritean and Epicurean philosophies of nature (Marx­Engels 1:25­105). This work is said to have anticipated the direction in which Epicurean studies progressed in later years (Farrington 93). The thesis has been translated into several languages and there are a number of book­length studies on the subject (McLellan 1972, 75n31), He gathered his material from a large number of sources which consisted of fragments quoted from the lost works of these two Greek philosophers. One has to remember that Marx had to gather his material exclusively from the fragments that are found quoted in later works. At the same time he had to evaluate which representations of Epicurus or Democritus were expected to be reliable and which were not. He did not have the advantage of having Hermann Karl Usener (1834­1905)’s Epicurea (1887) or Hermann Alexander Diels (1848­1922)’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1903), not to speak of such readymade collections as The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: the Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonia of the Major Presocratics (2010). Marx had to rely exclusively on his wide reading of Greek and Latin literature and assiduously collect the fragments and copy them out in his notebooks. Thus Marx worked not only as a student of philosophy but also as an accomplished classical philologist in tracing and evaluating the fragments attributed to Democritus and Epicurus. Marx never lost interest in his early work and often considered revising it for publication. As late as 1858 he drafted a second Preface to his thesis but other preoccupations did not permit him to go back to the task.

The materialist tradition in Indian philosophy too has to follow the same method as adopted by Marx and other classical scholars. Since no text of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system has come down to us, the only way is to gather fragments referring to the Cārvāka/Lokāyata found in a variety of Sanskrit and Prakrit works written by its opponents. All those who had devoted themselves to this task, however, did not try to separate wheat from chaff. They sometimes accepted uncritically whatever the philosophical opponents of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata had spoken of it. For example, a few aphorism­like statements have been attributed to the Laukāyatikas in the Kāmasūtra (1.2.26­30) and almost all historians of Indian philosophy have admitted them to be genuine. But a systematic analysis reveals that the so-called aphorisms included in their list of Carvaka fragments by D. R. Shastri and Mamoru Namai are actually nothing but current maxims (laukika nyaya) found in other sources as well (Bhattacharya 2009a 94-95).


Marx did not make the mistake of uncritically accepting Plutarch’s representation of Epicurus in his works and proved conclusively that such representations did not always reflect the authentic views of Epicurus (McLellan 1995, 31). Even though Marx wrote his thesis when he was a very young man (he was in his twenties then), his critical faculty was so well developed that, contrary to current belief, he was able to show that Epicurus did not merely echo Democritus’ views but definitely showed advancement in his treatment of atom.

This brings us to another question. There is a tendency among many scholars to think of a uniform and homogeneous materialist tradition in India, beginning from Ajita Kesakambala, a senior contemporary of the Buddha (sixth/fifth century BCE), down to the Cārvākas (around the eighth century CE). They do not find any discrepancy in this supposedly linear tradition as if the whole of the basic doctrines of materialism are to be found right from its inception, and the basic ideas were not subject to any kind of development. The Marxists, on the other hand, warned by Marx’s approach to the history of modern materialism in Europe (Holy Family 150­154), have sought to trace the origin of materialist thought in India right from the Upaniṣads and traced other proto­materialist views before the rise of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata.

How did Marx approach the issue? He observed that Duns Scotus (c.1265­1308), a Catholic philosopher, had asked “whether it was impossible for matter to think” – a significant pointer to the basic tenet of materialism. Marx did not concern himself with other aspects of Scotus’s thoughts but moved on to trace the development of materialism in England through Francis Bacon (1561­1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588­1679), and John Locke (1632­1704).

How could a medieval schoolman ask such a question and provide an affirmative answer? Marx observed:

In order to effect this miracle (sc. matter itself can think), he took refuge in God’s omnipotence, i.e., he made theology preached materialism. Moreover, he was a Nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolman (HF 150).

Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, whether or not he had Marx’s words in mind, in his later studies went back to an Upaniṣadic seer, Uddālaka Āruṇi and projected him as the first materialist thinker and the first scientist in India (Chattopadhyaya 1985, 196­204; Chattopadhyaya 1991, 89­148). This was quite a new approach in tracing the origin of materialist thought in India. Earlier still Walter Ruben, following the lead provided by his mentor, Hermann Jacobi, had compared Uddālaka with Thales of Miletus, a Presocratic philosopher, pointing out that both of them were hylozoists, and in this sense, proto­materialists (Ruben 345­46).

The prevailing tendency to think of materialism as one homogenous doctrine (while idealism is accepted as divided into several different schools, traditionally numbered six) has also come to be challenged. As Marx’s study of the development of materialism in Europe demonstrates, materialism had to wait quite a long time to become atheistic. All theological bars that hemmed­in materialism in England had to wait to be shattered till the late seventeenth­century and eighteenth­century thinkers such as Anthony Collins (1676­1729), David Hartley (1705­1757) and Joseph Priestley (1753­1804) appeared in the scene. Even then, many of them were deists: although they refused to believe in the concept of revelation, dogma or any kind of supernatural connections and denied the efficacy of supplication and prayer, they did not deny the existence of God altogether. In spite of this drawback of theirs Marx said: “At all events for materialists, deism is but an easy­going way of getting rid of religion.” (HF 152) Atheism then was not a part and parcel of materialism in Europe right from its inception.

Similarly materialism originally was not a progressive, democratic doctrine. Engels has specifically shown that in the British tradition materialism in the seventeenth century was an aristocratic doctrine, antagonistic to the masses in general (Engels 441). Only in the hands of the French Enlightenment thinkers in the following century materialism came to be connected with communism and socialism. Originally materialism was not a part of a singular worldview and materialist thinkers in modern Europe did hold and still hold divergent socio­political views.

Is there anything in this that proved to be relevant to the study of the materialist tradition in India? Yes. There was a view that Lokāyata was a philosophical system that along with Sāṃkhya and Yoga was cultivated in royal circles, as purportedly appeared from the Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra (1.2.10). Erich Frauwallner further proposed that materialism originally was cultivated by the Realpolitikers in ancient India (2:216). Some scholars have also followed this view, apparently on the basis of a story found in a Buddhist text (‘Pāyasi Suttanta’, Pali DN 2:23). However, such a theory of the aristocratic origin of materialism in India does not bear scrutiny, for Lokāyata in early Buddhist and Brahminical writings invariably stands for ‘the science of disputation’, vitandāśāstra and not materialism (Bhattacharya 2009a 187­96). Hence, Kauṭilya could not have meant ‘materialism’ by Lokāyata. Secondly, using a frame story of a king being addressed by several of his ministers, each trying to convince his master of the truth of his own philosophical system, is a well­known and oft­used narrative device found in many an Indian text (Bhattacharya 2009b). Such a device should not be taken to refer to a real­life incident recorded in fiction.

Nevertheless there can be little doubt that at least three proto­materialist doctrines – of Time, Own Being and Elements ­­in their rudimentary form were current in India right from the time of the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (not later than the third century BCE). The doctrine of elements (bhūtāni) may refer to five natural elements (earth, air, fire, water, and space), but in later times we hear of four elements only (space being excluded) in a Cārvāka aphorism (Bhattacharya 2009a 80). In the Tamil epic, Manimekalai, we read of two materialist schools existing side by side (27:271­76). Incidentally it may be mentioned that the Tamil tradition between the third century and the ninth century CE contains much of interest in relation to materialism (Vanamamalai 25­41) However, we are yet to hear anything about the social outlook of the Cārvākas. Although no primary source is available in this regard, at least two opponents of materialism find fault with it for being anti­sexist and opposed to caste discrimination (PC 2.18, NC 17.40, 42, 58). If such accusations are admitted to be true, the representation of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata as an adherent of the Establishment point of view would not hold water.

The whole picture, based as it is on purely fragmentary sources and those too derived from the works of anti­materialists, is somewhat confusing. It would appear that the ontology of the Indian materialists alone was common to all the materialist schools right from the time of the Buddha down to the Cārvākas. But the epistemological positions were widely divergent. There must have been one school or maybe several schools which admitted perception and perception alone as the only valid instrument of cognition. This is one point of controversy that is raised and argued against by the opponents of materialism right from the eighth century CE. One aphorism in this connection is often cited: “Perception indeed is the only means of right knowledge” (Bhattacharya 2009a 80, 87). Yet there is enough evidence to show that at least the Cārvākas did not reject the validity of inference insofar as it was based on perception; any inference based exclusively on scriptures or verbal testimony concerning the existence of God, after­life, rebirth, heaven and hell, and the omniscient being was rejected. At least three commentators on the Cārvākasūtra, Purandara, Aviddhakarna and Udbhaṭa, specifically state their position in this regard quite unambiguously. Inference, however, is never accepted as an independent means of knowledge but it is not considered inadmissible in cases of everyday life. Hence a clear distinction is made between “Probanses well­established in the world” and “Probanses established by the scriptures”. Another set of terms employed by Jayantabhaṭṭa is inference “in case of which the inferential cognition can be acquired by oneself” and others “in case of which the inferential cognition is to be acquired on somebody else’s advice” (Bhattacharya 2009a 83). Even though such distinctions were known by the ninth century, we find no mention of them in the refutation offered by the anti­Cārvākas even in the tenth century and beyond (Hemacandra AYVD, v. 20; Bhattacharya 2009a 167). Sāyaṇa­Mādhava does not seem to be conversant of all this;he continued to hold the view that the Cārvākas were opposed to all other means of knowledge except perception (9­11).

Can Marx help us in unraveling this mystery? If we follow Marx’s approach in tracing the development of materialism in Europe we may venture to apply it in understanding the development of materialism in the Indian tradition as well. Instead of trying to synthesize all discordant views concerning epistemology we should start from the fact that the materialists in India before the Cārvākas appeared did hold very different views and the commentators of the Cārvākasūtra too were not unanimous in their understanding of the same set of aphorisms. Udbhaṭabhaṭṭa, the last commentator known to us, attempted to interpret the aphorisms in the light of the Nyāya­Vaiśeṣika system and offered such strange views as it was impossible to lay down any fixed number in essential characteristics of sources of knowledge and objects of knowledge. He further argued that the number of principles instead of four could be many more (Bhattacharya 2009a 82). Such interpretations reflect a marked inclination toward revisionism and forcing to fit the well­attested position of the Cārvākas to a different, immaterialist mould altogether. Following Marx’s method of rejecting Plutarch’s misrepresentation of Epicurus we can reject some of the views of Udbhaṭa as misinterpretation of the original Cārvāka position.

To sum up: Marx’s approach to the history of materialism helps us understand how materialism developed in India in very many different ways before the formulation of the Cārvāka/Lokāyata system and how the later aberrations are to be detected and rejected.


Works Cited

• Bhattacharya, Ramkrishna. Studies on the Cārvaka/Lokāyata. Fierenze (Florence): Società Editriche Fiorentina, 2009; London: Anthem Press, 2011. (2009a)
• ‘Pre­Cārvāka Materialism in Vasudevahindi’, Jain Journal, Vol. 43 No. 3, January 2009, 102­09 (published in July 2010). (2009b)
• Dīgha Nikāya. Part 2, ed. J. Kashyap. Patna: Pali Publication Board, 1958
• Chattopadhyaya, Debiprasad. History of Science and Technology in Ancient India. Vol. 2, Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1991
• Knowledge and Intervention. Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1985
• Engels, Frederick. Anti­-Dühring. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976
• Farrington, Benjamin. ‘Karl Marx – Scholar and Revolutionary’, The Modern Quarterly. Vol. 7 No. 1, Winter 1951­52, 83­94
• Frauwallner, Erich. History of Indian Philosophy. Vol. 2, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1973
• Kṛṣṇa Miśra. Prabodha Candrodaya. Ed. and trans. Sita Krishna Nambiar. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971
• Manimekalai. Trans. Prema Nandakumar. Tanvjavur: Tamil University, 1989
• Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. Collected Works. Vol. 1, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975
• Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975
• McLellan, David. Marx before Marxism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972
• Karl Marx: A Biography. London: Papermac, 1995
• Ruben, Walter. ‘Uddālaka and Yājñavalkya: Materialism and Idealism’, Indian Studies Past and Present. 3:3, April­June, 1962, 345­54
• Sāyaṇa­Mādhava. Sarvadarśana­samgraha. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1978
• Śrῑharṣa. Naiṣadhacarita. Ed. Sivadatta and V. L. Panshikar. Mumbai: Nirnay Sagar Press, 1928. Trans. Krishna Kanta Handiqui. Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate Research Institute, 1956
• Vanamamalai, N. ‘Materialist Thought in Early Tamil Literature’, Social Scientist, 2:4, November 1973, 25­41
• Vātsyāyana. Kāmasūtra. Varanasi: Chowkhamba, n.d

This paper was presented in the Marx seminar held in Kolkata (22 to 24 March 2012)

Ramkrishna Bhattacharya taught English at the University of Calcutta, Kolkata and was an Emeritus Fellow of University Grants Commission. He is now a Fellow of Pavlov Institute, Kolkata.

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