Hegel's India ─ A Reinterpretation with Texts

Hegel's India presents, collected together in one volume, all of Hegel's writings on and about India. It is remarkable how much effort Hegel expended on what he ultimately characterized merely as fantastic, subjective, wild, dreamy, frenzied, absurd, and repetitive. Hegel also presented a scathing social critique of the caste-order, a theme reiterated in all his works. The central provocative issue is, if Indian art, religion, and philosophy, are so grossly inadequate, what explains his life-long fascination with it in this unparalleled way?

This reinterpretation of Hegel's India writings argues that Indian thought haunted Hegel, representing a sort of evil twin to his own philosophy. He did achieve two points of clarity in distinguishing his own thought from Indian philosophy: the first was to focus on freedom, and thus he railed perpetually against the caste system; the second was to indicate the necessity for dialectical, progressive mediation, and thus he spoke in contrast on the stasis of Indian thought. But did Hegel really ever manage to exorcise this evil twin haunting his work?

Hegel's India raises such crucial questions while comprehensively and systematically presenting the various texts that lay out Hegels reflections, shedding new light on Indological and Hegelian studies.

Aakash Singh Rathore is a visiting faculty member at the Centre for Law and Governance at JNU, Delhi.

Rimina Mohapatra is the Publishing Manager of Routledge India, Taylor & Francis Group, in New Delhi.