Swaraj in Ideas

Introduction

A lecture by Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya from the late 1920s or early 1930s – the sources differ on its date and place – that was not printed in his lifetime and was published only after his death. Bhattacharya distinguishes political subjection from a subtler “cultural subjection”: Western ideas have been imposed on the educated Indian mind without being genuinely assimilated, so that people think in borrowed concepts cut off from the life of their own tradition. The remedy is neither rejection of the West nor uncritical revival of the past, but critical comparison in which Indian and Western ideas are judged on their merits. The lecture is much discussed today in debates about decolonising philosophy.