AK Saran
A rare Indian sociologist who refused to think inside British intellectual frameworks - his is one of the few attempts to develop a genuinely Hindu social science, reading the tradition from within rather than against Western categories.
The influence of the British on Indian scholarship was deep and some of the great scholars of the times including Dr. Bhandarkar was working consciously or sub-consciously under paradigms which were patently un-Hindu. There were very few scholars in those times who could see our tradition, the traditional way and yet be well-versed in the western epistemology and ontology. A K Saran was one of those scholars who, building upon Ananda Coomaraswamy, explained our tradition in the way it always has been but using contemporary metaphors. His work is invaluable in understanding our tradition in the contemporary world.
Select Works
- Traditional Thought: Toward an Axiomatic Approach (1996) – Methodological foundation for perennialist sociology.
- Illuminations: A School for the Regeneration of Man’s Experience (1996) – Proposal for holistic education.
- On the Intellectual Vocation (1996) – Essays on scholarship, tradition, and integrity.
- Sociology of Knowledge and Traditional Thought (1998) – Critique of modern social science from traditionalist perspective.
- Traditional Vision of Man (1998) – Anthropological reflections rooted in perennial philosophy.
- The Marxian Theory of Social Change (2000) – Philosophical critique of historical materialism.
- Meaning and Truth: Lectures on the Theory of Language (2003) – Prolegomena to a traditionalist theory of culture.
