School of Cultural Traditionalists
The oldest living school in India - scholars who see themselves as contemporary interpreters of the same tradition that produced the Upanishads and the Nāṭyaśāstra - treating metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy as one continuous project rather than separate departments.
This school of thought can be considered the oldest school of thought in India since it takes inspiration and sees itself directly in the line of the great scholars and saints of ancient India who created Bharatvarsha’s scriptures, philosophies and metaphysics. They see their role as the contemporary interpreters of the great Hindu tradition, expounding upon its metaphysics, history, philosophy and culture.
In the past one decade this school has been debating with the political traditionalists about almost everything including the nature of our polity, economy, education, medicine, law, ecology etc. They maintain that political power alone is not enough and will be reversed if not accompanied by deep cultural and social change.
They stress that it is impossible for India’s indigenous culture to co-exist with the colonial institutions that India has adopted in its politics, law, education, economy and elsewhere; that there is a natural clash between the public institutions that India adopts right now and the ancient culture and dharma of Bharatvarsha. According to them India’s policy should be in direct consonance with India’s ancient culture and dharma. In this case, their vision is closer to brhat, since Bodha also thinks in terms of culture-conducive policy.
There is one more way in which this school is important to Bodha. This school thinks that India’s India’s Knowledge Tradition conveyed and sustained through its Guru Parampara is most centrally important to India’s present and future. It holds all of India’s gurus in spiritual and temporal matters in utmost reverence.
This is very important for Bodha too since we seek to cultivate the kind of leadership which incorporates IKS and carries forward India’s great Guru-Shishya tradition in contemporary ways. This leadership seeks continuity of the universal wisdom of Sanatana Dharma, which has been the reason of the greatness and endurance of this great culture and civilization.
Some of the greatest proponents of this school of cultural traditionalists are Dr. A. K. Saran and Swami Karpatri. Dr. A. K. Saran has tried to tackle various contemporary problems from the lens of Hindu shastras. Similarly Swami Karpatri has made a critique of Western theories and ideologies from the point of view of the traditional darshanas. Although Swami Karpatri was a brilliant intellectual, some of his arguments tend to become rigid and need relief from other epistemologies like science. Bodha seeks to do that, and it is that context that we have to see the next and last school of thought that is centrally relevant to us.
