Blackwell Reference Online

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Among the twentieth-century Indian philosophers, K. C. Bhattacharyya (1875–1940 ce) is much less known to the wider public than such contemporaries as radhakrishnan and sri aurobindo. Unlike them, he was, despite being an Indian nationalist, not politically prominent, and indeed was critical of the “neo-Vedantic” preoccupation with social reform. Moreover, he published relatively little, his collected works Studies in Philosophy, which include several unpublished pieces, amounting to only 720 pages. (There exists, apparently, a host of as yet unedited writings.) Nor was he blessed with a fluent style of writing, managing – according to one commentator – to “out-Hegel Hegel in incomprehensibility” (Burch, 1976, p. 3). The story is told of one lecture audience's relief when Radhakrishnan summarized in a few seconds what Bhattachar— yya had labored to articulate in an hour. In addition, he did not, until holding a Chair at the University of Calcutta from 1935 to 1937, occupy especially distinguished positions in academic life, his career having been largely spent teaching at various government colleges in his native Bengal. Today, arguably, Bhattacharyya's reputation among professional Indian philosophers overshadows those of his contemporaries – a reputation due in part to the dissemination and exegesis of his ideas by two of his many children, Gopinath and Kalidas, distinguished ... log in or subscribe to read full text