Yoga and Colonialism K.C. Bhattacharyya and Shyam Ranganathan

Abstract

This review connects two books, Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya’s (KCB) Reflections on the Bhagavadgītā (Bhagavadgītā-Vicāra, written sometime in the 1940s) and recently translated from Bengali by D.K. Mohanta (2023), and Yoga: Anticolonial Philosophy by Shyam Ranganathan (2024). Why review these two books, so different from one another, composed in different periods, in different continents, for different readers, by authors of a different background? The answer is that Ranganathan’s title perfectly fits KCB’s work. Reflections, like KCB’s other writings (especially of his 1929 manifesto “Swaraj in Ideas”) brims with decolonial sentiment. When many could not foresee a postcolonial situation, KCB spoke in “Swaraj in Ideas” of freedom which goes beyond political independence for India; of swaraj, or freedom, at the level of the mind. KCB is one of the most original voices of Indian philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote primarily in English, but recently, essays which he wrote in Bengali in the last phase of his writing-life are being discovered, and my hope is that they will be published and translated into English. In this sense, Mohanta’s book is a first piece of a philosophical jigsaw-puzzle which promises to be intriguing. KCB is a philosopher of freedom, a modern classicist, a comparative philosopher with one leg solidly grounded in European philosophy, especially Kant and Hegel, and another in Sanskrit sources. In Reflections, he provides us with a new reading of the Bhagavadgītā, the famous dialogic poem. Shyam Ranganathan’s book is a different story. It is an introduction to Indian philosophies of freedom for yoga practitioners, primarily in the west, who develop the thirst to go beyond yoga postures, and to acquire initial acquaintance with classical texts and historical background. Ranganathan’s work offers a new reading of classical yoga treatises, first and foremost the Yogasūtra.