Benoy Kumar Sarkar's positive Hindu sociology and political thought: legitimising strategies for the state and the nation

Abstract

From early nineteenth century up until India's independence, colonial yet highly cosmopolitan Calcutta was a major centre of social and political innovation. Narratives of the past, critiques of the present, and debates on possible futures proliferated on the pages of vernacular as well as English press, often mixing religion freely with science and politics. The Bengali economist and sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) belonged to the generation of Indian intelligentsia who sought to dismantle the British Empire by engaging on multiple fronts with their counterparts in interwar Germany. Since this widescale and intensive engagement, epitomised on a grand scale by Subhash Chandra Bose, and its legacy were to a great extent subdued after the Germany's Untergang, it has been only recently critically examined. Benoy Kumar Sarkar proposed a vision of India which was fiercely modernist yet, at the same time, deeply embedded in a tradition reinvented to that modernist end. Furthermore, he took it upon himself to do for India what August Comte and Max Weber had done for Europe, i.e., to resurrect a specific notion of positivism from diverse sources of the Hindu textual tradition and posit it as a precursor to a modern Hindu Sociology, itself a device of placing Bengal and India on the map of global geopolitics. This chapter is going to explore, through close reading, the legitimation strategies he employed for new resurgent India in relation to her past and to her European counterparts.