K.C. Bhattacharyya

Daya Krishna’s essay ‘K.C. Bhattacharyya: A Philosophical Overview’ is a compilation of a few paragraphs written by him on K.C. Bhattacharyya (KCB) in two chapters on contemporary Indian philosophy in his books Indian Philosophy: A New Approach (1997) and Developments in Indian Philosophy from Eighteenth Century Onwards (2002). Daya Krishna revisits KCB’s three absolutes and their alternation, and the subject–object relationship at the heart of KCB’s formulation. Original as ever, Daya Krishna depicts KCB’s philosophical project as based on an ‘inverted Hegelian dialectic’, which ‘moves through what may be called a process of identification and de-identification, where each step of de-identification reveals the earlier identification to have been both voluntary and mistaken’. This dialectic, he adds, is rooted in Sāṃkhya philosophy, ‘but it has been given a new turn by K.C. Bhattacharyya’. Daya Krishna does not merely explain this ‘new turn’, but moreover, takes issue with KCB. First, he reminds KCB that even according to his own premises, identification is as free an action as de-identification. Hence, just like KCB’s prescribed de-identification, it conveys a sense of freedom. Second, Daya Krishna appeals for re-identification after de-identification, as he puts it, revealing his own conviction that freedom is found in the back and forth of engagement and disengagement, namely both in engagement and in disengagement at one’s will.