Abstract
This chapter enacts a dialogue between the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and the Indian social theorist and guru Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1922–1990). It is an attempt to test the creative possibilities generated through an intercivilisational dialogue. The dialogue seeks to explore the congruences and incompatibilities that such an encounter can reveal. This co-creative process gives us new insights into the world and leads to the emergence of new categories and concepts to help us negotiate it. Both Deleuze and Sarkar take their philosophical traditions and rethink them in the light of new global demands, acting as creative traditionalists who speak from the past to the future through the medium of Western and Indic philosophy respectively. At the heart of this work lies the recognition that “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Continuum, 1994, p. 2).
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Notes
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Sarkar describes such a grounding in terms of each culture’s prana dharma —its inherent characteristics, something akin to ethos and mores. “The words práńa dharma mean the cardinal characteristic of a person which differentiates one person from another. Just as each human being has his or her own traits, similarly an entire race living within a particular geographical, historical and cultural environment will also inhere some traits which distinguish that particular race from other. These traits or specialities are inseparably embedded in the internal behaviour of the entire population, and they help to form a particular bent of mind, expression of external behaviour, attitude towards life and society, and on the whole a different out look” (Sarkar 1998, p. 148).
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It is worth noting here that Sarkar remained in the oral tradition of Tantra—he spoke but did not write; this task was left to his followers. His linguistic strategy was not to privilege the printed text but to embody the intellectual richness of the premodern, pretextual universe of timeless time. Though many of his talks have been recorded, and published, his concern has been—through speakingto—to reinforce the relational nature of spoken thought as a form of “intellect … always associated with benevolence” (Sarkar 1978, p. 96).
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Thus we have, from the Cosmic perspective, relative identity and eternal identity, which come with a set of rational processes that support each (i.e. personal and cultural assumptions about the real and a set of eternal verities—benevolence, mission, truthfulness, etc.) that wrap the process in an immutable context.
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Sarkar defines devas as “waves … carrying so many ideas” that create action in individuals and collectivities ( 1997, pp. 85–86).
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It is useful to compare his approach with that used by Ananta Kumar Giri, who develops a social theory of agency around Vedic concepts (see Giri 2006).
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Bussey, M. (2018). Dancing East and West: Charting Intercultural Possibilities in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze and Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar. In: Giri, A. (eds) Social Theory and Asian Dialogues. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7095-2_11
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