Indian Political Thought, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Mahendra Prasad Singh

Methodological Issues and an Overview

After a prolonged debate, Indian political thought has arrived as a field of study in its own right without succumbing to what appeared to be a compulsive instinct to compare it condescendingly with Western political thought. The hold of the orientalist mode of thought even on Indian scholars was such that some maintained that Western political thought was unquestioningly more systematically abstract and universal. It was subtly historically contextual as well. Indian political thinking, on the other hand, was supposedly banally contingent. Some writers tended to the view that Indian thought was religious and metaphysical without being concerned with the political (non-theological) ...