The article examines the reception of Marxism by modern Indian culture and its interaction with Vedanta, a religious and philosophical system that dominated the intellectual landscape of Modern and Contemporary India. The assimilation of Marxism by modern Indian culture, as shown in the article, was simplified due to the fact that some concepts of Vedanta itself (for example, the concept of liberation) had a social aspect along with the religious one.
Keywords: Indian Marxism, Vedanta, neo-Vedantism, moksha, modern Indian philosophy.
Like any other philosophical system in any other social and cultural environment, Marxism in Indian culture has inevitably undergone and is undergoing changes due both to the logic of its own development and to its interaction with the local cultural substrate. Indian culture is large and extensive, so we will focus in this article on the features of the relationship between Marxism and Vedanta - a religious and philosophical system that played no less (and even, perhaps, more) a role on the intellectual scene of India in the XX century than in medieval India.
First of all, it is important to note that the ideas about Indian culture developed in Western culture, having become accessible to Indian intellectuals, have actually turned into one of the full-fledged elements of Indian philosophical discourse, self-description of Indian culture, so that educated Indians, willy-nilly and without realizing it, have begun to look at their own culture to some extent, through the eyes of Europeans (of course, all this is true in relation to any other civilizations). Marx's words about the British intervention in the economic structure of India, which destroyed the economic basis of the Indian rural community and thereby "produced the greatest and, it must be said, the only social revolution that Asia has ever experienced" [Marx, 1986(1), p. 100], which in themselves had a significant impact on the perception of Indian history, changing their unders ...
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