Charvaka and Lokayata: Materialism of the Brahmins?

What Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya might have missed about the Lokayata and Charvaka materialists...

Let us first get this clear: When one refers to materialism in ancient India, it is more about a rejection of rebirth and karmic retribution, a rejection of the idea of the soul and other-worlds, rather than a philosophical materialist defence of “matter over mind” or “body over spirit”.

As is said, paralokino'bhâvât paralokàbhavah:

“There is no other-world because of the absence of any other-worldly being (i.e., the transmigrating self).” (Ramkrishna Bhattacharya).¹

This is the basic position of rejection of other-worlds (parloka) — that nothing remains after death. Then in the Buddhist tracts you have Ajita Kesakambalin whose perspective of ucchedavada will declare that nothing exists after death, that there is no “soul” which outlasts the earthly body. The position of deha-vada is also included in this. The Buddhist tracts highlight these materialist positions not in agreement. They do so in order to clarify the Buddha’s disagreement with these schools of materialism.

These are materialist “positions” or “standpoints” that we can claim to find in ancient India. No doubt about that, as there is enough evidence for the same.

And yet such positions might be just that, that is, “positions”, abstract theoretical positions propounded by a deracinated Brahmin elite who were often willing to uphold the Vedas as revealed knowledge! Such kinds of materialist thought might have been very distant from — and in fact could have been opposed to — the social life of the vast majority of people. The existence of a factional “secularist elite” among the ruling classes cannot be ruled out.

This means that the materialist thought process emanating from the lived productive life of the masses might not have been the ones often hastily or lazily included under the rubric of “materialism in ancient India”. The habit of conflating the good and the bad materialisms under one roof creates enormous problems. That Karl Marx distinguished his own materialism from Feuerbachian materialism might then be highly relevant here — that you do not just covetously seek all materialisms or materialist positions, but in fact want to see how One Divides into Two within it. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya seems to have painfully missed this aspect in his work, even though he repeatedly professes to uphold the Marxist approach.

For us, then, it is not completely irrelevant that most of the Charvakas were Brahmins. Many were Brahmin pundits at the royal court, fighting battles specific to their subject-position. Johannes Bronkhurst points out that the proponents of Charvaka like Jayarasi (Bhatta Sri Jayarasi Deva), Bhatta Udbhatta, Aviddhakarṇa and Bhāvivikta were Brahmins.² Bhattacharya and Bronkhorst have shown that the Charvaka Brahmins were not so keen on challenging the authority and sanctity of the Vedas. And that it was much later that the Charvakas started being regarded as opposing the Vedas.³

That way, Kancha Ilaiah is not off the mark when he states:

Even the Charvaka and Lokayata schools do not reflect the Shudra ideological, socio-spiritual and political ideas. In Charvaka and Lokayata schools also there was not much discourse around production.

Even if these schools are not specifically anti-Shudra, Ilaiah’s larger point about their abstraction from production relations is an important one.

Charvaka materialism seems like a position one section of the Brahmin elite had taken vis-a-vis another section, a philosophical stance arising out of an intra-elite scholarly dispute. So what explains the tendency to always regard these schools as inexorably standing as a radical challenge to power, and being on the side of the asuras and dasyus? We notice this tendency in Chattopadhyaya. He seeks to accomplish this by placing Tantric traditions and traditions of mother-right and fertility worship on the side of a materialism otherwise ensconced in the elite quarters.

Scholars tend to assume that a progressive stance challenging Brahminical power automatically follows from positions advocating rationalism or materialism, the rejection of God and other idealist categories.⁴ A materialist position rejecting idealist categories is supposed to be closer to the “spontaneous” life of ordinary folks. This is, however, one of the most dubious assumptions afflicting many a materialist philosopher.

Buddha as we can see from the texts in the Pali Canon was aware of this fallacy. Hence he maintains a good distance from the Charvaka and Lokayatas. In fact, Buddha distanced his teachings from Ajita Kesakambalin, Makkhali Gosala and Sañjaya Belatthaputta who famously evaded the question on “the fruits of the contemplative life”. Note: Does this not remind us of Marx’s critique of Feuerbach’s materialism, Marx’s rejection of certain forms of (undialectical) materialism as in fact a form of idealism?

But what happens if you take a materialist position like that of Ajita Kesakambalin or the Charvakas and Lokayatas and then try to somehow prove that they emanated from the social life of the masses, or that they were pro-Shudra. It will be disastrous.

It is not difficult to understand the temptation to carry out such a force-fitting exercise partly since it is true that the early Vedic and non-Aryan modes of life (like that of the asuras) do exude what could be interpreted as “primitive materialism” or “proto-materialism”. So this makes you think that you have the licence to connect the modes of life with the otherwise abstract materialist positions. However neither of these modes of life are actually coterminus with Charvaka philosophy propounded by an avant garde elite in the Brahmin, post-Upanishadic high cultures that emerged much later than the early Vedic period.

Hence a less careful scholar would tend to treat the Charvaka kind of abstract materialist positions as emanating from the lived reality of the early Vedic and non-Aryan modes of life. Note: It is like trying to force fit Marx’s historical materialism with Feuerbach’s materialism.

Is this what is going on in Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s work on ancient Indian materialism? Here we will look at his Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (1959).⁵

II

Citing Marxist scholarly writings, Chattopadhyaya wants to be able to show that the Lokayata is “deeply rooted in the lives of the masses”, that it “had never been a philosophy preached by a few individuals”. He keeps using populist terms like “masses” or “people” — the “philosophy of the people”. He writes, “Lokayata is a philosophy of the people”. He resorts very often to such populist generalities.

But who are these people in historical terms? He is unable to really find them.

The first Chapter has a promising title called the “Asura View”. One feels slightly assured that he has now identified the asuras. One expects that we are going to see a full engagement with the asuras. But as it turns out he suppresses the Asura as a people, race or clan, and seeks to ahistorically distil out only their “views”, the “Asura view”. It looks like he is interested in people or masses in the abstract but not in their historical specificity.

Chattopadhyaya writes:

By sophists and sceptics we understand certain individual philosophers whereas it may be that Lokayata had never been a philosophy preached by a few individuals. In all probability, it was a body of beliefs and practices, deeply rooted in the lives of the masses and at the same time hostile to the Brahmanical doctrines (p. 36).

Here he tries to present the Lokayata as not related to just a few individuals, or a deracinated elite, but actual working masses: “deeply rooted in the lives of the masses”. This is fine. And it does look like he will locate the people in their historical specificity, as when he writes:

The Lokayata-views, in all presumption, were the views of those people that were despised as daityas and asuras in the Brahmanical sources. But who were these people? (p. 42).

When he mentions the daityas and asuras and then goes on to ask “but who were these people?”, it looks like he will now delve into their actual social life, production relations and the material base — and then maybe prove Ilaiah wrong.

Instead we find that he spends a disproportionate amount of time in trying to engage with the rather obscure thesis that the asuras were related to the ancient Sumerians. Or to the Iranians. He keeps invoking S. N Dasgupta’s work on this question. He makes too much of the otherwise well trodden hypothesis that the asuras have much to do with the Iranian ahura.

We read lines that take us further away from engagement with the Indian social formation:

Dasgupta's assumption that the Lokayata deha-vada was originally a corollary to the belief underlying the Sumerian custom of adorning the dead cannot be readily accepted (p. 55).

It is very surprising that it takes him so long to finally mention that maybe the tribal folks in India could be the descendants of the asuras. He states:

The asura-tribe still surviving in Central India, according to some, could have been the asuras of ancient Indian literature (p. 56).

Then he goes on to quote some authority who tells him that these might be “the asuras living in Chota Nagpur”. Or they could be “the asura builders of those ancient embankments still found in the Mirzapur district”.

Why, in this context, ancient Sumeria should figure so much more than Chota Nagpur or Mirzapur is not obvious.

Finally, after having arrived closer to the ground in Chotanagpur and Mirzapur, he again slips away, refusing to stay on with the Indian social formation as it impinges on the asuras. He again flips back to a reflection on how the asuras might still have something to do with ancient Sumeria:

This diversity of views concerning the asuras at least shows that the problem is not a simple one and as such we cannot smoothly identify them with the ancient Sumerians (p. 57).

Refuting Dasgupta on this point seems not very relevant for this chapter whose focus is supposed to be on the mode of productive life of the asura people, and yet Chattopadhyaya does precisely the former.

But even when he again comes closer home, he finds another alibi to escape into scholarly obscure works rather than the history of a living people who very much exist in India as we speak. He slips into the obscure annals of the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation in search of asuras:

Among these bewildering multiplicity of references to the asuras, it may be useful for our present purpose to concentrate on one type of suggestion that appears to he quite prominent. The suggestion is that at least in a large number of cases the word asuras referred to the builders of the Indus Valley Civilisation (p. 57).

Why the multiplicity of references to the asuras should be considered “bewildering” is not clear at all. Earlier he notes that “the term (asuras) was not used in any uniform sense at all”. This need not have been any reason for him to tie himself in knots of philological nuance. Chattopadhayaya could have as well recognised that the asuras are a living people and not just an artefact in scholarly debates.

If he had just looked around he would have discovered that India comprised of people who identify themselves as asuras, or at least as the descendants of those considered asuras and daityas. Those like Phule, Rahul Sankrityayana and Ambedkar had already established that the asuras, daityas, nagvanshis were a living people in India. Rahul Sankrityayana actually traversed great distances on foot in order to find and live among those primitive tribes, be they asuras or kiratas.

But when Chattopadhyaya engages with the social life of tribals in India, he tends to presuppose a very problematic and automatic continuity between the high traditions of Charvaka materialism perhaps unfolding in courtly settings and the quotidian practices of say female fertility worship among say the Oraons or the Santhals. In his engagement with Tantrism he delves into practices that are based on the divinities of the earth and other fertility based chthonic cults. That would have been totally fine. In fact, this is an important area that would help sober down high-flying searches for suitable “philosophical outlooks” and “worldviews”. His account of the Durga Puja in Bengal is very helpful. But then trying to tether them to the sanitised world of philosophical materialism would have needed a different register of inquiry.

Disregarding the internal coherence of the asuras and dasyus as a people, Chattopadhyaya ends up cherry picking practices that he thinks are direct unmediated worship of earth, soil, nature and female fertility — practices that he wants to classify as “proto-materialism” in a way which seems more oriented towards sanitised philosophical debates rather than grounded Marxist research.

III

The problem is that Chattopadhyaya seems to be thinking that those who claim to be descendants of the asuras and nagavansis must be regarded as remnants of the past who will soon be wiped off the face of history through progress and development!
A real living society or people is for him nothing but “relics of such primitive or tribal society”. He refers to “one specific feature of this tribal survival, viz. mother-right”. He also uses a scary term which could be neoliberal in today’s terminology: “incomplete de-tribalisation”.

Let us read the passage:

The primitive society has always persisted here (India) along with and by the side of the advanced and civilised society, as it is in fact persisting even today. Secondly, relics of such primitive or tribal society have always strongly characterised the social fabric of India — ancient, modern and medieval. It is, as I have called it, a case of incomplete de-tribalisation, a point which I have attempted to illustrate with the following: the ethnic composition, the village communities, the caste organisation and the customary laws (p. xix).

In fact, there was no need to imagine that materialism is necessarily primitive. If say the Mahars of Maharashtra or the Nagvanshi Gonds of Central India today who identify as nagvanshis were to practice such a “materialism” then why should one keep classifying it as a remnant or only “primitive”. For Chattopadhyaya these are the “views” of those who if found living today must be understood as only a relic or survival, archaic and anachronistic — hence not worthy of any sustained engagement.

Chattopadhyaya is so keen on relegating the “primitive materialism” into the chronological primitive that he would even go to the extent of arguing that the Lokayatas were materialist since they did not “yet” have the idealist categories. If only the idealist categories were available then they would not be materialist! What kind of a serendipitous materialism Chattopadhyaya is banking on, I wonder.

Consider this:

It is not difficult to see that in such a scheme of thought there is no place whatsoever for anything that may attribute primacy to the spirit. In fact the earlier receptacles for the notion of the primacy of the spirit — the conceptions of God, Soul and the Öther-World — are conspicuously absent from all these. Thus, with all the ignorance about nature as well as the human body, human consciousness at this stage remains yet to he emancipated from the world and proceed to the formation of the spiritualistic or idealistic world-outlook. This is not materialism in the mature sense; nevertheless, in the sense of an instinctive acceptance of the primacy of the material human body and the material earth on which it lives, it can be characterised as some form of primitive proto-materialism.

Chattopadhyaya’s focus is on the supposed absence of idealist categories, or what he calls the absence of the “receptacles for the notion of the primacy of the spirit”. Without such categories and receptacles, he contends, human consciousness at this stage remains yet to be emancipated from the world — so you end up in “an instinctive acceptance of the primacy of the material human body and the material earth on which it lives”. Materialism is depicted as the product of a thought process which yet lacked the idealist categories, the categories and concepts that would make idealism possible. But wasn’t materialism in Chattopadhyaya’s own account supposed to be coterminus with the material conditions of life — a reflection at the level of concepts of the real conditions of existence. There is a move away from some of the basic tenets of the Marxist method.

Immediately we can see that this is a far cry from Chattopadhyaya’s own thesis that Lokayata or Charvaka materialism must be understood in terms of the material conditions of the existence of the life of the people. Chattopadhyaya’s engages in many such idealist slippages. We need not go over all of them.

IV

Finally, on the question of materialism, those who call themselves Marxists seem to have tragically missed Marx’s insight in his Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Chattopadhyaya could have done better to have kept it in mind. He would then have been perhaps more careful and discerning in putting his stamp of approval on any and all that looked like materialism to him. Simply to judge historical materialism and Feuerbachian philosophical materialism as both just materialism is not the right thing to do.

Let us then end by recalling Marx’s first thesis which says so much. Here it is:

The main defect of all hitherto-existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the Object [der Gegenstand], actuality, sensuousness, are conceived only in the form of the object [Objekts], or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice [Praxis], not subjectively. Hence it happened that the active side, in opposition to materialism, was developed by idealism — but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects [Objekte], differentiated from thought-objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective [gegenständliche] activity. In The Essence of Christianity[Das Wesen des Christenthums], he therefore regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice [Praxis]is conceived and defined only in its dirty-Jewish form of appearance [Erscheinungsform]^[1]. Hence he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity.

Thank you.

1. Ramakrishna Bhattacharya, CĀRVĀKA FRAGMENTS: A NEW COLLECTION, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 6 (December 2002).

2. Johannes Bronkhorst, “Who were the Carvakas?”, Revista Científica Guillermo de Ockham, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2016).

3. A caveat is in order here. For we must keep in mind that social life in the early Vedic period was in many ways in consonance with a kind of “proto-materialism”. The Rig Veda need not be treated only as revealed knowledge — to do so would be like capitulating to an idealist appropriation. In turn, certain forms of materialist appropriation of the Vedas could be Brahminical.

4. On this see Pradeep P. Gokhale, Lokayata/Caravaka: A Philosophical Inquiry, Oxford, Delhi (2015).

5. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism, Delhi (1959).