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Review of Dr. Ramendra Nath. M.N. Roy’s New Humanism and Materialism. Buddhiwadi Foundation (216-A, Sri Khrisnapuri, Patna-800001, India), 2001. Pp. 144. 100 rupees/US $5. Bertrand Russell is a fascinating subject for study because he was not only a significant thinker in his own right, but was also involved with so many of the controversies and key people of his time. The same might be said of the Indian thinker M.N. Roy (1887-1954). Roy’s intellectual odyssey took him from militant Hindu nationalist to communist to humanist and radical democrat. He was acquainted with Einstein and Gramsci, collaborated with Lenin, inspired Nehru, and was a political opponent of Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek and Gandhi. I confess I was ignorant of Roy’s life and ideas until I read Dr. Ramendra Nath’s new book, M.N. Roy’s New Humanism and Materialism, published by the Buddhiwadi Foundation. M.N. Roy’s New Humanism and Materialism provides a succinct and clear exposition of Roy’s thought and a brief but fascinating sketch of his life. Roy became an active nationalist at the age of 14 and left India in 1915 in a quest to buy arms for a planned uprising against British rule. He wandered through most of eastern Asia and then came to the United States, where he discovered the thought of Karl Marx in the New York Public Library. In 1919, he was in Mexico and participated in the founding of the Mexican Communist Party. He was invited to Russia in 1920 for the second conference of the Communist International (Comintern), where Lenin asked him to present his own thesis on national liberation movements. By 1926, Roy was a member of all four policy-making bodies of the Comintern—the Presidium, the Political Secretariat, the Executive Committee, and the World Congress. The Comintern sent him to China in 1927 with the mission to forge an alliance between the communists and the Kuomintang nationalists. His arrival coincided with the massacre of the communists by the Kuomintang forces of Chiang Kai-shek. He returned to Russia in disfavor, and was expelled from the Communist International in 1929. He said the real reason he was expelled was his claim to the right of independent thought. He returned to India in 1930, and was jailed in 1931. While in prison, he wrote some of his major works, in which he tried to work out a humanist and democratic philosophy appropriate to Indian conditions. He joined the Indian National Congress when he was released in 1936, but resigned in 1940 because he opposed Gandhi’s Quit India campaign. Roy’s view was that the war against the Axis powers temporarily took priority over the independence struggle. In 1944, Roy prepared a draft constitution for India, emphasizing decentralization, devolution of power and a kind of syndicalism or Jeffersonian democracy, consistent with his humanistic desire to restore sovereignty to the individual in society. He founded the Indian Renaissance Institute in 1946, and published New Humanism: A Manifesto, whose 22 theses are included as an appendix to Dr. Ramendra’s book. Roy rejected both Communism and capitalism, and put forth a philosophy of decentralized “radical democracy” as an alternative to parliamentary democracy. In 1948, he launched the Radical Humanist Movement, a nonpartisan political movement, to make India what he considered a true democracy. He was a founding vice president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU); the Radical Humanist Movement was one of the original IHEU member organizations. The IHEU has in his honor created the M.N Roy Human Development Campus in Mumbai (Bombay). Dr. Ramendra places Roy’s ideas in the context of the history of materialist philosophy, including a tantalizingly brief mention of Lokayat or Charvaka, an ancient Indian school of materialist thought. While Roy opposed the glorification of India’s so-called spiritual heritage, he favored a rational and critical study of ancient Indian philosophy. He thought it might do for India what the rediscovery of ancient Greek thought did for Europe in the Renaissance. Roy’s version of materialism was an ethical philosophy. He believed that human beings have the power to make free and rational choices, and that they have a duty to do this without debasing themselves before imaginary supernatural beings. Dr. Ramendra explains how Roy’s thought differed from Marxian materialism. According to Roy, Marxian determinism did not allow for human freedom and it neglected ethics. Like Bertrand Russell, Roy perceived there is no logical connection between Marx’s philosophical materialism (there is no supernatural reality) and his historical materialism (everything in history has economic causes). Roy preferred to call his philosophy “physical realism,” meaning that the physical world comprises all of reality, and a supposed supernatural or spiritual realm is not necessary to explain the world. He did not think the discoveries of modern physics invalidate physical realism. The universe may not be mechanistic, but it is still understandable through rational inquiry, according to Roy. Dr. Ramendra points out there is the same logical disjunction within M.N. Roy’s thought that Roy observed in Karl Marx, in that physical realism neither contradicts nor supports Roy’s new humanist political philosophy. While this is true, I would add that there is a psychological, if not a logical, connection between the two aspects of Roy’s ideas. The person who is able to reject supernatural beliefs and apply his own understanding to the physical world is a person likely to desire political freedom and the right to apply his own understanding to society. Dr. Ramendra deserves credit not only as a writer but as a publisher. He and his wife, Dr. Kawaljeet Kaur, together with relatives and friends, founded the Buddhiwadi Samaj (the Bihar Rationalist Society or BRS) in 1985, following a wave of religious riots and killings sparked by the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh guards. They have persevered through the years to give a voice to humanism. One can only guess at the difficulty of their effort. They launched the Buddhiwadi Foundation in 1996 as an independent affiliate of the BRS. The foundation publishes books and newsletters in Hindi and English, and maintains a humanist library and research center. At present Dr. Ramendra and Dr. Kawaljeet are collaborating on a new work – Rationalist, Humanist and Atheistic Trends in Twentieth Century Indian Thought, a study of seven leading Indian thinkers. The Buddhiwadi Foundation web site at http://www.buddhiwadi.org is well worth a look. It contains, among other things, 10 online essays by Dr. Ramendra and two by Dr. Kawaljeet in English. Dr. Ramendra is very much in the Bertrand Russell tradition. He says in his online essay “Is God Dead?” that Bertrand Russell is his favorite philosopher. His Ph.D. thesis was on the ethics of Bertrand Russell, and is available from the Buddhiwadi Foundation. A briefer essay on Russell’s ethics is available online. Another online essay, “Why I Am Not a Hindu,” was partly inspired by Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian.” I would particularly recommend the essay, “Why I Am Not a Hindu,” to North American humanists. We North American humanists sometimes think of Indian philosophy in terms of swamis and yogis, and to give them the benefit of the doubt which we do not extend to the Christian religion. Dr. Ramendra’s book on M.N. Roy reminds us that there is another tradition in Indian philosophy, one which it would behoove us to learn about. |