To be sure, given that Indian civilization is an ancient one, perhaps the most ancient, it stands to reason that all the initial thinking and ideation would have been done by the Indians.
And, they did do that, and have come up with all kinds of sciences, from natural to social to the humanities to religion.
In fact, as someone remarked, the Sanatan Dharma is the only one in which religion is based on a sound philosophical footing and is not merely faith-based like say the Abrahamic religions.
Be that as it may, once we hit the post-Shankaracharya period in India’s history, there is a drying up of the Indian spirit and intellection, whatever be the reasons thereof.
One finds that no fresh winds blow thereafter across India’s intellectual landscape.
Then the Western world, in particular Europe, wakes up from its deep slumber of Christianity, Dark Ages and the overly scholastic Medieval Period, and starts bursting upon the world stage with its staggeringly fecund free-thinking where it subjects anything and everything to the tribunal of reason mercilessly and unsparingly, Descartes, the father of Modern Western Philosophy, being one sterling example of that.
That juggernaut of Western intellection continues to this day relentlessly, so much so that one can only stand in awe of the intellectual light that has been shown upon every dark corner and crevice of man’s psychological, emotional, historical, social, political, and ontological being.
In this setting, the Indian intellectual flounders. He is raised in an Indian society that is inimical to fresh thinking, bogged down as it is by tradition and culture and religion that are NOT understood by most Indians and so they are handed down and practiced very ritualistically without any insight and understanding of the underlying symbolism and its significance. Thus, our greatest strength becomes our greatest weakness. How so?
You see, when your free-spirited thinking and questioning has been trampled upon by tradition, you are in no position to think afresh, question everything, look at things with a child’s eyes etc., and so the Indian intellectual can never come up with anything original, be it something that fits Indian ethos or some other foreign spirit, and will only go around parroting the Western man’s ideas, ideologies and idiocies.
