ADI SANKARA AND HIS PHILOSOPHY—A MARXIST VIEW 5 This is as true of India as of Europe about which the Manifesto was speaking. In India however, class struggle did not develop (as it did in Europe) 'between freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman etc.* The first division in ancient Indian society arose between the first.two of the four Varnas (Khatriya and Brahman) and the last two (Vaisya and Shudra). The beginnings of this could be seen in the emergence of a class of fighters and another of those who engaged themselves in the performance of rituals which is as necessary for success in war as actual fighting. The two classes whose services were thus essential for the victory of the advancing Aryan tribes against their opponents first marked themselves off as the *twice-born' (dwijas), superior to the rest of the population—Vis to begin with, later to be further divided into Vaisya and Shudra. In course of time, the four Varnas proliferated into innumerable castes and sub-castes at whose head stood the 'twice-born' (Dwijas), the Brahman in particular. Naturally therefore, the two Varnas (Khatriya and Brahman) were dominant in Indian society. They were, by and large, the producers of the intellectual, the aesthetic, the scientific and other forms of spiritual wealth including philosophy, while the rest of society produced material wealth. The division into the oppressing and oppressed sections of society thus involved the division between intellectual and physical labour, between the spiritual and temporal life. The dialectical relation between these opposites constitutes the totality of intellectual and physical life. i ROOTS OF PHILOSOPHY This explains the emergence of idealist and materialist trends in Indian philosophy. To quote Debt Prasad Chattopadhyaya, The philosophical view which arose to condemn and reject life could only have been the result of the philosophical pursuit turning away from life itself. As with the development of slavery in ancient Greece, so also in the Upanishadic India, the lofty contempt for the material world with its ever-shifting phenomena was the result of the philosophical enquiry taking free flight into the realm of 'pure reason', or 'pure knowledge', i.e. knowledge only when a section of the community, living on the surplus produced by another, withdrew itself from the responsibilities of direct manual labour, and therefore, from reality of the material world, for the process of labour alone can exercise a sense of objective coercion on conscious theory. Theory, in other words, was divorced from practice and became 'pure theory', the things thought of became mere ideas and thus the knower, the subject, sought to emancipate itself from the inhibitions of the known or