ADI SANKARA AND HIS PHILOSOPHY—A MARXIST VIEW 11 revivalist, against the revival of the Vedic and Upanishadic spirit, is an essential prerequisite for the building oŁa democratic, secular, new India. Let me in this context note the enormous harm caused to our national unity by the preaching and practices of the politics of Hindu reviyalist symbolised by such 'socio-cultural* organisations as the RSS, the Viswa Hindu Parishad, etc. and political outfits like the BJP. Such movements as on the Ram Janma Bhoomi and other temples are disruptive of the concepts of national unity and communal harmony which were part of our freedom movement. The organisers of these movements are using the names of the Vedic and Upanishadic Rishis, the successors of these Rishis including Shankara, to buttress their disruptive activities. Combatting the pernicious activities of these opponents of national unity is therefore one of the foremost political duties of the left and secular political forces in the country. In doing this however, we Marxist-Leninists should never adopt a nihilist attitude to the idealist school of which Shankara was the most illustrious representative. This is a mistake committed by a number of Marxist scholars in India and abroad. A Soviet scholar writing in Social Sciences in the {ISSR (No.l, 1989, p.l9(a)) says that some Marxist scholars 'often identified with materialism certain essentially non-materialist doctrines such as the anti-Brahmin attitudes or the rejection of the doctrine of 'liberation* ...... The Lokayata school was arbitrarily pushed into the foreground, while the Vedanta school was placed as the seventh and last.* The author is of the view that 'the Vedanta was and still is the most influential of the philosophical schools in India* and that 'Shankara occupied in Indian philosophy approximately the same place as Plato's doctrine holds in West European philosophy.' Let me conclude: Shankara was one of the tallest of India's (and world's) idealist philosophers; his Advaiia Vedanta is one of the richest contributions India has made to the treasury of human knowledge. But so are other philosophers and their works in which elements of materialism existed, such as the Nyaya, the Vaiseshika, the Sankhya, the Mimamsa, the Lokayata etc. not to speak of the Buddha whose near-materialist philosophy gripped the mass of suppressed humanity. While we are proud that both schools of our Indian philosophy produced geniuses of the intellect, those belonging to the materialist school had to fight an unequal battle and were therefore defeated. Still more unfortunately, the defeat of the materialists in this unequal battle was the beginning of a millennium-long age of intellectual and socio-political backwardness which culminated in the establishment of British rule in our land. I am however, not at all pessimistic. The dark age of all-round backwardness has slowly been coming an end; hard knocks have already been given to the socio-political forces which kept the mass of toilers under subjection; the alien rulers who did this job of destroying