As I was finishing my master’s project work in logic, I was increasingly allured by the possibility of visiting Nabadwip, the erstwhile centre of Nyāya in India. Navya-Nyāya authors of the highest capacity functioned out of the area, with many of these philosophers owning large swaths of land as well as ṭols in the regions of Nabadwip and its neighbours of Santipur and Krishnanagar, all in the Nadia region. Indeed, it was a wellspring of the most interesting technical debates in Nyāya.
The ‘rebel’1 philosopher Raghunātha is said to have ushered in a practice and lineage of novel, rationalist nyāya work in Nabadwip by establishing a ṭol. Although a list of philosophers of the region is superfluous for my concerns here2, it is wise to mention a few of the most innovative – Mathurānātha Tarkavāgisa, Harirāma Tarkavagīśa, Jagadiśa Tarkālaṅkāra and Gadādhara Bhaṭṭāchārya. There is a tremendous upsurge of interest in Navya-Nyāya work today, with some landmark publications exploring the details of the novelty of the texts and their ideas3. This interest piqued my curiosity as contemporary analytic philosophers explicating the details of Navya-Nyāya logic closely aligned with my interest in an analytic trend in the history of South Asian philosophy. I studied the contemporary formalizations of Navya-Nyāya technical language developed in the Nadia region while relishing the breeze and soil of Nadia at my institute.
The Indian Institute of Science Education and Research - Kolkata 4 is located around 70 kilometres from Nabadwip. As I began travelling on the NH-12 in a rented cab, I had about two hours to clarify to myself what I was doing. I was well aware of the region’s philosophical history, but I was utterly ignorant of any locations that were materially tied to the former. The central question that needed to be asked to make sense of the trip was: What do I intend to find at Nabadwip? I was well aware of the lack of an equivalent to a Spinozahuis or a Nietzsche-Haus in Nabadwip. The trip was open-ended. Scouring the web only returned the same few phrases praising the region’s lofty heritage of education and logic. Yet all this empty praise, whether on the official municipality website or the slew of contemptible tourism websites (most definitely not even written by a human), pointed to nothing concrete. No clear online guidance exists on the exact locations of any historical sites of relevance to Nyāya history. My ignorance of Bengali only compounded the issue, radically reducing the potential sources of information. Yet, my determination to travel to Nabdwip did not waver. During my search, I happened to stumble upon two web pages; both from Wikimedia Commons. The web pages listed two different images with ṭols. The helpful thing about Wikimedia Commons is that they also list the geotagged information. I had two potential destinations now. I lived and studied logic for the last two years, two hours from Nabdwip. I could not give up an opportunity to visit and experience the (extinct?) locus of logic itself. And I did not.
Negation is a terribly important part of our lives—difference, lacks, lacunae, gaps, holes, omissions, negligence, defaulting, divestment, withdrawal (read both as a noun and a verb), prohibitions, shadows, privation, carelessness, ignorance and perhaps most acutely, absences. However, it is not common for philosophers to give these entities their rightful role. To adequately make sense of our lives, we need to let the negative enlighten us (note the accusative case as opposed to the nominative). The phenomenological analysis of my trip, too, requires this very same acquaintance with the negative. What is the phenomenological structure of my experience of the journey to Nabadwip?
Our ordinary analysis reveals a structure of an intentional relation between thought and being, one where the being of the object of thought is given to us. The object of thought in the judgement “There is no Nyāya in Nabadwip today” (hereafter cognition A) is a negative entity. Putting aside the particular method of cashing out the semantics of “Nyāya” in this sentence (whether as books or residences/people of relevance to Nyāya or merely particular cognitions of logic in the people of Nabadwip), the sentence expresses an absence. What makes this judgement meaningful? Does the ordinary commonsensical analysis of cognition fail at the site of a negative cognition? In this series of posts, I enumerate a multitude of historical attempts to tackle this problem. Doing so hopefully eliminates a lack in me, an ignorance of my intentions, and the inattention to the intensity of my experience thereby becoming a chronicle of my own absence in Nabdawip. I intend these posts to be read merely as a personal reflection, both of my trip as well as of my understanding of the relevance of the debates on absence.
Note 🔗
A few elementary remarks are in order here. I use the word cognition free of its baggage of cognitivism in neuroscience. It is intended as a broad analogue of the Sanskrit jñāna. I use the phrases prior-absence, post-absence, constant absence and mutual otherness/absence for prāgabhāva, dhvaṃsābhāva, atyantābhāva and anyōnyābhāva respectively. These are different kinds of absences. Put simply, prior-absence refers to the absence of an entity before its generation; for example, the absence of a person before they are born. Post-absence refers to the absence of an entity after it is destroyed; for example, the absence of a pot after it is smashed. Constant absence refers to an absence which is not temporally specified; for example, the absence of colour in the air or a pen on my table. Mutual otherness is the absence in virtue of which one entity differs from another; for example, the absence of a pot in a cloth (insofar as they are distinct) and vice versa. Throughout the course of this series of posts, I use this terminology, which owes its origin to post-Udayana Nyāya authors. I also immediately discard the possibility of reading “There is no Nyāya in Nabadwip” as being entirely composed by “I do not assert that there is Nyāya in Nabadwip”, i.e. as just an illocutionary negation or denial of assertion. The former presents something about the world, whereas the latter is about my assertions5.
see Daya Krishna, Raghunatha the Rebel in Indian Philosophy: A New Approach, Daya Krishna, Sri Satguru Publications, (1997) ↩︎
see Siharan Chakraborty, A Brief History of Sanskrit Scholars of Nabadwip, (1998) for a more exhaustive list in English and Kantichandra Rarhi, Nabadwip Mahima, Nabadwip Purvatattva Parishad (2004) for information in Bengali. ↩︎
see Jonardon Ganeri, The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450-1700, Oxford University Press (2011) and Samuel Wright, A Time of Novelty: Logic, Emotion, and Intellectual Life in Early Modern India, 1500-1700 C.E., Oxford University Press (2021) ↩︎
an accurate denotation yet not an accurate description for it lies around 50 kms from Kolkata proper. ↩︎
This form of negation plays an important role in other places like Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka but is not of relevance for us here largely interested in accomodating absence into a broadly realist framework. ↩︎