Abstract

Indian philosopher and activist Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar is the focus of this study. Taking a critical interpretive approach, we attempt not to explain but to understand Sarkar and his work. Chapter one alternatively reads Sarkar's life sympathetically placing him in the mythological hero narrative and critically placing him in the politics of mythification. Chapter two places Sarkar's work within positivist, interpretive and poststructural sites of knowledge. We develop Sarkar's work not as a predictive theory, but as an alternative cultural approach and as a political asset that allows voices and realities previously silenced to be heard. ;Chapter three places Sarkar in the context of the Indian episteme. Sarkar uses the Indian episteme as a point of departure but articulates a new metaphysic and an alternative economic growth/distribution mechanism that radically transforms Indian thought. Chapter four contextualizes Sarkar's theory of history in various Indian constructions of time, space and power. While Sarkar takes the classic cyclical historical viewpoint, he includes within it the possibility of individual and societal spiritual and economic transformation, thus allowing an exit from the tragedy of history. ;Chapter five summarizes the prose of his history. We trace his various movements, stages and dysjunctions: the worker, warrior, intellectual, and capitalist eras, the worker's revolution and the intended spiritually-led permanent revolution. Chapter six places Sarkar in the context of other macro historians; specifically, Ssu-Ma Chien and Chang Hsueh-Cheng from Chinese macro history, Ibn Khaldun from Islamic macro history and from the West--Vico, Comte, Hegel, Marx, Gramsci, Pareto, Mosca, Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin, Voegelin, Foucault, Polak and Galtung. Chapter seven situates Sarkar's social laws within an alternative politicized construction of science and social theory. Chapter eight concludes this study asserting that Sarkar's theoretical moves and social movements will most likely be among the most significant in the coming century if not centuries