There was no such thing as atheism in ancient Bharata. atheism is a product of the western Enlightenment, a result of secularization of christianity. Indologists/missionaries etc have been falsely projecting it back into ancient Bharata since it much easier to project a generic secularized christianity, than actual christianity. For example the term nirishwar refers to nirguna aspect of brahman - it has nothing to with atheism. A lot of the evidence for "carvaka" is projection and much of it also colonial fabrication. Recently, these guys also discovered verses against infidels in Hindu texts! It does not even make sense from everything we know about the type of culture/civilization that bharata was.
Carvaka meant a conman in ancient India. A sophist. A contrarian. A degenerate. Something more degenerate than ordinary sansarik folk. leave it to sepoys to start making an ideology and religion out of that. It just goes with the colonial trend projecting heinousness onto ancient bharata. It's done using native materials/texts using strained reinterpretation. Just like the distortionist/contortionist Devdutt.
Nastika only referred to Jain and buddhist who are para vedic, not anti vedic. They both have Devas, But they give more prominence to their Tirthankaras and Buddhas/Boddhisattvas. In older literature nastika refers to the Aghori sect[1], as does the term chandala. It is the aghori sect which is discussed in Srimad Bhagvad Gita. Sraman referred originally to Saiva wandering Sadhus as opposed to Brahmanas who were grihastha. We see these sadhus even today.
Ajita Kesamkambali, the supposed atheist, refers to the "hair shirt" worn by medieval christian monks! Another fabrication! The Ramayana episode with the supposed carvak is another fabrication.
Brits and their sepoys tried to tamper with vedic traditions. Manu smriti is another such case. We know this happens. In fact they fabricated an ENTIRE false history for us.
The truth is that nothing survives of carvaka because it was never a real school or teaching, etc. We have plenty of jain and buddhist texts. they need to posit "brahmin conspiracy" to explain everything away - a clear indication of the colonial/monotheist origin. Same applies to the contention that ancient india was a hotbed of anti-ritual and anti-idolatry "revolutionary activity".
The entire "rational" vs "irrational" dichotomy emerged in Enlightenment Europe as a part of orientalist colonial discourse. The natives are deemed as irrational, needing to be saved and liberated by the colonizer. In this colonial discourse, the native is irrational just like women supposedly are.
Carvaka was just a description of certain tendencies in ancient people. It was not demagoguery, much more like psychopathy. Leave it to Indians to fall for a fabricated belief system out of this.
The book was reviewed by someone on social media. it was unfavorable.
Most of the stuff being bandied around here as carvaka is just repackaged J Peterson and other fringe american political opinions. Even Westerners are not fully onboard the westerm cult of rationalism, as indicated by authors like Dostoevsky.
there was no category of religion or even ideology in ancient Bharata - that itself indicates that this entire thesis is just another exercise in anachronism. The "carvakas" are colonially constructed much like the "aryans" are constructed, as bringers of logic and civilization. It is like saying there was race of fools and buffoons in ancient india.
Look at how a conman can be described - he uses deductive (or specious) logic and denies that he is using inference! Same as the carvaka.
Logic is not a property of persons. It is a property of normative linguistic statements useful in colonial discourse. Mathematical logic is another animal altogether, different than social language. There is in fact no singular logic reflected by the fact that is no universal grammar. Even the term "No" is unknown in certain cultures. In psychological systems, there is a category for subjective logic, with objective logic simply being a subjective logic mutually agreed upon.
Car-bak literally means "sweet talker" ie a deceptive person, a "smooth operator" or swindler. The Hindi term 'achaar' referring to pickles (ie "not sweet") is of the same derivation! In traditional texts where carbak is used, it refers to this connotation of fool/buffoon/criminal/swindler.
Savakar was not atheist - he wrote poems to the goddesses in his own blood. neither was bhagat singh- his book on the subject is a forgery with no known manuscript, unlike his other writings. Just speaks to the fact that these atheists are acting like typical monotheists, trying to politically subvert and tamper with the culture and timeline. Both monotheists and atheists also try to coopt native terms for themselves. Inculturation. Cultural appropriation.
This entire indian atheist gang is bad faith and unscrupulous and disingenuous. And they are widely known to be deracinated (their atheism is a consequence of their deracination). DMK rationalist are the same as these guys and DMK is known to be of colonial genesis. Pseudointellects.
Lastly, the development of atheism in the west started since the enlightenment and can be traced in minute detail as an outgrowth of christianity. Indian atheists are just a branch of the same. This ideology comes prepackaged with a bunch of plainly christian tropes: anti-ritual, anti-idolatry, anti-"priest", pro-colonial history, and millenarian pretensions to "reorganize society". all this signifies its cohesion as an ideology.
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[1] When the carvaka supposedly states, there is no dharma or the like, this is quite obviously a remapping of the aghori's abandoning of vyaktigat dharma.
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