As the above quote from Saran shows, he believed that Hindu tradition is dead and that there is no living Hindu tradition any more. Hinduism already developed meaninglessness during the Islamic invasions in India and this meaningless was further reinforced during the British period when Indian society confronted Christianity, secularism and science. The main idea behind this is that unlike other traditions Hindu tradition was a complete whole combining both religio-social and the spiritual-intellectual modes. With invasions of Islam and then with British rule the harmony between the two was broken. In the spiritual-intellectual mode the tradition was surviving but in the other religio-social mode it had decayed and died.
Ironically, A. K. Saran does not want that man completely succumbs to tradition. This is main contradiction of traditionalist thought. For A. K. Saran, man has to look forward.
Since man as man cannot live without tradition, the existence and continuity of tradition is simply the reality of human existence. However, since tradition is concerned with man's transcendent destiny, it is greater than, and prior to, man. (Hence no merely anthropological and sociological theory of tradition can be adequate). But man ultimately has to transcend all hence he is more than tradition. Man himself lives between temporal realities and a temporal meaning: he cannot be identified with either of them. Tradition, as the mediator between time and eternity, duplicates this Janus-like quality of man. Thus the relation of Man and Tradition is one of synonymy but without mutual reducibility. |
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