The History of Indian Philosophy Modern India （印度现代印度哲学的历史）.pdf

The History of Indian Philosophy Modern India THE M ODERN ERA In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a charter to the British East India Company, a private trading company made up of some eighty London merchants. Step by step this private trading company gradually wrested control of an empire from the Mughal rulers. After the overthrow of the last Mughal emperor in 1858, Queen Victoria signed the bill that transferred political control of India from the East India Company to the Crown. For almost another century, India was the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire. The British Raj thus replaced the Mughal Raj. It was through this transfer from Muslim to British rule that India gradually became assimilated into the modern world. Ironically, it was also partly at least the influence of Western political thought made possible by the British Raj, that led finally to the birth of the modern independent state of India in 1947. As it became gradually more apparent that the spirit of accommodation meant accommodation to the West and not with the Muslims, some thinkers began to be influenced by Western ideas, and thus the main feature of the early development of Indian philosophy during the modern era is this spirit of accommodation to Western ideas. Later, with the flowering of the “Renaissance” of Indian philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries, there would continue to be some incorporation of ideas from the West, but there would also be a resurgence and greater synthesis of Hindu philosophy, which now increasingly found it’s own way to the West. Rammohun Roy (c. 1774—1833) Rammohun Roy (or Ram Mohan Roy) is often considered the “Father of Modern India” because of his pioneering reforms in religion, morals,journalism, education, the status of women, and legal and political thought. Though born into a Bengali Brahmin family, he was educa