It used to be a commonplace in studies of modernity, and remains one still in philosophical historiography, that modernity is something that happened first, and uniquely, in Europe; and attempts were made to convert the supposition into a tautology through defnitions of modernity that exclude nonEuropean periodizations and geographies (for example, in terms of capitalist modes of production, the emergence of nation states and nationalist collective identities, the industrial revolution, secularization, and so on).Footnote ¹ NonEuropean philosophies are traditional, and only European philosophy is modern. Progress of sorts occurred with the acknowledgement of the existence of alternative regional modernities, but the acknowledgement was tied to a centre/periphery model and to an associated ideology of European diffusionism. Eisenstadt, for instance, is willing to acknowledge ‘multiple modernities’,Footnote ² but only insofar as these new modernities imitate and copy a first modernity centred in Europe. Post-colonial writers such as R. Radhakrishnan have struggled with what they term ‘the curse of derivativeness’,Footnote ³ and have sought to find in the interplay between colonised and coloniser, between tradition and modernity, a more dialectical pattern of engagement.

What I will argue for in this essay is a more radical rejection of the commonplace picture. I will claim that we should think instead of modernity as a happening potentially indigenous to any culture, irrespective of period or place, that like the famous Indian banyan tree it is ‘polycentric’, here borrowing Susan Friedman's very useful term. ‘The new geography of modernism’, Friedman says, ‘needs to locate many centres of modernity across the globe, to focus on the cultural traffic linking them, and to interpret the circuits of reciprocal influence and transformation that take place within highly unequal state relations’Footnote ⁴; it involves a recognition that these modernities are different, not derivative. There is just one way to substantiate such a claim, and that is through the detailed, painstaking, excavation of modernities that have been lost or lost sight of, and I will spend the remainder of this talk doing precisely that, unearthing an incipient early modernity in pre-colonial Indian philosophical theory.

The arrival of modernity at a certain point in the history of philosophy seemingly admits of two non-compossible explanations. One model presents modernity as involving a thorough rejection of the ancient – its texts, its thinkers, its methods – as starting afresh and from the beginning. This was how the two figures who are emblematic of the ‘new philosophy’ in Europe, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and René Descartes (1596–1650), chose to present themselves.Footnote ⁵ A second model locates modernity not in a rejection of the past but in a profound re-orientation with respect to it. The ancient texts are now not thought of as authorities to which one must defer, but regarded as the source of insight in the company of which one pursues the quest for truth. This new attitude towards the texts does not imply abandonment but a transformation in their place within inquiry, a change in conception of one's duties towards the past. Going forward doesn't mean forgetting where one has been.

The first model has dominated the standard history of philosophy, which speaks of a revolution in philosophy in early seventeenth century Europe, one in which the Aristotelianism of the schools – with its obscure terminology, doctrine of forms and final causes, and schoolmen who ‘loved Aristotle more than the truth’Footnote ⁶ – is cast aside in favour of a new mechanical conception of natural explanation. Recently, however, this familiar account has begun to unravel. John Cottingham says, for example, that ‘any picture of Descartes as a lone innovator setting out on a new quest for certainty cannot survive serious scrutiny’,Footnote ⁷ while Dan Garber, pointing out that Descartes' correspondents did not find his project seriously in conflict with their own progressive Aristotelian ambitions, speaks of ‘the revolution that did not happen in 1637’,Footnote ⁸ the year of publication of the Discourse. One of those correspondents, Libert Froimont, saw in Descartes' self-portrayal in the Discourse the renewal of a very ancient spirit:

New work has revealed a complexity in Descartes' relationship with late scholasticism, including a tension between the self-presentation of the Discourse and views expressed in his private correspondence.Footnote ¹⁰ In another vein, Julian Martin has described Francis Bacon's self-depiction as ‘a studied pose’, adding that ‘when Bacon painted himself and his natural philosophy as modern and novel, he was moved to do so by local concerns and ambitions’.Footnote ¹¹

There can be no doubt but that the new philosophers in seventeenth century Europe were profoundly innovative, but the standard historiography simultaneously distorts two aspects of their relationship with the ancient. First, it misrepresents the dynamism and openness of progressive peripateticism. Many late scholastics, it is now becoming evident, were highly original in interpreting Aristotle and in fact saw no incompatibility between a re-cast Aristotelianism and the new philosophy.Footnote ¹² The standard picture, furthermore, radically simplifies the complex ways in which the moderns drew upon the ancients. In the work of Leibniz, Spinoza, Basso, and Gassendi, what one finds is a firm conviction that there is truth in the ancient philosophers, truth which might well stand in need of radical rejuvenation and reconfirguration, but truth which provides a gateway to new philosophy and is not a road-block to it. Leibniz described himself as seeking a ‘reformed philosophy’, one which put the mechanical philosophy on sound ancient foundations. Spinoza's engagement with ancient Stoicism has also, recently, begun to be more thoroughly explored and acknowledged (eg. Kristeller).Footnote ¹³ Susan James' assessment is that ‘much of the substance and structure of the Ethics – its central doctrines and the connections between them – constitute a reworking of Stoicism’.Footnote ¹⁴ Something similar is true, as Richard Sorabji has recently demonstrated, of John Locke's theory of conscience. The fact is that the early modern philosophers had a far more subtle and interesting understanding of the relationship between their new work and the past than the standard model can accommodate. It is simply not the case that these early modern philosophers were merely residually scholastic; rather, a revival and retrieval of the ancient and a transformation of it into the modern was at the heart of their philosophical method. And that is not so different from those progressive Aristotelians who ‘draw from the springs of Aristotle and the ancients rather than from the cisterns of the Scholastics’.Footnote ¹⁵

When we come to look at early modern India it is especially important that we do so with eyes not blurred by the standard historiography of the battle between ancients and moderns in Europe. I am aware of no Indian thinker from the period who makes the sort of audacious self-proclamation that one finds in Bacon or Descartes, a sweeping dismissal of the ancient tradition and of everything associated with it. And yet a modernity there certainly was, one which had its equivalents of Leibniz, Spinoza, Basso, and Gassendi on the one hand, and Morin, Sennert, and Weigel on the other. I believe that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a remarkable project began to take shape in the Sanskritic philosophical world. It is not just that the philosophers are willing to describe themselves as ‘new’, though that is indeed a striking feature of the period. By the end of the seventeenth century we find in a work by Mahādeva a daunting array of terms denoting the new:

Yet others before them had done the same, and the question is in what this self-attributed newness consists and what the self-affirmation means. Was it only a newness in the ways that the ideas of the ancient authorities are described, a newness of style but not of substance? In asking this question, I have in mind Sheldon Pollock's well-known assessment of the new intellectuals of seventeenth century India, that their work displays a ‘paradoxical combination of something very new in style subserving something very old in substance.’Footnote ¹⁷ That was certainly how a pre-modern, Jayanta, at the end of the first millennium, conceived of his own originality:

This characteristically pre-modern attitude of deference to the past changes fundamentally in the work of Raghunātha Śiromaṇi (c.1460–1540). Raghunātha belongs to a tradition of philosophical speculation known as Nyāya, a term more or less synonymous with the appeal to reason and evidence-based critical inquiry – rather than scriptural exegesis – as the proper method of philosophy. Raghunātha concludes his most innovative work, the Inquiry into the Nature of Things, with a call to philosophers to think for themselves about the arguments:

The new attitude was summarised at the time by Abū'l Faẓl, in a work – the Āīn-i-Akbarī – which relates the intellectual climate during the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Abū'l Faẓl describes the philosophers as those who ‘look upon testimony as something filled with the dust of suspicion and handle nothing but proof’.Footnote ²⁰ In the writings of those philosophers who follow Raghunātha from about the middle of the sixteenth century until the end of the seventeenth there is a fundamental metamorphosis in epistemology, metaphysics, semantics, and philosophical methodology. The works of these philosophers – some of whom lived in Raghunātha's home-town of Navadvīpa in Bengal, others in the newly invigorated city of Vārāṇasī – are full of phrases that are indicative of a new attitude, phrases like ‘this should be considered further (iti dhyeyam)’, ‘this needs to be reflected on (iti cintyam)’, ‘this is the right general direction to go in (iti dik)’. Openness to inquiry into the problems themselves, a turn towards the facts, is what drives the new work, not merely a new exegesis of the ancient texts, along with a sense that they are engaged in a radical and on-going project. The spirit which Raghunātha sought to provoke is clearly on display in a passage which asks about the meaning of historical and fictional terms:

Other branches of scholarship, including linguistics (vyākaraṇa), philosophical theology (advaita and viśiṣṭādvaita vedānta), ritual exegesis (mīmāṃsā), and jurisprudence (dharmaśāstra), encountered early modernity in ways that borrow from but do not always agree that of the ‘new reason’, the later Navya Nyāya. Particularly worthy of notice are the Kerala mathematical astronomers, whose sensational work in the foundations of infinitesimal calculus and spherical geometry is increasingly being appreciated.Footnote ²²

The existence of this modernity, I have emphasised, can be seen only when we free ourselves from the idea that modernity involves a complete rejection of the ancient sources. Our philosophers still, for example, write commentaries, and still use concepts and categories that might, if looked at from a distance, seem archaic. What must be recognised is that the mere activity of writing a commentary, though now strongly associated with conservative scholasticism, does not by itself tell one very much about the author's attitude towards the text being commented on. The fundamental role of a commentary was to mediate a conversation between the past and the present. It therefore offers us a route into the question that lies at the heart of our study of early modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth century: the question of their sense of their duties towards, or separation from, the ancient philosophical world. There are different sorts of commentary, and a fundamental distinction is between those whose ambition is to clarify or systematize the ‘truths’ already in the ancient treatise, and those which are using the treatise in the process of a creative pursuit of an inquiry into the truth itself. Modernity expresses itself as a distinctive way of reading the past, and in our period this also finds a voice in a new genre of commentary, the commentary which digs up the deep or hidden meaning (gūḍhārtha) in an ancient text. A mistaken understanding of the ambitions of commentary has also led to a tendency to read new developments back into the original works, with the result that the originality of the later thinkers tends to disappear from view.

Other works structure themselves as auto-commentarial glosses on groups of tersely stated principles (sūtras; kārikās), in a style familiar to historians of early modern European philosophy through texts like Spinoza's Ethics and Descartes' Principles. Raghunātha is, nevertheless, also striking in his new promotion of the genre of philosophical treatise in which a problem is discussed directly; his Inquiry into the Nature of Things is just such a work. In general, however, the discursive style in the works of the early modern Indian philosophers – mostly devoid of boastful self-assertion – can make it easy to overlook the originality of their ambitions. So the relation between style and substance is more complex: innovations in style sometimes served to camouflage innovativeness about content.

Central to later Navya-Nyāya, the ‘new reason’, the school founded by Raghunātha, were three ideas. The first was that methods of inquiry have to be evidence-based and collaborative, relying on proof-strategies that are open to empirical confirmation or disconfirmation and involving reasoned decision-making mechanisms in multi-agent environments. The second idea was that of a stratified or layered conception of the world, in which atomism at the lowest level is compatible with the reducible or irreducible reality of other categories of entity, including composite bodies, at higher levels. The third was that a new philosophy needs a new language, one in which the underlying logical form of philosophical claims is exposed and transparent, and which can therefore serve the needs of demonstration in a calculus of relations. These key ideas – and the concomitant reworking of the ancient tradition they presumed – were all essentially in place by the middle of the seventeenth century. Indeed, we can read two very remarkable works of Jayarāma, the Garland of Principles and the Garland of Categories, as constituting a direct intellectual confrontation between the ‘new reason’ and Cartesian new philosophy. ‘Cartesian’ ideas are rejected in favour of a philosophy that could have held its own among any of the early modern philosophies of later seventeenth century European thought. Generally speaking, what we can say is that early modern forms of philosophical inquiry in India are governed by data drawn from logical form and linguistic practice rather than the microscopic and distal observation of natural phenomena. Philosophy in early modern India made the discipline rest instead on the sort of linguistic turn that characterised, much later, the origins of analytical philosophy in European thought. Bearing this point in mind, it is no surprise that profound affinities should have been discovered between early modern theory in India and twentieth century analytical philosophy; I have in mind in particular the discoveries made by Bimal Matilal,Footnote ²³ in whose name the Matilal lectureship at the University of London was created some years ago.

Raghunātha's fundamental criticism of the orthodoxy might be said to consist in the thought that the traditional Vaiśeṣika view of the world is myopic and flat, seeing only a mechanistic space of objects, compounded from atoms, bearing qualities of various sorts, and moving about in various ways. The inclusion into this picture of human inquirers has them fall under an identical descriptive model, located in space and time, displaying a range of qualities, many of which overlap with those of ordinary physical objects. That might seem like an attractively naturalistic picture, and later ‘new reason’ thinkers are keen to preserve the naturalism, but the very flatness of the model causes serious fault-lines within it. What it fails to see, according to Raghunātha, are the irreducibly normative structures introduced by the presence of thinking beings who represent and reason about the world they inhabit, and have duties and rights with respect to each other.Footnote ²⁴ To say that we therefore need new categories is just a way of claiming that the old model can not accommodate these facts; and part of the point is to throw down a challenge to his contemporaries to show how, if at all, a naturalistic reduction is to be achieved. The force of Raghunātha's challenge is to call for an account of just how to achieve an acknowledgement of the reality of features of human life which the orthodox model seems ill-equipped to accommodate without abandoning naturalism as that model conceives of it (a unified explanation of all objects of inquiry including inquirers).

In the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the town of Navadvīpa, Raghunātha's home town, which is also known by its latinized name Nadia or Nuddea, was one of the great sites of scholarship in South Asia. During his lifetime Navadvīpa was a place of great scholarship under a comparatively peaceful and cosmopolitan Muslim rule, creating the conditions for an Islamic Bengal politically independent of the Northern Indian sultanate, and drawing Bengal into relationship with the khalifah of Baghdad and a wider Muslim world. Considerable historical documentation relates to Navadvīpa in the period, in the form of Islamic histories of Bengal, biographies-cum-hagiographies of the Vaiṣṇava saint Caitanya, documentation internal to the scholarly community of Navadvīpa, chronicles of the Mughal court, and, for the final years, the records of the East India Company. One text from the period concludes by saying that it was written in Navadvīpa in 1494, a place full of learning and learned men, under the peaceful governance of Majlisav-arvaka.Footnote ²⁵ Raghunātha, of course, would have been among them. In the century to follow, students from all over the subcontinent, indeed from Nepal and possibly even Tibet, were attracted to a strict programme of studies in the ‘new reason’, a vigorous intellectual community, and the eventual prospect of prestigious certification by title. The programme of studies was provided in ṭols run by a series of celebrated paṇḍits, whose more important works were frequently transcribed and swiftly distributed throughout India.

It is indeed of enormous significance that ours should be a period of strong Persianate influence and Islamicate power. The problem is to square this fact with another: that one finds very few direct traces, if any, of Islamic or Arabic ideas in the work of the Sanskrit philosophers of the time. It is not at all similar to the situation in astronomy, for example, where the confrontation between ancient Hindu cosmological models and the new Arabic sciences is a topic of heated debate. In philosophy, the causality, if it exists at all, is much more indirect. The Persianate context nevertheless created incentives that had not existed before. One fact to note is that the brightest and best Sanskrit intellectuals were actively encouraged, for instance by Akbar's great minister the Hindu Ṭoḍarmal, to learn Persian and join Mughal imperial office. Those who preferred instead to remain within the intellectual world of Sanskrit faced a very clear challenge to demonstrate the relevance and vitality of that world.Footnote ²⁶ They did this by drawing on its resources without burying themselves within its folds. If in Europe power lay with the Aristotelians in the university departments, in India it was located in the Islamicate administration. By not becoming a part of it, the new philosophers were, one could say, in a state of internal exile. Modernity was the alternative to irrelevance. Another possibility is that rather than writing directly about Islamic thought they wrote instead about constructed surrogates within the Sanskrit milieu, with Advaita Vedānta in particular serving as a pretext for the examination of Islamic ideas. In any case what is clear is that the sheer presence of alternative modalities of thought presented motivations and opportunities that could not have existed before.

India in the seventeenth century, the century after Akbar, was in intellectual overdrive. Muslim, Jaina and Hindu intellectuals produced work of tremendous vitality, and ideas circulated around India, through the Persianate and Arabic worlds, and out to Europe and back. For a flavour of the times let us fix our gaze on a single year, the year 1656. In India, this was the year in which a long running process of religious isomorphism, pioneered by Akbar's chronicler Abu'l Fazl and orchestrated around Ibn al'Arabi's idea of unity in being (wa ḥdat al-wujūd), reached fulfilment in Dārā Shukoh's grand project to translate fifty-two Upaniṣads into Persian, a project for the sake of which he assembled in Vārāṇasī (Benares; aka. Kāśī) a large team of bilingual scholars. Dārā believed that he could establish that the differences between Hinduism and Islam were largely terminological, and even that the Upaniṣads can be read as a sort of commentary upon the Qur'ān. The fallout from this remarkable project of Dārā, Akbar's great-grandson and heir-apparent to the Mughal throne, would reverberate throughout the period and long afterwards. (And I am happy to see that today is the opening day of a new exhibition on the Mughal Empire at the British Museum).

1656 would also be the year in which the French philosopher and physician François Bernier would leave behind him the France of les libertins érudits on a journey that would bring him soon to Mughal India. In Bernier's travel writings we will find a fragment of testimony to the aftermath of Dārā Shukoh's translational project. Before embarking on his travels, Bernier had been the protégé of the early modern philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). Indeed it was Bernier who would eventually – on his return to France – devote himself to making Gassendi's work available to French and British audiences. Before doing so, however, he was to spend years as the court physician first of Dārā Shukoh and then of Aurangzeb. In a letter written from Shiraz in 1667, some ten years after the Vārāṇasī project, Bernier describes how he had come to know one of the paṇḍits whom Dārā Shukoh had used, someone fluent in both Sanskrit and Persian, how they had exchanged the latest medical and philosophical knowledge, and, fascinatingly, how he had translated work by Descartes and Gassendi into Persian for the paṇḍit's benefit:

It is of considerable interest to those who are interested in the global circulation of ideas to be told here that the work of Descartes, by this time the leading French philosopher and a key figure in the Early Enlightenment, was available to the Vārāṇasī paṇḍits already in the early 1660s, barely ten years after his death. If Bernier's testimony is reliable, the migration of ideas was already remarkably swift. As for the name of Bernier's paṇḍit, and the nature of his reaction to the work of Descartes or Gassendi, that is a story which Bernier neglected to tell. He has now been identifiedFootnote ²⁸ as the very influential scholar-poet Kavīndra Sarasvatī, an important mediary between the Sanskrit intelligentsia and the Mughal court, and someone who built up a great library of beautifully transcribed manuscripts.Footnote ²⁹ The patron of Bernier and Kavīndra during this period was the Persian nobleman Danishmand Khān, who was the only person to oppose the capital sentence against DārāFootnote ³⁰ and who afterwards offered Kavīndra and Bernier employment. His generosity and openness created the space for a remarkable exchange of French, Persian and Indian philosophical ideas in the three years from 1658/9 to 1661/2. Kavīndra was on good terms with perhaps the most important of the ‘new reason’ philosophers in Vārāṇasī, Jayarāma Nyāya-pañcānana. It would be during this period that Jayarāma would write two very unusual and significant works, The Garland of Principles about Reason, and the Garland of Categories.

Some of the most powerful intellects of South Asia were working in Vārāṇasī and Navadvīpa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among them were prominent contributors to the revitalised ‘new reason’, and it seems very probable that some would be among the ‘learned scientists’ who associated with François Bernier.Footnote ³¹ These philosophers were engaging in a profound and radical dialogue, with each other and with the tradition from which they had emerged. Educational networks centred on individuals and their families provided the structures needed for the ‘new reason’ to flourish in Islamicate India, but I would also argue that their very nature, particular the fiscal arrangements surrounding them, hampered as well as nurtured innovation. It is striking that several of the most original ‘new reason’ philosophers existed on the periphery of these structures, benefiting from them without being too closely implicated in their perpetuation. Others were able to participate in broader networks, such as those existing in Navadvīpa at the time of Raghunātha, or the type of informal umbrella of association created by a patron like Danishmand Khān, which ‘brought together a Frenchman of Paris, a Muslim of Persia and a Brahmin of Benares’.Footnote ³²

I believe that in a very complex political and intellectual climate the early modern ‘new reason’ thinkers were developing philosophical ideas of great radicality and originality, initiating a line of philosophical inquiry that did not so much run its course as was brought to a virtual stand-still, in the first instance by the collapse in stable Mughal power and patronage, and in the second by the disruption caused to established patterns for conducting and financing education by the British imposition of new fiscal arrangements and educational policies. Work in the ‘new reason’ continued into the nineteenth and twentieth century in an educational set-up now sharply bifurcated between low-prestige traditional networks and well-funded colonial colleges and universities.Footnote ³³ Sheldon Pollock writes that ‘when colonialism made the norms of Europe the norms of India the Sanskrit intellectual formation melted like so much snow in the light of a brilliant, pitiless sun’.Footnote ³⁴ I don't see in contemporaneous European epistemology ideas so superior to the Indian ideas surveyed by Mahādeva as to have been powerful enough in and of themselves to accomplish this: what caused the dissolution of Sanskrit culture under colonialism was the dismembering of the systems of education and patronage that held that culture together, along with the simultaneous creation of well-funded colonial universities and colleges. More importantly, it was precisely the ‘norms of India’, its modern model of engaging the new in a dialogue with the old, of the outsider with the insider, which enabled it to emerge from British colonialism if not unscathed then at least uncrushed.

Early modernity in India consists in the formation of a new philosophical self, one which makes it possible meaningfully to conceive of oneself as engaging the ancient and the alien in conversation. The Sufi Dārā Shukoh, Akbar's great grandson, is an exemplary early modern thinker, his belief that the Upaniṣads could be read as a commentary on the Qu'rān envisaged a relationship that was based neither on deference nor on rejection.Footnote ³⁵ For Dārā the Hindu text was not an authority to which Islam must defer but a partner in a single quest for truth – his sectarian contemporaries' inability to make that distinction cost him his life. The Jaina philosopher Yaśovijaya Gaṇi is a quintessential early modern thinker too: in his case this was due to his search of a theory of individuals and community in which liberal political values occupy the centre stage. Yaśovijaya articulates a key feature of the early modern self when he says that public discussion must rest in balance, neutrality and an openness to the reasonable opinions of others.

What distinguishes the modernity of the ‘new reason’ philosophers is a new sense of one's duties towards the past. They saw themselves as engaging in ‘dialogues with the dead’,Footnote ³⁶ not in deference, but to collaborate in a new search for the truth. I have characterized early modernity not as real modernity mixed up in a confused muddle with pre-modern habits, as many historians of early modern Europe do, but as the embodiment of a distinctive understanding of one's duties towards the past. The texts of ‘new reason’ philosophers are full of exhortations to the reader to direct their attention to what matters. The Inquiry, in particular, is a challenge: deliberately provocative, it led other philosophers to a far-reaching and sophisticated reformation of realism. The new spirit is succinctly captured by Veṇīdatta at the end of his Embellishment of the Categories. He appeals to a model of reasoning as ‘adaptation’ (ūha) and claims that an adaptation of the ancient metaphysics is legitimate as long as it done on the basis of a proper deliberation.Footnote ³⁷ Veṇīdatta here finds a new application for a conception of reason as modification or adaptation (ūha) that had already achieved considerable theoretical articulation, especially in the work of Mīmāṃsā ritualists who sought rationally to adapt the ancient ritual prescriptions to suit the circumstances of contemporary ritual performance. This is the via moderna, working with the ancients but not hamstrung by them. Raghunātha revealed himself to be at best uncomfortable with the idea that one can be a reductionist and a realist at the same time: for him the way to defend claims about metaphysical autonomy was by the identification of new irreducible categories of being. The position which emerges as the most attractive in the seventeenth century, consists in a new demonstration that realism is not, as the earlier tradition assumes, incompatible with reduction. The ability to see that there is a way to escape the ancient antinomy produced by the false dichotomy between realism and reduction is one of the great ‘conceptual breaks’ of the period. It enabled the emergence of a new natural philosophy in the early modern thought of late seventeenth century thinkers, most notably Jayarāma, a philosophy of nature the equal of any to appear in the new mechanical philosophy of early modern Europe or in their progressive Aristotelian interlocutors.

The construction in the nineteenth century of what I earlier called the ‘standard history’ of early modernity fabricated a mythology which served to exaggerate and dramatize the differences between India and Europe.Footnote ³⁸ The standard history about the distinctively European origins of modern philosophy in the seventeenth century was shaped, it seems, by distinctly nineteenth century needs. It is actually rather shocking that this history of the birth of modern philosophy continues to be taught uncritically in university philosophy departments still today.

I spoke at the beginning of Susan Friedman's coining of the term ‘polycentric modernities’ to capture the idea that modernity has a spatiality and a geography, and should not be thought of simply in terms of periodization. ‘Rupture’ is the term she prefers to characterise the onset of a new modernity, suggesting that ‘modernity involves a powerful vortex of historical conditions that coalesce to produce sharp ruptures from the past that range widely across various sectors of a given society… Across the vast reaches of civilizational history, eruptions of different modernities ofen occur in the context of empires and conquest’,Footnote ³⁹ and she stresses that a polycentric model ‘recognizes the modernities that have formed not only after the rise of the West but also before the West's post-1500 period of rapid change – the earlier modernities of the Tang Dynasty in China, the Abbasid Dynasty of the Muslim empire, and the Mongol Empire, to cite just a few’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Modernity, and this is a point that has been made forcefully by Sanjay Subrahmanyam in his use of the term ‘conjuncturality’, is also characterised by the ‘intensification of intercultural contact zones… heightened hybridizations, jarring juxtapositions, and increasingly porous borders both characterize modernity and help bring it into being.’ Subrahmanyam says, perfectly accurately, that ‘modernity is a global conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another’.Footnote ⁴¹ It has its own distinctive phenomenology too, the phenomenology of the new and the now: there is something that it feels like to be in the grip of modernity, incorporating ‘a gamut of sensations from displacement, despair, and nostalgia to exhilaration, hope, and embrace of the new…’. ‘Modernity’, Friedman says, ‘invents tradition, suppresses its own continuities with the past, and often produces nostalgia for what has seemingly been lost. Tradition forms at the moment those who perceive it regard themselves as cut off from it.’ I have found all these indicators to be present in my study of the early modernity of India. Friedman, I think, only oversteps the mark when she places too great an emphasis on the centrality of rupture, of a ‘dislocating break with the past’, citing with approval Paul de Man's statement that modernity, ‘a ruthless forgetting’ of the past, ‘exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier.Footnote ⁴² In this essay I have argued instead that it is better to see modernity as involving not radical rupture but a shift of allegiance, a new sense of one's duties to the past, and a transition from deference to dialogue.