Govinda Chandra Dev – or Dr D.C. Dev, as he was generally known – was a major educational figure in East Pakistan. At the time of his death he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dacca and also General Secretary of the Pakistan Philosophical Congress. He was murdered by soldiers of the Pakistan Army, who broke into his house at the start of the war which led to the creation of Bangladesh.
He calls this book a defence of Idealism. It emerges only gradually what he means by ‘Idealism’, but in the Glossary at the end he defines it as ‘The theory according to which the basic stuff of things is a universal mind or consciousness. There is nothing which is in the final analysis non-mental’. The defence consists in a well-informed, but rather brief, account of the main ideas of Western philosophy, followed by a similar survey of Eastern ideas – at least, those of the Indian sub-continent. He aims at a synthesis of all that is best in the philosophies of the past.
His primary objective, however, is not theoretical, but ethical. By establishing the essential oneness of things, he hopes we can achieve a thoroughgoing appreciation of the real and equal humanity of all human beings: one in which national boundaries will disappear, and religious divisions likewise, thus removing the rivalries and dissensions they encourage. ‘If Krishna, Buddha, Christ and Muhammad could be found together, they would have assuredly vied with one another in superlative love and friendship but, curiously enough, their so-called followers do not hesitate to paint them at times as arch-commanders, as it were, of belligerent forces fighting hard for what is wrongly called a spiritual conquest’ (165).
His optimism about achieving this may have seemed more plausible when he wrote than it can now. He sees the United Nations as a great step towards world government, and the nuclear bomb as the means of making war impossible. We cannot now hope for these things in the near future. Still, it is true that the world has become a smaller place, and the interaction between peoples has helped towards a recognition of the equal rights of all human beings, even though there is a great deal more to be done.
He is aware that his theoretical conclusions do not guarantee the practical results he hopes for, but he believes that they would be ‘the legitimate objective counterpart of a truly synthetic philosophy’ (164). Amongst the thinkers of the West it is Plato that he admires most, but it is Shankara that he is closest to – Shankara and his successors in the Advaita or ‘non-dualist’ tradition, which holds that there is a relation of identity between the many in the changing world and the unchanging One. He attempts to clarify the senses in which the world of change is and is not an illusion; he seeks to replace the idea of identity in difference with the idea of identity as difference, though it is not really clear that this helps. He agrees that it is an insoluble mystery: a mystery that can be appreciated only by ‘supra-logical intuition’, an intuition that takes us beyond what logic will permit.
His fundamental objection to most of Western philosophy is that it considers only sense-experience and reason as the sources of knowledge, failing to appreciate supra-logical intuition. (A few Western thinkers have got there – Plato perhaps, certainly Bergson – but very few). His fundamental objection to much of the Indian tradition is that it puts too much weight on contemplation, too little on practical action. He claims that Shankara recognized the need to balance a life of action with one of contemplation, and in more recent times Ramakrishna and Vivekananda have certainly emphasized the importance of activism. He himself takes activism very seriously, and it is much more important to him than theory. Supra-rational insight is not granted to everyone, but that does not matter, and the details of an individual's belief do not matter either, so long as we can recognize our common unity and act accordingly. He finds much in common between his own views and those of Allama Iqbal and other Muslim thinkers who combine mysticism with practical action, and he argues that the Qu'ran and the Gita are essentially at one.
The soldiers who killed him called him an infidel, i.e., not a Muslim. Gandhi described himself as a Christian and a Hindu and a Muslim and a Jew; the same could be said of Dr D.C. Dev.
