Lokayata

The studies in and on thoughts should explore the strands enmeshed in the lived, ordinary pragmatics of everyday life, too. This chapter aims to find such substantial strands rather than reproduce the available debates on the imperative of lived and ordinary, or lived or ordinary, in the studies of thoughts. Suffice it to mention that many critical interjections about theories from nonwestern contexts, philosophy from the East, or the famous revisiting of the idea of science and social sciences in the post-World War II milieu enabled us to rethink thoughts and theories, science beyond positivistic scientism, among other things. This includes the critique of Eurocentrism, as well as the skewed development of thoughts in the wake of globalisation, to the history of ideas, resulting in debates on universal versus contextual, global versus local, allegedly perpetuating and repackaging the cognitive and conceptual binaries of the twentieth century. In this chapter, there is a modest attempt to focus on and explore a possible local strand of thought that could be a springboard for a discursive addition to the body of thoughts rather than merely critique or be confined to the framework of thoughts riddled with conceptual binaries. This is, however, not aimed at the reactionary or romantic abandonment of the self-proclaimed universals. Instead, it humbly hinges on a modest proposition that the local strands are evolving universals. Hence, the chapter shall spend time examining one such a strand from the corpus of South Asian thoughts.