Pon Chandran

India’s Independence Day has never carried a single meaning. While August 15, 1947, is remembered as the moment colonial rule ended, its significance was understood differently by some of the country’s most influential social and political thinkers. For B.R. Ambedkar and Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, political freedom could not be separated from the social structures that governed the lives of millions. Their concerns centered on caste, inequality, social hierarchy and the distribution of power.

Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism did not remain confined to the economic categories of his own time. From his early writings on alienation to the mature analysis of commodities, value and capital, Marx developed a method for understanding how historically specific social relations come to appear as permanent and natural features of human existence. Later thinkers, particularly Max Weber and the theorists of the Frankfurt School, extended, challenged and transformed parts of this critique.

Philosophy is often imagined as a specialised intellectual activity conducted in universities, seminar rooms and libraries, surrounded by difficult concepts and an elaborate history of thinkers. It is frequently presented as a discipline that requires familiarity with technical terminology and a long apprenticeship in abstract argument. Sundar Sarukkai’s Homo Philosophicus: Discovering the Spirit of Philosophy in Everyday Life offers a very different understanding.