Intro
This website is an archive of materials in contemporary Indian philosophy, and includes mostly volumes of the Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research (JICPR), edited by two polylogs, D.P. Chattopadhyaya (1931-2022) and Daya Krishna (1924-2007).
Chattopadhyaya was the founding chairman of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR) – an all-India umbrella-body for the promotion of philosophy – and the founding editor of the Council’s journal, the JICPR. He edited the journal from its first volume (Autumn 1983) until August 1990, and was succeeded by Daya Krishna, who edited the journal until his passing in October 2007. Daya added to the journal sections such as “Discussion and Debate” and “Agenda for Research”, intended to breathe life into the journal and establish a philosophical community around it. Since 2007, the journal has been published under different editors. Our archive focuses only on the volumes edited by Chattopadhyaya and Daya Krishna. During these years, in these volumes, the journal was a stage, even a home, for contemporary Indian thinkers who read classical Indian texts anew, and hosted a dialogue between contemporaries, predecessors and ancestors. Besides this trajectory, which for us – archivers – is the heart of the matter, the volumes collected here also include papers in different fields of philosophy by different scholars. Many young Indian scholars at the time published their first article on the pages of the JICPR. Their promotion was one of the incentives of the journal.
But our main interest, and focus, and the reason we founded this archive is the abovementioned dialogue created in papers written for the JICPR by an illustrious generation of thinkers, most of them no longer in this world, who contributed regularly to the JICPR and made it what it was, a unique intellectual hub. They include the two first editors, D.P. Chattopadhyaya and Daya Krishna. The latter contributed an article per volume throughout his tenure as editor. They also include G.C. Pande, R. Balasubramanian, Rajendra Prasad, Sundara Rajan, Mukund Lath, R.S. Bhatnagar, S.S. Barlingay, D. Prahladachar, Sibajiban Bhattacharyya, J.N. Mohanty, Ramesh Chandra Shah, Margaret Chatterjee, N.K. Devaraja, K. Satchidananda Murty, and K.J. Shah.
Other contributors to the JICPR in the volumes collected here belong to the next generation of Indian philosophers/philosophers in India: Mrinal Miri, V.N. Jha, K.T. Pandurangi, Ashok Vohra, S.K. Ookerjee, Jagat Pal, Arindam Chakrabarti, Tara Chatterjea, Shefali Moitra, A. Raghuramaraju, Murzban Jal, R.C. Pradhan and G. Mishra. The contributors also include Western pandits who write Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and comparative philosophy, including Karl Potter, Roger Ames, Gerald James Larson, Richard Sorabji, Lawrence Babb, and Harold Coward.
Under the title of Other Texts, you will find different materials in contemporary Indian philosophy that we collected through the years. These texts also contribute to the dialogue which is at the center of the archive between and across thinking traditions and eras, thinkers and texts.
