Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (1959) In his writings, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya aimed to illuminate science and materialism in ancient India, and to trace their evolution. While commenting on his work on Lokayata, German indologist
Walter Ruben called him a "thought-reformer", who was "conscious of his great responsibility towards his people living in a period of struggle for national awakening and of world-wide fighting for the forces of materialism, progress, humanism and peace against imperialism. He has written this book
Lokayata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism against the old fashioned conception that India was and is the land of dreamers and mystics". This study questioned the mainstream view that Indian philosophy's sole concern was the concept of
Brahman. "From the scattered references in the ancient philosophical literature which were completely hostile to the ancient materialist schools, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya reconstructed the philosophy of
Lokayata, which consistently denied the existence of brahman and viewed pratyaksa (perception) as the sole means of knowledge. He demolished the so-called "interpretation of synthesis" which sought to combine the diverse philosophical traditions of India to form a ladder that leads to the philosophy of
Advaita Vedanta. Being a Marxist, Chattopadhyaya's uses the method of
historical materialism to study "the ultimate material basis of the primitive
deha-vada and the primitive rituals related to it" and to reveal how these could "be connected with the mode of securing the material means of subsistence". He also traced "the course of development this archaic outlook eventually underwent".
Indian Philosophy: A Popular Outline (1964) It was an introductory book that examined Indian philosophy through an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on anthropological, economic and philological studies. The book traced the philosophical development in India from the
Vedic period to later Buddhism. In this introductory study, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya targets another important myth that overshadows the study of Indian philosophy – that of the presupposed predominance of
shastrartha or textual interpretation. He views the development of Indian philosophy as the consequence of real clashes of ideas – "contradiction constituted the moving force behind the Indian philosophical development". Dale Riepe in his review of this book says that Chattopadhyaya "combines the analytic sagacity of Hume with the impatient realism of Lenin".
Indian Atheism: A Marxist Analysis (1969) This is yet another provocative critique of the standard accounts of Indian philosophy and religion. This book brings out a coherent historical account of atheism in India. In fact, according to Chattopadhyaya, "an unbiased survey of the Vedas clearly shows the total absence of religious consciousness in its earlier stage and the
Rgveda is full of relics of this stage of thought. Even the world
polytheism is misapplied to such an early stage of the Vedic thought". On the other hand, the idealists believed in complete separation between theory and practice. They adhered to, in the words of
Kumarila Bhatta, the principle of
bahyartha-sunyatva (the unreality of the objects of knowledge), which, according to Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, formed "the real pivot of idealism throughout its Indian career".
Science and Society in Ancient India (1977) This book is about
scientific method in ancient India and how societal divisions of the time shaped the development of science. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya chooses the field of medicine for the purpose, because, according to him, "the only discipline that promises to be fully secular and contains clear potentials of the modern understanding of natural science is medicine". The main concentration of the book is to present an analysis of
Caraka Samhita, the crucial source book on Indian medicine. According to Chattopadhyaya, "discarding scripture orientation, they [the Indian physicians] insist on the supreme importance of direct observation of natural phenomena and on the technique of rational processing of the empirical data. They go even to the extent of claiming that the truth of any conclusion thus arrived at is to be tested ultimately by the criterion of practice". For them, "everything in nature occurs according to some immutable laws, the body of which is usually called
svabhava in Indian thought" and "from the medical viewpoint there can be nothing which is not made of matter". They even say that "a substance is called conscious when it is endowed with the sense-organs". Further, Chattopadhyaya shows: :"If anywhere in ancient Indian thought we are permitted to see the real anticipation of the view that knowledge is power – which, when further worked out, assumes the formulation that freedom is the recognition of necessity – it is to be found among the practitioners of the healing art". Chattopadhyaya also tries to show in the book, how societal divisions, especially the
caste system, which was enforced by the law-givers and their justificatory idealist ideologies, formed obstructions in the way of scientific development in India.
Lenin, the Philosopher (1979) This book was written in the context of growing state authoritarianism during the
Indian Emergency declared by
Indira Gandhi, on the one hand, and the upsurge of rightist forces in the form of
Jan Sangh,
Shiv Sena etc., on the other. Chattopadhyaya opined "that in these grim and anxious days through which India today is passing, that which holds hope for our future is the growing awareness of our people of socialism being the only way out". And, "an essential pre-condition for moving forward to Socialism is the consolidation of Socialist consciousness in its right sense among the Indians today", for which "it is imperative to understand and absorb the philosophical views of Lenin". This book is meant to be a "guide or introduction" to Lenin's philosophical writings. It seeks "to lead the readers to the actual study of Lenin, providing them with some clarifications, annotations and summations that they may be useful only for the limited of a preliminary acquaintance with Lenin's philosophical ideas". Communist leader
E.M.S. Namboodiripad in his overall appreciative review of the book criticised Chattopadhyaya for not explaining "in a sufficiently convincing way as to why Lenin thought it necessary to go to Hegel in his later years", as evident from his
Philosophical Notebooks of 1914. == Reception ==