Traditionalism in India: A. K. Saran

A new article draws attention to an Indian Traditionalist who has until now not attracted much attention internationally, Awadh Kishore Saran (1922-2003), pictured, an academic sociologist. He taught at Lucknow University and Jodhpur University, and was a Senior Fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research. In 1962 he joined Pitrim Sorokin, Henri Lefebvre and Ernest Gellner in a round-table discussion of sociological theory at a conference in Washington, DC.

The article, R.K. Misra, "Between Tradition and Modernity: Some Reflections on Professor A.K. Saran’s Intellectual Sojourn," Dialogue Quarterly 17, no. 4 (April 2016), pp. 18-26, is available online. It explains that Saran read Ananda K. Coomaraswamy as a young man, and then René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, and Marco Pallis. He became well known in certain circles as a critic of modernity. The book considered his best is Traditional Thought: Toward an Axiomatic Approach: A Book on Reminders (Varanasi: Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, 1996).