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nat ional sent iment. His position was based on an updated version of Sankara. It
exploit ed t he idea of levels of t rut h as well as t he general idealism of t he Brit ish
philosophic al tradition at the end of the nineteenth c entury. He was pluralist: all
religions point t o t he same Reality. Hinduism has always had suc h a tolerant
attitude. People are on differing stages of the upward spiritual path. His philosophy
c ould underpin a pan-Indian pat riot ism: Muslims, Christ ians, and ot hers c ould all
take part, for they all had a view of the truth. Vivekananda was also a social
reformer. Following indirec t ly in his foot st eps was Mahat ma Gandhi (1869–1948),
whose pluralist attitude and c onveniently vague appeal to Truth helped to c ement
Indian nationalism. Also important (though often despised by Western
philosophers, who did not see t he wider meaning of his ideology) was Sarvepalli
Radhakrishna n (1888–1975), lat er president of India. Nat urally, t he idealism whic h
had underpinned muc h of the Indian renaissanc e died in World War I, and Indian
philosophy of religion c ame t o be largely neglec t ed in t he period aft er World War II.
However, the pluralist tradition was very important in the thinking behind the
Indian c onstitution and the idea of India as a sec ular state (that is, pluralistic , not
‘sec ular’ in the sense of non-religious). Naturally, the main c onsumption of Indian
philosophy in relat ion t o religion was in t he business of worldview-rec onstruc tion.
In this it was suc c essful, but in the early 1990s there is a turn away from the old
pluralism, and among philosophers a more tec hnic al methodology.