Desire and Liberation: Biography of a Text by Vaddera Chandidas

A. Raghuramaraju has curated and edited this volume, which proposes a major breakthrough in the field of philosophical studies. The volume reproduces not only Desire and Liberation and Kalidas Bhattacharyya’s introduction to it, but also the letters that Bhattacharyya wrote to Chandidas, and Chandidas’s own commentary on his text. In Desire and Liberation Vaddera Chandidas creates a new metaphysical system. The author rejects major convergences in philosophy from both India and the West, especially on the ontological primacy of non-being that results in permanence. He is especially opposed to the idea of permanence, which renders unreliable anything that is not permanent but changing. Chandidas points out that contradictoriness is the structural ‘tinge’ of reality.