The Carvaka school of philosophy offered some of the first rationalist opposition to the otherworldly tendencies of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Through the ages, various societies have sparkled with bursts of creative and intellectual energy. Historians have a penchant for dubbing these 'golden' ages, examples of which include the Athens of Herodotus, the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, and the India of the Buddha. But though India has long been famous for its 'ancient wisdom', the few historical sources that survive shed woefully inadequate light on the Sakyamuni's society. By contrast, very adequate portraits of classical Greece and Abbasid Baghdad are available.
Evidence at hand suggests that around 600-500 BC, in parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain of North India, people were asking some very bold and original questions: What is the nature of thought and perception? What is the source of consciousness? Are virtue and vice absolute or are they mere social conventions? Old traditions were under attack at the time, as new trades and lifestyles were emerging; with urban life in a churn, the power of uptight Brahmins was being steadily eroded. In this marketplace of ideas, philosophical schools flourished, and included chronic fatalists, radical materialists, self-mortifying ascetics, diehard sceptics, cautious pragmatists, saintly mystics and the ubiquitous miracle-mongers. "Rivalries and debates were rife," the historian Romila Thapar wrote in 2002. "Audiences gathered around the new philosophers in the kutuhala-shalas – literally, the place for creating curiosity – the parks and groves on the outskirts of the towns … The presence of multiple, competing ideologies was a feature of urban living." It was also an age of nascent democratic republics, which, like Athens later, did not ultimately survive the march of monarchy and empire.
Ever since the colonial encounter, the West has strongly associated India with the homegrown spiritual tradition. Often this has been out of sympathy, respect and the best of intentions, but sometimes dismissively as "the land of religions, the country of uncritical faiths and unquestioned practices". Such assessments, writes Amartya Sen, are clearly problematic. As he has argued, the history of India is incomplete without its tradition of scepticism, as well. To see India "as overwhelmingly religious, or deeply anti-scientific, or exclusively hierarchical, or fundamentally unsceptical involves significant oversimplification of India's past and present." The West, Sen claims, focused unduly on India's spiritual heritage, on "the differences – real or imagined – between India and the West", partly because it was naturally drawn to what was different in India. Sen continues: