Bhattacharyya exhibited a distinctively “cosmopolitan consciousness”-an intensely creative and agential philosophical intelligence that thrived on engaging a global intellectual community. Garfield ( 2017) put it, colonial philosophers such as Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and K.

Footnote 3 These scholars have defended a more fruitful and nuanced “cosmopolitan” approach to colonial Indian thinkers.

A growing number of scholars, however, have begun to challenge this reductive “Neo-Hindu” approach, arguing that it not only overlooks the various indigenous Indian sources upon which colonial Indian thinkers drew but also misrepresents the subtle dynamics of their creative, critico-constructive engagement with both Western and Indian thought.