Introduction

The major narratives and understandings that are hurting India both nationally and internationally relate to religion, caste, secularism, and Indian culture. The colonials established most of the theoretical frameworks, which our social sciences have relentlessly perpetuated after independence. However, the lived experiences of an average Indian vastly differ from these understandings. The narratives have the ability to instill feelings of shame, anger, or pride in varying proportions in Indians, either on an individual or collective level.

Despite an already existing Indian framework, which unites all faiths, communities, and individuals, we find it difficult to eradicate the divisive narratives set by the colonials. We need to urgently rediscover indigenous understandings of ourselves for not only our sake but for the whole world. This requires shedding off many colonial narratives and giving a view through our own lenses of India and the world. Prof. Balagangadhara and the Ghent School in Belgium have been at the forefront of formulating research programs that specifically achieve this decolonization at the intellectual level. As Sri Aurobindo and Ananda Coomaraswamy in the past, the Ghent School reiterates that there exists a more fulfilling India, or Bharat, which holds many solutions for humanity.

The magnificent Bharatiya culture unites us as one country and people. It is difficult to exactly define Sanatana Dharma, the essence of our culture and civilization. The briefest description is that it is a conglomeration of many traditions—both Vedic and non-Vedic in character. While Vedic traditions, perhaps the first among equals, may have laid the foundational basis of Indian culture, they are not exclusive, predatory, or discriminatory toward other traditions of the land. Traditions broadly encompass the sampradayas, paramparas, ways of living, and lineages, where gurus (living or not), differing gods, philosophies, and routes take precedence rather than a single prophet, a single book, or a single type of place of worship. In this way, traditions differ significantly from religions.

Religions and Traditions

One of the fundamental tenets of Balu’s research program is the assertion that there are no religions in India. This does not imply that the practices forming religions such as “Hinduism,” “Buddhism,” “Sikhism,” or “Jainism” are non-existent, but rather, they fall under a category known as “traditions.” The category of “religion” includes Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Terming the various Sanatana or Indian traditions as “religion” is a simple category error. Comparing religions with traditions is not comparing apples with oranges but something even more distinct, like comparing vegetables with fruits.

When the West arrived in India to establish rule, they encountered an alien culture with diverse practices. Due to their own religious background, they assumed that religion was a “cultural universal” and that cultures could not function without it. The many phenomena they saw in a different culture made no sense when viewed as a religion, and yet the narratives at all levels (political, academic, popular) continued to build religions in Indian culture. Fundamentally, Indian traditions, with their multiple texts, philosophies, temples, gods, rituals, goals, living gurus, and multiple saints, clash with the idea of a religion with a single God, a single temple, a single book, and a single final prophet for all times to come.

How do traditions differ from religions? Books and doctrines form the essence of religion; rituals form the essence of traditions. In religious cultures, the “why” question dominates the learning process. This incessant “why” question finally leads to the flourishing of both atheism and scientific enterprise. The “how” question, or the performative ability, is the dominant learning process in traditional cultures, which have rituals at their foundation. Both learning processes are present in all cultures, but it is the specific domination of one or the relationship between the dominant and non-dominant learning processes that determines the “learning configuration” of the culture. The strongest thesis of Balu, which he supports with extensive research and study, is that the learning configuration of western culture is religion, where the “why” question takes precedence, and the learning configuration of Indian culture is ritual, where the “how” issue takes pre-eminence.

This has numerous implications for comprehending the evolution and development of various cultures and also making sense of the interactions between Western and Eastern cultures, particularly India. It is a historical fact that religions divide, and rituals unite. Religions come with a strong ideology of “One True God” and “many false gods.” Traditions talk about “many True Gods.” For religion, conversion is a strong dynamic. The primary method of dealing with the “other” is through intolerance, and therefore, the ultimate ideal is either tolerance for differing viewpoints or mutual respect. Traditions approach the “other” with an “indifference to the differences.” The latter far transcends the solutions of harmony that religious cultures achieve in the form of tolerances and mutual respect.

In a religious culture, proselytisation is a necessary dynamic, and it would be imperative for the state to give rights to convert people. In a traditional culture that firmly believes all are equally true, conversion would imply aggressive violence to the existing social fabric. Syncretic interactions occur when traditions converge, but physical violence is virtually unknown. A state allowing conversion would be an unthinkable proposition in traditional cultures.

As Balu says in Reconceptualizing India Studies:

This does not suggest that traditions are either fluid or amorphous. The Lingayat tradition is not just a Shaiva tradition; the Vishistaadvaitins are not a variant of Advaitins. Each is not only distinct and different from the other but also strives to retain the distinction. Importantly, traditions distinguish each other as traditions. Being different from the other traditions is crucial to be a tradition. In fact, the vibrancy of a tradition is by the extent to which it can retain its difference from other traditions. We are not yet able to make sense of the presence of these two properties: (a) the enormous flexibility in belonging to a tradition and the sharpness with which the boundaries are drawn between traditions; (b) the possibility that any element could be absent from a tradition and yet it could maintain identity and distinction. Depending on what we emphasize, traditions appear very elastic and extremely dogmatic at the same time. Contrary to popular understanding, traditions are neither variants of either religion or are they philosophies. They are what they are—traditions.

As a broadest description, traditions are routes to a certain defined ideal, either moksha (state of eternal happiness and peace with no further births) or heaven (as some traditions define). Each route is individualised to the person or community at various stages of its life. Therefore, a multitude of traditions can coexist and continue to evolve over time. Mutual interactions and a dynamic exchange of ideas occur continuously. This is the universal story of how traditions constructed as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism evolved in our country. To imagine them as separate identities is an intense violence to our understanding of the culture. In fact, apart from Charvak philosophy (materialism), almost all the traditions, whether Vedantic, Buddhist, Sikh, or Jain, have karma, repeated births, and moksha as their integral metaphysics.

In this sense, traditional cultures have an immense capacity to deal with diversity by interacting with and absorbing the others. This absorption does not imply annihilation, but rather some alterations in attitudes and ways of living. This is how Christianity and Islam interacted with Indian culture. They did not cease their practices or their places of worship, but they lost their focus on the two important general dynamics of religion: the desire to distinguish the “true” from the “false” and the desire to proselytize. This is the traditional Indian approach to dealing with alien religions. The alien religions have largely adapted to the Indian way of life, leading to their integration into Indian traditions. This is the precise alteration of character that Islamic clerics and Christian evangelists strongly militate against.

Instead of continuing with this trend of converting religions into traditions, most intellectuals in the colonial and post-colonial periods were and still are intent on converting flexible traditions into rigid religions. The Christian and Muslim intellectuals remain silent to the efforts of the clerics and the missionaries to resist the traditionalising of religions. On the other hand, Sanatani intellectuals fail to resist the attempts of practically all narratives to religionise our traditions.

Trying to define “Hinduism” (perhaps metaphorically the trunk of the Sanatana Tree after all the other traditions like Buddhism, Jainism, Tribalism, Animism, and Sikhism have branched off) into strict doctrines, temples, truth values, and ideology is giving rise to the disconcerting process of intolerance and the almost paradoxical and oxymoronic “Hindu fundamentalism.” To repeat, the Indian solution was always to traditionalise religions, making them tolerant in the process. Instead, our steadfast commitment to religionising our traditions renders them harsh and intolerant in the process. Today, the solutions for multiculturalism and pluralism in the world can only come if we truly understand the nature of traditional India.

Caste, Varna, Jati, and Kula

The lived reality of Indian social systems encompasses the numerous Jatis and Kulas, which have largely escaped scholarly scrutiny. From colonial times to the present, all scholarship has focused on Varnas and equated them with the caste, a term that originated in western contexts. Western scholarship understood caste and sub-caste as fundamentally about hierarchies and a class system. The fundamental understanding of Varnas was as a class system with social hierarchies, exploitation, discrimination, and all kinds of inequalities as the overriding themes. Scholars have yet to consider the possibility that the Varnas could represent a deeper meaning, such as a normative ideal for a functioning society.

Our texts (like the Valmiki Ramayana, for example) simply mention the four Varnas, but they never developed a theory of Varna. However, theorizing about Varnas has been an incessant exercise for Indologists of all hues over the past few centuries. Post-independence scholarship perpetuated colonial ideas without consulting traditional experts or comprehending the fundamental concepts of the civilization and its philosophies.

The overwhelming ideal of the nation, on an individual and collective level, too, is moksha. The other two quartets, which are the four ashramas (brahmacharya, grihastha, vanaprastha, sannyasa) and the four purusharthas (dharma, artha, kama, moksha), intricately link to the third quartet of Varna at a higher level. Concepts such as guna, svadharma, adhikara, karma, and reincarnation, in turn, relate to all these concepts. Intellectuals such as Sri Aurobindo and Ananda Coomaraswamy cautioned against isolating Varnas from other quartets and from civilizational philosophical ideas, and against studying these concepts independently. This can lead to significant epistemic harm to Indian culture. We see this in various caste studies in India.

There are thousands of Jatis (4000 in recent counts) based on a variety of factors, such as birth, occupation, language, ethnicity, region, belief in gods, rituals, and so on. Each Jati has its own unique food practices, marriage considerations, and beliefs. The one-to-one correlation of the Jatis with the four standard Varnas has been a near impossible task for centuries. No one has ever studied Jatis in detail. They evolve, new Jatis spring up, they merge, they split, and so on. Manusmriti describes fifty Jatis, and today there are four thousand. How do the Jatis correlate with the Varnas in an exact matching order? Nobody knows.

Field studies of the Jati practices refute every theoretical claim about the caste system in India, due to the Jatis’ numerous and varied practices. As a basic example, there are priests from varied Jatis, who are not Brahmins, in various rituals across the country. Similarly, all Brahmins are not priests and many to most involve themselves with activities inconsistent with the theoretical understanding of the caste system. However, we tend to ignore the unsettling information. New data does come in all the time regarding Jati practices, but there is always a desperate attempt to fit it to the original theory of a 4-tiered Varna system with exploitation and discrimination as its main struts. The most startling finding is the actual crime data, which reveals that the Scheduled Castes experience thirty times less crime than the overall population in the country.

The Aryan theory serves as one of the fundamental basis for the establishment of the caste system. It is highly improbable that the Aryans (the Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaisyas) arrived in small numbers from the outside world and managed to dominate a huge majority of the indigenous population. The minority numbers of the first three orders still continue, and thus, if caste scholars need believing, the indigenous Indians who became Dravidians, Shudras, tribals, and Dalits are so naive that they permanently accept an inferior position for thousands of years because their ancestors did so. In no culture did invaders come in as a minority and yet remain so. In the Americas, the majority faced simple extermination. This never seemed to have happened in Indian culture.

Jati practices and rituals throw up many contradictions to the caste system story, and yet scholars consistently ignore the data. Scholars constantly strive to align the data with preexisting caste theories, which primarily focus on discrimination. Today, the caste system story has three interlinked strands: 1) the original Varna-Jati arrangement, the “rules” of which nobody knows, 2) the colonial understanding of the caste system, which has been perpetuated by the caste scholars after independence, and 3) the solidification of the caste hierarchies by successive governments by creating more and more categories (like FC, BC, OBC, SC, ST), and so on.

These three strands have combined to create a confusing and inconsistent depiction of the caste system, where all facts and observations may be true, but the explanations are blatantly false. The social sciences need to adopt a new perspective on Indian culture, fostering a genuine and respectful dialogue with traditional scholars. They are, after all, not studying or trying to understand a dead Roman, Greek, Egyptian, or Mesopotamian civilization. We are still a throbbing and living civilization and culture whose existence is at stake.

Secularism and Conversion

If one understands that Indian traditions are essentially indifferent to differences and that religions inherently promote intolerance and proselytization, one can begin to comprehend the futility of secularism and the challenge of conversion. During a specific period in its history, when various denominations engaged in intense and violent conflict, the Christian European world specifically turned to secularism as a solution. Everyone knew what Christianity was and who Christ was in the background. No one ever intended it to be a universal solution for all times and all cultures.

Today, despite secularism being the universal core mantra, the influx of Islam in Europe and the increasing polarization of Hindu and Muslim communities in India highlight the problems with this model. Westward-looking intellectuals and politicians after independence simply thought the West had the best solutions for the world, not realising that India too had certain inbuilt cultural values that promote diversity and multiculturalism without violence and without secularism as the root model.

Similarly, for Christians and Muslims, who view it as a fundamental constitutional right, freedom of religion (as specified by Article 25) refers to the freedom to convert. In individual judgments, the courts have disagreed with the constitutional position because, for Indian traditions, freedom of religion implies the freedom to practice one’s own belief without external interference. The prevention of indigenous practices through pressure to convert implies a violence against the social fabric of the tradition or the communities. Religions understand propagation as the freedom to convert someone from a “false” religion to a “true” one. Traditions understand propagation as debating the good and bad points of each and fostering a mutual give-and-take attitude from each other. It rarely involves a complete rejection of the previous faith and a wholesale conversion to a new one. Buddhist statues and Vishnu idols sit happily together in many temples and individual homes across the country.

Yet, somehow, the Indian religions lost their focus on proselytization and trying to distinguish between the true and the false. Similarly, Hindus have reacted tepidly to anti-conversion rules across the country. There must be deeper research in these aspects. The nature of Hindu-Muslim conflicts in India also remains unexplored. These conflicts differ significantly from the religious wars in Europe between various Christian denominations or between Christians and Muslims, which were based on truth values. Indian clashes have been more socio-economic in nature.

Colonial Consciousness

Colonial consciousness involves the application of Western perspectives, particularly in the social sciences, to evaluate various aspects of Indian culture and its relationship with the west. One does not realize that the social sciences have a far more important role in giving a correct self-identity to the country and its people than the STEM fields. Regrettably, we tended to prioritize STEM fields over the social sciences, relegating the latter to a specific ideology. Post-independence, the social sciences continued to give a warped picture of us, providing more and more data to fit into the pre-existing theories. At no point did they question the validity of the colonial descriptions.

The colonial consciousness that Balu refers to is the mental attitude of accepting whatever the colonials have established, even after they have departed. It is an attitude that presumes the superiority of western civilization and even refuses to believe that anything good can come from our own culture unless validated by the west. Only a small part of this consciousness is the imitation of western fashion and technology. The worrying aspect for the country’s future lies in the near-permanent intellectual alteration that occurs as a result of blindly accepting many narratives and failing to reject others.

Where does the colonial consciousness work? The answer: everywhere. Refusing to reject the most vicious Aryan-Dravidian theory, which continues to undermine India even after decades, may be the most tragic. According to the Aryan story, horse-riding Aryans came from somewhere in Europe or Russia in 1500 BCE and conquered the indigenous Indians living in the Indian subcontinent. These numerically smaller Aryans formed the later Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vysyas. They were able to subjugate a large majority, who, if we believe the caste scholars, accepted a meek and permanent inferior position in society because their ancestors had done so. The subjugated minority either stayed at the bottom of the social scale as Sudras, transitioned into tribals when forced into the forests, or became Dravidians when driven south of the Vindhyas region. The Dalits of today allegedly are the descendants of the lowest slaves.

Linguistics, archaeology, textual (Vedic) sources, inscriptions, and recently genetics come into play in the Aryan theory debates. Linguistics does not categorically support or reject, and the same is true with genetics. However, archaeology and textual evidence clearly reject the Aryan theory, which forms the basis of every Breaking India narrative. However, the colonials have solidified this idea so much that we cannot reject it despite contradictory evidence. In fact, textual evidence supports even an opposite Out of India migration theory, which posits that it was not Aryans who came to India, but that Indians moved to other parts of the world, including Europe. An entire Dravidian political ideology now grips the nation, albeit for misguided reasons.

Similarly, understanding Indian traditions as religions despite all contradictions; accepting secularism as the best solution for harmony despite seeing a paradoxical rise in fundamentalism; rejecting the ideas of Varna, Ashrama, and Purusharthas developed in our texts and superimposing caste, a Western idea, into the Varna and Jatis of India; taking an inferior view of Ayurveda despite its great achievements; blanking out the most profound Indian philosophies (or Darshanas) from schools by calling them “religion;” rejecting Sanskrit and making English the language of culture, prosperity, and social mobility; making the Western conflict between science and religion our own; understanding our rituals from a scientific perspective and making them irrational; accepting the political ideologies of the left-right- centre; the story of the revolt of Buddhism against Hinduism; the disbelief in a golden period of India; the story that we were never a nation. And so on, ad infinitum.

Whether we are able to match the West, China, or Japan materially and technologically, it is imperative that we break through the mental barriers and provide a better understanding of India to both us and the rest of the world. This is crucial for the well-being of all humanity. On a fundamental level, we are all one.

Dravidians, tribals, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Dalits, Sikhs, Jains, and Hindus are all a part of this magnificent land and culture. Bharat is a conglomerate of a vast number of traditions, each free to practice their own belief systems, remaining either indifferent or mutually interacting with one another without physical violence. This has been a prevailing reality throughout our history. While the Vedic traditions may have established the foundational basis of the culture, syncretism and organic interaction with non-Vedic traditions persist, even in the face of occasional violent outbreaks and the distorted narratives of colonial or post-colonial scholarship.

Concluding Remarks

We are one people and one land. Every person on this wonderful land is a part of and an inheritor of this magnificent culture, irrespective of what faith they may be following, what Jati they may belong to, or what language they are speaking. The most important thing to learn from the Ghent school is that there is a grand unity in this enormous country called India, or Bharat. The start would be to decolonize the social sciences, which transmit their theories and ideologies to the elite holding the reins of the country—the politicians, the bureaucrats, the media, the intellectuals, and the influential artists.

The four grand statements of the Ghent School (like the four Mahavakyas) could be:

• There are no religions in India but only traditions.
• There is no caste-system in India but only Jatis as the lived reality with Varna as a higher level idea.
• Secularism breeds fundamentalism and it will continue to fail as a solution for harmony in a plural world.
• Colonial consciousness is embedded deep into our intellectual frameworks and the only way forward is to shed this consciousness.

One crucial aspect of the Ghent School idea of India is that it does not deny the existence of any of the practices involved in the formation of Indian religions or the caste system. However, the Ghent School idea of India denies the construction of a metanarrative that explains these phenomena using terms like religion or the caste system. The Indian religions and the caste system were a colonial experience of an alien land, and the larger explanations were given to bind their varying experiences of the cultural practices into a unity. The colonials wanted to have a better understanding of the country they were ruling. However, it was their experience of Indian culture, and there is no reason why we should not apply our own lenses to understand it better.

In the early part of the 20th century, during colonial times, Ananda Coomaraswamy had argued that the aim for educational systems should be to develop the people’s intelligence through the medium of their own national culture and local vernacular since the national culture is the only vantage point from which a person can take a wider view of other cultures. Sadly, this was not to be. Balu and the Ghent School persuasively argue that we should adopt an Indian lens and reject Western perspectives when examining both India and the world. Such a lens would provide a better description of India, which not only makes sense to our lived experiences as an Indian but also gives hope to the world in dealing with the multiculturalism and pluralism packed into smaller and smaller geographical areas. The facts of the culture would remain the same; only the overall understanding would be grossly different in terms of harmony and peace.