Consider this excerpt from Steven Pinker’s ‘Rationality’:

Here Michael Cole interviews a member of the Kpelle people in Libera:

Q: Flumo and Yakpalo always drink rum together. Flumo is drinking rum. Is Yakpalo drinking rum?
A: Flumo and Yakpalo drink rum together, but the time Flumo was drinking the first one Yakpalo was not there on that day.

Q: But I told you that Flumo and Yakpalo always drink rum together. One day Flumo was drinking rum. Was Yakpalo drinking rum?A: The day Flumo was drinking the rum Yakpalo was not there on that day.

Q: What is the reason?
A: The reason is that Yakpalo went to his farm on that day and Flumo remained in town on that day.

The Kpelle man treats the question as a sincere inquiry, not a logical puzzle. His response, though it would count as an error on a test, is by no means irrational: it uses relevant information to come up with the correct answer. Educated Westerners have learned how to play the game of forgetting what they know and fixating on the premises of a problem.

Let us say that the Kpelle people are configured to think differently. Pinker calls it ecological rationality. Michael Cole is interviewing the Kpelle to check their logical rationality which is taught in modern schools. I started with this interview to make a point: different cultures have different thinking configurations!

Now, let me continue with my story.

Let us talk about a certain culture which is defined by strong traditions. The people of that culture were always concerned about How to carry out their traditions. They believed their traditions were eternal and timeless: Sanatana. So, let us call them Sanatanis.

The Sanatanis did not have linear time. They treated time as cyclical. They had a peculiar relation with the here and now and what is eternal and indestructible, yet manifests differently in different cycles. Every aspect of their life was a tradition, which was composed of myriad rituals. Everything was sacred. There was no defining line between divine and civic life.

The Sanatanis were composed of many, many groups with different traditions. Each group carried out a certain natural function in the society or acted as a custodian of a natural resource. It built its traditions and rituals around that function and resource. These groups were loosely called jatis. The jatis and their traditions were rigid, yet flexible. They changed with time. Jatis merged, intermarried, and expanded. New jatis formed all the time. Their social standing changed all the time. Some went up in the hierarchy and some went down. Some jatis had friction with others, but violence was minimal. They had their own ways of resolving conflicts among themselves.

The land in which the Sanatanis existed was huge. It was composed of different geographic regions. The traditions and the characteristics of the jatis varied hugely in different regions. But they also had a metaphysical social organization, called Varna, which cut across jatis for the pursuit of their metaphysical ideas like Karma, Dharma, Reincarnation, Purusharthas etc. The rules of Varna are not understood properly, even today. They had pan networks of learning, commerce, and cultural exchanges. They constantly argued among themselves, but remained indifferent to their differences. There was constant inward migration into their lands. But the Sanatanis assimilated the new peoples and let them preserve their own traditions without any significant violence. The new peoples also became Sanatanis without losing their particular identities.

The Sanatanis had a peculiar way of adapting to new changes. They have seen many new traditions born within their lands. But the old methods, traditions and technologies never fully died. They gave way to the new, had a dialogue with the new and both the old and new mixed and co-existed as one whole. That is why they could maintain an unbroken identify and consciousness for thousands of years.

Let us now look at a different culture. This one is new. The lands in which it was born were often subjected to extreme violence. Hence, old cultures of those lands were often totally erased, leaving almost no trace. The one culture we are referring to here is characterized by strong centralization. The people of this culture identified themselves by one book, one set of rules, one land, one language and one race. They developed strict boundaries for their lands and called them nations. One True God is characteristic of their religion with one Holy Book and everything outside of it is false. The other races are inferior to them. They should be subjugated and converted to their religion.

The races of these different nations fought among themselves constantly over land and religion. The religion of their one book took a peculiar turn in one of those lands. It questioned the authority of the priests of the book. It said that every man can directly communicate with the God without their help. It emphasized on the individual and the individual’s freedom and effort to realize the ultimate One Truth. It emphasized on the question of Why. Let us call it the culture of the individual. It fought bitterly and violently with the old form of the same religion.

Overtime, the culture of the individual morphed and shed its religious nature. It called itself ‘enlightened’ and ‘secular’. But its essence remained the same: there is One Truth, individual is the unit, individual freedom to pursue the Truth is the ultimate goal. The particular economic and social forces of recent centuries favoured this enlightened culture. It became materially rich and started dominating the world.

It so happened a few centuries ago that the people of the enlightened culture, first in its religious and later in its secular form, started ruling and exploiting the Sanatani lands. Exploitation aside, they also started trying to understand the Sanatani culture. They asked the Sanatanis questions like: Who is your one God? What is your one holy book? What is your one set of laws? What is the meaning of your rituals? Why do you perform them? Is there a linear record of your history? The Sanatanis got confused. These questions did not exist to them. They gave some confused answers.

The enlightened people started creating a linear history of the Sanatanis based out of those confused answers, trying to fit them into their own rigid ideas and concepts. They called the Sanatani traditions which follow some rituals as Hindus. But they did not know how to treat the other traditions which did not follow those same rituals. So, they made them into other ‘religions’ like Buddhism and Jainism. They tried their best to homogenize the Sanatanis and their lands, imposing rigid boundaries everywhere. They did not understand the jati concept. So, they called them castes, which were rigid social categories, mainly related to classes, in their own culture. They did not understand the Varnas of the Sanatanis and conflated them with jatis. They assumed all the viciousness and violence of their own culture to be present in the Sanatanis like slavery, religious violence, conversions, racism, class hierarchies, exploitation, and oppression. They did not understand the fluidity and dynamism of the Sanatanis.

Unfortunately, the Sanatanis did not understand the Why and What questions. They only knew how to follow their traditions. And they were dazzled by the material success of the enlightened. They felt inferior. They assumed that the material success of the enlightened is due to their culture. So, they started learning the enlightened culture and disowning and disparaging their own culture. They started attributing all the backwardness and poverty in their lands to their Sanatani culture. They adopted all the assumptions of the enlightened without any kind of questioning. The result? Rigid social divisions. Land divisions. Unimaginable amount of violence. Extreme hatred towards imaginary labels and identities. Ill adopted and badly implemented policies and practices. Widespread confusion and self-hatred.

That is the state of the Bharat of our times!

The solution? Understand the above process thoroughly and rigorously. Be conscious of the assumptions of the enlightened culture which shaped our minds through education and all the media surrounding us. Understand the conceptual tools required to understand the Sanatani culture. Study it in its original form. Study the other cultures with Sanatani tools. Have a dialogue as an equal, not as an inferior. Don’t take for granted whatever the Western culture is producing – in academia and everywhere else.

Welcome to ‘Decolonizing Bharat, the Balu way’. Balu or SN Balagangadhara is not the first one to recognize the problem and offer some solutions. But he is probably the first one to make a rigorous academic study of it and establish an academic branch for it. It is a solid, foundational first step for a promising new future for the Sanatanis.

Dr. Pingali Gopal has made it his mission to bring a lucid introduction to Balu’s thought to the lay man. One has to be a serious reader to understand this book. Don’t expect a linear story and ready to offer solutions. The problem we are discussing is not that simple. But Dr. Gopal has made the book as simple an introduction as possible to some of Balu’s key points in the huge corpus of their academic output without compromising on the academic rigor. It is a commendable work. A must read for every Indian, whether we agree or not with the ideas presented.