Europeans have shown a great fascination for the study of India starting with its missionary and travel reports. However, what was the understanding of the ‘otherness’ of Indian traditions in this scholarship continuing till the present times?  The Comparative Science of Cultures programme initiated at the University of Ghent by Dr. SN Balagangadhara Rao shows that the understanding of the Indian traditions inextricably links to the indigenous religious developments in Europe. The Roman Catholic Church after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment was a continuum of changes that took place in Europe since the turn of the millennium. At the time of the colonial venture in India, a Protestant understanding of religions was predominant along with Enlightenment values.

Peculiarly, despite all the changes in European history, the idea of India as a land of ‘pagan’ religions filled with superstitions, false gods, meaningless rituals, and tyrannical priests held constant sway. There were of course many changes in the understanding of religion itself per se in India. One story (Vedism to Brahmanism to Hinduism) was a degeneration of a pure religion of the Vedas in the remote past having Biblical links to the one true religion of the Christ through the manipulation of crafty Brahmins. Another story ordered religions on an ascending evolutionary scale starting with the primitive religions (the pagans) and ending with the highest form of religion as Christianity (especially the Protestant variety).

The Enlightenment scholars apparently rejected religion but Balagangadhara (The Heathen in His Blindness) clearly shows that most of their ideas were simply secularisation of theological ideas. This is, in fact, a more powerful way of the universal spread of Christianity than a direct conversion of subjects. Enlightenment did not change its understanding of the nature of Indian traditions as degenerated religions in need of reforms for their many deficiencies.

Balagangadhara shows that, across centuries, it was a continuous failure of most intellectuals of both Europe and India to understand the Indian traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism) as religions. The major mistake was to persist in calling Indian phenomena (perhaps best termed as traditions) as religions despite realising that everything they were dealing with was not religion in the definitional sense. This led to many conceptual distortions and sad consequences. Balagangadhara explains that Hinduism was not a ‘construction’ as some scholars have alleged but it was simply an experience of the colonials of the many practices in an alien land that they were trying to understand and rule.

The many rituals, practices, Brahmins, deities, murtis, scriptures, and worships existed but the structure or the meta-narrative they gave to such a conglomerate became the ‘religion’ of Hinduism. Their own culture rooted in religion gave rise to the idea that religion is a cultural universal and they could not just imagine that cultures could exist without a religion. There have been many scholars like Sri Aurobindo, Bankim Chandra, or more contemporary scholars such as Frits Staal who intuitively were not comfortable with the idea of converting Indian traditions into religions of the Abrahamic mold.

Frits Staal, for example, studying the Indian rituals, concluded that the Western origin of the concept of religion is inadequate in the study of Indian traditions. Staal simply says that it is impossible to consider Asian traditions to be religion. Thus, in Asia, groupings of various traditions are not only uninteresting and uninformative, but unreal, says Farek. What counts instead are ancestors and teachers—hence lineages, traditions, affiliations, cults, eligibility, and initiation. These are concepts with ritual rather than truth-functional overtones typical of a religion.

In the present book, Martin Farek, a brilliant scholar and presently Associate Professor (docent) in the Department of Geography, Technical University of Liberec (Czech Republic),  examines specifically whether Czech Indology, though it was not a coloniser, followed a similar pattern of understanding as the rest of Europe.  He also examines whether the British Orientalists and European historiography in its understanding of Indian culture were truly free of the many theological assumptions and ideas. The Indians looked at their past in a different manner and this did not make sense to European scholars. The Aryan theory has played havoc with the socio-political-cultural fabric of India and Farek shows in this book that again theological considerations of religion, language, and the origin of humankind formed this theory. In the final chapter, the author deals with an Indian intellectual of those times, the Bengali reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy, and shows how his understanding of Indian culture had distortions due to influences of western narratives.

European Search for Religion in India    

In the second chapter, perhaps the crux of the book, the author describes Europe’s attempts, specifically Czech scholarship, in trying to understand the religions of India. He demonstrates that the long line of pre-colonial writings (missionary reports, travelogues, traders’ descriptions), the first oriental scholarship, the later European scholarship both in India and abroad, Indian intellectuals of the colonial and post-colonial era, and finally the present-day Indologists show a remarkable consistency in their understanding of religions in general and of Indian traditions in particular.

Over a period, through repeated affirmations, the basic story is that of a pure religion in the remote past (the Vedic Era) brought by the invading Aryans from Central Asia/Russia in 1500 BCE. Through the handiwork of corrupt and crafty Brahmins (who introduced not only the hierarchal ‘caste system’ in connivance with the rulers but many superstitions and rituals), this religion degenerated into Brahmanism. Then rose the many great rebellious movements (Bhakti movements, Buddhism, Jainism, and so on) against the priesthood. Along the way, the rejected untouchables stayed out of the Hindu four-fold caste system.

Finally, through many means both violent and nonviolent, Hinduism not only drove Buddhism away to remote lands but managed to absorb the good teachings of Buddha into its own fold. Buddha also became one Avatara of Vishnu in this process of absorption. Thus, came about the final form of the present Hinduism. The transition from Vedism to Brahmanism to Hinduism is the overall framework of all present understanding of Indian religions which has also permeated the standard teaching curriculum of India today; only the mechanisms of the transition vary.

However, there were huge discrepancies in their understanding and what existed in society as its practices and what was evident in many scriptural texts. Despite realising that doctrines did not really exist (as for other Abrahamic religions) for the disparate, apparently disconnected conglomerate of rituals, philosophies, and practices, they could crystallise some common themes:
1) Hinduism as one unified socio-religious organisation;
2) The Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Manu Dharma as its central sacred texts;
3) Reincarnation, the law of Karman, and moksha (the goal of life) as the central doctrines; and
4) Brahmins as its priestly class.

Though invariably Buddhism was a strong contestant, its characterisation by European scholars was even more problematic: it was a religion, or it was a philosophy, or it was an atheistic religion because it did not speak of God, or it was a unique religion-philosophy; and so on.

Martin Farek methodically analyses the information gleaned from societal practices and from the various scriptures as cited by scholars across centuries. The classical work of Balagangadhara (The Heathen in His Blindness) forms an important starting point for his examination. He shows how each of the elements of the main story has glaring inconsistencies, untenable conclusions, contradictions, and assumptions.

Hinduism was not a unified whole; the law of Karma and reincarnation plays no role in many traditional groupings; not moksha but a heavenly paradise is an aim for many others; not all priests are Brahmins; not all Brahmins are priests; Brahmins hardly had a say in the internal matters of other jatis; there was never ever a pan-India central sacerdotal authority implementing rules and regulations and ordering the society in a hierarchal manner; hardly any Indian ever knew or knows the content of the Vedas or even the existence of a Manu Dharma which is allegedly the source of all problems; one could visit temples or not, declare oneself as an atheist and still be a Hindu; and so on. There is neither historical nor contemporary evidence supporting the idea that the Brahmins are some powerful priestly class of Indian society.

Buddhism was even more problematic when the Buddhist original texts clearly reveal that Buddha and Buddhism never rejected either the Brahmins or the varna vyavastha. In fact, Buddha himself sought to define a true Brahmin; declared Rama as his previous reincarnation; placed Kshatriyas above the Brahmins in the hierarchal ordering; and conformed with most of the Upanishadic statements and yogic-meditative methods. Later Buddhist writings did not deviate much from the original Buddha messages. The whole story of Buddhism rebelling against Hinduism is simply a house of cards placed on shifting sands.

However, the most important questions now come into play. This ‘construction’ of Hinduism was definitely not mischief on the part of some serious intellectuals across centuries. So, how exactly did Europeans become convinced of the religious nature of Indic traditions? What was the underlying evidence? Why do they consider the Vedas, the Upanishads, etc., to be central sacred texts and its core doctrinal texts? How did Brahmins become priests of unified Hinduism? What makes the Europeans think that ascetic traditions are protest movements?

The first colonial and oriental scholars drew their theories from the observations of many missionaries, travellers, and administrators whose predominant image of India was a negative one where the priests were exploiting the society by their privileged position. The author explains how with regards to the first colonial scholars (John Zephaniah Holwell, Alexander Dow, William Jones, and Henry Thomas Colebrooke) and the later ones too (like H. H. Wilson, Monier Monier-Williams, and Friedrich Max Müller) a Christian theological framework explicitly postulated the existence of religion as a quest for the only true God in all cultures although in mostly a degenerated pagan form.

The author explains how the first British Orientalists adopted the theological questions of their predecessors and how they developed them, from Holwell’s speculations about the original revealed scripture of India, distorted by Brahmins, to Jones’ quest for the original monotheism of India in the Vedas and the Upanishads. The supposed “early departure” from monotheism to polytheism was in fact the starting point of the degeneration hypothesis of Indian traditions. In this specific theological framework developed by H. H. Wilson and Monier-Williams, Indian religion had three transformations from monotheist Vedism to the extravagant ritualism of Brahmanism to Hinduism. Knowledge of Sanskrit played no role in revising this basic understanding which demonstrates strongly the role of theory or the background web of European cultural ideas in the selection and interpretation of data on Indian traditions. Jones’ linguistic and other scholarly outputs were finally assuming the truth of a Biblical global chronicle and in the search for Noah’s lost sons after the great flood.

As an example, the Europeans saw rituals as an expression of religion only and nothing else. The established conceptual structure simply did not allow consideration that ‘puja’ in Indian traditions might be something other than a false or imperfect form of worship to mainly false gods. The imbibing of theological terms into natural language made the translations of many Indian concepts like Brahman, deva, devis, manas, buddhi into equivalents of many exclusively theological terms like God, idols, sin, conscience, and so on. What was common sense to one culture became extremely problematic when used to understand alien traditional cultures.

The Protestant criticism of Catholic priests and the degeneration of society; the Christian criticism of Jewish practices and its priesthood; the absolutely alien ideas of blasphemy and heresy; and the Enlightenment values protesting against religion became the frameworks finally in understanding Indian traditions as religions. However, as Balagangadhara shows, most of the Enlightenment principles were simply secularised forms of Christianity which showed consistency in holding up Indian traditions as religions. Whatever movements took place in Europe, the rock-like explanation for the degeneration of the ‘primitive’ monotheism remained the ‘power-hungry’ Brahmins, an answer anticipated by the Protestant-Catholic controversies in which the argument against degenerate clergy gained force by reference to ‘similar abominations’ in India; says the author.

Post-independence, there was a deep colonial consciousness, which did not allow Indian intellectuals to question the narratives set by colonisers. The most amazing facet of this entire story has to be the fact that, throughout, the definition of Indian traditions remained mainly negative: what it was not with respect to Christianity, or Islam, or Judaism.  Yet, they were religions. Despite mounting evidence across centuries that the phenomena Europeans encountered in India were never religions like Christianity or Islam, they persisted with the idea that India had many religions (sometimes even fighting each other like in Europe) instead of redefining what religions may actually mean. Their culture rooted in religion could never accept that cultures could exist without religions.

Religion, Historiography, and Indian Past

In an incisive chapter, Farek elegantly shows how Christian theology defined the way of European historiography but played havoc with the understanding of the Indian past. The combined story of the Old and New testaments starting with the creation of the universe till Jesus Christ as the final Messiah formed the framework of understanding history by European scholars. The imminent expectation of Christ’s second coming and the end of the world became the basis for a linear concept of time that was supposed to evolve from the creation of the universe, through the turning point of Christ’s advent until its ending. The concept of history as a linear time with progress from a ‘primitive’ past to an ‘advanced’ future remains ingrained to date.

The author then traces how theology receded but, in its secularised form, the framework of universal global history persisted with the linear concept of time. More chronologies of various cultures merged into the single linear chronology of the universalising framework where European history took center stage and the other cultures became its appendages. Interestingly, the same historical consciousness turned back on itself and led to criticism of its own Christian legends. However, despite gradual secularisation, Christian thinking preserved its basic structures in considering history as a goal-directed process involving all of humanity. This remains the defining philosophy of the new research field called world history.

The history of India written by Europeans followed the same pattern. Thus, historians trapped in religious thinking and Eurocentrism, keeping a purpose and progress in mind; wrote about Hindu, Muslim, and European (or Christian) periods of the Indian past. Many influential authors applied the terms ‘Antiquity,’ ‘Middle Ages,’ and ‘Modernity’ eventually to the history of India corresponding to the same religious chronological periods. The religious periodisation implied a development from primitive paganism towards its highest form – British Protestantism. Colonial scholars, starting with William Jones, did not deviate from this framework of theological thinking. They force-fitted the local narratives of native peoples’ past, including the Indian conception of time into the Biblical framework. Everything that did not fit the framework of the Biblical story (the Universe beginning in 4004 BCE for example), such as the enormous time span of the Puranic ages, were simply ‘allegories, falsities, fabrications, myths, or fables.’

Even today, though rejecting the explicit theology, both Indian and western scholars fail to enquire into what those narratives meant to Indians themselves. Instead, the only possible approach to the past is either as “history proper (or true),” rooted in the theological foundations of historiography, or as a “myth (thus false).” This framework does not allow for other possibilities. European and Indian scholars continuously discuss to date why ancient Indians did not have any historical consciousness. Apart from stereotypical reasons such as predilection for ‘myths, fables, and fantasy’ and ‘aversion to serious narrative,’ it was due to a primitive religion controlling the economic and political spheres along with a rigid caste system. The cyclical conception of time allegedly is a major obstacle in developing a historical consciousness. It never occurred to the researchers and historians of both the West and India alike that there could be a very different way of dealing with the past quite different from the European idea of history.

The section on Indian history expands on and complements a most thought-provoking essay by Balagangadhara – What Do Indians Need, A History or A Past? The combination of chronological genealogies mixed with stories (an important component of teaching, learning, and socialization in the Indian culture) was perhaps a unique Indian way of preserving the past. The ancestral lineage of Shri Rama traces back to 40 generations and that of Raja Janaka (Devi Sita’s father) to almost 20 generations in Valmiki Ramayana. These genealogies remain permanently etched. Yet, for Indians, an attitude which Europeans could not fathom, the names of Shri Rama’s ancestors or the existence of Shri Rama himself is of less importance than the stories of Ramayana. This ‘mimetic’ learning using stories forms the most important aspect of Indian culture where there is no ‘primitive’ past but an ‘ancient’ past with its stories relevant across time.

The European polarised distinction of ‘historical thinking’ as opposed to ‘myth’ fails to make sense of Indian culture. Just like the Europeans, the Indians too have not grasped the theoretical grounds of western historiography. Indian theoretical interpretations in the framework of a linear progression of time from a primitive past to a golden future stay intact in their otherwise meticulous studies.

European historiography gives importance to the link between specific events and the whole religious message. When confronted with the otherness of Indian narratives, William Jones declared: “Either the first eleven chapters of Genesis are true, or the whole fabric of our national religion is false; a conclusion, which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn.” A message can be true only if an event factually happened. Western thought, even when rejecting Christ or Christianity, gives central importance to the factuality of Jesus Christ’s life and other events; no such link has developed in Indian traditions. In Indian thinking, Shri Rama, Buddha, or Shri Krishna may never have existed but Ramayana, the Buddhist teachings, and Mahabharata are always true.

Indian traditions deal with the past by mingling of stories with the preservation of the names and actions of their ancestors, rulers, and important figures.  However, as a major difference, Indians have taken little interest in a long-term precise chronology and they never ordered various events in a pan-India or global chronology. They have not tried to find the purpose of history in those memories. In what way do traditional narratives become linked up with memories of past events? What constitutes the ‘truthfulness’ of narratives in Indian culture as opposed to the status of historical factuality in European historiography? Such research can allow Western historians to draw inspiration, in reverse, from Indian thinking and understand that there are alternative ways of looking at the past, says the author.

Changing Interpretations of the Aryans

The classical paradigm of Indian pre-history initiated by European scholars is that of the invading or migrating Aryans from Central Asia/Russia, who in around 1500 BCE, entered India through the northwest and displaced the indigenous people of India. Those driven south of the Vindhyas became the Dravidians; those to the forests and mountains became the ‘tribals.’ The Brahmin priests, in the invading foreign groups, in connivance with the rulers, created a caste system where the first three orders (the original exploiters) were Aryans. The subjugated people as the lowest in the hierarchy became the Sudras and the untouchables. Thus, the mysterious Aryans became a wholesome explanation to explain many things about India.

The only scientifically established fact of the entire theory is the relatedness of Indo-European languages noted first by Oriental scholars such as William Jones and others who predated him (like Newton or Leibnitz). This led to a vibrant area of comparative philology which in essence arrived at the idea of a mother language (PIE or Proto-Indian-European language) giving rise to all the languages of Europe and India. This mother language must also have a motherland from which people migrated to various areas and where each group developed a degenerated version of the original language.

The author explains how theological assumptions formed the basic structure of the first ideas of the theory and laid the basis for later 19^th century linguistic and anthropological research. The discussions were on three related questions: What was the primary language of humankind? How did languages come to separate from each other and spread in the world, and is it possible to find the ideal language? The basis for these questions, especially for William Jones, was Genesis and the later dispersal of Noah’s descendants as the truthful account of global history. The European nations were descendants of Japheth and India perhaps either of Ham or Japheth.

Jones’ comparative project was primarily aimed at reconstructing the earliest history of humankind and discovering the original and the oldest religion of humankind. It was more of speculative identifications and parallelism of Biblical and Graeco-Roman characters with Indian ones rather than comparative linguistics. Thus, a language family originated in the quest for an original religion. A common original homeland originated in the belief of a Great Flood in the aftermath of which Noah and his descendants moved to all parts of the world. Ironically, a truly linguistic proof of identity and European languages came from Franz Bopp, who in turn, took his inspiration from Indian linguistics.

Later scholars rejected explicit theology. The post-flood dispersion of nations was secularised in linguistic and anthropological speculations about the noble Aryan race subjugating the uncivilised peoples of India. Thus, Aryan theories clearly root in theology which presupposes the universal truth of the Biblical accounts. The prism of presupposed invasion remained a framework for explaining even later linguistic and archaeological discoveries.

The most important source for rejecting the Aryan theory comes from archaeology. Till date, there is not a shred of evidence supporting the invasion or migration scenario. Unfortunately, this Aryan theory became an established fact and highly selective words with fancy interpretations from the Vedic corpus became their supporting evidence. Words such as varna became colour and a-nas became ‘without a nose’ or ‘stub’ nose to support many racial speculations of distinct Aryan and Dravidian races. Such interpretations laid the basis of physical anthropology studies. On a dubious interpretation of a single passage from the large Vedic corpus by Max Mueller, the promoter of anthropometry, H. H. Risley, claimed that the Vedic Aryans referred to their enemies as noseless.

Archaeology remained the biggest problem even as the Indus excavations (the Harappan and Mohenjo-Daro civilisations in the 1920s and the Mehrgarh excavations later) flew in the face of the Aryan theory. All the evidence (archaeology, textual, Vedic, inscriptions, astronomical) has suggested not only an indigenous Vedic civilisation without any Aryan-Dravidian divide but even a possible reverse migration from India to other parts of Europe (the OIT or Out of India Theory). However, as the author says, the idea of an invasion remains primary and the question of integrating any new findings with it was merely subsidiary to all European scholars and their Indian followers.

One scholar says it is amazing that European scientists were convinced for a long time about an Aryan race despite there being no biological criteria that would characterise the Aryans.  The author shows elegantly how Enlightenment theories (progress of civilisation from a primitive society to its supposed culmination, represented by the Western world) and Darwin’s evolutionary theories (spinning of racial ideas) played a crucial role in the Aryan debate and the subsequent speculations of the caste-system in India.

Selective bits of Vedic corpus supported their preconceived theories and ad hoc adjustments explained away uncomfortable archaeological findings but the basic idea of invading Aryans remains consistent. One adjustment, on the discovery of the Dravidian Brahui language in the North, involves even the mysterious Dravidian race invading from the South and destroying the Harappan culture! This is the state of contemporary scholarship to this day. Both Western, as well as Indian scholars, have not discarded the noxious Aryan theory standing without evidence but causing intense damage to the social fabric of India.

Did Ram Mohan Roy Understand Western Religion?

How does it matter to Indians how Europe views India? The answer which the Comparative Science of Cultures scholars provide is that it mattered across centuries till date because of an intellectual entrapment of Indians to the colonial narratives. Believing whatever the colonials said about us and then superimposing them on our own understanding and lived experience has caused severe distortions. Dr. Balagangadhara defines this in great detail as a process of ‘colonial consciousness.’ This violence at an intellectual level is far more severe and long-lasting than the physical and material plundering of colonialism. All current understanding of Indians about India – such as caste, religion, secularism, linguistic policies, and so on; is coloured in this colonial consciousness. Martin Farek ends the book with a brilliant analysis of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, considered one of the great ‘reformers’ of Hinduism.

Jakob De Roover and Sarah Claerhout explain the concept of ‘topos’ (plural ‘topoi’) in their recent excellent book Religious Conversion-Indian Disputes and Their European Origins. This refers to commonplace ideas and words which occur as clusters of interrelated ideas specific to a culture. For example, while discussing Christian theology or in common language, the West uses words and ideas with self-evident meanings such as ‘belief,’ ‘faith,’ ‘doctrine,’ ‘conversion,’ ‘religion,’ and so on. ‘Conceptual distortion’ occurs when topoi originating from one cultural setting interpret topoi from another culture. Thus, a partial understanding of Christianity and its superimpositions on Indian culture made Gandhi look incoherent and inconsistent; as Roover and Claerhout show. Here, Ram Mohan Roy has the same inconsistencies when he was superimposing his partial understanding of Christianity to the traditional systems of India.

Farek shows how Roy, accepting wholly the ideas of European deism and Unitarianism, reinterpreted Vedanta and tried to reform the society of its evil practices and ‘meaningless’ rituals, such as Sati. Image worship was immoral, with Roy arguing that this type of worship did not exist in Vedas and Vedanta. His descriptions of the “one true God” as the designer of the universe, of the human body, and of nature were clearly Western Christian ideas. Believing, like the Orientalists, that the original and pure monotheism of the Vedas had degenerated into polytheism, he strived to get the degenerated Hinduism back to Vedism cleansing it of Brahmanism. The criticism of a supposedly immoral Shri Krishna involving Gopis followed the same line of arguments as the missionaries, even as he did not show interest in understanding the Vaishnava view of Krishna Bhakti or devotion.

Yet, Roy did not condemn idolatry completely.  In a contradiction of ideas, Roy still advocated that if one is not qualified to worship the one true God, one should worship at least the idols. But worshipping by means of form would lead to only temporary bliss. However, from a Christian viewpoint, this is completely unacceptable. True worship can only be upon belief in one true God. All other gods are simply false gods and to worship them means to perform ‘idolatry.’ In the framework of the Christian European lense, his reform of Vedanta and Hindu society was a severe distortion and it is no wonder that traditional scholars rejected Roy’s reframing outright. The general populace also did not accept Brahmo Samaj in any big way.

On the other hand, Roy’s great esteem for Christian ethical teaching (The Precepts of Jesus), was also controversial.  He believed in the Unitarian doctrine of Jesus Christ being a human being, not God, and his fights with the Baptists were in line with many theological debates on the nature of Christ and Christianity. A distortion appeared here again when Roy believed that historical narratives and dogmas concerning the life of Christ were not as important as the teachings of Jesus. This was clearly a distortion of Christian fundamental importance to the truth of doctrines and here Roy was applying his Indian understanding to Western theology (Shri Rama may not be true but the Ramayana is always true). Thus, the Christians also rejected his ideas.

Farek says that Roy’s works and the facts about his life make for a strong argument that he basically accepted the Western, especially the Unitarian framework, of understanding as his own. He then strived to apply them in his life and society. Farek says: How can any “earnest-minded investigator of the science of comparative religion” just compare practices of different religious groups without considering the differences between their doctrines? How can you consider principles of moral conduct to be the essence of Christianity and resign to the very possibility to find out who Jesus was?

Finally, despite his heart being in the right place, Roy’s superimpositions of Christian theology (where he did not really understand the concepts of ‘worship,’ ‘idolatry,’ and so on) on Indian traditions failed to convince both Indians and the majority of Christians.

Concluding Remarks

This is another wonderful work from the scholars of the Comparative School of Cultures or the Ghent School. Initiated by the legendary Dr. SN Balagangadhara, its scholars have taken forward his ideas to give a better understanding of India and the world. Their works are extremely important to Indians as they give real solutions to the problems we are facing presently, especially those related to religion and the so-called caste system. The research program has a fundamental idea regarding religion which says that the phenomena in India (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism) are traditions and not religions. Traditions and religions are two different paradigms.

The configuration of Indian culture roots in traditions while Western culture roots in religion. The cultural understanding of Indian culture has been only one-sided from the Western, mainly European Christian, perspective. Their plea to Indian scholars is to develop as a first step an Indian view of itself and the world. Only with an alternative view, which does not seem to exist now, we can talk about decolonisation and replacing it with something else. The colonisation is most severe at the intellectual level. At the same time, the school makes strong arguments for how most western progressive and liberal ideas have never been free of theology. They ask the West to be aware of this strong theological background of its present lenses to view itself and the world.

The finest aspect of their writings is that it never descends to abuse, polemic, or rhetoric. Both West and the East stand as equals facing each other with the potential to learn from each other. Only a very superficial reading and a shallow understanding can construct them as ‘anti-Christian’ or even worse, ‘pro-Hindutva.’ Their extremely scholarly output put forth in lucid language, makes sense to laypersons and ordinary concerned citizens as it connects well to their lived experiences and shows some solid solutions which the present narratives fail to provide.

Unfortunately, there is deep resistance to their ideas in the dominant academic scene either by ignorance, superficial understanding, or fear. The ideas of this school threaten to rip out the foundational basis of their well-established truths on which rest huge monuments of discourses. The present social sciences, permeated with western secularised theological ideas, influence thinking in almost all spheres – politics, law, bureaucracy, or media. The present path of India is on a dangerous course, and only if we reject some old narratives and take up a fresh approach can we correct the course. Fortunately, a ray of hope comes from the Comparative Science of Cultures school. Its time will surely come even if the wait is long.