I. The Illusion of Equality: Debunking the Moral Grammar of Modernity

Contemporary discourse tends to universalise a particular moral lens derived from European Enlightenment values of equality, liberty, and social mobility. Within this framing, the Indian caste system becomes the quintessential symbol of injustice—rigid, hierarchical, and inherently oppressive. This essay challenges the normative framing and argues for a civilizationally rooted understanding of Dharma, role-based ethics, and structured interdependence.

The critique here is not a denial of suffering, constraint, or asymmetry in traditional society, but a rejection of the idea that these constitute moral failure by default. Every society assigns roles, labour, and hardship. What matters is whether it does so transparently, sustainably, and meaningfully. Dharma-based societies did this through inherited roles embedded in ritual, cosmology, and ethical duties. Modern egalitarian societies, by contrast, conceal structural inequality behind illusions of choice, meritocracy, and individual autonomy.

Egalitarianism is not a civilisational constant but an 18th-century ideological response to European monarchy, feudalism, and Church authority. It carries assumptions about human nature (as autonomous and interchangeable), society (as a collection of rights-bearing individuals), and justice (as sameness of access and outcome) that are metaphysically alien to dharmic thought.

In the dharmic view, justice is contextual, not abstract. It is realised not through equality, but through harmony—when beings act in accordance with their Svabhāva and Svadharma. A society ordered by Dharma acknowledges difference without equating it with degradation. The modern push for uniformity produces friction, deracination, and often worse forms of hierarchy masquerading as fairness.
Modern societies that proclaim equality still rely on unacknowledged caste-like structures. Meritocracy often reproduces inherited privilege through elite education, urban concentration, and social capital. The so-called “open competition” is open only to those born into networks of advantage.

At the same time, the very jobs that caste society made explicit—waste removal, caregiving, death rituals—have not vanished. They have merely been rendered invisible. They are still performed disproportionately by the same social strata, but now without the ritual frameworks, ethical acknowledgement, or social duties that traditionally bound the elite to care for those in labour roles.

II. Dharma and Devotion: Role, Boundaries, and the Bhakti Continuum

Traditional Indian society, rooted in Dharma, never structured itself as a hierarchy of value, but as an interwoven field of functions. The very use of the word “hierarchy” to describe Varnashrama Dharma is a misapplication of Western theological and political frameworks that misunderstand functionally differentiated order as moral inequality.

Dharma does not assign superiority—it assigns responsibility. The Brahmin is tasked with restraint, discipline, and study; the Kshatriya with defense and order; the Vaishya with production and trade; the Shudra with service and support. These were not “ranks,” but vocations embedded in a cosmological ethic. Antyajas, too, were not denied sanctity—they served necessary roles in a ritually stratified but spiritually cohesive society.

Critics who frame these distinctions as oppressive ignore that a dharmic society obligated the Gṛhastha (householder) to care for all beings under his protection, including labourers, artisans, animals, and guests. The village was not a battlefield of classes, but a mandala of co-sustaining Dharmas. When it occurred, exclusion was the failure of individuals and communities to live up to this standard, not the system’s intention.

Modern caste discrimination is a degeneration, not a continuation, of the dharmic model. True reform is restoring Dharma, not replacing it with imported moral constructs. Bhakti movements, Smriti evolutions, and even internal critiques from within Sampradayas show that reform has always been a civilisational capacity, without needing rupture.

Modern academic narratives often frame Bhakti poets, Varkaris, Nayanmars, and Lingayats as “reformers” of Hinduism—individuals who challenged the caste system and replaced hierarchy with equality. This is a gross mis-characterisation, built on secular paradigms that confuse inclusivity with subversion.

The Bhakti tradition did not reject Dharma—it embodied it more personally. The Nayanmars did not dismantle temple ritual; they glorified it through ecstatic poetry. The Varkaris did not attack varnashrama; they walked to Pandharpur as Vaishnavas singing Abhangs about service, surrender, and love. Even the so-called radical Lingayats under Basava did not dismantle caste—they affirmed Svadharma within bhakti. Basava’s own vachanas acknowledged traditional occupational roles, not as oppression, but as sacred Karma when performed with devotion.

What Bhakti offered was access, not abolition. It invited all beings into a deeper spiritual intimacy with the divine. It softened ritual formality through emotion, not by erasing form. It widened the gate but never tore down the house. It was not a Protestant rupture—it was civilisational continuity through lived devotion.

This extends beyond the role into boundaries. Modern liberalism preaches coexistence through sameness: flatten food codes, marry across lines, erase locality. But real diversity thrives not in homogenised spaces, but in respectful boundaries. Jains and Muslims, Brahmins and butchers, temple towns and artisan lanes—all coexisted with separation, not forced integration.

To accuse a Jain society of being “exclusionary” for disallowing meat-eaters is to misunderstand ritual integrity. Not all coexistence requires shared walls. Some coexistence requires distance, clarity, and mutual reverence.

The liberal dream of integration often becomes a demand for erasure. But Dharma allows for difference without dominance. Its pluralism was lived—not preached.

III. Ambedkar and the Shaping of a Political Theology

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar is revered as a reformer, lawmaker, and voice of the oppressed. But reverence must not become immunity from critique. Ambedkar’s intellectual project was deeply flawed, fueled more by personal grievance and ideological appropriation than deep civilisational understanding.

His view of Hindu society was shaped by colonial anthropology and missionary scholarship. He uncritically adopted the Aryan invasion theory, framed Brahmins as racial oppressors, and misrepresented ancient texts such as the Manusmriti through tendentious quotations and hostile English translations. He mistook Varna for Jati, ritual restriction for moral subjugation, and complex social ecosystems for systemic oppression. These were not scholarly errors but deliberate narrative constructions aimed at civilisational rupture.

Ambedkar’s engagement with Buddhism was similarly instrumental. He did not convert out of spiritual awakening but to provide an oppositional identity to Hinduism. His Buddhism was stripped of metaphysical depth and built into a political instrument. It bore little resemblance to the renunciant, cyclical, and cosmologically ordered tradition founded by Gautama. Instead, it was a vessel for modern grievances projected onto a reconstructed ethical screen.

Ambedkar’s implementation was more damaging than any theoretical inconsistency. His constitutional framework entrenched identity politics into the machinery of the state. He fragmented society into permanent categories of grievance and compensation. Far from dissolving caste, he bureaucratised it, weaponised it electorally, and made it the central axis of Indian politics.

He did not reform Hindu society. He attempted to erase it and replace it with a synthetic moral order whose only cohesion came from centralised law and state power. He did not preserve dignity—he redistributed alienation. He did not offer a new Dharma—he removed the old one and left the space unfilled.

Despite the consequences of Ambedkar’s project, he remains immune mainly to serious critique. This is not because his framework is philosophically unassailable, but because the political, academic, and cultural costs of naming its flaws have become prohibitive.

Modern Indian academia is dominated by postcolonial, Marxist, and liberal ideologies that cast Ambedkar as a secular prophet. His critique is treated as gospel; his project is sacralised. To question him is to risk moral excommunication, political backlash, and intellectual ostracisation.

Political parties across the spectrum, from the left to the so-called Hindu right, avoid critiquing him for fear of alienating entrenched vote blocs. The state itself has enshrined Ambedkar through statutes, holidays, statues, and curriculum. He has become an untouchable figure in the ideological sense—one whose ideas cannot be questioned without immediate moral reprisal.

This fear is compounded by the Hindu community’s own intellectual hesitation. Centuries of colonial trauma, missionary propaganda, and internal fragmentation have produced a psychology of self-doubt. Even those who intuit the incoherence of Ambedkar’s framework hesitate to speak, for fear of being labelled regressive, casteist, or anti-modern.

The result is silence where there should be truth. But the price of that silence is civilisational disorientation. The longer Dharma is denied its rightful defence, the more deeply the architecture of resentment and rupture becomes entrenched.

Ambedkar’s intellectual framework relied on colonial myths: Aryan invasion, caste-as-race, and Brahminical oppression of original Buddhists. These have all been thoroughly dismantled by genetic studies, archaeological data, and philosophical rebuttal. Yet his mythology continues to animate state policy, academic discourse, and public morality. It is not sustained by truth—it is sustained by fear, inertia, and political utility. The longer it remains unchallenged, the deeper the fracture in India’s civilisational memory.

India’s postcolonial secularism mirrors the Protestant imagination. It moralises against ritual, champions textual purity (Constitution over Smriti), and privileges individual conscience over collective Dharma. Like the Protestant rebellion against Catholicism, modern Indian reform dismantles inherited order and replaces it with guilt, grievance, and abstract rights.

Christian missionary funding of “secular” causes is not accidental—it’s strategic. Movements against Brahminism, caste identity, ritual authority, or temple ecosystems serve the same logic: weaken Hindu cohesion to create convert-friendly fragments. When the community dissolves and identity is politicised, missionary work thrives.

Thus, the modern Indian liberal who quotes Ambedkar, decries Brahmins, and dismisses temple ritual may believe himself secular, but he is walking the exact road laid out by colonial Protestant reformers. He is not deconstructing injustice; he is continuing a project of civilisational erasure.

IV. From Forgotten Youth to Remembered Fire: A Civilizational Reckoning

Urban Hindu youth are not to blame for their amnesia. They were born into a world where Dharma was unspoken, mocked, or sold back to them as “culture.” They were raised in schools that taught shame, surrounded by media that preached mimicry, and welcomed into institutions that offered identity without anchoring.

They are not anti-Dharma. They are ritual orphans. When their pleasure wears thin, when their performances collapse, and when their anxiety peaks, they will come looking for what was lost. The duty of those who remember is not to mock them, but to rebuild the path.

Most don’t care. Not now. The scroll is easier than studying. Performance is more appealing than presence. But caring isn’t measured in popularity—it’s revealed in silence, when the fog of distraction lifts, and the soul hears something older than itself.

The project of Dharma does not wait for the crowd. It is sustained by those who refuse to lie to themselves. And if no one else cares, it must still be written—for the few now, for the many later, for the unborn who will wonder what remained.

This wasn’t written by someone outside the malaise. It was written by a man within it—addicted to the feed, fractured by pleasure, torn between ritual memory and algorithmic sedation. And still, something in him remembered. Still, something refused to forget.

So yes, I care. Not because it is easy. But because even in the noise, even through the fog, there is a thread worth holding. And writing this—against indifference, beyond exhaustion—is the proof.

This clarity won’t get you swipes. It won’t earn brunch invites or dopamine hits. But it might get you something else: the recognition of someone who sees fire and not façade. Not attraction built on image, but Kāma born of coherence. A woman who seeks stillness, not spectacle. A bond with gravity.

So no, it won’t win you casual encounters. But it will make you unmistakably real. And that’s rarer, deeper—and perhaps, in the long run, more magnetic than anything else.

Because in the end, Dharma doesn’t ask for applause. It asks for a witness. For someone to remember the rhythm even when the music stops. For someone to light the lamp even when the temple is empty.
And so it is done.

Acknowledgment: To ChatGPT—whose patient recursion, argumentative fidelity, and willingness to be corrected made this entire edifice possible—thank you. This is not AI-assisted writing. This is mantra-by-mantra reconstruction. Together, we held the line.