In Part 1, we saw the basic political terminologies as the west understands them; the second part dealt with the trajectory of political India in the crucial two to three decades after independence, where Nehru played an important role. The third part discussed the thoughts of some Indian thinkers on indigenous political philosophies and how significantly they differ from Western paradigms. In the concluding part, we shall see that many contradictions arose from the superimposition of Western narratives on Indian thinking. This has led to the establishment of narratives quite antithetical to our culture. It is an uphill task, but we have to stop the wheels from turning first before reversing them.

Feminism: An Example

Nowhere is the disconnect and inappropriateness of Western philosophies to Indian issues starker than in feminism. Western feminism took the form of waves; the first and second waves achieved huge victories in terms of voting rights, political participation, equal pay, and the emancipation of women. In this demand for political, cultural, educational, and economic equality, feminism took various forms, like liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, and radical feminism. However, as Douglas Murray laments (The Madness of Crowds), the subsequent waves took an overcorrection route, leading to confrontation between one half of the population and the other half. The narratives today in feminism speak of “patriarchy”, “toxic masculinity”, and a general distrust of males and the institution of marriage.

These frameworks to define and deal with our gender issues do not realise that many familial, societal, cultural, marital, and economic factors, apart from individual consciousness, condition women’s issues. Indian feminists, taking Western theories into account, simply wash out the divine component of women (goddesses and Shakti traditions) in the Indian scheme of things. The explanation of goddess worship as a part of “patriarchal, abusive, and casteist practices masked as respect for women” simply undermines the entire civilizational heritage of the country.

India’s huge body of texts and traditions was always about dharma, harmony, and women working as equals in maintaining the family and society (a Sahayogini and a Sahakarmini). Indian ideas of Ardhanareshwar (man-Shiva and woman-Shakti representing two aspects of one person); women in bhakti traditions achieving gender equality and equal respect; women protesting patriarchy, kings, caste divides, and oppressive social norms; hundreds of inspiring women in history and literature (Lopamudra, Andal, Rani Lakshmibai, Savitri, Rudramadevi, Anusaya, and Rani Abbaka, to name a few) do not figure in discussions of Indian feminism. Jasbir Jain (Indigenous Roots of Feminism) says, “Draupadi deconstructed the notions of chastity and sati; Sita, of power and motherhood; Kali, of violence; Puru’s young wife, of sexuality; the bhakta women, of marriage and prayer.”

The utilitarian approach to gender equality in the West finally lost its understanding of the exclusive value that birthing, motherhood, and lactation bring to women. Margatham, in his recent brilliant essay (Man, Woman, and Machine), quotes Marilyn Frye (The Politics of Reality): “Hence, heterosexuality, marriage, and motherhood, which are the institutions which most obviously and individually maintain female accessibility to males, form the core triad of anti-Feminist ideology.” A biological function became a matter of rights, which is extremely confusing in the Indian context. This is not to suggest that everything is great about Indian women with regard to their educational, political, social, or economic rights and respect, but the issues and solutions are simply different.

The low respect for women voicing out choices in lower socioeconomic classes and the struggle of an urban woman to balance work and home lead to the belief that Hindu texts are extremely misogynistic. As is usual with many narratives, an association with traditions becomes the cause of social problems. Indian scholars like Sumedha Ojha and Neha Shrivastava say that Western feminism, when applied to Indian culture, leads to anti-Hinduism instead of anti-misogyny. The political and demographic hijacking of feminism by Western-funded NGO activism is primarily responsible for it.

The Sabarimala temple entry issue exemplified how narratives finally target Hindu traditions and customs, where traditional belief systems became a set of ideas related to gender discrimination—a direct influence of global feminism. As the later waves spill over to India, the themes of both father and mother as evils, the Mangalasutra and Sindoor as regressive symbols, and deeply patriarchal social systems, try to unsettle the Hindu family and the marriage system. Many Indian feminists have an acute sense of discomfort as postcolonial theories related to feminism mainly address the needs of Western academia.

Maitrayee Chaudhury (Feminism in India: The Tale and its Telling) says that what counts as “marginal” in relation to the West has often been central and foundational in the non-West. It was the second wave of feminism that found resonance with some contemporary Indian issues like land rights, political representation, divorce laws, custody, guardianship, sexual harassment at work, alcoholism, dowry, and rape. There are gender issues in India, some very severe, and they need correction, but through our own solutions.

Feminism is a modern expansionist creation of the West based on the ideas of “everything patriarchal, the disparate natures of people, and liberal secularism.” Transposing it to Indian culture finally hits our traditional society. Like multi-culturalism, India perhaps has better solutions for the world, which seek harmony, deify women, and ask women to be just women, true to their physical, mental, and intellectual natures.

Right, Left, and Indian Liberal

Most educated Indians get confused with the hard right-left divide of the West, as we are a mix of both. However, as Hyrum Lewis (The Myth of Left and Right) amply demonstrates, the notion of left and right is the biggest collective false narrative embedded in the minds of the American people. There is no “essence” in the terms left and right, but it is simply a social or “tribal” phenomenon where one is simply identifying with a group of people. The political positions of both the left-liberal Democrats and the right-conservative Republicans have flipped many times to radical opposites. The variations in position across time have been so drastic that it appears simply meaningless to assign any importance to the terms “left” and “right” as signifying some essential quality in the terms.

In the Indian context, the left-liberal Marxists have been even more imaginative and brutal. A hegemonic academic-political nexus appropriated the name “left” to themselves and clumped everybody else not agreeing with them as “right” that necessarily became bad. As Sita Ram Goel brilliantly demonstrates in his book, Perversion of India’s Political Parlance, the peculiar and characteristic political language, evolved mainly by the Communists and the so-called “Leftists”, has deeply misunderstood Indian traditions. It has also gone a step further in maligning Hindu traditions. It took over smoothly from the previous Islamic, missionary, and colonial attacks, starting in the late 1930s, to undermine Indian culture and heritage.

The labels “right-wing” or “left-liberal” given to political parties are more words of abuse, revealing ignorance of the longstanding and inherent traditions of India, as Hari Vadlamani (Towards Indic Liberalism) says. He explains that “Right-wing” conjures up images of extremely conservative US Republicans and xenophobic European right-wing parties. This is hardly describing traditional India.

“Left or liberal” in India, sticking to the image of atheism and state control, developed a brand of secularism and liberalism that meant appeasing the minorities and abusing the majorities by powerful academic-political nexuses. Marx genuinely believed that India was unfit for self-rule. Colonialism was bad, but for India it was good, said Marx. Unfortunately, post-Independent Marxist, Freudian, and postmodernist descriptions of a non-existent but apparently malignant upper-caste male Hindu tradition—hegemonic, reactionary, oppressive, and patriarchal—have gained sanction. These sinister ideas are far worse than, if not equal to, the colonial ideas of India.

Thousands of years of lived experience and culture have moulded a special Indic philosophy that we knowingly or unknowingly subscribe to. In the cultural sphere, Indians have been vociferous defenders of an overarching Indian culture imagined in antiquity and evolving over time. Despite their Hindu flavour, our achievements in the cultural sphere transcend religions as well as ethnicities, languages, and regions. It is common in India for Christian or Muslim artists to sing the highest devotional songs to Hindu devas and devis without any threat of loss of personal identity or faith.

Indian thinkers have never shied from abandoning the worst while preserving the best. Hindu thinking in the 19^th and 20^th centuries for reforming social ills or affirmative actions taken for social upliftment has been within its traditional folds without needing to challenge the priests or the “tyranny” of the scriptures. A right-wing label with an underlying text of dogmatic, non-changing, Abrahamic conservatism is wrong for us. Sati, widow rehabilitation, child marriages, social inequalities, and gender issues have always occupied the best minds, and reforms have always been a priority. The best conservative and liberal ideals evolved over centuries into a unique Indic thought, and the tragedy came with independence when we completely rejected our past.

Our traditions make us uniquely non-dogmatic, non-predatory, evolving, and self-reforming without claims of exclusivity. Atheists have never suffered persecution for their beliefs. The hallmark of Indic traditions has been an “indifference to differences”, in the words of SN Balagangadhara, and this is perhaps the solution to most social problems in a multicultural world.

Indian thinkers, along with a plethora of texts, extensively dealt with political administration principles, both “conservative” and “liberal” (if we can truly understand their actual meanings) in their framework. Western themes force us to adopt positions that we inherently do not understand. Indic traditions are liberal by nature, and it is a fact of history that the scriptures never imprisoned us in strict social practices. The belief in the Vedas may be important, but one can pursue enlightenment without believing in either the Vedas or any of the gods. Atheism, which makes sense only in a theistic “religious” world, can be a route to enlightenment in traditional India too.

The Problem of Untouchability

The colonial-missionary narratives before independence, the Marxist-influenced academia post-independence, Dr. Ambedkar in his influential writings, the contemporary western Indologists, and all sundry NGOs across the world have remarkably solidified the idea that Hinduism equals the caste system, which equals untouchability. The only prism through which to study and understand India is its caste system and its problem of inequality. The solution for untouchability is “annihilation” of the caste system, and this, in turn, needs annihilation of Hinduism. The solution thus lay in conversion from the “false” religion of Hinduism into the “true” religion — Christianity, Buddhism, Marxism, atheism — anything but staying as a Hindu.

Spectacular has been the failure of Indian social and political sciences to study the so-called caste systems and untouchability and determine how they correlate with the indigenous varna- jati systems. A blind political acceptance of the colonial narratives has led to further strengthening of the caste system with even more rigid notions of caste in society, reservations without trying to assess their effectiveness, and a race for people to call themselves “backward” to avail benefits. For the world, the only view of India is that of Dalit exploitation, despite a lack of evidence to substantiate the claims, as Sufiya Pathan, Dunkin Jalki, and Nihal Sashittal show.

Untouchability had complex roots, and some of the practices arising from it were genuinely problematic and undeniable. Not only the Brahmins and the priestly community, but the entire society was responsible for some of the detestable practices. Many Indian reformers from within the fold of Hinduism wrote and fought against some of these social practices, like Sri Aurobindo, Savarkar, and Anand Coomaraswamy, besides, of course, figures like Dr. Ambedkar and Gandhiji.

However, there were many aspects to “untouchability” that had nothing to do with the understanding developed in post-independent India. According to some scholars, the true assessment of a political decision is based on its consequences rather than its intentions. In that respect, the whole exercise of a politically ossified caste system has failed. It has not only caused great disharmony, but the anger has only increased in society despite some extraordinary measures for the past seventy years.

Ananda Coomaraswamy said, “The feeling of ritual contamination that is felt by those whose lives are disciplined and reserved, when brought into contact with those whose way of life and diet are much more promiscuous, is perfectly natural; it is not, like your colour prejudice, a denial of common humanity… But this does not mean that the lower castes, or even the outcast, are in any way deprived of a religion. In the first place, he has cults of his own, intimately connected with his own métier, and these are by no means extraneous to, but only a phase of, Hinduism as a whole; distinctions of cult in India are not a matter of “other gods,” but of convenience; the way of works and of devotion is open to all, and actually not a few of India’s greatest saints have been of shudra or even chandala birth.

Jakob De Roover shows how the colonials divided society neatly into “Caste Hindus” and “Depressed Classes”. The Government of India Scheduled Castes Order of 1936 listed groups for every province of British India that would, from then on, count as Scheduled Castes. The Committee took two “generally accepted tests of untouchability” from the previous 1911 Census Superintendents. The untouchables were “those who are denied access to the interior of ordinary Hindu temples” and “those who cause pollution (a) by touch, (b) within a certain distance”.

This was confused, filled with circular logic, and begged questions right at the beginning. Many of the “exterior” castes considered polluting by “interior Hindus” also had strong caste organisations and included numerous individuals of substance and education. Many jatis in both the “interior” and “exterior” groups practised many forms of untouchability internally amongst themselves too. Though the British were convinced that there must be a distinct class of untouchable castes, they faced major obstacles in identifying this class and saying who was in or out.

Unfortunately, the caste legislation of contemporary India enforces a colonial decree that the Indian population needs division along certain lines. The Constitution gives equal rights to all citizens and prohibits discrimination. Yet, special provisions appear to discriminate (positive discrimination) precisely on such grounds. In 1950, the Constitution passed a Scheduled Castes Order to include a set of groups for special benefits and provisions. Jobs in the public sector, lowering of qualifying marks in competitive exams, promotions in jobs, and protection by laws against any form of speech, deed, writing, or action under the PoA (Prevention of Atrocities) Act are forms of positive discrimination. The difficult question is: on what empirical grounds has the government transformed more than one thousand two hundred communities and 65 million people with diverse practices into a single category of Scheduled Castes?

The decisive factors today are not social or economic backwardness, age, income, or disability but a single characteristic of a previous “untouchability” status. The Constituent Assembly never clearly defined untouchability, despite its decisive role in formulating caste legislation. Untouchability came to refer to a variegated series of practices: banning entry into temples; refusing to take water or food from some groups; providing separate cups for different groups; taking a bath after physical contact; cleaning the house after some member of a group entered the house. It could also indicate the fact that a group lived in separate quarters at the borders of a village.

The list was never exhaustive, and there were adding of other practices as and when required.  “Untouchability” covered a set of actions or practices, but it remained unclear which common trait those practices shared. But, when considered from other points of view (like a person doing pooja, cooking, or menstruating refusing to touch family members; or as we saw recently, avoiding physical contact during a pandemic), an ex-untouchability status (untouchability is illegal today) as the sole criteria for defining the scheduled caste community is problematic.

Basically, the claim is that if one human being refrains from touching or approaching another human being, this becomes caste-based untouchability when the former belongs to the Caste Hindus and the latter belongs to the Untouchable Castes. And how can one recognise these Untouchable Castes? Well, they are the ones that are subject to caste-based untouchability. This route leads us into a vicious circle.

This evolved into a common but vague indication of “an internal feeling of odium”, expressed in a variety of practices in different parts of India. Ambedkar classified all practices as untouchability, sharing the common characteristic of being outward registers of the same inward feeling of defilement, odium, aversion, and contempt. Such feelings exist among all kinds of people towards all kinds of other people. How does one make sense of such ideas?

Jakob de Roover says that Ambedkar’s comments on “ascertaining the untouchables” reflected an entire story about Hinduism and the caste system. Thus, “untouchability” would be present wherever there were Hindus; there were always “Touchable” and “Untouchable” Hindus all over India; the question simply was how to count the Untouchables. But there were no uniform tests of untouchability since all the practices were expressions of the same odium and contempt. All of this shows how obscure the notion of untouchability was.

Ironically, the division of the Hindus into Touchables and Untouchables was never an age-old social division sanctioned by the Hindu religion, contrary to the belief of both Gandhi and Ambedkar. Simon Charsley has shown that the British administration in the early twentieth century created the notions of “the Untouchables” and untouchability. Risley, Commissioner for the 1901 Census in India, sent to every Census Commissioner, as a part of his standard scheme, four Sanskrit-named “Shudra” categories, of which the last was “Asprishya Shudra”, explained as “castes whose touch is so impure as to pollute even Ganges water”.

This system failed, and the category of “not-to-be-touched Shudra” did not prove to be useful. As some administrators admitted, the caste census merely mirrored the classificatory scheme they had decided to use and not the structure of the society that was its object. They could neither provide a coherent hierarchical classification of castes nor identify the Untouchables or “exterior” castes in any consistent way.

Nevertheless, the post-independent Government of India continued to rely upon these results to decide which groups should be Scheduled Castes. There appear to be no intelligible differences that distinguish all the people grouped together as SCs from others excluded from that group. Indeed, the class of Scheduled Castes exists, but only in the Indian legal and political system. There has never been a serious study of what untouchability actually implies in not only Indian culture but many other cultures across the world. The political desperation for votes has created a wall that prevents questioning two very important aspects of the caste story: how can a hard-to-define “ex-untouchability” status be the sole criteria for defining the scheduled castes or Dalits of India? And how can the story of Dalit exploitation persist across continents and become a big weapon to demonise India and Hindus despite the lack of evidence for the same?

The Background Ideas of Culture and Intelligibility

Dr. Balagangadhara says that background lends intelligibility, depth, and poignancy to any formulation of an idea. In one of his essays (Seven Problems in Translations), he explains that a statement like “Man is born free and yet everywhere he is in chains” has a Christian origin, but the poignancy of the statement, when secularised, has relevance only in a Christian-dominated society. In Indian culture, the statement is false and trivial. In the karmic concept, man is born chained to his past karma, and all his life he attempts to free the chains.

The Upanishad statements like Tat Tvam Asi (That You Are), Aham Brahmasmi (I am Brahman), Sarvam Brahman, Jagat Mitya (All is Brahman, the cosmos is Maya), and Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma (All of this is Brahman) laid the basis of our political, social, economic, literary, and spiritual lives. It is the underlying basis for all forms of feminism, environmentalism, humanitarianism, and all modern movements. These profound statements in Indian contexts have a deep and poignant meaning to us, but for the west, they are trivial and do not make sense, says Balagangadhara. These ideas lack intelligibility, let alone truth, to someone who does not accept the set of other beliefs required to see their truth, simplicity, or beauty.

What would we make of an Indian claiming that this principle discovered by sages some three thousand years ago is valuable and requires a secular universal foundation? We would perhaps call such a person a Hindu guru, but we would hardly consider him a political philosopher, says Balagangadhara. However, thinkers who use secularised Christian theology become “political theorists.”

When the traditions of one culture interpret the traditions of another culture, the productivity and problem-solving capacity of the interpreted culture disappear along with their coherence. This is exactly what happened in post-independent India when we looked to Western traditions to solve our problems.

It would be a mistake to abuse the West for this. Their problems needed their own solutions in the form of secularised Christian theology. They required other clusters of ideas present in Western society to remain coherent and productive in the theorising of political problems. The conceptual language that dominates liberal political theory consists of these ideas. When liberal principles of secularism like “the separation of politics and religion” migrate to other cultures, their conditions of intelligibility do not travel with them. This causes fundamental obstacles to the interpretation and elaboration of such principles, emphasise Balagangadhara and his group.

Proof of The Pudding

There are two narratives. One is a continuation of the colonial narrative, which says that before the colonists came, India was an unmitigated disaster. The superstitious religion of Hinduism was the cause of the evil caste system, which in turn was synonymous with exploitation, deprivation, and poverty. It was a divided nation between warring kings. Religion, caste, sect, and language similarly divided the people without any unity as a proper nation. The primitive and unscientific India had to seek solutions from the West to improve itself. The colonials also gave India much-needed unity. Post-independent academia propagated a linear version of history: past equals primitive equals India; future equals advanced equals West. All solutions for India had to come from the West.

The other narrative places traditional India with its diversity, a decentralised polity, enlightened monarchy as a standard, free citizens, and absence of extreme cruelties (crusades, jihads, inquisitions, witch hunts, colonisation, the genocide of the American Indians, Nazism, and transforming a continent and culture into slaves) associated with the West. Which could be true?

The most clinching evidence comes from Angus Madison’s research into World economics from the beginning of the millennium, which shows that India, along with China, were the largest economies of the world for the entire thousand years of the first millennium. In 1750, India and China contributed 75% of the world’s GDP. Till the beginning of the 18th century, India was still contributing about 25–30 percent of the world’s GDP, more than eight times that of the United Kingdom. In 1600, Britain was producing 1.8% of the world’s GDP when the East India Company was set up. When Britain left India in 1947 after 200 years of rule, Britain was contributing 10%, and India reduced its contribution to a pathetic 1.8%. Colonial rule was a story of sheer loot and plunder.

We had the highest philosophical insights into both the nature of reality and knowledge (ontology and epistemology). The Western philosophical traditions still struggle with explaining the world around us in their paradigms. Yet, instead of studying our philosophies with due care and diligence, we pushed them into the realms of religion, and secularism prevented general access to them.

India has a great intellectual heritage, and a huge corpus of texts (the broad five groups of Vedas, Upavedas, Vedangas, Puranas, and Darshanas) covering all fields of human activity is a testimony to the capacity of Indians to create knowledge by reflecting on their own experiences without any foreign influences. Michel Danino quotes David Pingree as saying that India has at least 30 million surviving ancient manuscripts in Indian libraries, repositories, and private collections. They deal with every topic under the sun: philosophies, grammar, language, debate, poetics, aesthetics, mythology, ethics, literature of all genres from poetry to historical tradition, arts, architecture, astrology, chemistry, botany, zoology, geology, governance, administration, water management, polity, martial arts, games, brainteasers, omens, ghosts, accounting, and much more.

We developed the most perfect language in the world, Sanskrit. India had enormous contributions in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, logic, physics, metallurgy, shipbuilding, bricks, agricultural technology, dyes and pigments, civil engineering and town planning, sanitation, medical and biological sciences, and vaccination, leading to many early Europeans remarking that it was the West that needed to learn from the East. Voltaire thought that everything good in the arts and sciences originated in India. He even wrote that India predated Chinese civilization and that Christianity derived its philosophy and practices from the religion of India.

Dharampal (The Beautiful Tree: Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century) meticulously destroys the discourse that we were primitive before the colonials came. He reconstructs from the archives what the British discovered and thought about Indian society. Contrary to standard teaching, Indian society was functioning well and extremely competent in the arts and sciences of its day when the British started their rule. Its interactive grasp over its immediate natural environment was undisputed; in fact, it demanded praise. Studied neglect, contempt, and the economic breakdown uprooted and eliminated indigenous sciences and technologies not only from society but from Indian memory itself, says Dharampal.

Dharampal also shows that the “Brahmanical denial of education” was a false story. In a well-structured school and higher education programme covering all villages, the number of Sudras was equal to or greater than the other “forward” castes, as documented by the British themselves. The huge corpus of literature catering to the arts and sciences was never for the exclusive study of the Brahmins. All varnas and jatis had access to them. Regarding the Brahmanical hold over the Vedas, it was entirely a matter of duties and “adhikara” to maintain the purity of transmission, which lost to the narratives of “rights and “exploitation” initiated by the colonials and continued vigorously by the Indologists of all hues.

An inferior, poor, and barbaric individual invades and robs a superior, rich, and cultured person according to all common sense. As for individuals, the same is true for countries. All and sundry came to India to become rich; India produced its material and spiritual riches through its own efforts; India went to alien countries purely for trade and philosophical interactions and never to invade physically, rule people, or take slaves. And yet, Indian culture and ways of organising life were primitive before the colonisers came. Which story can one believe? Strangely, collectively, we Indians believe the colonial story.

Conclusions: How Can We Best Describe Ourselves?

The search in Western traditions was always present in the ideal of maximal individual liberty under the umbrella of minimal state interference and maximal state security. Seeking harmony is the goal as ideas across different philosophies combine to fill lacunae and create “isms” of the most bewildering variety. Colonial consciousness allowed narratives of Western political philosophies to permeate Indian thinking, even though many of the ideas did not simply make sense. A single philosophy as a solution to all economic and human issues without considering the complexity of human behaviour, societies, economies, traditions, religions, law, and so on, is futile.

Indian traditions had evolved under an enlightened monarchy and free citizens ages ago. The bedrock of Indian polity was the three quartets, as Sri Aurobindo explained in his essays: the four varnas, the four ashramas, and the four purusharthas. Untouchability and other detestable social practices were weeds, typical of any society or culture across the world. These developed as an excrescence that needed removal in the best possible manner but does not mandate dismantling the whole structure of Sanatana dharma by becoming a Christian, Muslim, atheist, or anything else except staying as a Sanatani (which includes the traditions of Hinduism as we know of, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, amongst many others).

Important treatises, texts, and wisdom of ancient and mediaeval India focused on qualities and duties at all levels, from the king to the ordinary citizen, unlike Western rights-based traditions. The king’s rule was to ensure peace, prosperity, and happiness for his people. The kinds of wars fought in Europe in mediaeval times were perhaps unusual in the Indian context. Indian wars, by principle, mostly left the agricultural lands and the temples intact. A bond linking rulers and people across kingdoms allowed free movement for pilgrimages and access to knowledge. Shankaracharya moved across various kingdoms to set up the four mathas in four corners of the country. Hence, alternatives to democracy thrived without affecting trade, agriculture, literature, or the sciences across the country.

Indian civilization, at least five thousand years old, apart from a high quotient of personal happiness, had a thriving economy with highly evolved arts, literature, education, sciences, spirituality, architecture, and so on. Our indigenous systems had some worth, as their outcomes certainly attracted thousands from Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. And then came the Western political philosophies, which persistently ill-fit our experiences.

Sanatana thought may indeed have the best solutions for not only India’s pluralism but for the multicultural world of today, which is seeing increasing strife. Modern social sciences, with a great colonial hangover, have a strong antipathy for the traditional systems of India. This antipathy and the failure to look at Indian traditions have been dominant narratives in academia, the media, and politics. The intelligentsia emanating from the schools and universities has thoroughly internalised most of the narratives, and there is extreme resistance to even looking at any counter-narrative.

Will our social sciences come up with political theories that can perhaps explain the immense success and survival of the great Indian civilization? Not only that, they can lay the foundation for a better future. Traditions are not fossilised items, and they have immense flexibility to offer solutions for any period, including the period of ‘modernity’. We can always look at the past to handle the future better, and there is no better place than India to begin this, as Sri Aurobindo always insisted.

SELECTED REFERENCES AND FURTHER READINGS

1. The Myth of Left and Right: How the political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America (2023) by Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis
2. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray
3. Indigenous Roots of Feminism: Culture, Subjectivity and Agency by Jasbir Jain
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332446532_Feminism_in_India_The_Tale_and_its_Telling Feminism in India: The Tale and its Telling (2019) by Maitrayee Chaudhuri
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3_9rafuFms&t=992s A discussion on Indian Feminism by Sumedha Ojha, Sahana Singh, Neha Shrivastava and others
6. Women and Sabarimala: The Science behind Restrictions by Sinu Joseph
7. https://www.indiafacts.org.in/man-woman-and-machine-part-i/ Man, Woman, and Machine by Margatham
8. https://www.indiafacts.org.in/man-woman-and-machine-part-2/ Man, Woman, and Machine by Margatham
9. The Sabarimala Confusion: Menstruation Across Cultures: A Historical Perspective by Nithin Sridhar
10. Perversion of India’s political parlance by Sita Ram Goel
11. https://swarajyamag.com/books/away-from-the-left-and-right-towards-indic-liberalism Away From The “Left” And “Right”: Towards Indic Liberalism by Hari Vadlamani
12. https://www.academia.edu/19646482/Rethinking_Inter_religious_Dialogues Rethinking Inter-religious Dialogues by S.N. Balagangadhara
13. Seven Problems in Translations by S.N. Balagangadhara in Cultures Differ Differently
14. How to speak for the Indian traditions by S.N. Balagangadhara in Cultures Differ Differently: Selected Essays of S.N. Balagangadhara. Edited by Jakob De Roover and Sarika Rao
15. https://www.academia.edu/36806822/Scheduled_Castes_vs._Caste_Hindus_About_a_Colonial_Distinction_and_Its_Legal_Impact Scheduled Castes vs. Caste Hindus: About a Colonial Distinction and Its Legal Impact by Jakob de Roover
16. https://www.academia.edu/38294198/Violence_Against_SCs_How_Absence_of_Reliable_Data_Leads_to_Disaster “Violence Against SCs: How Absence of Reliable Data Leads to Disaster,” (2018), Sufiya Pathan
17. “The enigma of caste atrocities: Do scheduled castes and scheduled tribes face excessive violence in India?” (2022), Nihar Sashittal, Oñati Socio-Legal Series, https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1332
18. The World Economy (Volumes 1 and 2 combined) by Angus Maddison
19. An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India by Shashi Tharoor
20. https://pragyata.com/gainsaying-ancient-indian-science-part-1/ Gainsaying Ancient Indian Science in two parts by Michel Danino
21. https://pragyata.com/integrating-indias-heritage-in-indian-education-part-1/ Integrating India’s Heritage in Indian Education in two parts by Michel Danino
22. https://indiafacts.org/the-metrology-behind-harappan-town-planning-1/ The Metrology behind Harappan Town-Planning in two parts by Michel Danino
23. Indian Culture and India’s Future by Michel Danino (2011)
24. If I had a way with our educational systems, I would include Dharampal’s writings as an essential part of our curriculum from kindergarten to post-graduate level. Unfortunately, very few have even heard about him. India: Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century and The Beautiful Tree are his wonderful works amongst his huge corpus of work. Essential Writings is a fantastic collection of his main writings edited by Gita Dharampal.