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Jauhar & Rakhi: The art of misreading history – Abhinav Kumar

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Jauhar

Before labelling a tradition as good or bad, can we first understand what it truly meant? – Abhinav Kumar

There are debates which catch your attention, and you want to respond, but the argument is not worth responding to. But then, in the age of social media, if you don’t counter that statement, it becomes a tool for shaping the narrative. In the last two weeks, there have been two statements by two so-called influencers. Both are on different issues, but the method is the same, and the target is also the same, i.e. Hindu traditions.

The first debate is about an old comment by Swara Bhasker that was presented at a new venue. She raised questions about the Jauhar sequence in the movie Padmaavat and said, “If I were a rape survivor, what is this film telling me? It would make me feel like a coward for not killing myself to save my honour.” On the sequence involving a pregnant woman in the Jauhar scene, she said that “the film seemed to suggest that a fetus, if female, does not deserve to be born because she might one day be raped by a Muslim ruler.”

The second debate is about a viral clip made for engagement farming by an influencer on Raksha Bandhan, where she calls the festival funny and then calls it patriarchal, saying that a sister ties a Rakhi and asks for protection, but protection from whom?

Both statements are not of the same kind, but they follow the same pattern. Both have a similar target and modus operandi: first, take an example of a tradition, separate it from its historical context, paraphrase it in simplistic language, and then criticise and demonise that translation as if it were the fact rather than an interpretation.

Historians call the deliberate misrepresentation of the past through present-day assumptions “presentism.” David Hackett Fischer referred to a similar error as the “nunc pro tunc” fallacy- imposing the present on the past.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, however, presentism is primarily an ontological doctrine: it is the view that only the present exists, absolutely and unrestrictedly. The view is the subject of extensive discussion in the literature on time and change, with much of it focused on the problems that presentism allegedly faces.

Jauhar: The question asked vs. what it was made out to be

About Jauhar first we need to understand why it was taken up by women of the Rajput rulers. Not that anyone wants to willingly go to self-immolate in a pyre of fire. The women of that time knew something about the raiders that, if they were alive, what they could be subjected to from sexual exploitation to slavery for lifetime. The Rajput women who chose Jauhar may have understood, from the earlier invasions of Muhammad bin Qasim, Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad Ghori, what defeat could mean for women-enslavement, sexual exploitation, captivity and being treated as spoils of war, with captives entering the slave markets of the Islamic world.

According to historian K.S. Lal’s Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, the Arab conquest of Sindh was accompanied by large-scale enslavement of women and children. Lal writes that after the fall of Debal, the male population above the age of seventeen was put to the sword, while women and children were taken captive. He further records that 700 women who had taken refuge in the temple were captured, with a portion of the female captives being sent to Hajjaj as part of the conquerors’ share of the spoils, while the rest were distributed among the soldiers. After the capture of Rawar, Lal records that thousands of men were massacred and that women, children and dependants were taken prisoner; he gives the number of captives as around 60,000, including women of royal families who were sent onward as slaves. Lal also describes instructions attributed to Hajjaj ordering Muhammad bin Qasim to give no quarter to the conquered population and to take women and children as captives. In the final stages of the conquest, he records that 20,000 prisoners from prominent families were set aside as the ruler’s share, while the remainder were distributed among the soldiers. Lal therefore concludes that “a few lakh women were enslaved” during the Arab invasion of Sindh.

Men would perform Saka, a final, suicidal charge. This history is not a figment of one side’s imagination. Muslim historians themselves recorded it during the Sultanate and Mughal eras. The book The Campaigns of Alauddin Khilji, translated with notes by Muhammad Habib, states that “a more horrid act of tyranny was committed by Nusrat Khan, the Wazir of Khilji and the author of many acts of violence in the city. In revenge for his brother’s death, he dishonoured and disgraced the wives of those who had struck his brother with their axes; he gave them to sweepers to be used as prostitutes and ordered their suckling children to be broken to pieces on their heads. His actions filled people with horror and dismay. A shiver went through the hearts of men.”

Even Akbar’s own records following the fall of Chittor in 1568 document the enslavement and massacre of the surviving women and children. In other words, the reason for lighting the pyre was not imaginary; the fear was real.

Now, think of Swara Bhasker’s argument. She seeks a different kind of “objective” or, rather, an object to degrade the tradition of that time and its circumstances. So she picks up rape survivors and creates an alternate theory, replacing the Rajput women with them. This allows the audience to be asked whether the right to live ceases to exist after rape. The straightforward part of this argument that a survivor has every right to live is absolutely correct, and there can be no ifs or buts about it. But the problem is that Jauhar was not the answer to that question.

The women who performed Jauhar were not “rape survivors.” They were rejecting the future that awaited them after defeat, namely, becoming sex slaves, used as sexual and domestic “resources” within the hierarchical order of the Sultanate, and seeing their children enslaved and reduced to spoils of war, to be sold in slave markets for a few tankas.

Equating the two is not an act of empathy; it is a failure of translation.

Raksha Bandhan

Rakhi: When did the thread become a ‘protection contract’?

Now lets move on to Raksha Bandhan. The argument regarding Raksha Bandhan is often simplified as follows: a sister ties a thread around her brother’s wrist and the brother pledges protection, therefore, the festival implies that women are weak and men are their protectors. Hence, the tradition is patriarchal.

However, this line of reasoning overlooks the entire significance associated with the raksha-sutra.

When a sister ties a Rakhi on her brother, she is not asking him for “protection”; rather, she is invoking protection FOR him.

The Rakhi tradition was not limited to the contemporary sibling dynamic; references to pratisara and kautuka appear in early Vedic and Grihya texts.

In the Atharvaveda Parishishta, a priest ties a protective thread around the king on Shravan Purnima. In the Bhavishya Purana, Shachi ties a Raksha Bandhan on Indra before a battle—meaning the protection is bestowed upon the wearer of the thread, rather than the act serving to prove the superiority of the person tying it.

Consider a historical example that upends this entire argument: during the anti-partition movement in Bengal in 1905, Rabindranath Tagore used the Rakhi as a symbol of Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, urging people to tie the thread across communal lines. A symbol that once served as an instrument of communal unity has today been reduced to a “signifier of a woman’s helplessness.”

This is not to say that criticizing contemporary advertisements or social media messages—which portray the brother merely as a “bodyguard”—is wrong; such criticism of modern portrayals is valid. However, concluding from this that the festival itself is inherently misogynistic is a different matter altogether.

The three tricks behind the distortion of tradition

First: Synecdoche, where a single popular interpretation is made to stand in for the entire tradition. Jauhar is reduced to “honour suicide following rape”; Rakhi becomes merely “a sister seeking protection from her brother.” Anything that does not fit this mould, the harem, Islamic slavery, children on the funeral pyre, the thread tied by a queen to a warrior or by a priest to a king is discarded.

Second: Moral inversion. Once the synecdoche is established, the critic can position themselves as the protector of the victims. Historians, proponents of the tradition, and even the sister who is happy to celebrate her festival are all portrayed as if they desire women to die or remain dependent.

Third: Deliberate disregard for the alternative. In today’s city, “living after rape” is the humane imperative. In today’s world, there are constitutional rights, laws, police, and institutions designed to protect people’s rights.

In a falling fortress, however, “living” signified a specific future: becoming a captive, being forced into domestic servitude, or ending up in a harem. There was no constitution, no modern legal framework, no IPC or BNS at that time to protect the rights of the enslaved. Any argument that fails to mention this third factor, being bought and sold like a commodity, pretends that there are only two values at play: honour versus life. Yet it is this third factor that drives the historical reality, and it is the very first thing to be erased.

This is not merely the tactic of a single ideology. The question is: what becomes of a politics that champions criticism when criticism itself is reduced to this?

An Honest Critique: Neither worship the past nor demonise it

An honest critique of Padmaavat might have gone something like this: Jauhar was a horrific choice made under horrific circumstances. Glorifying it through cinematic aesthetics in a society that already equates a woman’s worth with her sexuality raises valid questions. Critique the scene, certainly, but do so without labeling the deceased as “survivors,” a status they never actually held.

An honest argument regarding Rakhi could have been: popular culture often markets the day solely around the concept of male protection. Protection that does not include a share in property, or safety and dignity within the family, is an incomplete deal that is what needs fixing. But this does not require fabricating a narrative that a patriarchy, which somehow escaped Shachi’s notice when she tied the thread to Indra, has existed since the Vedic era.

Honest arguments ultimately leave something behind: film criticism, the politics of property rights, and the demand that living women not be shamed. Dishonest versions leave behind only a headline and contempt, whether for Rajput memory or domestic tradition while real issues, such as the rights of rape survivors or daughters’ property rights, remain buried beneath that very scorn.

In the End: Before judging a tradition, understand what it meant

Jauhar meant that Rajput women had a choice, and they chose death over constant sexual exploitation. Rakhi means that the one who wears the sacred thread is protected by the prayers of the person tying it. So, you can start from here. Feminism still has something left to offer. You can start by calling out and denying both presentism and engagement-farming. Because explaining is never enough, and the next festival or tradition will have to face the same kind of distortion.

People should not make it a binary choice between worshipping the past and demonising the past. There is a third way that can be defended. What can be defended should be defended, but what can be rejected must be rejected. What is being demonised also needs to be stopped and corrected. And, most importantly, do not congratulate yourself on defeating a caricature of Indian civilisation that you have conjured up.

There is no need to demonise Jauhar to defend the right to life of a rape survivor. This is also an injustice to rape survivors when they are used for engagement-farming. There is no need to make fun of Raksha Bandhan in the name of women’s rights. And feminism need not assume that women of the past lacked agency simply because they did not behave the way women do today.

The fundamental question remains the same: before labelling a tradition as good or bad, can we first understand what it truly meant? – Times Now, 4 September 2026

› Abhinav Kumar is a columnist at Times Now Digital.

Mountain of Hindu Skulls

The future will judge our Hindu civilisation – Ajai Sahni

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Hindus and Flag

The question for Indians today is not what our ancestors achieved, but what we are doing. – Ajai Sahni

There is something profoundly perverse in contemporary politics: those who shout loudest about defending civilisation and culture are those whose conduct is most conspicuously divorced from both.

The phenomenon is not confined to India. Islamists invoke an imagined purity of Islamic civilisation while practicing violent intolerance. Christianity has a long history of projecting a ‘superior’ Christian civilisation, while engineering atrocities across the world. In India, the contradiction is increasingly visible in the political appropriation of Hindu identity: the Kanwarias, for example, have become a spectacle of religious assertion and of coercive and obscene public behaviour, while the vocabulary of Hindutva, Sanatan, and civilisational greatness is used to legitimise an aggressive repudiation of civility.

The fundamental confusion is between cultural and civilisational history, on the one hand, and living culture and civilisation, on the other.

India possesses an extraordinary civilisational inheritance. Its achievements in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, literature, architecture, medicine, and the arts are indisputable. Its ancient traditions of argument, scepticism, dissent, and intellectual contestation are extraordinary.

But the achievements of people who lived centuries or millennia ago are not the achievements of those who merely occupy the same geographical space today.

We cannot claim Aryabhata’s mathematics, Kalidasa’s genius or the intellectual achievements of ancient India simply because we were born here. Civilisation is not hereditary property.

A civilisation survives not because its ancestors were great, but because its descendants are capable of greatness.

Contemporary India is increasingly substituting ancestral pride for contemporary achievement. We celebrate Nalanda while engineering a collapse of educational standards; invoke ancient philosophical traditions while public discourse rewards abuse; boast of vasudhaiva kutumbakam while cultivating hostility towards specific ‘outgroups’; invoke a tradition of debate while treating disagreement as betrayal.

The past has simply become an instrument for avoiding responsibility for the present.

Culture, meanwhile, is reduced to symbols—dress, food, ritual, festivals, monuments, and slogans. But the essence of culture is reflected in whether disagreement produces argument or assault; whether public spaces belong equally to everyone; whether citizens can live differently without becoming objects of hatred.

The Kanwaria who believes religious devotion entitles him to intimidate another citizen, the Islamist who believes faith entitles him to suppress unbelief, and Christian extremists who believe righteousness entitles them to impose their dominance over others, are separated by theology and history; but they share a deep pathology: the conversion of a complex civilisation into a closed political identity.

The scheme behind this is Orwellian. Political control increasingly depends not merely on coercion, but on controlling language and historical memory. Nationalism is obedience; patriotism is the absence of dissent; culture is conformity; history is grievance; and dissent is anti-national. Through these, authoritarian proclivities are socialised: vocal sets of citizens dictate what others should or should not eat; who they should or should not marry, how they should practice their faith; what they should read; and what particular opinions they must hold.

But a confident civilisation does not fear difference; an insecure ideology does.

India’s civilisational history provides powerful resources against this insecurity. It is a history of encounters, migrations, arguments, accommodations, and transformations. India’s strength was not uniformity, but its capacity to absorb and transform differences through intellect.

The question for Indians today is not what our ancestors achieved, but what we are doing.

Will future generations admire our universities, literature, science, institutions, and public culture? Or will they see a technologically capable society that squandered its energies in manufactured cultural antagonisms?

There is nothing wrong with pride in India’s past. But if we admire intellectual achievement, we must produce it. If we admire philosophical argument, we must promote free discourse. If we admire pluralism, we must practice it. If we admire civilisation, we must behave civilly.

The truly civilised society does not need to proclaim its civilisation. Its character is visible in its institutions, intellectual life, public conduct and, above all, in the space it permits for those who disagree with it.

Inheritance is not achievement. Towering civilisations in history have collapsed into disorder and ignominy. The only civilisation that ultimately matters, is the one we ourselves create. – The New Indian Express, 13 September 2026

› Ajai Sahni is an author on counter-terrorism and Executive Director of the Institute for Conflict Management, New Delhi.

Kanwar Yatra Violence

India’s Holocaust – Koenraad Elst

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Tower of Hindu heads as depicted in Akbarnama.

The great genocides of history are rarely taught in school. Only the Jews have succeeded in publicizing what happened to their people—Amazon.com lists 2,856 books devoted to the Holocaust of World War II. But just in this century Tutsis, Tibetans, Cambodians, Bangladeshis, Gypsies, Ukrainians and Armenians have all suffered more than a million deaths in deliberate actions. Before them died possibly a hundred million natives in North and South America, tens of millions in the slave trade—and unknown millions of Hindus in India as a result of the invasions beginning in the 7th century. In this thought-provoking article, Dr. Koenraad Elst attempts to shed light on the horrific and historically neglected Hindu experience. – Hinduism Today

Genocide is the intentional attempt to destroy an ethnic community, or by extension any community constituted by bonds of kinship, of common religion or ideology, of common socio-economic position or of common race. The pure form is the complete extermination of every man, woman and child of the group. Examples include the native Tasmanians and many Amerindian nations, from Patagonia to Canada, by European settlers in the 16th-19th century. The most notorious attempt was the Nazi “final solution of the Jewish question” in 1941 to 45. In April 1994, Hutu militias in Rwanda went about slaughtering the Tutsi minority, killing about 800,000, in anticipation of the conquest of their country by an Uganda-based Tutsi army.

Hindus suffered such attempted extermination in East Bengal in 1971, when the Pakistani Army killed one to three million people, with Hindus as their most common target. It is significant that no serious count or religion-wise breakdown of the death toll has been attempted. The Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi ruling classes all agree that this would feed Hindu grievances against Muslims. While India-watchers get indignated about communal riots in India killing up to 20,000 people since 1948, allegedly in a proportion of three Muslims to one Hindu, the best-kept secret of the post-Independence Hindu-Muslim conflict is that in the subcontinent as a whole, the overwhelming majority of the victims have been Hindus. Even apart from the 1971 genocide, “ordinary” pogroms in East Pakistan in 1950 alone killed more Hindus than the total number of riot victims in India since 1948.

“Selective genocide” may be defined as killing a sufficient number who form the backbone of the group’s collective identity, and assimilating the leaderless masses into the dominant community. This has been the Chinese policy in Tibet, killing over a million Tibetans. It was also Stalin’s policy in eastern Poland and the Baltic states after they fell into his hands under the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, exemplified by the massacre of thousands of Polish army officers in Katyn. During the Islamic conquests in India, there was a policy to murder the brahmin priests after the Hindu warrior class had been dispatched on the battlefield. The Portuguese in Malabar and Goa also followed this policy in the 16th century. In antiquity, such partial genocide typically targeted the men for slaughter and the women and children for slavery or concubinage. That is how the Athenians depopulated the isle of Melos in 416 BCE to punish the Melians for their reluctance to join the war against Sparta. Likewise, in 626 CE, Islamic forces destroyed the Jewish tribe of the Banu Quraiza by having its 700 men beheaded and its women and children sold into slavery. Hindus too experienced this treatment at the hands of Islamic conquerors, e.g., when Mohammed bin Qasim conquered the lower Indus basin in 712 CE. The Chach-Nama reports how in Multan “six thousand warriors were put to death, and all their relations and dependents were taken as slaves.” This is why Rajput women committed mass suicide, to save their honor in the face of the imminent entry of victorious Muslim armies, e.g., 8,000 women immolated themselves during Akbar’s capture of Chittorgarh in 1568—where this most enlightened ruler also killed 30,000 non-combatants.

A third type of genocide is when mass killing takes place unintentionally, as collateral damage of other forms of oppression. The death of millions of natives in Central America after the first Spanish conquests was mostly the unintended side effect of the hardships of forced labor and the contact with new diseases brought by the Europeans. In contrast with Nazi and Soviet work camps, where forced labor had the dual purpose of economic profit and a slow but sure death of the inmates, there is no evidence that the Spanish wanted their Native laborers to die—eventually replacing them with African slaves required a large extra investment. These invader’s religious missionaries wished to convert the unbelievers, and preferred not to kill them.

The mass killing of Hindus by Muslims typically took place in the fervor immediately following military victories, e.g., a general massacre and arson followed the fall of the South Indian metropolis of Vijayanagar in 1565. Genocide in peacetime, perhaps the most perverse kind, is extremely rare; one example was Stalin’s organized famine in Ukraine in 1931-33, which killed some ten million people.

In India, once Muslim power was established, Muslim rulers sought to exploit and humiliate rather than kill the Hindus, and discouraged rebellion either by military action or by making some sort of compromise. One constraint was the endemic intra-Muslim warfare and intrigue, another the prevalence of the Hanifite school of Islamic law in India. This is the only school which allows Pagans to subsist as zimmis, disempowered third-class citizens paying a special tax for the favor of being tolerated; the other three legal schools ruled that Pagans, as opposed to Christians and Jews, had to convert. Sometimes, though, Muslim rulers resorted to forms of oppression comparable to Stalin’s famine. A policy of deliberate impoverishment by rulers like Alauddin Khilji and Jahangir were described as follows by Fernand Braudel in A History of Civilizations (1963): “The levies [the Hindus] had to pay were so crushing that one catastrophic harvest was enough to unleash famines and epidemics capable of killing a million people at a time. Appalling poverty was the constant counterpart of the conquerors’ opulence.”

Apart from actual killing, millions of Hindus disappeared by way of enslavement. After every conquest by a Muslim invader, slave markets in Baghdad and Samarkand were flooded with Hindus. Timur Lenk, who conquered Delhi from another Muslim ruler in 1398, recorded in his journal that he made sure his pillaging soldiers spared the Muslim quarter, while in the Hindu areas, they took “twenty slaves each.” Hindu slaves were converted to Islam, and when their descendants gained their freedom, they swelled the numbers of the Muslim community. It is a cruel twist of history that the Muslims who forced Partition on India were partly the progeny of those Hindus.

For its sheer magnitude in scope and death toll, coupled with its occasional intention to exterminate entire Hindu communities, the Islamic campaign against Hinduism, which was never fully called off since the first naval invasion in 636 CE, was famously evaluated by Will Durant as follows:

“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”

A first glance at important testimonies by Muslim chroniclers indicates that, over 13 centuries and a territory as vast as the subcontinent, Muslim warriors easily killed more Hindus than the six million of the Jewish Holocaust. Ferishtha lists several occasions when the Bahmani sultans in central India (1347-1528) killed a hundred thousand Hindus, which they had set as a minimum goal for “punishing” the Hindus; and they were only a third-rank provincial dynasty. The biggest slaughters took place during the raids of Mahmud Ghaznavi (ca. 1000 ce); during the actual conquest of North India by Mohammed Ghori and his lieutenants (1192 ff.); and under the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526). The Moghuls (1526- 1857), even Babar and Aurangzeb, were fairly restrained tyrants by comparison. Prof. K.S. Lal once estimated that the Indian population declined by 50 million under the Sultanate, but that would be hard to substantiate; research into the magnitude of the damage Islam did to India is yet to start in earnest.

In Indian schoolbooks and the media, an idyllic picture of Hindu-Muslim harmony in the pre-British period is propagated in outright contradiction with the testimony of the primary sources. Like Holocaust denial, this propaganda can be called “negationism.” The really daring negationists don’t just deny the crimes against Hindus, they invert the picture and blame the Hindus themselves. Thus, it is alleged that Hindus persecuted and destroyed Buddhism; in reality, Buddhist monasteries and universities flourished under Hindu rule, but their thousands of monks were killed by Ghori and his lieutenants.

Hindu philosophy holds that God pervades everything and everyone in the universe and that nothing and no one is intrinsically evil. How then to understand these great slaughters? Did the Ukrainians starve ten million people to death at some point in their past? Did the American Indians annihilate a race? Who did we Hindus conquer and oppress? History doesn’t record such events, and they certainly could not have been on the scale of the modern events, for there simply were not that many people in the world in prehistory.

But perhaps these catastrophic events are matters of national or racial karma, necessary occurrences related to the overall evolution of the people. In this down-to-earth sense, suffering genocide is the karmic reward of weakness. Even Hindu scriptures on government advise a king to invade and conquer his weaker neighbor, least another king do the same first and then threaten him.

The Jews concluded their genocide was a result of weakness, and since World War II have sought to create a strong nation-state out of a fragmented and stateless community. Even more importantly, they helped foster an awareness of the history of their persecution among their former persecutors, the Christians, which makes it unlikely that Christians will target them again. At the Global Forum in Moscow in 1993, the Jewish representatives said their oppressors have not repented and reconciled for their actions, and therefore, the representative said, “Given the chance, they will do it again.” In this respect, the Hindus have so far failed completely. With numerous Holocaust memorials already functioning, one more memorial is being built in Berlin by the heirs of the perpetrators of the Holocaust; but there is not even one memorial to the Hindu genocide, because even the victims don’t seem to care. – Hinduism Today, 1 March 1999

› Dr. Koenraad Elst is a Belgium Orientalist who studied philosophy, Sinology and Indology in Leuven, Belgium and Varanasi, India. He has published works on comparative philosophy, the Aryan invasion debate, Islam and contemporary Indian politics.

Bengal famine of 1770.

Ganesha: A figure of great mystery, power, and paradox – David Frawley

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Shiva, Shakti & Ganesha

Ganesha represents the cosmic realisation of the Self as all nature, and can teach that infinite truth to us. But for this to occur we must also learn to go beyond the mind, something that most modern intellectuals with all their opinionated views are not likely to attempt. – Dr. David Frawley

Ganesha is a figure of great mystery, power, and paradox. We sense in his unusual figure something of the unknown, unlimited and mysterious, far beyond our human considerations. What are the secrets that he holds and what do they mean for us at the deepest level?

Ganesha’s arising or birth, if you could call it, appears very strange. It is said that his mother Parvati created him for her protection and asked him to prevent anyone from entering into her room. While Parvati was bathing, Lord Shiva approached, and Ganesha true to his role would not let him in. When Ganesha obstructed Shiva from entering, Shiva sensed an infringement on his power, fought with him and in the skirmish cut the boy’s head off.

Soon learning his mistake, that it was Parvati’s son, who was quite angry at his demise, Shiva quickly, sometimes it is said by chance, found the head of an elephant for Ganesha, put it on the headless body and brought him back to life. The story seems contradictory and arbitrary, like many Puranic depictions that have been the subject of denigration, if not ridicule.

Clearly, such bizarre tales are riddles for the mind to ponder, and not meant to portray literal events. They require a deep insight to unravel. This story has been analysed politically and psychologically, extending to bizarre Freudian and Marxist theories, but the inner meaning, which has nothing to do with sex or politics, has been missed altogether.

Symbolism of Ganesha

Ganesha symbolises the human soul and its latent aspiration for the infinite. Initially, the soul is bound to Maya or Prakriti, symbolised by Ganesha being created by Parvati (Prakriti) and seeking to protect her as her servant. The ignorant soul does not know Shiva, the transcendent reality beyond Maya. Shiva, therefore, cannot recognise the soul as his own.

In cutting off Ganesha’s head, Lord Shiva takes the soul beyond the human mind, its dualities and expectations—which is a common theme in deities with their head cut off, be it Hayagriva, Chinnamasta or Ganesha. In giving Ganesha the head of an elephant, Shiva connects it to the profound cosmic intelligence that is under his guidance.

Shiva is Pashupati or the Lord of the Animals that symbolises the souls bound to ignorance, ruling over them from his unbounded awareness. Ganesha as Ganapati or the Lord of the Group is the chieftain or head of the animals, the foremost of which is the elephant and indicates Shiva’s consciousness in manifestation.

The elephant relates to memory, concentration and the hidden wisdom of nature. Ganesha as the awakened soul learns the secrets of the universe and gains the ability to teach them to all who are receptive. Ganesha becomes the guide to the cosmic processes of birth and death, karma, and liberation, and holds all the vidyas or sacred ways of knowledge for understanding all existence.

Ganesha as the Guru

With the head of an elephant, Ganesha becomes awake as Shiva’s son, and functions as the great guru and the giver of wisdom through Shiva’s power within him. He gains access to the mantric energies of the cosmic mind, in which all the higher knowledge is stored, the omkara of Lord Shiva, which is Ganesha’s own word of power.

Such higher knowledge as Ganesha possesses cannot be transmitted to the mortal mind, put into ordinary language or logic, or confined to the parameters of mere human depictions. It requires going beyond the intellect and emotions to unitary awareness or samadhi, which rests upon a profound Yoga sadhana.

Ganesha represents the cosmic realisation of the Self as all nature, and can teach that infinite truth to us. But for this to occur we must also learn to go beyond the mind, something that most modern intellectuals with all their opinionated views are not likely to attempt.

To worship Ganesha, we must become Ganesha, which is to let go of our outer minds and embrace the unknown higher knowledge, becoming the entire universe and beyond, Shiva and Shakti, both within and around us. To do that we must become humble and let Shiva and Parvati enter into us. Jai Ganesha! – Daily-O, 24 August 2017

› Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) is the director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies and the author of more than 30 books on Yoga and Vedic traditions. 

Ganesha Symbolism

The Bottle, the Broom and the Cockroach – Mayank Jain

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BBC Meme

The symbols — bottle, broom and cockroach — change but our weakness remains the same: hope can misguide us into forgetting the lessons of the past. – Mayank Jain

How Intoxication Makes History and Suffering Disappear

Sita Ram Goel once told a disturbing parable. A man had strangled his wives yet women continued to marry him. Each new bride knew what had happened before but persuaded herself that her own story would be different. Circumstances had changed. Perhaps she understood him better. Perhaps what happened to the others would not happen to her. Wishful thinking had acquired the appearance of reason.

The horror of the parable lies not merely in the murderer but in the failure of memory and judgement. Human beings can know what happened yesterday and still persuade themselves that tomorrow will somehow be different. Politics repeatedly exploits this weakness. The old order is declared rotten and a new movement arrives promising purification through a new symbol — a rose, a fist, a broom and now a cockroach.

The last symbol is unintentionally revealing. In nature cockroaches can be useful decomposers. In human habitation they are pests capable of carrying pathogens such as Salmonella and E. coli, while their shed skin and droppings can trigger asthma and allergies. The broom promised to clean the system; the cockroach thrives in its filth — and can spread the disease.

Delhi’s broom once possessed enormous moral power. Anna Hazare’s fasting body became an accusation against an entire political class while Arvind Kejriwal supplied the organisation and strategy capable of converting indignation into political power. The outsider eventually entered the Secretariat.

The destination of this austere revolution contained a remarkable irony. Kejriwal had identified himself with the rejection of VIP culture and ostentatious government privilege. Years later his official residence at 6 Flagstaff Road became the centre of the controversy his opponents called the “Sheesh Mahal”. The CAG found that a project initially estimated at ₹7.91 crore and awarded for ₹8.62 crore ultimately cost ₹33.66 crore. Of that final expenditure, ₹18.88 crore went into additional items involving what the audit described as superior-specification, artistic, antique and ornamental work. The built-up area itself increased by 36 per cent. The numbers supplied their own political metaphor: the movement that entered power carrying a broom and preaching austerity had arrived at a ₹33.66-crore residence.

From the Fast to the Bottle

Perhaps no image captures the transformation more cruelly than liquor. India Against Corruption had been born amid fasting, sacrifice and Gandhian imagery. A decade later, during the COVID period, Delhi witnessed liquor retailers offering a bottle free with every bottle purchased — “buy one, get one free” — under the AAP government’s excise regime. The movement born around an old man’s fast against corruption had travelled from abstinence to an excise regime associated with aggressive liquor discounting. The financial consequences were serious too. The CAG subsequently estimated a ₹2,002.68-crore revenue loss arising from deficiencies in the formulation and implementation of the 2021–22 excise policy.

But the bottle interests me for a reason larger than Delhi. Alcohol has historically offered governments an extraordinary combination: revenue for the state and oblivion for the drinker. An intoxicated man can forget his misery for an evening. The unpaid bill disappears, humiliation recedes and tomorrow loses urgency. Morning arrives, circumstances remain unchanged and the bottle beckons again. Intoxication privatises anguish. Instead of asking why his circumstances remain miserable, a man acquires a temporary escape from them. The sorrow has not been cured. It has merely disappeared from consciousness.

Tsarist Russia constructed an enormous fiscal machine around vodka and, remarkably, the Communist state rediscovered the same instrument. Lenin maintained prohibition but after his death Stalin restored the Tsarist-era vodka monopoly, importantly for state finance. Mark Lawrence Schrad traces the continuity across supposedly antagonistic systems: the Tsar fell and Communism abolished the aristocracy but the political utility of intoxication survived the revolution (Mark Lawrence Schrad, Vodka Politics).

Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign exposed the trap from the opposite direction. Once the state becomes dependent upon alcohol revenue, curing alcoholism carries a fiscal cost. Misery encourages intoxication, intoxication generates revenue and revenue makes the state materially dependent upon the source of intoxication. The worker believes he is escaping the system for an evening; the system is collecting money from his escape.

Apartheid South Africa offers another disturbing example. Under the notorious dop system, agricultural labourers in parts of the Cape were historically remunerated partly in wine, a practice studied explicitly in relation to alcohol abuse and social control. Alcohol could become part of a structure that impoverished a family while making its suffering temporarily easier to endure. Across radically different political systems, the mechanism survived: revenue for authority, oblivion for the citizen. Consolation is easier to distribute than competence.

When the Rebel Became the Establishment

Ramlila Maidan briefly made corruption a moral question in Indian homes. The Lokpal was being discussed by people who had never read a statute. Millions believed politics might finally be purified by people who did not resemble politicians. Kejriwal converted that moral energy into organisation and electoral power. But power brought new interests — offices, money, loyalists and the need to stay in power. By 2017 Anna Hazare was looking back with a devastating sentence: “I hope no Kejriwal comes out of my movement again.”

The lesson goes beyond Kejriwal. Movements that claim to be morally superior often discover that power changes their leaders too. The broom had promised to change politics. Instead, power changed those carrying the broom.

When the Broom Met the Ledger

Eventually every revolution meets arithmetic. DTC recorded a loss of ₹8,498.35 crore in 2022–23 (CAG, State Finances Audit Report of the Government of NCT of Delhi, 2022–23). A loss on that scale is not an accounting abstraction. Public finance eventually becomes human experience — in buses, roads, hospitals, water supply and the quality of institutions a citizen encounters every day.

The Delhi Jal Board illustrated the problem differently. Water can be made free to the consumer but water itself cannot become free. Somebody must source it, purify it, pump it, maintain pipes and sewers and treat what eventually enters the Yamuna. A government can remove a bill from a household; it cannot repeal engineering.

The Mohalla Clinic was similarly an attractive idea: take primary healthcare closer to people. Yet against a target of 1,000 clinics, only 523 were operational by March 2023. Auditors also found that in the period examined, 70 per cent of patients in sampled clinics spent less than one minute with the doctor. A healthcare promise ultimately has to survive contact with a patient. Politics can announce an entitlement in an afternoon. Institutions capable of delivering it take years to build.

The Intoxication of Populism

The bottle now becomes a wider metaphor. Populism can also intoxicate. The bottle offers immediate escape from suffering; the freebie offers immediate escape from economic cost. Both can obscure who eventually pays. A sewage-treatment plant cannot compete emotionally with a zero bill.

Welfare and populism are different. Welfare helps people become stronger; populism gives immediate benefits to win their support, often at tomorrow’s cost. The real question is whether public spending strengthens people and institutions or weakens institutions to keep people happy.

Venezuela is an extreme warning. Oil wealth allowed the government to fund subsidies and cheap imports while domestic agriculture and industry weakened. When oil revenues fell, the country could no longer afford what it had become dependent on importing. Shortages, inflation and mass emigration followed. Political disasters rarely look dangerous when they begin.

Communist societies generated their own jokes about this gulf between ideological promise and everyday reality. An old Eastern Bloc joke has a man standing for hours in a bread queue in the freezing cold. Finally he explodes: “I have had enough of this Communist regime. I am going to shoot the General Secretary!”

An old Soviet joke tells of a man who has been standing for hours in a bread queue. Finally, furious with the shortages, he shouts, “I’ve had enough. I’m going to shoot Brezhnev!” and storms off.

An hour later he returns and quietly takes his place in the bread queue again.

“What happened?” his friend asks.

The man sighs: “The queue to shoot Brezhnev was even longer.”

The joke captured the absurdity of a system in which shortages had become so common that even getting rid of the leader required standing in a queue.

This is why a competent government is less glamorous than revolutionary politics. Sewage treatment, water pressure, bus maintenance, hospital staffing and balanced accounts do not generate the emotional excitement of a movement. But civilisation depends upon precisely these boring achievements.

Punjab: The Second Laboratory

Punjab gave AAP something few political experiments receive: a second laboratory. It also inherited one of India’s most terrible social problems — narcotics. The Tribune estimated in 2025 that 7.5 lakh to 10 lakh people in Punjab were addicted to heroin, consuming an estimated 93.75 kg daily and spending an average ₹60–70 crore every day.

The government’s enforcement campaign has produced arrests and seizures but the magnitude of those figures itself reveals the scale of the disease. Behind them are households in which savings disappear, possessions are sold and parents watch addiction consume the future they imagined for their children.

The narcotic makes the same promise as the bottle: I cannot remove your sorrow, but I can make you forget it for a while.

Russia’s vodka, South Africa’s alcohol system, Delhi’s liquor politics and Punjab’s narcotics tragedy belong to very different histories but expose the same psychological vulnerability. Suffering disappears from consciousness without disappearing from life.

Goel’s United Front

Here another warning from Sita Ram Goel becomes particularly relevant. In Hindu Society Under Siege, he wrote:

“The United Front between Islamism and Communism has been in existence and active since the early forties. … Christianism … has not been an equal and direct partner. … This United Front functions under the protective umbrella of Macaulayism.”

Goel was not describing three identical ideologies. He was describing forces with different doctrines, constituencies and ambitions which, in his analysis, could nevertheless converge against Hindu society. Elsewhere in the same discussion, he identified different social fields in which he believed these ideologies operated: Christianism among tribal Hindus, Islamism among Dalits and Communism among the upper and middle classes. Goel’s argument was simple but powerful. Different forces do not need the same goals to unite against a common enemy. They may disagree about the India they ultimately want but can still work together against the civilisation or political order they all oppose.

Delhi offers a good example. Different political and ideological groups repeatedly came together around the same protests. Jamia, Shaheen Bagh and the anti-CAA protests began around a law but soon became part of a much wider political mobilisation. Sharjeel Imam’s words revealed how far some of the rhetoric had travelled. Speaking at Aligarh Muslim University in January 2020, he said: “If we have five lakh people with us, we can cut off the Northeast from India.” He spoke of blocking roads and railway tracks so that Assam would be separated from the rest of India, at least temporarily.

Then, during Donald Trump’s visit in February 2020, north-east Delhi erupted in riots. Fifty-three people were killed. Homes and businesses were destroyed within hours, leaving families to live with the loss long after the riots ended.

The farmers’ agitation became another huge protest movement. On Republic Day 2021, sections of protesters left the agreed routes, broke barricades, clashed with police and stormed the Red Fort. CCTV cameras, metal detectors and other property were damaged. What was presented as a protest over farm laws ended with one of India’s greatest national symbols being vandalised.

Goel’s warning therefore leaves us with questions more important than the slogan of any particular agitation: who converges around a movement, who supplies its intellectual legitimacy, who amplifies it and what political order emerges if the movement succeeds?

The Colour-Revolution Trap

Colour revolutions understood the power of symbols. They turned complex politics into a simple battle between a corrupt government and a virtuous public, represented by a colour, flower, fist or other symbol. Public anger provided the energy while organisation, funding, media, international support and political ambition helped turn that anger into a movement.

Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003 was initially celebrated around the world. The new government reduced petty corruption and strengthened parts of a dysfunctional state but the revolutionary halo offered no protection against concentrated power. In 2007 the government violently dispersed opposition protests and imposed a state of emergency. Then came the disastrous 2008 war with Russia and enduring territorial fracture involving Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The lesson is larger than Georgia. Destroying legitimacy is easier than constructing legitimacy. A crowd can help bring down a government within weeks. Building institutions capable of restraining power, administering justice and holding a divided country together can require generations.

A rose identifies the enemy. A broom promises cleansing. Neither runs buses, treats sewage or administers courts. Revolution simplifies; government must deal with everything the slogan omitted.

From the Broom to the Cockroach

And now another symbol has appeared. The Cockroach Janta Party has brought together anger over examinations, jobs and institutions. The broom belonged to the television age; the cockroach belongs to social media, where an insult can become a meme, a meme can become an identity and an identity can quickly become a political movement.

Sonam Wangchuk initially gave the movement credibility. But by August 2026, he was distancing himself from its founders, calling them “not saints” and saying they appeared to have political ambitions. He wanted the student movement to remain independent of political parties..

Delhi has seen this pattern before. Moral credibility builds trust, trust brings crowds and crowds create political power. The broom also began with a promise to clean up politics. What happened afterwards is exactly why we should not forget that history when another movement arrives with a new symbol.

Delhi has already paid the price for one political experiment. A new name, younger faces and a new symbol do not necessarily mean a new kind of politics. The lesson of AAP is simple: the next movement promising to clean up politics should be examined carefully before it is trusted.

And then there is the symbol itself. The broom promised to clean the system. The cockroach survives in the very dirt the broom failed to remove. The question now is simple: will the cockroach clean up the system or thrive in its dirt?

When Intoxication Erases Memory

We return finally to Sita Ram Goel’s parable. Every woman knew what had happened to the women before her. Yet each believed that her own story would end differently. That was Goel’s warning: history may show us the danger but hope can misguide us into believing that this time will be different.

Political intoxication works similarly. Revolutionary certainty can intoxicate. Populism can intoxicate. The conviction that this time the faces are different can intoxicate. Every new movement offers essentially the same reassurance: they became corrupt, we shall remain pure; they wanted power, we want change; they betrayed the movement, we are the movement.

Real people pay the price for political experiments. Anna’s supporters gave the movement their trust. Families devastated by addiction lose much more than money. Fifty-three people lost their lives in the Delhi riots. The Red Fort was vandalised. And angry young people can easily become a ladder for someone else’s rise to power.

That is what connects the bottle, the broom and the cockroach. The symbols change but our weakness remains the same: hope can misguide us into forgetting the lessons of the past.

That is the warning in Sita Ram Goel’s parable. The husband had killed his wives before, yet each time he could present himself as innocent and convince another woman that the past did not tell the truth about him. She knew what had happened to the others but still believed that her own story would be different. Politics often works in the same way: the record is there but a new promise makes us believe that this time will be different.

The bottle makes us forget our suffering. Revolutionary politics makes us forget history. And when we forget history, the next promise looks new again.

› Mayank Jain is an author and filmmaker with more than 50 critically acclaimed films to his credit. His work spans governance, national security, public health and social reform and is known for tackling complex issues with intellectual rigour and cinematic clarity.

I am a cockroach.

Christian Inculturation: How Tamil evangelists are trying to appropriate Murugan-Kartikkeya – Aravindan Neelakandan

VOI

Murugan

Culture marauders in Tamil Nadu are trying to appropriate the shining Vedic deity Murugan-Karttikeya, making him into a historical Tamil patriarch they can co-op into Christianity via the mythical St. Thomas. – Aravindan Neelakandan

Murugan is the god of Tamils. Of late, a virulent form of Tamil secessionists has been seeking to appropriate this deity. Paradoxically, this movement wants to remove all the cultural and spiritual significance attributed to Murugan through the millennia. Murugan has been for Tamils a higher principle—both transcendent and immanent. Personified as a handsome boy and a valiant romantic young man with charming anecdotes woven around him, he is also unborn. However, the movement headed by one Seeman, whose original name is Simon, has been claiming that Murugan was originally a patriarch—a historical personality, and that worship of Murugan is nothing but worshipping ancestors.

It is important to understand that such claims by Seeman which are being considered by many as statements by a lunatic fringe leader, are an indicator of a “breaking India” force trying to attain critical mass in the political arena. As early as 1990s, John Samuel, a fanatical Christian, started using the Institute of Asian Studies in Chennai to further an evangelical agenda in the academic domain. Samuel started conducting international conferences on Murugan. Many devotees and scholars, who were unaware of the real intentions of Samuel, attended these conferences and even presented papers.

Hinduism Today in its May 1999 issue, unwittingly brought out the subtle agenda that was being covertly run in the conferences. The magazine asked Sri Lankan delegate Dr Vimala Krishnapillai of the Colombo University, if the participants considered Murugan as a godhead, or “just an evolution of a historical person”. She said that out of 45 research papers she knows of (a total of 135 were presented), 70 per cent extolled Murugan as god. However, the magazine discovered that Samuel “increased the last percentage, opining a non-mystical—and subtly anti-Hindu—view that most scholars, including himself, believe Murugan was elevated from a historical person”. Soon, the pretence of subtlety was jettisoned. He stated openly in 2001 that Soma-Skanda, a famous form of Murugan worshipped throughout Tamil Nadu, was actually the representation of the Christian Trinity.

It is not an accident that Samuel, who tried to reduce Murugan to  historical personality and then christanise him, and Seeman, who is trying to echo these sentiments in the political arena, are both Christians, who are trying to use Tamil identity politics to subvert the community’s culture and spirituality. In this, they are aided by cultural and spiritual illiteracy that has been created among Tamil Hindus by the Dravidianist education system.

If one correlates the way this appropriation happens with the change in religious demography of the state then one can understand how well choreographed the evolution of Murugan-appropriation movement is with the demographic siege.

Between 1951 to 1971, Christian population in the state rose from 4.79 to 5.75 per cent. It was during this time that the Dravidian movement described by a Christian bishop as “a time bomb planted by the Church to destroy Hinduism” rose to power. That also coincided with crackpot scholars releasing books which claimed Christian origin for Thirukkural. By the 1980s, the percentage was galloping towards 6 per cent, and that saw the International Tamil Reserach Institution releasing a book claiming not just Thirukkural but also Saivaite cannonical texts as being derived from Thomas Christianity.

These academic attempts met with severe resistance from real scholars. The period between 1991 and 2011 saw a very rapid increase in Christian population and aggressive forms of evangelisation. Academically-discredited crackpot theories of Hinduism or a perverted form of Thomas Christianity have started becoming strong evangelical tools. Simultaneously, Christian leaders in seemingly secular Tamil chauvinist movements started claiming that Murugan was only an ancestor and not a deity. This has serious consequences. One can very well see how these fringe groups work ideologically and theologically in tandem with Christian evangelical strategies. Let us take a hypothetical scenario. Christian demography can decide the political outcome in parts of Thanjavur, Tiruchirappalli and Dindigul in the central region; the Nilgiris and parts of Coimbatore in the west; Sivaganga and Ramanathapuram in the southeast; and, Tirunelveli, Thoothukkudi and Kanyakumari in the south.

If the evangelical Church and “secularised” Tamils in these pockets influence the victory at least of a few of the candidates of fringe elements, then they can start raising these totally unscientific even pseudo-scientific theories in the legislative assembly. If these elements can also enter into administrative positions in Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, then they can even conduct a mass in a Murugan temple, claiming that Murugan being just a secular ancestor, a Christian service in his honour would not be wrong. The scenario may look right now hilarious or paranoid but then which sensible person in the seventeenth century would have thought that one day the Ramayana would be interpreted in terms of races?

So Hindus, people belonging to a post-colonised, third-world religion, need to fight against this siege at different levels with only one weapon. They have neither state support nor surplus from colonialism. Worse, they have to also face apartheid. So the only weapon they have is their immense cultural and spiritual knowledge and heritage.

So, who is Murugan?

He is the son of Shiva and the goddess who slayed Mahishasura. The most ancient of Tamil literature speaks of him as the one who slayed the asura—Soor. In the eco-cultural classification of landscapes, Murugan is the deity of kurinchi—the forests, mountains and mountain forests. One of the core aspects of Murugan worship is the manifestation of him in the altered state of consciousness, into which the chief priests of Murugan, both male and female, enter.

Epigraphist and author S. Ramachandran, points out to a very important feature about Murugan. Kurinchi, the eco-cultural zone, where Murugan is the deity, is also used as a literary backdrop for secret love-making. The literary setting for this usually portrays the girl as belonging to a tribal clan, and made to guard the millet. When a rogue elephant charges at her as she guards the field all alone, a young tribesman (usually from another clan to raise the level of hostility that would stem from the romance), saves her from the elephant, and they fall in love. In this context, S. Ramachandran points out that one of the prominent mounts of Murugan was elephant. In very ancient petroglyphs found in Tamil Nadu, a male form mounted on an elephant with females dancing in line, is depicted.

As late as the fifteenth century, the elephant-enabled romance gets mapped to Murugan. Murugan desires to marry Valli, a tribal girl. However, she is not attracted to Murugan, who appears before her in the form of an old man. So, Murugan meditates upon Ganesha, who, by now, is considered as his elder brother. Ganesha appears in the form of a wild elephant. Terrified by the elephant, Valli hugs the old man, who then reveals his original form. The anecdote is repeatedly highlighted in Tamil literature, emphasising its spiritual symbolism—Ganesha being muladhara and Valli being the jivatma, and Murugan the Brahman. Also, Valli-Murugan symbolism speaks of Valli as iccha-shakti. The spear of Murugan represents the gyana shakti and Devayani or Devasena, another consort of Murugan, represents kriya shakti.

He is also called Kandan—another favourite name Tamils use to call him. Needless to say, it comes from Skanda. One of the ancient forms of Tamil temples enshrined “kanthu”, which is mentioned frequently in old Tamil literature. “Kanthu” is related to both linga worship as well as Murugan worship, emphasises the epigraphist.

The word “kanthu” is also related to skambha—the pillar of all existence worshiped in Atharva Veda through the Skambha-Sukta hymns. Here, he is described as the very foundation of rtam—the cosmic order. He is pursued by “two maidens of different colours”—here, day and night. Skambha is also the “unborn”. His very form is the hymns of the four vedas. Skambha “firmly holds in place the six widespread directions”.

All these aspects of Murugan are repeated in the Tamil bhakti literature with remarkable consistency. The six faces of Murugan looking in six directions also become the symbol of the infinitely diverse nature of the divine in Tamil literature. Nakeerar, a Sangam Age poet in his Thirumurkaatrupadai, describes the first face of Murugan as the one that dispels darkness; the second gives his devotees what they seek; the third protects the Vedic yagna; the fourth illuminates the intellect of those who search for knowledge; the fifth destroys the obstacles in the path to realisation including ego, illusion and karma; the sixth being enchanted by the beauty of tribal girl Valli, radiating eternal bliss. Arunagirinathar, a fifteenth century Murugan devotee and a great poet, has also popularised through a very melodious song the diverse functions of the six faces of Murugan. In his Kandar Anuboothi, a famous devotional and mystic hymn on Murugan, he speaks of the lord as “unborn”.

Through his poems that are melodious, rhythmic and highly spiritual, he describes Murugan as being attained through the great Shiva-Advaitic state of consciousness. In the seventeenth century, Kumaraguruparar, an autistic child who later became a prodigy, sang songs in praise of Murugan that were filled with poetic brilliance and deep spirituality. He defines the spiritual form of Murugan with mantras as his bloodstream. The consistency with which the spiritual symbolism of Murugan is brought forth is indeed breathtaking. One can say that Tamil culture has not only preserved but taken Vedic divinity, which was presented in a seed form in the Vedic hymns, to the highest spiritual potential.

The colonial-Marxist historiography, euphemistically called Nehruvian secularism, has systematically devalued this innate spiritual nature of our culture. This, in turn, plays well into the hands of evangelical and other “breaking India” forces, which want to reduce Hindu deities to historical personalities.

The distorted worldviews of the likes of Samuel and Seeman are then the disease vectors bred by the cultural illiteracy created by our curriculum. They represent the ignorance propagated by what author Ram Swarup calls the “ego-god” complex. In Tamil tradition, the spear of jnana given to Murugan by the goddess destroys this “ego-god” complex, ultimately subduing them to become his mount and his flag mast. –  Swarajya Magazine, 1 December 2018

Jesus as Murugan.

Manu and Moral Presentism: The safest book to hate in India – Prajesh Panikkar

VOI

B.R. Ambedkar burning the Manusmriti.

The Manusmriti deserves neither worship nor hysteria. It deserves to be read as what it is: an ancient text, shaped by the anxieties, assumptions, customs and social hierarchies of its time. – Prajesh Panikkar

In his Annihilation of Caste, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar says the Manusmriti prescribes pouring molten lead into the ears of a Shudra who hears the Veda. Ambedkar writes: “The Manusmriti prescribes such heavy sentences as cutting off the tongue, or pouring of molten lead in the ears, of the Shudra who recites or hears the Veda.”

Among the many charges levelled against the Manusmriti, this is one of the most frequently cited and most damning: that it prescribes pouring molten lead into the ears of a Shudra who hears the Veda. How brutal! How primitive! One might even think that stoning the offender to death would have been the more humane alternative. After all, stoning is not primitive; it is still prescribed and practised in some places for certain offences considered immoral.

But there is a problem with this charge: the Manusmriti does not mention it. Dr. Ambedkar was mistaken. Nowhere in the Manusmriti is such a punishment prescribed for such an offence. Interestingly, one of the more recent editions of Annihilation of Caste, edited and annotated by S. Anand, with an introduction by Arundhati Roy, acknowledges this discrepancy in a footnote, though without explicitly stating that Ambedkar himself was mistaken. The footnote says, “Such verses do not figure in the Manusmriti”, as if the Manusmriti has fallen short, rather than Ambedkar having gotten it wrong.

Ever since Ambedkar attacked the Manusmriti, the text has come to be seen across India as a symbol of all that is vicious in Hindu society. But this perception overlooks a basic fact: the Manusmriti is not a sacred text, nor does it govern the day-to-day life of a Hindu, not even that of a Brahmin. It is just one text among many in the vast corpus of Hindu Dharma literature, a tradition that spans the Apastamba and Gautama Dharmasutras to the Yajnavalkya and Vishnu Smritis. Occasionally these texts are cited to justify a particular practice or position in a religious context. But the corpus is so vast and varied that one can find scriptural support for almost anything, as well as for its opposite.

Not a binding text

Today, no Smriti, not the Manusmriti, not any other, dictates how a Hindu lives, Brahmin or otherwise. These texts do not govern the daily life of even the most conservative modern Hindu. To treat them as the Hindu equivalent of a universally binding religious code is not just wrong; it is a fundamental misreading of their place in the tradition.

But there is a readymade answer to this argument. Since the Manusmriti-charade has been going on for so long, anyone who follows the debate is familiar with the arguments, the comebacks, and the comebacks to those comebacks.

“We are not saying that the Manusmriti is a binding text,” the critic of the Manusmriti would say. “What we are saying is that the Manusmriti shaped India’s casteist social backwardness. Its ideas seeped into the culture, even if nobody cites the text today. It therefore stands as a symbol of the viciousness and societal ugliness of Hinduism.”

The reality is that there was never, in the entire history of Hinduism, a single Smriti followed by all its sects and communities, Brahmin or non-Brahmin. There was no single tradition, no single set of rituals, no single code of law. The Namboothiris, the Brahmins of Kerala, for instance, claim their code of conduct is shaped by the Shaankarasmriti, a text attributed to Shankaracharya, and many of its provisions directly contradict those prescribed in the Manusmriti. Even its followers readily admit that Shankaracharya did not write it; the attribution was likely made to lend the text greater authority.

Plurality of laws

Each region, village, and family had its own customs and its own code of law. In the Arthashastra, Kautilya refers to this as the “plurality of laws”. The many Smriti texts and Dharmasutras emerged in this context. Each of these codes of law contained provisions that differed from those found in the others, while also sharing, and sometimes directly borrowing, ideas and verses from one another. More importantly, these texts were not necessarily expressions of the personal ideas of their authors. The authors largely codified practices and norms that were generally accepted as law, while also extolling the virtues and traditions of their own clans. This explains why many Smriti texts contain similar ideas, and why some even contain identical or near-identical verses. Whether it is the Manusmriti, Yajnavalkya Smriti, Vishnu Smriti, or Shaankara Smriti, these texts reflected the ideas, customs, and social norms prevalent among the communities in which they emerged. At the same time, they often sought to establish the special status of those communities and their traditions, portraying their customs as more authoritative, their social position as more legitimate, and, at times, their place in the social order as having a particular sanction or proximity to the divine.

Among these, Manu’s code of law has a particular significance, as it is among the earliest surviving systematic codifications of law in India. It was a text that was written around 2nd century CE. One of the verses most often cited to portray the text as primitive is “na stri svatantryam arhati”, commonly understood to mean that a woman should remain under the care of her father, husband, or son and is not entitled to independence. This was one of the verses quoted by Rahul Gandhi in one of his recent PowerPoint presentations, in what appeared to be an attempt to connect with the Gen Z. (One is reminded of Eric Cartman’s famous line from the sitcom South Park; “How do I reach these keeeeds!”)

The idea expressed in this verse, however, was hardly unique to India. The notion that women should remain under the guardianship of men was widespread across the ancient world and reflected a broader social and legal norm of the period. Take The Institutes of Gaius for example. That text was an introductory legal textbook on Roman private law written around the same period as Manusmriti. In the Book 1, the text says, “Where the head of a family has children in his power he is allowed to appoint guardians for them by will. That is, for males while under puberty but for females however old they are, even when they are married. For it was the wish of the old lawyers that women, even those of full age, should be in guardianship as being scatter brained.”

Women in Manusmriti

The text goes beyond merely denying women independence. It places women in a subordinate legal and social position, explicitly justifying their continued guardianship on the grounds that they were considered incapable of exercising independent judgment.

We can judge such ancient observations and value systems by today’s standards, recoil in shock, and condemn them with full force. But that is moral presentism. There is a difference between condemning an ancient law according to our present moral standards and understanding what that law meant, how it functioned, and the historical context in which it emerged. The former becomes the fallacy of moral presentism when contemporary assumptions are substituted for historical inquiry.

No sane person in India would support the Manusmriti and seek to enact it as though it were the word of God. For a believing Hindu, the text has virtually no practical authority in everyday life. It does not dictate family life, social or political life, how a man or woman conducts themselves in public, or even religious practice. For the overwhelming majority of Hindus, the Manusmriti has little to no bearing on how they actually live their lives.

Even though it has no direct bearing on a Hindu’s life, it is possible that the Manusmriti may have influenced or shaped Hindu practices in some faint or indirect way, much as the Institutes of Gaius influenced the development of modern civil law systems. Such influence does not mean that the text’s ideas, positive or negative, were simply copied and carried forward unchanged. It means only that an old text can leave traces in the intellectual and cultural traditions that develop around it, even when the text itself is no longer followed as a code of conduct.

Why was Manusmriti written?

The Manusmriti was written, or perhaps more accurately codified, at an interesting point in Indian history. Buddhism was gaining increasing acceptance among several major royal houses, while Brahmanical traditions, which had until then enjoyed considerable influence and a role in courtly and political affairs, were facing a changing social and intellectual landscape. It is in this context that the Smriti tradition takes on an interesting significance. The Brahmins had to reaffirm their own importance, not merely to others but to themselves. They needed a framework that affirmed their place at the centre of the social and religious order, and that presented the proper functioning of society as dependent upon Brahminical authority and sanction. Scholars who have studied the text in detail, such as Wendy Doniger and Patrick Olivelle, as well as historians of ancient India, have advanced versions of this view. The Smritis, with their repeated emphasis on Brahminical status and their assertions of the superiority of Brahmins over other social groups, can be understood, at least in part, against this backdrop of a community seeking to reaffirm its position and authority.

Given all this, why is the Manusmriti, a text that is almost two millennia old, that plays no major role in how Hindus live their lives, and that is today of greater interest for its anthropological and historical value than its religious one, so often portrayed as a vicious scripture venerated by the entire Hindu community as though it were sacred and universally authoritative? This week too, the Congress burned the text in front of the RSS headquarters. Every year brings at least one such protest, a public burning of the Smriti. Yet hardly anyone seems to care anymore. No Hindu, not even the most conservative, bats an eye.

This has to be seen in contrast with the conspicuous silence from the same quarters when it comes to more severe forms of misogyny from other corners. For example, Kantapuram Aboobacker Musliyar, the current general secretary of the Samastha Kerala Jam’iyyathul Ulama, the same body that passed a resolution discouraging Muslim women’s education in the 1930s, said last week that women should “remain confined to the home and live quietly”. Kantapuram, an octogenarian Islamic scholar who holds the title of Indian Grand Mufti and commands considerable respect among Kerala Muslims, said the Holy Quran itself holds this view and that women’s public appearance would cause great destruction. The comment, which one would not need to think twice before condemning or rejecting, was handled with kid gloves by many political leaders. P.C. Vishnunath, a Congress MLA from Kerala and Minister for Cultural Affairs, whom one might have expected to be among the first to condemn such a misogynistic remark, instead said, “I do not want to get into the substance of Kantapuram’s remarks and comment on them.”

If a national leader of the Congress, say Rahul Gandhi himself, were pressed for a comment on Kantapuram’s observation, it would be hard to imagine him giving a very different answer. The reason is simple. Misogyny in many other quarters is harder to attack because it is woven into the very fabric of their ideology. Religious and social practices in those communities are still shaped by such ideas, making it difficult to condemn them without risking accusations of hurting religious sentiments.

Why is it an easier target?

The Manusmriti, and the other Smriti texts, present an easier target. Their misogyny or casteism can be attacked and vilified precisely because, for all practical purposes, these texts are obsolete and have little or no influence on the religious or everyday lives of Hindus. Burning the Manusmriti costs nothing: no priest will refuse to perform a wedding over it, no temple will alter its rituals, and no believer will feel that their faith has been violated. Nobody’s religious sentiments are going to be hurt, because for most Hindus, the text was never a living document to begin with. It is a safe act, a pseudo outrage, one that lets the burner claim the moral high ground of fighting caste and patriarchy without having to confront any actual, currently practiced belief or institution that might resist, defend itself, or generate real controversy.

Burning the Manusmriti had a symbolic value when Ambedkar did it decades ago. It no longer carries the same significance today. The symbolism was further eroded when some protesters turned the burning of the Manusmriti into an annual, and sometimes even a monthly, ritual. What was once a powerful symbolic act has now been repeated so often that it has lost much of its meaning. Today, burning the Manusmriti means little to anyone. Want to burn a Smriti text now? Go ahead. Who cares?

Today, the Manusmriti is attacked not because it plays a prescriptive role in Hindu life, but precisely because it does not. It has virtually no role in the lives of Hindus, and nobody is likely to object when it is attacked. Burning it is therefore a profitable exercise for a politician. You can fight a glorious battle without hurting anyone, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, and walk away with accolades, applause, and, instantly, the credentials of a progressive.

And that is why, after a point, talking about the Manusmriti becomes boring. Yes, patriarchy. Yes, misogyny. We know. It is a code of law that is two millennia old and is not practised in any meaningful way by anyone today. Tell me, sir, what are your views on the misogyny that is still practised and remains embedded in the foundational ideas of other faiths? What about the lived reality of women in those communities? What about scholars who say that women should not appear in public, or that women should not lead governments? Does that not require any rectification or change?

The Manusmriti deserves neither worship nor hysteria. It deserves to be read as what it is: an ancient text, shaped by the anxieties, assumptions, customs and social hierarchies of its time. We can reject its misogyny and caste distinctions without pretending that it governs the lives of Hindus today. We can condemn what is objectionable in it without attributing to it an authority it does not possess. And if our concern is genuinely with the dignity and freedom of women, our scrutiny should not stop at texts that are politically convenient to attack. The real test of progress is not how loudly we condemn a book that nobody follows, but whether we are willing to question ideas that continue to influence the lives of people today. That is a far more difficult, but far more meaningful, battle. As long as that concern does not extend to those politicians who attack the Manusmriti, their criticism cannot be regarded as genuine. It is agenda-driven, insincere, and nothing more than political posturing dressed up as progressive morality. – News18, 2 September 2026

› Prajesh Panikkar is a commentator with a research degree in philosophy from the University of Sheffield, focusing on the intersections of culture, history, and politics. 

Gandhi-Ambedkar Cartoon

Caste-based reservation system is not rational – S.N. Balagangadhara

VOI

Caste-based Reservations

The caste-based reservation system is neither rational nor moral. One has to say that Indians are either irrational or immoral or both, if they defend reservation. — Prof. Dr. S.N. Balagangadhara

The problem that has plagued India since Independence [is] caste-based reservations for education, employment and career promotions. In the last four decades of living in Europe, I have heard both sides of the debate. As an Indian living abroad, it appears to me that these debates actually raise one single question: Are Indians irrational or immoral, or both? This is the un-debated side of the reservation discourse in India. Let me explain. Is caste-based reservation a rational policy to follow? The answer to this question does not require a definition of ‘rationality.’ Instead, the issue is: does this policy eventuate in irrational consequences or effects?

Consider two individuals: one outside the reserved category, the other within. The former knows that to get an admission in a good university, he should belong to the top 0.5 per cent of the applicants. He knows too that he will not be part of the very few, who make the grade. Thus, what is the most rational thing for him to do? If putting in enormous effort and taking it easy both produce the same result, it is rational for him to expend less effort. Consider the latter. He knows that to get a seat in a good university, he only needs 35 per cent. Getting more marks will not increase his chances. No matter how little effort he puts in, he will get the desired seat. As a rational agent, therefore, he too takes it easy. Because knowledge and competence are mostly commensurate with the efforts put in to acquire them, expending little effort implies equivalent increase in ignorance and incompetence.

Since the caste-based reservation makes it rational for people both in and outside reservation to choose to be lazy, there is an incentive to remain ignorant, incompetent and inefficient. If this attitude is generalised—in colleges, courts and bureaucracy—it produces and reproduces such people. Result: the institutions they run cannot be more efficient than them. The inevitable consequence is the collapse of both the society and its institutions. That is how outsiders perceive India today: her courts, educational institutions, bureaucracy, police, governments, are in the process of breaking down.

Why does this rationality argument not figure in Indian discourse? There is a well-known answer: the reservation is the reparation for the injustice committed by one group of people against another over two millennia or more. In that case, moral considerations trump rationality. If we accept that it is irrational to follow policies that lead to the collapse of society because everyone is rationally encouraged to pursue irrational goals, the question becomes: is it moral to be rational?

In and of itself, there is nothing absurd about it. One can indeed speak of local rationalities, such as scientific, technological and ecological rationalities and raise ethical questions about them. So, let us ask: irrespective of its rationality, is the caste-based reservation system moral?

Today, it is common sense to say that there is oppression of one group of people across the whole of India by another group of people spread equally widely across India. However, there can be no empirical evidence for this claim because say ‘Dalit’ or OBC (Other Backward Castes) is neither one social group nor one particular caste. Both names refer to sets of groups. It is only correct to say then that multiple groups have oppressed multiple other groups in the last millennia in India. One could, of course, name the oppressed groups as the Dalits or OBCs. Sadly, this fact of oppression is true for all human civilisations. Therefore, if the reservation system is a moral critique of oppression, it would have to follow that all other societies except the Indian are immoral, because they do not have such a system. This suggestion is implausible. Is the reservation system a payment for the sins of our forefathers, who instituted an unjust social system? This could be true, but only if one argues that the children of oppressors have to pay for the sins of their forefathers.

This moral stance is unique to the Judaic tradition, where the sins of the fathers visit their sons. No other moral tradition has coherently argued this. I am aware that some Indians do talk in this fashion but that is incoherent within the framework of Indian culture.

Rightly or wrongly, ideas like karma and punarjanma require that only the agent pays for his misdeeds. If one has to pay for the misdeeds of another, what do karma and karmaphala mean? The entire set of Indian traditions would become totally incoherent. Therefore, you cannot assume this ethical stance unless you are a Jew yourself. But Jewish Israel has no reservation system. Neither are Indians Jewish. Hence, this moral justification does not work.

Can we not say that the reservation system is the reparation of past damages, whether inflicted on one group or on multiple groups? Maybe. In the case of the Native Americans, for example, the white settlers took away their lands and became wealthy as a result. The Nazis deprived the Jews of property, wealth, and life itself. African-Americans were displaced and transformed into slaves.

Perhaps, one could also address the British for the damages inflicted by colonialism. In all these cases, a specific group appropriates unjustly what belonged to another specific group. Again, there is no historical evidence to indicate that there was dispossession of the property of one particular group by another specific group all over India.

If none of these arguments work, why does this policy appeal? Is it because of the demands of justice in general and of social justice in particular? If this is the case, one should give the criteria of justice and of social justice that make sense of caste-based reservation. Nobody has done so. Surely, those who question the morality of rationality mean something other than all these flawed arguments.

Here is one such. Just structures are preferable, since they always generate just consequences. However, it has been shown that just structures, in certain contexts, produce unjust consequences. Therefore, this claim is not a logical truth; we are compelled to show empirically that the reservation system is not generating unjust consequences. If that were to be the case, there would be no Patel, Gurjar or Jat protests, nor Mandal Commission. Thus, the reservation system is not an embodied critique of a local rationality—‘the’ caste system—nor is it about the morality of rationality.

Consequently, the caste-based reservation system is neither rational nor moral. One has to say that Indians are either irrational or immoral or both, if they defend reservation. The British were reluctant to give self-rule or independence to India because many were convinced that Indians were immoral and irrational. Looking from the outside today, one is compelled to ask: were the British telling the truth, after all? – The New Indian Express, 11 September 2015

› Prof. Dr S. N. Balagangadhara of Ghent University, Belgium, is the Director of the India Platform and Research Centre, Comparative Science of Cultures.

A History of Caste – Koenraad Elst

VOI

Caste Batman Meme

In an inter-faith debate, most Hindus can easily be put on the defensive with a single word—caste. Any anti-Hindu polemist can be counted on to allege that “the typically Hindu caste system is the most cruel apartheid, imposed by the barbaric white Aryan invaders on the gentle dark-skinned natives.” Here’s a more balanced and historical account of this controversial institution. – Dr. Konraad Elst

Merits of the Caste System

The caste system is often portrayed as the ultimate horror. Inborn inequality is indeed unacceptable to us moderns, but this does not preclude that the system has also had its merits.

Caste is perceived as an “exclusion-from,” but first of all it is a form of “belonging-to,” a natural structure of solidarity. For this reason, Christian and Muslim missionaries found it very difficult to lure Hindus away from their communities. Sometimes castes were collectively converted to Islam, and Pope Gregory XV (1621-23) decreed that the missionaries could tolerate caste distinction among Christian converts; but by and large, caste remained an effective hurdle to the destruction of Hinduism through conversion. That is why the missionaries started attacking the institution of caste and in particular the brahmin caste. This propaganda has bloomed into a full-fledged anti-brahminism, the Indian equivalent of anti-Semitism.

Every caste had a large measure of autonomy, with its own judiciary, duties and privileges, and often its own temples. Inter-caste affairs were settled at the village council by consensus; even the lowest caste had veto power. This autonomy of intermediate levels of society is the antithesis of the totalitarian society in which the individual stands helpless before the all-powerful state. This decentralized structure of civil society and of the Hindu religious commonwealth has been crucial to the survival of Hinduism under Muslim rule. Whereas Buddhism was swept away as soon as its monasteries were destroyed, Hinduism retreated into its caste structure and weathered the storm.

Caste also provided a framework for integrating immigrant communities: Jews, Zoroastrians and Syrian Christians. They were not only tolerated, but assisted in efforts to preserve their distinctive traditions.

Typically Hindu?

It is routinely claimed that caste is a uniquely Hindu institution. Yet, counter examples are not hard to come by. In Europe and elsewhere, there was (or still is) a hierarchical distinction between noblemen and commoners, with nobility only marrying nobility. Many tribal societies punished the breach of endogamy rules with death.

Coming to the Indian tribes, we find Christian missionaries claiming that “tribals are not Hindus because they do not observe caste.” In reality, missionary literature itself is rife with testimonies of caste practices among tribals. A spectacular example is what the missions call “the mistake:” the attempt, in 1891, to make tribal converts in Chhotanagpur inter-dine with converts from other tribes. It was a disaster for the mission. Most tribals renounced Christianity because they chose to preserve the taboo on inter-dining. As strongly as the haughtiest brahmin, they refused to mix what God hath separated.

Endogamy and exogamy are observed by tribal societies the world over. The question is therefore not why Hindu society invented this system, but how it could preserve these tribal identities even after outgrowing the tribal stage of civilization. The answer lies largely in the expanding Vedic culture’s intrinsically respectful and conservative spirit, which ensured that each tribe could preserve its customs and traditions, including its defining custom of tribal endogamy.

Description and History

The Portuguese colonizers applied the term caste, “lineage, breed,” to two different Hindu institutions: jati and varna. The effective unit of the caste system is the jati, birth-unit, an endogamous group into which you are born, and within which you marry. In principle, you can only dine with fellow members, but the pressures of modern life have eroded this rule. The several thousands of jatis are subdivided in exogamous clans, gotra. This double division dates back to tribal society.

By contrast, varna is the typical functional division of an advanced society—the Indus/Saraswati civilization, 3rd millennium, BCE. The youngest part of the Rg Veda describes four classes: learned brahmins born from Brahma’s mouth, martial kshatriya born from his arms; vaishya entrepreneurs born from his hips and shudra workers born from his feet. Everyone is a shudra by birth. Boys become dwija, twice-born, or member of one of the three upper varnas upon receiving the sacred thread in the upanayana ceremony.

The varna system expanded from the Saraswati-Yamuna area and got firmly established in the whole of Aryavarta (Kashmir to Vidarbha, Sindh to Bihar). It counted as a sign of superior culture setting the arya, civilized, heartland apart from the surrounding mleccha, barbaric, lands. In Bengal and the South, the system was reduced to a distinction between brahmins and shudras. Varna is a ritual category and does not fully correspond to effective social or economic status. Thus, half of the princely rulers in British India were shudras and a few were brahmins, though it is the kshatriya function par excellence. Many shudras are rich, many brahmins impoverished.

The Mahabharata defines the varna qualities thus: “He in whom you find truthfulness, generosity, absence of hatred, modesty, goodness and self-restraint, is a brahmana. He who fulfills the duties of a knight, studies the scriptures, concentrates on acquisition and distribution of riches, is a kshatriya. He who loves cattle breeding, agriculture and money, is honest and well-versed in scripture, is a vaishya. He who eats anything, practises any profession, ignores purity rules, and takes no interest in scriptures and rules of life, is a shudra.” The higher the varna, the more rules of self-discipline are to be observed. Hence, a jati could collectively improve its status by adopting more demanding rules of conduct, e.g. vegetarianism.

A person’s second name usually indicates his jati or gotra. Further, one can use the following varna titles: Sharma (shelter, or joy) indicates the brahmin, Varma (armour) the kshatriya, Gupta (protected) the vaishya and Das (servant) the shudra. In a single family, one person may call himself Gupta (varna), another Agrawal (jati), yet another Garg (gotra). A monk, upon renouncing the world, sheds his name along with his caste identity.

Untouchability

Below the caste hierarchy are the untouchables, or harijan (literally “God’s people”), dalits (“oppressed”), paraiya (one such caste in South India), or scheduled castes. They make up about 16% of the Indian population, as many as the upper castes combined.

Untouchability originates in the belief that evil spirits surround dead and dying substances. People who work with corpses, body excretions or animal skins had an aura of danger and impurity, so they were kept away from mainstream society and from sacred learning and ritual. This often took grotesque forms: thus, an untouchable had to announce his polluting proximity with a rattle, like a leper.

Untouchability is unknown in the Vedas, and therefore repudiated by neo-Vedic reformers like Dayanand Saraswati, Narayana Guru, Gandhi and Savarkar. In 1967, Dr. Ambedkar, a dalit by birth and fierce critic of social injustice in Hinduism and Islam, led a mass conversion to Buddhism, partly on the (unhistorical) assumption that Buddhism had been an anti-caste movement. The 1950 Constitution outlawed untouchability and sanctioned positive discrimination programs for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Lately, the Vishva Hindu Parishad has managed to get even the most traditionalist religious leaders on the anti-untouchability platform, so that they invite harijans to Vedic schools and train them as priests. In the villages, however, pestering of dalits is still a regular phenomenon, occasioned less by ritual purity issues than by land and labor disputes. However, the dalits’ increasing political clout is accelerating the elimination of untouchability.

Caste Conversion

In the Mahabharata, Yuddhishthira affirms that varna is defined by the qualities of head and heart, not by one’s birth. Krishna teaches that varna is defined by one’s activity (karma) and quality (guna). Till today, it is an unfinished debate to what extent one’s “quality” is determined by heredity or by environmental influence. And so, while the hereditary view has been predominant for long, the non-hereditary conception of varna has always been around as well, as is clear from the practice of varna conversion. The most famous example is the 17th century freedom fighter Shivaji, a shudra who was accorded kshatriya status to match his military achievements. The geographical spread of Vedic tradition was achieved through large scale initiation of local elites into the varna order. From 1875 onwards, the Arya Samaj has systematically administered the “purification ritual” (shuddhi) to Muslim and Christian converts and to low caste Hindus, making them dwija. Conversely, the present policy of positive discrimination has made upper-caste people seek acceptance into the favored Scheduled Castes.

Veer Savarkar, the ideologue of Hindu nationalism, advocated intermarriage to unify the Hindu nation even at the biological level. Most contemporary Hindus, though now generally opposed to caste inequality, continue to marry within their respective jati because they see no reason for their dissolution.

Racial Theory of Caste

Nineteenth-century Westerners projected the colonial situation and the newest race theories on the caste system: the upper castes were white invaders lording it over the black natives. This outdated view is still repeated ad-nauseam by anti-Hindu authors: now that “idolatry” has lost its force as a term of abuse, “racism” is a welcome innovation to demonize Hinduism. In reality, India is the region where all skin color types met and mingled, and you will find many brahmins as black as Nelson Mandela. Ancient “Aryan” heroes like Rama, Krishna, Draupadi, Ravana (a brahmin) and a number of Vedic seers were explicitly described as being dark-skinned.

But doesn’t varna mean “skin color?” The effective meaning of varna is “splendor, color,” and hence “distinctive quality” or “one segment in a spectrum.” The four functional classes constitute the “colors” in the spectrum of society. Symbolic colors are allotted to the varna on the basis of the cosmological scheme of “three qualities” (triguna): white is sattva (truthful), the quality typifying the brahmin; red is rajas (energetic), for the kshatriya; black is tamas (inert, solid), for the shudra; yellow is allotted to the vaishya, who is defined by a mixture of qualities.

Finally, caste society has been the most stable society in history. Indian Communists used to sneer that “India has never even had a revolution.” Actually, that is no mean achievement. – Hinduism Today, 1 September 1994

› Dr. Elst is a Belgian scholar who has extensively studied the current socio-political situation in India. Keenly interested in Asian philosophies and traditions from his early years, he has studied yoga, aikido and other oriental disciplines.

Caste Reservation

The fallacy of human agency and the perils of algorithmic grooming – Sreejith Sreedharan

VOI

AI

Who decides what AI knows? Whose values shape its reasoning? Which languages, histories, and knowledge systems are marginalised by the data it learns from? Which voices are amplified, and which are effectively erased because they do not belong to profitable markets or dominant cultures? – Sreejith Sreedharan

We have built an entire civilisation on a comforting assumption: that each of us, as individuals, freely determines our own thoughts, values, and choices. That we are the authors of our own minds. That our decisions are wholly and unmistakably ours.

It is a beautiful idea. It is also, in the strictest sense, incomplete.

A person does not begin life as a self-made thinker. A child inherits language, class position, family habits, cultural assumptions, religious background, and ideas about success long before the child has the capacity to question them. School extends that inheritance. Peers reinforce it. Media saturates it. Daily routines harden it. By the time a person begins to call a belief their own, much of the mental architecture has already been installed by forces outside their control.

That does not mean agency is an illusion. People still choose. They still judge. They still resist. But agency operates inside conditions that were not selected by the individual. Human freedom is real, but limited, shaped, and unevenly distributed.

Artificial Intelligence has entered this already conditioned environment and begun to alter it at scale and speed.

The loud concerns around AI diminishing or even replacing human agency are understandable. Yet the argument often misses a deeper point. Human minds have never developed in a vacuum. They have always been formed by institutions, social norms, and inherited systems of belief. The real question is not whether conditioning exists. It always has. The real question is what kind of conditioning AI now produces, and who controls it.

For the first time in history, a technology can do more than distribute information. Writing preserved knowledge. The printing press widened access to it. The internet made vast quantities of it available to nearly everyone. But none of these systems democratised the capacity to reason with information. They expanded access to data, not necessarily access to judgement.

AI changes that status quo radically. Used well, it can act as a reasoning companion. It can explain, translate, compare, summarise, test assumptions, and scaffold thought. A first-generation learner in a small town in Odisha or Oaxaca can now ask questions and receive a level of intellectual engagement that once belonged largely to elite classrooms. That is a real shift in the conditions under which thought develops.

This is why AI carries such promise. It may become the first technology capable of raising the cognitive floor rather than merely expanding the speed of execution. It can help more people reason, write, learn, and participate in knowledge systems that were earlier closed to them by geography, class, language, or institutional access.

Across philosophical and spiritual traditions, many thinkers have argued that a civilisation advances when knowledge and capability become more widely shared. Not equal outcomes, but a more even base of epistemic standing. A society cannot remain intellectually healthy if only a small minority has the tools to think clearly while everyone else is left to consume, repeat, and comply.

AI may be the first technology capable of helping build that base.

But that promise sits beside a more troubling reality. The AI systems shaping public life today are not neutral infrastructure. They are products. They are built within business models, commercial incentives, and institutional assumptions that reflect a narrow set of priorities. Frontier AI remains concentrated in a relatively small number of firms and research ecosystems, even if development is becoming more global. That concentration is a red flag, as it shapes what these systems know, what they optimise for, and what kinds of users they are designed to serve.

The result is not a plural expansion of human possibility. In many cases, it is a worldview encoded at scale. English-language dominance, Western institutional habits, and the logic of engagement and monetisation influence how these systems respond, recommend, and rank. The hidden power here is not simply technical. It is cultural and political.

Algorithmic conditioning works differently from older forms of cultural conditioning. Traditional conditioning was often coercive, but it was visible. People could argue against it, form counter-cultures, or reject it outright. It had friction. That friction gave some room for reflection.

Algorithmic conditioning is more adaptive. It studies what a person already prefers and returns it in refined form. It offers convenience while narrowing the range of encounter. Personalisation can reinforce existing habits, reduce exposure to disagreement, and narrow the range of ideas people encounter. It creates the feeling of discovery while quietly reducing surprise. The recommendation engine does not simply show people more of the world. It often shows them more of themselves.

The deeper concern is not that a feed is mildly curated. It is that repeated curation trains attention, and attention shapes thought. A person who is continually shown familiar positions, familiar styles, and familiar emotional cues begins to treat familiarity as depth. The system does not need to coerce. It only needs to keep rewarding what already works. We already see this pattern in everyday choices, from mundane chores to the people we choose to lead us.

That is why the AI governance question is critical and matters so much. The real influence lies in the algorithms, where design choices quietly become societal outcomes.

Who decides what AI knows? Whose values shape its reasoning? Which languages, histories, and knowledge systems are marginalised by the data it learns from? Which voices are amplified, and which are effectively erased because they do not belong to profitable markets or dominant cultures?

These are civilisational questions, not technical ones. Yet they are being resolved today with limited public oversight and little democratic participation from most of the world.

There is still a meaningful opportunity here. AI can widen access to reasoning support, lower barriers to learning, and help more people participate in intellectual life with greater confidence. It can serve as a tool for epistemic levelling if it is designed and governed with that purpose in mind.

But that outcome is not guaranteed. If the systems that shape thought at scale remain concentrated in a handful of corporate hands (or governments), the result will not be liberation. It will be a more efficient consolidation of intellectual power, dressed in the language of empowerment.

Governing AI for the good of all humanity is not a nicety, but a necessity. Public institutions cannot treat AI as a neutral utility while its incentives shape what large populations see, repeat, and accept. The systems that mediate thought now require scrutiny equal to their influence. Transparency, language inclusion, dataset diversity, and accountability are no longer niche policy concerns. They are core conditions for preserving plural thought.

The debate we need is not whether AI threatens human agency that never fully existed. It is who governs the algorithmic conditioning that now shapes thought, and whether that power serves human development or merely corporate advantage.

That debate is not happening at the scale and with the intention it should. It urgently must. – Firstpost, 22 August 2026

› Sreejith Sreedharan is a technology analyst and author. He works on organisational AI readiness and created the AI Instinct Index®, a psychometric diagnostic designed to assess behavioural readiness for AI adoption and adaptive capacity in constraint-heavy environments.

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