Durga we worship, women we doubt – Tejusvi Shukla

October 21, 2026October 21, 2026VOI

Dharma is not set once and preserved in amber; it is re-established in every age. Civilisations endure by shedding what has worn out so that what is eternal may continue. Even the Constitution of India, barely 76 years old, has been amended over a hundred times because the society it serves is alive. Continuity depends on change. – Tejusvi Shukla

Navratri brings nine nights of a civilisation remembering who it believes holds up the universe. Each night unveils another face of Shakti, and the journey ends on Vijayadashami, or Bijoya, when Durga stands over the slain Mahishasura. She is not the rescued but the rescuer.

There is something extraordinary about a culture whose very word for power, shakti, is feminine. That inheritance is also a mirror. A society that bows before the Devi for nine nights sometimes returns, on the tenth morning, to imagining her daughters as fragile, and calls that culture. Bijoya leaves us one question: what do we keep of her once the pandals come down? The answer is not to worship less but to let worship mean what it says.

The Goddess who speaks for herself

The idea is ancient. In the Devi Suktam (RV 10.125), the rishika Vak Ambhrini does not pray to the Goddess. She speaks as her:

Aham rashtri sangamani vasunam chikitushee prathama yajniyanam.

I am the rashtri, the sovereign of the universe, the knower of Ultimate Reality.

This is not a goddess waiting to be defended. She is sovereignty, knowledge and righteous force, declared in a woman’s own voice. The same tradition gave us Gargi, who questioned Yajnavalkya, and Maitreyi, who chose knowledge over wealth.

What the shastras also said

The Dharmashastras are often held responsible for the distance between the Goddess and the woman, though the record is richer than that. The Manusmriti carries the much-quoted

Na stree swatantryam arhati (9.3). Yet the same text declares: Yatra naryastu pujyante ramante tatra devatah (3.56).

Where women are honoured, the gods rejoice; where they are not, every rite is fruitless.

Kautilya’s Arthashastra, in its chapter on the superintendent of yarn (2.23), fines any officer who looks upon a woman worker’s face or speaks of anything but the work, in a workshop where the lamp is kept only as bright as the yarn requires. The burden of propriety fell on the official, not the woman. The text secured the space; it did not confine her.

How the two voices came to part

If both voices belong to one tradition, how did they come to part? The divergence between the exalted status of the feminine in sacred thought and the lived position of women was neither instantaneous nor uniform. It grew through the interaction of normative texts, customary practice, social institutions and changing material conditions. The authority of Vak Ambhrini, Gargi and Maitreyi coexisted with later juridical formulations that increasingly located women within the structures of the family, and even within the Dharmashastra tradition the record cannot be reduced to a single position.

Every text carries the worldview of the world that wrote it. The hymns belong to an age that made room for women as seers. The legal literature that followed was composed as settled households, inherited property and lineage became society’s central concerns, and its authors, writing as men of their time, spoke of women chiefly in relation to the family. Even the verse on independence is framed as guardianship, with father, husband and son each keeping watch in turn. It reads less as a verdict on a woman’s worth than as the assumption of a household-centred world. Over centuries, custom repeated those assumptions until they felt like scripture.

What changed, then, was not the disappearance of the feminine principle from our religious imagination, but its uneven translation into social practice. Shakti remained divine, sovereign and unconstrained in the sacred sphere, while the autonomy of women in the social sphere became progressively mediated by custom, family structures and patriarchal readings of tradition. Neither the reverence nor the reflex is foreign to us. Both are ours.

A civilisation that is alive

Which one we carry forward is a question the tradition itself prepared us to answer, for it never claimed to be fixed. The very Manusmriti that records the household’s rules also observes that dharma differs from age to age:

Anye kritayuge dharmas tretayam dwapare apare; anye kaliyuge nrinam yuga-hrasanurupatah (1.85).

Sri Krishna gives that understanding its grammar: Dharma-samsthapanarthaya sambhavami yuge yuge (Bhagavad Gita 4.8).

To read the old texts as living thought is therefore not to defy them but to follow them. Their authors answered the questions of their age; ours is to answer our own. Restricting a daughter’s movement instead of making the street safe for her, or questioning a woman’s clothes rather than an offender’s conduct, is not preservation. It is a quiet disservice to a civilisation whose own statecraft fined an officer for a lamp that burned too bright. The Saraswati we invoke before examinations holds the book and the veena in her own hands; her daughters can hold their ambitions the same way.

The victory we celebrate

The Devi Mahatmya tells how the gods, unable to defeat Mahishasura, pooled their radiance into one feminine form and placed their weapons in her hands. She did not need their protection. She needed only their trust, and she won. Its best-loved hymn salutes her in every being:

Ya Devi Sarvabhuteshu Shakti-rupena Samsthita.

In every being, not only on the altar.

The hymn to the sovereign Devi was voiced by a woman. The rules of the household were written by men of their age. What is written next belongs to us, for every generation of this civilisation is handed the same pen. The Devi has already answered what a woman is. The question that remains is ours: when a daughter stands at the door with a book in one hand and a dream in the other, which of our two voices will she hear?

Shubho Bijoya! – The Pioneer, 20 October 2026

› Tejusvi Shukla is the Assistant Director (Research) at Bharat Ki Soch. Her focus of research is internal security, left-wing extremism, medical diplomacy, and the weaponization of social media.

Even the creator-god is Durga’s creation – Aravindan Neelakandan

October 18, 2026October 18, 2026VOI

For the Hindu, evolution being the work of a blind watchmaker creates no problem. The creator-god is not the supreme power. He is not infallible. He is but a form of the Mother Goddess. – Aravindan Neelakandan

Unlike Christendom, Hindu intelligentsia did not have a problem with the idea of evolution. Evolution came to India within a few decades of 1859. In 1879, the Krishna Samhita of Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda was published. He was the grand guru of Abhay Charanaravinda Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada Swami, the founder of ISKCON. Particularly interesting is the way Bhakitivinoda Swami treats the Dashavatara concept in his book:

Here the Samhita describes how each incarnation of God successively assumes a physical form to match the evolutionary development of the embodied soul (jivatma) from its most primitive invertebrate state to its highest vertebrate and intelligent state. Not only do these passages suggest the evolutionary theories of Darwin, they also reflect the view that the passage of time is synonymous with progress. – Shukavak N. Das, ‘Bhaktivinoda and Scriptural Literalis’ in the Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant, 2004.

Whether such a progressive evolution is consistent with Darwinian evolution is another question. But that the Hindu scholarship of that time could approach religion with what Vinoda Swami himself called Adunika Vada or modern approach is what is important.

Again, two important savants of Hindu dharma in modern context, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo had no problem with evolution. In fact, Sri Aurobindo could sing it in his Savitri.

Hindu puranas speak of the humbling of both Brahma the creator-god and Indra the celestial sky-god. In Skanda Purana, we see Skanda-Muruga humbling the creator-god because he did not know the meaning of Aum through which alone, he creates. In Bhagavata again, we see that Brahma is humbled by Sri Krishna—who emanates the entire population of cowherds, when Brahma hides them. Again, Indra is also humbled when he becomes jealous and seeks to get revenge for the cowherds worshipping the Govardhan mountain.

Knocking down of Brahma, humbling of Indra—the conceited creator-god and the jealous sky-god is known to every child of Hinduism. As Swami Vivekananda says, it is manifestation not creation—and a Hindu child knows this truth. So, when science speaks of the random mutation and natural selection ushering in the infinite variety of life, the Hindu child can say with Darwin, “there is grandeur in this view of life.…”

Sri Aurobindo in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad explains:

Uma is the supreme Nature from whom the whole cosmic action takes its birth; She is the pure summit and highest power of the One who here shines out in many forms. From this supreme Nature which is also the supreme consciousness the gods must learn their own truth; they must proceed by reflecting it in themselves instead of limiting themselves to their own lower movement.

The gods, devas, are hence just movements in the infinite consciousness that is She.

In fact, the names from 256 to 262 in the Sri Lalita Sahasranama speak of Her as doing the five functional archetypes of creation, sustenance, dissolution, veiling and liberation as the five gods themselves—Brahma, Vishnu, Rudra, Ishwara and Sadashiva (Names: 264 to 273).

So, for the Hindu, evolution being the work of a blind watchmaker creates no problem. The creator-god is not the supreme power. He is not infallible. He is but a form of Her.

In the nascent stages of Christianity, particularly during its Gnostic phase, the same insight into the Divine Feminine was present there too.

In Gnostic tradition, the creator of the material universe was not the ultimate god but a deity by name Yaltaboath who was actually a creation of the Wisdom Mother Goddess, Sophia. However, having forgotten Sophia, Yaltaboath, who thinks he had out of his own power created humanity in his image, declares that he is the jealous god and that there is no other god besides him. Through a heavenly voice, Sophia reminded him who he really was and called him Samuel—the blind god. Gnostic Christianity even tried to structure a mytho-theological universe with a break from the literalist textual traditions—the creator-god and a higher God whose wisdom was Sophia.

Unfortunately, Sophia went into exile as Christianity became more institutionalised. Had Christianity not been a separate religion but a mere sect of Judaism—incorporating the mythology of Sophia as its theological basis—one wonders how the Western common religious mind would have responded to the science of evolution.

The Goddess tradition in India is such that it makes us like a child look up to the Devi as the Mother Universe and then approach material science with the same awe and veneration. – Swarajya, 12 October 2021

› Aravindan Neelakandan is an author, psychology and economics major, and contributing editor at Swarajya.

Ma Durga is the innermost power of consciousness – David Frawley

October 14, 2026October 14, 2026VOI

Ma Durga is not a mere formation of human thought, an image or archetype of our minds or culture. She is Adi Shakti, the inmost power of consciousness, ever taking shape within and around us as the creative and transformative force that is the essence of the cosmic life. – Dr. David Frawley

Ma Durga is one of the oldest, most powerful and widely worshipped of the great Hindu mother goddesses, claiming the very name of Jagadamba, the “Mother of the Universe”.

Ma Durga arises from Agni, the Vedic deity of fire and light as a protective force, as is mentioned in the ancient Vedic Durga Sukta. All the devatas arise through Agni, the flame of immortal consciousness within us that brings our spiritual potentials into manifestation.

Durga literally refers to difficulty. She takes us across all difficulties like a ship across the sea, the great Vedic metaphor for going beyond all the sorrow of our samsaric or worldly existence. Durga Devi delivers us from darkness to light, from non-being to being, from death to immortality.

Durga as Agni, the Vedic deity of speech, is the power of the divine word, the mantric vibration of cosmic intelligence that is our inner guide and guru. Agni is invoked as the first of the divine powers that manifest the divine light within us. Unless we have awakened that divine flame, will and awareness, our spiritual practices may not take us beyond the illusions of our own minds.

Skanda Mata

Agni is the divine child, Kumara, who holds the potential of immortality. Durga is his cosmic mother. She gives birth to and nurtures the Agni within us by directing the movement of our lives. Agni becomes Skanda or Murugan, the son of Shiva and Parvati who has the nature of fire and destroys all negativity. Skanda is Durga’s son as Skanda Mata, one of the nine forms of Durga worshipped over Navratri.

Tara

This saving power of Ma Durga is also called Tara, who similarly takes us across all difficulties like a ship across the sea. In this regard, Durga represents divine compassion that we need to help us go beyond our karmic limitations and attachments.

Aditi

Ma Durga is Aditi, the great Vedic mother goddess from whom the solar godheads or Adityas arise, who is invoked as a ship to take us to well-being or swasti. Aditi is the unbounded, a-diti, or the infinite. She represents the cosmic space that is the womb and matrix of all existence, yet she is also Mother Earth, who upholds the ground of our own being.

Taking us beyond ignorance and death

Yet the most important action of Ma Durga is to take us beyond death, the greatest of all calamities and its related factors of time and karma. It is not our mere physical death that she saves us from but the spiritual death that is the ignorance of our true nature.

To accomplish this extraordinary task Durga assumes her multi-armed martial form and wields her many weapons, extending to Lord Shiva’s trishula, to destroy all the powers of darkness from our minds and hearts like so many intractable demons.

Ma Durga removes the evil forces that plague us, the forces of duality, division, conflict, and egoism that our mortal world abounds in. Yet the saving grace of Durga will not shield our own ignorance or arrogance that she will purify with her fiery force and burn away from the core of our being. She also protects the earth and its creatures, for which humanity is becoming a great oppressor. We must honour her power and her rule over the entire universe. She does not function for our personal benefit or to fulfil our desires.

It is the greatness of India that Ma Durga represents its inner reality and guiding spiritual force. This same Durga becomes the Yoga Shakti that arises like a flame within the mind, expanding and uplifting our awareness to the universal Self.

May that supreme Durga Shakti arise within all! May we have the receptivity to allow it to both purify our faults and energise our highest aspirations! Jai Ma Durga! – Daily-O, 20 September 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.

What DNA reveals about 65,000 years of Indian ancestry – Meghna N.

October 11, 2026October 11, 2026VOI

What can our DNA tell us about where Indians came from? How far back can scientists trace human migration? And can artificial intelligence help decode the genetic history of one of the world’s most diverse populations?

For Dr. Kumarasamy Thangaraj, a geneticist at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR-CCMB), Hyderabad, these questions have shaped more than three decades of scientific research. A CSIR Bhatnagar Fellow, Dr. Thangaraj has worked extensively on population genetics and human evolution. His research has helped trace the ancestry and migration of Indian populations, including studies of the Andaman tribal populations that provided evidence for an early modern human migration out of Africa through a southern coastal route about 65,000 years ago.

In an interview with The New Indian Express, Dr. Thangaraj discusses India’s genetic ancestry, the Andaman populations, the limits and possibilities of DNA evidence, the health implications of endogamy, and how AI could help scientists analyse the country’s vast genomic diversity. – Meghna Nath

Q : You come from a village in Tamil Nadu. What sparked your interest in biology and genetics first?

A : I was born and brought up in Cheyyur, a village in Tamil Nadu located between Chennai and Puducherry. I completed all my schooling in the village before moving to Chennai for my undergraduate studies and later pursuing higher education, including my PhD. Having spent my early years in a village, I had the opportunity to spend a great deal of time around plants, animals, and diverse ecosystems. This naturally sparked my interest in the life sciences, particularly genetics.

Growing up in a village, I often heard people say that a child has a nose like their mother’s or hair like their father’s. They may not have known the science of genetics, but they understood, through everyday observation, that certain characteristics are passed from parents to their children. The same principle can be seen in plants. When a plant produces a better yield, farmers often preserve its seeds and use them for the next season. These simple, everyday practices are all examples of how genetic characteristics are transmitted from one generation to the next.

Q : What were some of the major milestones in your scientific career, and what led you to focus on the genetic history of Indian populations?

A : My lab has been working on human evolution and medical genetics for more than three decades. One of our major areas of work was studying the enigmatic tribal populations of Andaman and Nicobar islands. There are four tribal groups in the Andaman Islands, including the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese. The Sentinelese continue to live in isolation, so researchers cannot approach them. We had the opportunity to collect samples from three Andaman populations. When we analysed their mitochondrial DNA and other genetic markers, we found evidence that these tribal populations migrated from Africa and reached the Andaman and Nicobar Islands around 65,000 years ago through a southern coastal route. Some groups remained in South Asia, while others continued towards Australia.

Q : What does genetic evidence tell us about when and how modern humans reached the Indian subcontinent after leaving Africa?

A : The evidence indicates that modern humans reached this region around 65,000 years ago. Some groups settled in southern parts of the Indian subcontinent, some moved towards the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and others eventually migrated towards Australia. There are genetic affinities between some present-day populations in South India, the Andaman region and Aboriginal Australians, suggesting connections with these very early migrations.

Q : How can the DNA of people living today act as a record of migrations that happened thousands of years ago?

A : Mutations occur naturally in DNA, and some of these changes can accumulate over generations. When a genetic change is inherited and persists in a population, it can be passed from one generation to the next. By studying these genetic variations and comparing them across different populations and with ancient DNA, we can infer genetic relationships and reconstruct aspects of population history.

For example, if we sequence an ancient DNA sample that is 50,000 years old and compare it with genomes from contemporary populations, we can identify genetic changes that have accumulated over the intervening 50,000 years. By examining these genetic differences and shared patterns of variation, we can gain insights into the relationships among populations, as well as their evolutionary history and migration patterns.

Q : Your research has reshaped our understanding of the ancestry of present-day Indians. What were some of the most significant findings?

A : There are several important findings. One is that genetic evidence indicates that the earliest modern human populations in the region were connected to out-of-Africa migrations. Our research also challenged the idea of an Aryan invasion in which a population from outside India arrived and displaced or pushed existing populations towards the south. Genetic evidence does not support that simplistic model. Another important finding is that present-day Indians have evolved from two ancient ancestries—Ancestral South Indian (ASI) and Ancestral North Indian (ANI)—and these two ancestries admixed around 2,000–4,000 years ago. Today, populations across India share genetic ancestry from both ASI and ANI, irrespective of caste or tribal identity. This also illustrates the idea of “unity in diversity” from a genetic perspective. There is also an important medical dimension. For roughly the last 2,000 years, many Indian populations have practised endogamy—marriage within the group. Because of this, certain mutations can become more frequent within particular populations, and some of these may be responsible for population-specific diseases.

Q : India has extraordinary genetic diversity. How much of this diversity reflects ancient migration, later population mixing and isolation?

A : Population-specific marriage practices have existed for a very long time. The caste system, as we understand it today, developed later, but endogamy existed before the present-day caste identities emerged. Communities may have different names and identities today, but these identities do not necessarily represent separate ancient populations. Genetic studies show that different Indian populations have shared ancestry and have experienced admixture at different points in history. Therefore, genetics should not be used to assume that present-day caste or community identities correspond directly to distinct ancient biological populations.

Q : AI is increasingly being used to analyse large genomic datasets. Could it help identify migration patterns or ancestral relationships that conventional methods may have missed?

A : Geneticists have been using various statistical tools to analyse genetic data. What we now call artificial intelligence provides opportunities to analyse large datasets much more efficiently and quickly. However, AI itself does not provide the final scientific conclusion. Scientists have to interpret the results and draw conclusions.

Q : What are the risks of AI producing misleading conclusions from genetic data?

A : There are risks. If something goes wrong during analysis, AI or any computational method can produce incorrect information. That is why we don’t rely on a single method. We use multiple methods or approaches. If two or three independent methods produce consistent results, we have greater confidence in the finding. If one method produces a different result, that needs to be investigated. Ultimately, scientists have to validate and interpret the results.

Q : What are the biggest unanswered questions about Indian genetic history that new genomics technologies and AI could help address?

A : India is inhabited by 4,635 populations. Since these populations have been practising endogamy for 2,000 years, each population is expected to acquire population-specific mutations. Some of these may be associated with genetic diseases, some with responses to commonly used drugs, some with adaptation to the environment, and some may provide resistance or susceptibility to infectious diseases. We have now sequenced the whole genomes of 10,000 individuals from 83 populations and identified 130 million variations. This means that we need to sequence every single population to understand their health and design precision medicine. Therefore, we need to generate genetic data from every single population. Once we generate sufficiently large datasets, AI and other computational tools can be used to analyse them and identify patterns that may otherwise take a very long time to detect. AI alone cannot generate the data; it can only help us analyse the data.

Q : After decades of studying India’s genetic history, what is the one thing you want the public to understand about where Indians came from—and what our DNA can and cannot tell us about our ancestry?

A : One thing is very clear from our studies: we all descended from early humans who migrated out of Africa. Present-day populations have mixed genetic ancestry. Genetically, we are all connected, supporting the idea of unity in diversity. Genetic testing can help identify disease-causing mutations in appropriate situations. Once a mutation is identified, there can be opportunities for counselling and preventive measures to reduce the risk of passing certain genetic conditions to the next generation. – The New Indian Express, 30 September 2026

› Meghna Nath is a Chennai journalist specializing in education, transport, civic issues and human-interest stories.

How secularism has failed Hindus and India – Arvind Sharma

October 7, 2026October 7, 2026VOI

A glaring example of the anti-Hindu nature of Indian secularism is provided by the way Hindu temples have been taken over by the state governments. The extent of this practice is simply mind-boggling. What is even more disturbing is that some of the states, where the BJP is in power, have not discontinued the practice. – Prof. Arvind Sharma

Part One

How secularism has failed India

This question can no longer be dodged.

Secularism, in its broadest connotation, was held up as the guiding principle of the new country when it came into existence in 1947, and of the new republic in 1950 when it adopted a Constitution, which was secular in every respect except in name, which too was added to it in 1976, by the Constitution (Forty-Second Amendment) Act.

But what is secularism? The fundamental principle of secularism is the separation of Church (or religion), and State. The state stays away from religion, and religion stays away from the state. All the citizens become subject to secular law as equals, religion becomes a private matter, which is kept out of the public square, and religious peace is thereby secured.

Let us now examine how well this principle has worked in India. What does the record of the past 75 years reveal in this regard? This is a considerable slice of time, almost a third of the period of British rule over India.

Has the Indian state stayed out of religion?

Let us take the case of just one state such as Tamil Nadu. Tamil Nadu has about 44,000 temples. Out of these, 38,000 are run by the Tamil Nadu government. If we spread our net wider, we discover that around 34,500 temples are under the control of the state of Karnataka. It has been further calculated that around 90,000 temples in the five southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana are run by the state governments.

One is compelled to ask if this degree of state control of temples is consistent with secularism. Is it a tenet of Indian secularism, that it is only the central government which will stay out of religion, and not the state governments? I know of no such principle. Both the central and the state governments represent the state in India.

Sometimes it is argued that the governments take temples over to fight corruption, but other secular democracies do not take over a religious institution if they suspect foul play; they take the institution to court, precisely because a secular government is supposed to stay out of running religious institutions. So far as corruption is concerned, the likelihood of the state governments themselves getting corrupted by running the temples cannot be discounted either. According to one source, the various state governments collected a total of around Rs 6,000 crore from the temples in the year 2020. According to another source, Rs 2,300 crore from the Tirupati temple were transferred to the treasury of the Andhra government in 2021. With such astronomical amounts of money floating around, the possibility of corruption cannot be overlooked. Just imagine that the annual hundi collection of Tirupati is Rs 1,310 crore, of Vaishno Devi Rs 520 crore, and of Siddhivinayak Temple Rs 98 crore. There are good reasons why a secular state needs to stay out of religion.

Can the Indian state still be considered secular? Consider this. In both Delhi and West Bengal, both Hindu and Muslim priests are receiving monthly stipends from the respective state governments. This also seems to be a serious violation of the secular principle.

A secular legal system is the next feature one needs to consider in this context. This is the necessary legal basis of the secular state. In keeping with this realisation, the Constitution directed the government to move towards evolving a Uniform Civil Code for all its citizens in keeping with Directive Principle No 44. In the absence of such a code, a Muslim can have four wives in India but other citizens are restricted to monogamy, to mention just one anomaly. The principle of equality also has implications for the running of religious institutions by the state. Only Hindu institutions, it seems, have been taken over by the state governments; Muslim and Christian institutions have been left untouched, although they are also subject to Article 25 of the Indian Constitution.

A remarkable example of the inequality in this respect has come to light recently. The St. Stephen’s College is a well-known Christian institution of higher education in Delhi. According to newspaper reports, it receives substantial funding from the Indian government; some reports put the extent of support as high as ninety per cent. However, fifty per cent of the student body is said to be Christian. According to reports, the college now wants to influence the procedures for admission for the other fifty percent. One wonders how all this can be reconciled with the idea of secularism.

Has Indian secularism succeeded in securing religious peace as promised? The record is extremely distressing in this regard. Over the years, Hindus have killed Muslims and Christians. The names of Akhlaq and Pehlu Khan come to mind, who were lynched by Hindu mobs, and of the Christian missionary Graham Staines, who was killed by Dara Singh. Muslims have also killed Hindus, as the film The Kashmir Files documented, and as happened recently in Udaipur and Amravati. Christians have also killed Hindus, as in the case of Swami Laksmananada, in Kandhamal in Odisha. It is remarkable that a secular state has succeeded in making members of both the majority and minority community equally insecure.

In other words, it could be argued that secularism has failed in India, but can we conclude from this that secularism has failed India?

It has been said that the trouble with Christianity is that it has never been tried. The same could be said of secularism in India. The parallel is tempting.

Just as, by and large, the impressive ecclesiastical structures of Christianity pay lip-service to the principles of Christianity, but hardly ever seem to abide by them, according to its critics. Similarly, the impressive political structures of Indian democracy, regularly pays lip-service to the principles of secularism, but seems to ignore its basic principles in the actual functioning of it.

The secular foundation of the Indian nation has been receiving one jolt after another in the form of The Kashmir Files, the hijab controversy, the Gyanvapi mosque episode, the Nupur Sharma controversy, and now its gory aftermath—for how long will it be able to withstand such shocks?

The government or governments should immediately get out of the business of running Hindu temples, as by not doing so they violate one of the basic tenets of secularism, even as they invoke it. Similarly, equality of all citizens before the law must be established, which is to say that a Uniform Civil Code in some form must be introduced as soon as possible, before the so-called secularism collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.- Firstpost, 24 July 2022

Part Two

The anti-Hindu nature of Indian secularism

In an earlier post, I tried to draw attention to what I perceived to be the failure of Indian secularism. In this post, I would like to identify its anti-Hindu character.

I admit that the claim, that Indian secularism is perceived as hostile to Hinduism, is a controversial claim, and therefore, I would like now to provide the evidence in support of this claim.

Soon after independence, the Hindu community rebuilt the Somnath Temple which had been destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazna in the 11th century, and also subsequently by other rulers. Jawaharlal Nehru, first prime minister of India, not only declined to participate in the celebration but also tried to prevent the then president of India from participating in it, whereas Pandit Nehru had no compunction in attending functions of a similar kind when organised by minority religions.

Although the Indian Constitution directs the government to endeavour to establish a uniform civil code for all Indians, the then government only consolidated Hindu personal law and left the minorities out of that exercise. This was, and is, perceived as discrimination against the Hindus. It leads to the anomaly that a Muslim in India can have four wives, but not the followers of other religions in India. It is not so much that the followers of other religions want to have four wives; the feeling of resentment springs from the discrimination involved.

Another aspect of the Constitution, which has caused considerable anguish in the Hindu community, is that the rights of the minorities to run their own institutions are clearly safeguarded in the Constitution but no such protection is afforded to the institutions run by the Hindu majority. A glaring example of how this works out in the field is provided by the Ramakrishna Mission. This quintessentially Hindu body petitioned the courts in 1980 to have itself declared a non-Hindu minority religion (following Ramkrishnaism), in order to benefit from the protection of Article 30 of the Indian Constitution, which allows Muslim and Christian institutions to safeguard their autonomy. The request was finally turned down by the Supreme Court of India in 1995, after the Calcutta High Court had accepted it. The fact that a Hindu institution had to claim to be a minority institution to safeguard its independence speaks volumes.

According to most scholars, the case of Shah Bano disillusioned many Indian intellectuals regarding the commitment of the Indian government to secularism. Shah Bano was the name of a Muslim divorcee, who petitioned Indian courts for maintenance under India’s secular laws and the request was granted by the Supreme Court. The government, however, under pressure from the Muslim lobby in India, introduced legislation in 1985 to modify it in accordance with Islamic law. The prolonged debate around the issue, and the volte-face of the government on the issue, seriously undermined popular confidence in the secular claims of the Indian government. One Muslim member of the cabinet, Arif Muhammad Khan, resigned over the issue. He now serves as the Governor of Kerala. According to him, the Shah Bano case was a point of departure on the issue of secularism.

The Indian government has rarely shown such legal sensitivity in cases involving Hindus.

Kashmir has been a bone of contention between India and Pakistan for a long period. It could be argued that Kashmir as a Muslim majority state within India, which is a largely Hindu country, is a strong factor in keeping India secular. However, a chain of events from 1989 to 1991 led to the expulsion of a large number of Hindus from the state, amidst violent circumstances in which many Hindus lost their lives and those that survived the convulsion had to be accommodated in camps in Jammu. The spectacle on TV of unarmed Hindus being driven out of the Kashmir Valley to threats of rape and murder (some of which were carried out) was not the best advertisement for Indian secularism. The plight of the exiled Hindus has been captured in a film, released recently under the title The Kashmir Files and creates the impression that there is no place for Hindus if they are in a minority anywhere in secular India.

It is difficult to imagine a more serious violation of the secular principle. It has led to such potentially incendiary developments, as money collected from Hindu temples being used to fund Haj trips for Muslims, and trips to the Holy Land for Christians. It is as if the looting of the Hindu temples, once associated with Muslim and British rule, continues unchecked in a secular India.

I hope enough evidence has now been provided to convince the sceptical reader that the charge regarding the anti-Hindu nature of Indian secularism should be taken seriously. – Firstpost, 21 August 2022

Part Three

India should have adopted pluralism rather than secularism

India famously claims to be a secular state. What is the basis for this claim? The claim rests on the grounds that the present Constitution of India declares it as such in the Preamble. Two objections could be raised against this claim. The first, that the original version of the Constitution did not contain this word in the Preamble and it was inserted into the Constitution during Emergency (1975-1977) imposed by Mrs Indira Gandhi. Emergency is generally regarded as a dark period for Indian democracy and therefore the insertion remains questionable. The second could be that although the Constitution claims to be secular, some of its provisions favour the minority religions over the religion of the majority, and therefore cannot be accepted as a genuinely secular document.

These are heavily contested points, so let me make it clear that, for the purpose of this column at the moment, we will accept the statement that at face value India is a secular state.

The point to note then is that the concept of secularism arose in the Western world, in a context in which religion dominated the public square. Religion in the Western world, as a term, connotes exclusive religious identity. In the broader context of the Abrahamic religious traditions, one cannot be a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim at the same time, although all of them are monotheistic religions and believe in only one God. In the narrower context of the Christian world, one cannot be a Catholic or a Protestant at the same time, although both accept Jesus Christ as their Saviour. Such exclusive religious identification, in the Christian world, did not pose a problem so long as Roman Catholicism remained the dominant form of Christianity, but the situation changed with the Protestant revolution ushered in by Martin Luther (1483-1546). The Reformation, as it was called, ultimately led to enormous political conflict when different principalities in Europe started espousing the cause of different sects. The idea of the separation of the church or religion from the state, which is the key conceptual element of secularism, then arose as a way of dealing with the religious conflict generated by these developments.

This concept was then applied to India, where the dominant concept was one of dharma, which does not insist on an exclusive religious identity. One could challenge this point by insisting that the concept of religion, as a replacement for dharma, had been successfully introduced in India during the British period through the decadal censuses; that the introduction of the Western concept of secularism was therefore justified to deal with the problems of religious life in India. More than seventy years have passed since secularism was adopted as a possible solution to the problem, but it does not seem to have produced the desired outcome so far.

This raises the question: What went wrong? Could it be that the close connection between European secularism and Christianity was overlooked when the concept was applied to India? Was Indian reality perceived through a European lens and the European solution applied to an Indian problem unthinkingly, thereby creating or aggravating the very problem it was meant to solve in Europe, in India; that the treatment created the disease? Was the fact also overlooked that Europe faced a sectarian problem, not a religious one? That is to say, Europe faced the problem of conflict among different sects, all of whom professed Christianity, while India faced the problem of conflict among various religions. Could a solution meant to resolve an inter-sectarian problem, be applied to an inter-religious problem, such as the one faced by India?

Let us, however, adopt a historical approach to the issue for a moment. Then it becomes clear that just after World War II, when India became independent and the Constitution was framed, the key term invoked in matters of religion was secularism. Let us now fast-forward to our own times. Is the word secularism still the flavour of the season? To a certain extent it is, but there has also been a new development. In the interval, the West has witnessed what has been sometimes referred to as “marbling”. The word refers to the fact that the West, which was previously monochromatic, has changed. The West, which was overwhelmingly Christian until the end of World War II, has now sizeable minorities following religions other than Christianity within its borders, with the result that it finds itself as much in an inter-religious situation as an inter-sectarian one. The word now increasingly being used, as a response to this new situation, is pluralism.

What then is the difference between secularism and pluralism? Secularism wants to keep religion in general, and any religion in particular, out of the public square; pluralism wants to find a place for all of the religions, and ideologies, in the public square. Both want to avoid the public square being dominated by any religion (or sect or ideology); secularism wants to achieve this result by keeping religion out of it altogether, pluralism wants to prevent it from being dominated by any one religion by allowing all an equal place at the table.

Perhaps our Constitution would be more in sync with the dharmic traditions of India if it adopted pluralism rather than secularism as its guiding principle. Perhaps it is not too late to make the change. – Firstpost, 14 Novemeber 2021

› Prof. Dr. Arvind Sharma, formerly of the IAS, is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal Canada, where he has taught for over thirty years. He has also taught in Australia and the United States and at Nalanda University in India. He has published extensively in the fields of Indian religions and world religions.

Fire Behind Folded Hands: The Gandhi India never understood – Acharya Prashant

October 4, 2026October 4, 2026VOI

I am no great fan of Gandhi. As a student at IIM Ahmedabad I spent half my time at his Sabarmati Ashram, and like any curious student I have kept questioning him ever since; I have disagreed with him on more than one count. But criticism is one thing and slander quite another. … Einstein once said that generations to come would scarcely believe such a man had ever walked the earth in flesh and blood. Given how he is spoken of in parts of his own country today, those words are coming true sooner than anyone expected. – Acharya Prashant

Gandhiji’s 157th birth anniversary falls on 2nd October. The United Nations observes it as the International Day of Non-Violence. Few faces are more familiar to Indians than his. His image appears on currency notes and classroom walls, and most people carry some early memory of him, an essay written in school or a story told at home. He came to be called the Father of the Nation, and for decades discourses have been delivered in his name, speeches made, seminars held. Many of them carry a gentle lament that the country is forgetting his thought. The truth may be quieter than that. The country is not so much forgetting him as never having quite understood him.

Out of that half-understanding, two Gandhis have grown. The first is garlanded every October as a gentle saint who preached non-violence to the world. The second, in some town or other, has shoes and filth thrown at his statue, a villain whose every failing is paraded and whose every choice is called a betrayal. Between the garland and the stone, the man himself has gone missing.

Truth is not an ideology. Ahimsa is not an ideology either. When lofty words are attached to a person, then whenever that person is rejected, for whatever reason, the words are rejected along with him and fall into disrepute. That is what has happened here. Satya and ahimsa have been bound so tightly to one man that the words now rise and fall with his reputation, and whatever is thrown at him lands on them too.

Truth does not mean that if someone asks how much money I have in my pocket, and I have 555 rupees, I tell him 555. Ahimsa does not mean that someone slaps me and I say, never mind, I will not hit back, please sit, have some jaggery, drink some water. Neither word is a rule of behaviour, and neither began with Gandhi.

What, then, is truth? At one end of every duality sits the ego, the one who says “I”. When that ego turns and looks at itself, the duality it was holding up is seen to have no ground. That seeing is truth. There is no doctrine in it and no principle to be carried around; it is immediate, and it has to happen afresh each time.

I will bring nothing new about Gandhi. Whatever has long been said about him, I will only try to bring some clarity to it.

A Word Older Than the Man

Gandhi did not give birth to the word “ahimsa”. It is very old. The Buddha came before Gandhi, and ahimsa is older than the Buddha; it is there in the Upanishads. So ahimsa certainly cannot be about becoming weak or fearful. Its real meaning has to be understood.

Human beings, this species, first commit violence against themselves, and every other violence starts from there. Ahimsa is not ruining one’s own life; it is being sensitive towards oneself. The ego that sits within, the sense of “I am”, must keep a love for liberation. That is ahimsa towards oneself. To sell oneself from within and accept bondage is violence. To say, I will not be sold and I will not bow, and to keep moving against bondage all one’s life, is love for oneself, a love that wants one’s freedom rather than one’s comfort. That very love is ahimsa. Ahimsa means first defeating the enemy that sits within, the weakness within, and fighting that real enemy fiercely; and it includes, where necessary, taking on the one outside as well. When this love is present within, it shows up in every relationship one has.

What has been attempted all these years instead? Nothing within, and ahimsa performed only on the outside. So a known bribe-taker is told to his face that no one is more honourable, and an aunt who wishes one ruin is assured that one knows how deeply she cares. All of this is violence, yet exactly this counterfeit conduct has been taught as ahimsa. People will recite a couplet and explain that ahimsa means never hurting anyone’s heart. In real ahimsa, one may have to hurt not only the heart but, if needed, the body too, as the Gita’s own battlefield shows.

The idea that has settled into the culture, that one must speak sweetly to everyone and respect everyone, is itself a form of violence. Speak sweetly to Duryodhana? With him the conversation will be through arrows. Respect him? He should get the mace, and on the thigh. Is he even worthy of respect? Perhaps my love for him lies precisely in refusing him respect, because if I keep respecting him, why would he ever change?

Gandhi called the Gita his mother, and the Gita is spoken on a battlefield where arrows are about to rain. If ahimsa meant that no one’s heart must ever be hurt, Gandhi could never have given that book such a place in his life. In the Gita and the war it leads into, desires and ambitions are hurt at every step. Duryodhana wants the throne of Hastinapur, and Krishna tells Arjuna to fight, because this man is not fit and the kingdom must not pass into his hands. His heart is certainly being hurt. Hearts are the least of it; in the war that followed, so many were killed, and by so many different methods. One method was used with Karna, another with Drona, another with Bhishma, yet another with Duryodhana. No pattern of conduct, then, can be called ahimsa. If conduct were ahimsa, the Gita too would stand condemned as a violent book.

Blood has been shed near Delhi more than once. Arjuna brought down bodies on that ground, and centuries later Timur brought down bodies in Delhi itself, in the massacre of 1398. The difference between the two is great, and it has to be understood. Arjuna fights after his own confusion, ignorance and ego have been laid bare before him. He is not killing to serve a personal interest. He is fighting for dharma, and by dharma I do not mean a sect, a community or a religion; I mean that which is right. Timur kills to expand an empire and spread his dominion. The same act can be violence, and it can be ahimsa. Whether violence has happened is not measured by whether blood was shed; it is measured by whether the mind stands with consciousness or against it. Had Arjuna gone to war for a throne, out of ego, that would have been violence. Having heard Krishna and understood him, what he did on that field was ahimsa.

Gandhi saw the danger of confusing ahimsa with weakness. In “The Doctrine of the Sword“, written for Young India in August 1920, he said that where the only choice lay between cowardice and violence, he would advise violence. He knew cowardice could arrive wearing the name of ahimsa, and he wanted it understood that cowardice is not ahimsa; better violence than cowardice. At the same time he held that ahimsa is certainly higher than violence.

The meaning Gandhi gave to ahimsa was sound, but it stayed at the level of behaviour. At its root, ahimsa is paramarthik (highest truth, ultimate reality), and there it asks for something far more radical. Where there is an other, I too am there; the very existence of the other means ego, means “I am”. And the other, simply by being other, is held at a distance as a stranger. That estrangement is the violence. So ahimsa, at this depth, is neither keeping good relations with the other nor even loving the other. It is seeing that what makes the other an other, what makes him a stranger, is the ego, and that this ego is false. Ahimsa, finally, means there is no other.

Gandhi never spoke at that depth. His gifts lay elsewhere than in philosophy; when he wrote on the Gita, I find innumerable holes in his reading of it. Whether he understood it inwardly, I cannot say. When I visited his Anasakti Ashram in Uttarakhand and read his words displayed there, they spoke more of practice than of philosophical depth. But he knew the worth of non-attachment, and that alone sets him apart from most. Those who lived at that depth recognised something in him. Ramana Maharshi, the tallest sage of the first half of the last century, held him in deep regard, and Gandhi, for his part, would send people who came to him with restless minds off to Ramana’s ashram. Understanding and living are not the same thing. His life went further than his words about ahimsa, and it is in the life that he has to be read.

The Man Who Would Not Bend

It should not be forgotten that Gandhi did not personally hate anyone. But he was fiercely confrontational. He never retreated; he would plant himself in front of you and stay there. Violent he was not, but confrontational he certainly was, and not only with the British. He held firm against Mountbatten and Jinnah, and against the Congress itself. Many times he stood against the people of India. When riots broke out, he would place himself before the crowd and demand that the killing stop. By the definition of ahimsa now in circulation, even Gandhi would not qualify as non-violent, because he too would go and dig in. His message was plain: you are wrong, you will have to bend, and if you will not, I am fasting from this moment. I may die, but I am telling you that you are wrong.

If he is to be remembered, he should be remembered neither for truth nor for ahimsa but for his insistence, his aagrah (pertinacity). Learn aagrah from Gandhi, not ahimsa. Once something seemed right to him, it seemed right; whether it truly was right is a separate question, but having found it right, he stood on it. His name is usually linked to truth and non-violence, but the resolve made him unforgettable, and everyone dreaded that stubbornness. A thin, frail, elderly man, quick on his feet, stands there immovable, and it is not only the British who are unnerved. Indians are unnerved too. Beyond his opponents, Jinnah, Mountbatten and Churchill, even the members of his own party worry that he may take a stand yet again over something new.

Insistence by itself is no virtue; every stubborn ego insists. His was worth something because it was first turned against himself, and then carried outward in widening circles, each costing him more than the last.

The first circle was himself. That insistence did not come to him ready-made. If ahimsa begins with refusing to sell oneself, the first battle had to be fought within himself. In his early years he could not stand up to others and would often give way under pressure. Of very ordinary build, he had no commanding presence, and speaking before people frightened him. Even after studying in Britain, he was so afraid of arguing in court that he took to drafting petitions instead; in his own account, his voice would not come out. That same man went on to speak to vast gatherings across the country for the rest of his life.

In his youth he stole money from home, ate meat, went to a brothel, told lies. His desire was once so strong that at his father’s final hour he could not remain by his side and was drawn away to his wife. At one stage his faith in his own religion wavered so far that the Christian friends urging him to convert nearly won him over. In England he admired the English so much that he spent a good deal of money only to learn their manners and acquire their clothes; later that same man stood up to the English so firmly that they came to dread him. In 1906 he entered brahmacharya, and understood it in its deeper sense: for him it meant not only restraint of the body but freedom from the afflictions of the mind, without which the vow meant nothing.

Every ordinary failing was present in him, and he admitted each of them himself. Seeing his failings was not enough; he set himself against each one. Very few people, while being called Mahatma, have the courage to lay their own lives open for anyone to see. He kept saying that he was experimenting, that he did not know. He said his life was his message, and he let that life be read, flaws included. He meant it as an invitation: what had been possible for him is possible for anyone. That an entirely ordinary man, a man of clay, kept overcoming his weaknesses one after another and kept moving forward is the thing about him that moves me most.

The next circle was his own household. With his wife, things did not settle for many years, because, coming from the family background he did, he tried to dominate her. Kasturba resisted him quietly and would not be cowed, and he later said that he learnt the lesson of non-violence from her when he tried to bend her to his will. Only after decades of marriage did the two arrive at harmony and a deeper affection. He was not very successful as a father either, and he said so himself.

The same household saw him at his most unbending. In 1915, soon after founding his first ashram in India, at Kochrab near Ahmedabad, he admitted a Dalit family with their little daughter, Lakshmi. Donors withdrew their money, residents protested, and Kasturba herself resisted. He would not yield. If this child could not stay, then nobody would stay; everyone could leave, and he would leave too. He was ready to close the ashram rather than turn the family away, and he later raised Lakshmi as his own daughter. His stand was simple. What is right is right, and if others would not accept it, he would not let things go on as they were; at the very least, he would not cooperate. That was his whole method, non-cooperation. If he could not stop a wrong from happening, he could at least withdraw his hand from it.

Was he, then, a saint or a politician? The question assumes that sainthood is a profession, which it is not. One cannot ask a saint what hours his sainthood keeps, whether it is a five-day week, how many days of leave it allows. Saintliness is not a role but a devotion to the truth, and one so devoted will do outwardly whatever the time and circumstances demand. When the circle had to widen to a whole nation, the time demanded that he enter politics and lead the country, and he did that as well.

He came to that scale slowly. In South Africa he was an ordinary lawyer of no particular natural gift who saw injustice and stood up against it, and in time his practice flourished and respect came with it. He left all that and came home, and for his first years in India he mostly watched, trying to understand what was actually happening to the country. Once he understood, he asked himself how he could go to these people in a suit and coat. If he was to serve the poorest, he would go to them as one of them.

At the scale of a nation, non-cooperation became his gift to those who had nothing. He taught dignity to the class that had no resources. He told them, you have nothing else to resist with, but you have your life. You have neither weapons nor money, neither a voice in society nor political power, but you do have your own life; stand your ground with it. That is his contribution. And what did he himself have? A small length of cloth, spun by his own hands, and a resolve that said: I will stand by what I find right.

His own life was the stake he put down most often. Insistence of that kind is no small thing, and that much strength comes only when one insists on what one sincerely finds right. Nobody can fast unto death for a whim. Were someone to announce “I will not eat” over some shallow matter, within two days the sound of a refrigerator door would be heard from somewhere in the house.

At the Round Table Conference in London in 1931, the Congress sent him as its sole representative. The photographs are still there to see. Most of the others are in suits, warm winter suits at that, and in their midst sits one barely clothed man who has left every one of them feeling small. The loincloth was a choice; he had given up not only foreign clothes but even the ordinary dress of the common man. The bareness itself is his weapon, and he has used it deliberately, as if to say: I am India, and I am alone; I have neither numbers nor force, nor even money, and yet before me all of you are ashamed. Churchill refused even to meet him on that visit, having earlier called it nauseating to see this lawyer “striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace”. Churchill could not bear him. Were Gandhi to stand before an audience today, people would listen spellbound; they might call much of what he said impractical, but none of them would call him lightweight.

The last circle was the hardest, because it held his own people. He resigned from the Congress in 1934, thirteen years before independence, and though he held no office in it thereafter, his word still carried great weight. His work now, he said, was social reform: removing untouchability from India, cleaning away the filth of the villages and of the body and mind. He took up the name Harijan, from the poet-saint Narsinh Mehta, for the Dalits and asked that wells, temples and schools be opened to them. One may certainly say he should have done more, and I agree; but nobody is stopping anyone from doing more today, and it is not right to discredit what one man did.

In his final years he was struggling against communal hatred itself. When riots tore through Noakhali, he went there and stayed, refusing to let the killing continue. On 15 August 1947, while Delhi celebrated, he was in riot-torn Calcutta, fasting and praying. When the country was rejoicing in its freedom, he was walking against the violence of his own countrymen, and in the end he took the bullets for it. A life like this ought to be hard to misread. India has managed to misread it twice over.

The Garland and the Stone

The stone comes first, and those who throw it are, for the most part, the least interested in Gandhi. Most have never read him and have no wish to. They are trying to build something, and he stands in the way. If one wants a society that is illiberal and split along communal lines, the symbol of liberalism and communal harmony has to be dragged down first. Wherever ignorance means to rule, anyone who stands for light becomes an enemy. Gandhi is not only a person; he is a thought, and the stone is aimed at the thought.

Its heaviest charge is that his ahimsa made Indians cowards. Why did so many fall to so few in the first place? This was an entire subcontinent, not only today’s India but Pakistan, Bangladesh and more besides. The British came from a few small islands off the north-western edge of Europe, by sea, on voyages of many months, long before electricity or the telegraph, and before long they had made Indians their subjects and ruled them for close to two centuries. Something had rotted within the Indian condition, some deep inner weakness, a want of discipline, a faith in caste and similar follies, all of them the ego’s comforts. That is why it gave way so easily. If the causes of that defeat were still present in 1921, how was the same people to defeat the British now, when British power had only grown?

The India of a hundred years ago, the India of 1922, has to be seen beside the Britain of that time, the empire on which the sun never set, fresh from its victory over Germany. What would one have had him do, incite violence? Should he have told these hungry, ragged, weakened, destitute people to take to the streets and drive the British out by force? The Raj was run largely by Indians, many of them so hungry that they would do anything to fill their bellies, and the informers who kept delivering the revolutionaries into custody were Indians too. With no food, no schooling, sunk in a hundred superstitions and drowning in caste and squalor, how could such a people have been led into a violent mass uprising? So, step by step, he asked them for civil disobedience. Do not fight them, he said, but do not obey them either. One may say there was one Bhagat Singh and there could have been ten thousand; but there were not, and had there been, it was not Gandhi who would have held them back.

This is also why he did what he did at Chauri Chaura. In February 1922, when a mob set fire to the police station there and policemen died in the blaze, he called off the Non-Cooperation Movement at its height, to the dismay of many in the Congress. He began each movement on his own judgment and ended it on his own judgment, and what his judgment saw this time was that the impatience was still there, the indiscipline was still there, and no one seemed willing to ask why India had been defeated in the first place; the ego would rather blame an enemy than look at itself.

Having ruled out the gun, he chose carefully where to strike instead. Indian cotton had long fed Britain’s textile mills, and India was the largest market for the cloth those mills sold back. The bonfires of fine foreign cloth he led people to light were no small matter; Manchester knew his name well. His reasoning was simple. These were traders, and they were hungry for money; London was growing fat on India’s plunder, and he would stop the plunder. His countrymen had no guns, and he would not ask them to fire any, because it was they who would die, and in lakhs. So he would strike where it hurt. Khadi and the salt satyagraha both served that purpose.

As for cowardice, he was its sharpest critic; it was he who would advise violence sooner than cowardice. The charge also proves too much. If turning first to face oneself makes a man a coward, the accusation cannot stop at Gandhi; it would have to be laid against the whole line of seers and sages before him, from the Buddha onward. The very word Jina means a conqueror, one who has conquered himself. How does facing one’s own reality make anyone a coward? Every one of them taught that the greatest courage lies in first conquering oneself. How many of them will you kill?

The second charge, that he appeased Pakistan, rests mostly on a sum of money, one his assassin named as his reason. After Partition the government withheld ₹55 crore, Pakistan’s remaining share of undivided India’s cash balances, until his last fast in January 1948 led to its release. Had the money not been paid, would Pakistan have given up its claim on Kashmir? Did it send in the raiders because it was about to receive the money? The raiders had entered Kashmir in October 1947, three months before the money was released. Pakistan would have done in Kashmir what it did regardless. The only difference would have been the loss of the higher ground India stood upon, that of a nation that honours its word. Nothing would have been gained by keeping the money; it was owed in any case.

Did Gandhi make Pakistan, then? No one insisted more firmly than Gandhi that India would not be divided; if there was one man Jinnah dreaded, it was Gandhi. Writing in Harijan in May 1942, he called the vivisection of India a sin. By 1946 and 1947, though, the fires of communalism had been stoked so far that killings were spreading across whole provinces, and two communities steeped in hatred of each other could not be held together by one man’s will. If partition was to be averted, the right steps were needed decades earlier. One may still argue that he misjudged something along the way; that would be an error of judgment, and nothing more.

Criticism of him is fair, and he invited it all his life. I am no great fan of his. As a student at IIM Ahmedabad I spent half my time at his Sabarmati Ashram, and like any curious student I have kept questioning him ever since; I have disagreed with him on more than one count. But criticism is one thing and slander quite another. In recent years, around Gandhi Jayanti, statues have been defaced in several places and filth flung on his face. He was killed once, and that, it seems, was not enough; now attempts are made to kill him in other ways. But certain things cannot be killed. He hid nothing. What he did, he disclosed himself, in his books or whenever he was asked, and today he is mocked for the very things he confessed. Before judging a man who concealed so little, one might ask how much of one’s own life one would be willing to lay open. Einstein once said that generations to come would scarcely believe such a man had ever walked the earth in flesh and blood. Given how he is spoken of in parts of his own country today, those words are coming true sooner than anyone expected.

The garland is gentler, and no truer. Was he a Mahatma, a rishi? I would not call him either, and he never claimed to be. People grew fond of him and called him Mahatma, and that was their doing. He never asked for it, and he never encouraged any notion of divinity about himself. It was Rabindranath, by the usual account, who gave him the title, and Subhas Chandra Bose who called him the Father of the Nation, over Azad Hind Radio in 1944. The argument today proceeds as if he had demanded these honours and his critics were exposing an impostor, when in truth he sought none of them. Those who knew him best never made a god of him either. Nehru, Patel and Bose all disagreed with him, some of them sharply. Rabindranath himself opposed the charkha and distrusted Gandhi’s nationalism, and still held him in deep regard. They argued with him without reviling him, and that healthy exchange is a long way from the sloganeering of today.

As a title, “Father of the Nation” expresses affection more than it makes a literal claim. The country may be new as a political entity, but the nation is ancient, and its roots go back to the rishis who composed the Upanishads and the hymns, and to Truth itself. If this nation has fathers, they are those. Gandhi, who sought none of these honours, would hardly have claimed otherwise.

The title came from the people, and so did the stature. Had anyone higher than Gandhi stood up, the people would have followed; no one did. For decades a poor country gave to him in trust, not only industrialists but farmers with almost nothing, a few paise, a rupee or two, as an offering to the cause of freedom. They watched a frail old man keep walking from one village to the next, past seventy and on towards eighty, and they grew fond of him. Were earlier generations simply fools to revere him? They were not; they saw something in that man. No one who walked like that, at that age, for that many years, could be dismissed lightly.

To see him as a man is also to see his limits. Many of his ideas, particularly in economics, would not serve a modern nation if applied today. When I was studying textile engineering at IIT Delhi, the question of how India’s textile industry fell so far behind would often come up, and his principles played a real part in the answer. A handloom cannot compete with a power loom, and a nation cannot become internationally competitive by spinning the charkha. But that does not make him a villain; he did not ask people to wear khadi because he wished India harm. He offered what he truly believed would serve the country, and the man deserves credit for putting forward with courage whatever he found right, and for leading a nation to act on it.

Nor did he win freedom single-handed, as a popular film song would suggest. The Second World War, the naval mutiny of 1946, the revolutionaries who took the path of violence and the efforts of Subhas Chandra Bose all brought the date nearer. But would freedom have come on the same day had there been no Gandhi? To say that Gandhi alone brought freedom is wrong, and to say that he contributed nothing is far more wrong. The complaint that his stature left other freedom fighters in shadow may hold some truth. He grew into so vast a tree that much beneath it went unseen. The answer is to bring their stories into the light and honour them fully, and none of that requires reviling him. As Kabir Saheb put it: saar saar ko gahi rahai, thotha dei udaay. Keep the grain and let the husk blow away.

The stone and the garland look like opposites, but they do the same work. Whoever throws the stone and whoever hangs the garland are both spared the trouble of reading him, and of reading themselves. The difficulty lies deeper than the man. Gandhi tried to live by principles that are very old, and hardly any of them has been understood: what the ego is, or what ahimsa and asteya mean. A society that has not understood these will not understand anyone who speaks of them, today or tomorrow. Indian society today needs neither satyagraha of the old mould nor ahimsa of the old mould. It needs rebellion and fire; satyagraha was always pointing towards that rebellion, and ahimsa begins in the fire that burns falsehood away.

The first thing that rebellion must refuse to cooperate with is whatever keeps pulling us away from ourselves. Those forces have never been stronger. Media and politics alike keep the eyes fixed outward, on some temptation or some enemy, some sensation or some snake said to be waiting to strike, so that the eyes never turn within. A man whose whole method was to withdraw his hand from what was wrong would know where to begin.

Every Gandhi Jayanti, the two words are spoken everywhere. Schoolchildren recite them, and ministers lay wreaths beneath them, and by evening both words are folded away for another year.

Nobody is obliged to walk his path, follow his principles or adopt his ideals. But he deserves to be read once, properly, and known. It is not easy to become Gandhi, and no one is being asked to. The question he leaves is a smaller and harder one: what has been sold within, and which chains accepted, for the sake of being left in peace? – The Pioneer, 3 October 2026

› Acharya Prashant is a philosopher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life.

The Eiffel Tower controversy and Hindu monastic practice – Bhakti Mamtora

October 2, 2026VOI

The Eiffel Tower episode and its subsequent media coverage reveal how personal religious disciplines can be rendered as demands for accommodation. This is especially the case within the context of French secularism, or laïcité, wherein public expressions of religiosity might have made people upset. In this environment, a little-known monastic vow can be easily misinterpreted. – Prof. Bhakti Mamtora

A visit to the Eiffel Tower by a delegation of monks representing a global Hindu religious denomination on Sept. 5, 2026, has raised broader questions about accommodating religious observances in public spaces.

Eiffel Tower workers protested with a one-day strike after tower management allegedly replaced some women employees for the duration of a 20-minute visit by monks from the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, or BAPS.

As a scholar of South Asian religions, I have studied the Swaminarayan Sampradaya, a religious community founded in India in 1801, for nearly a decade. BAPS is one of several denominations within the group. I argue that at the center of this controversy lie different reactions to a long-standing Hindu religious practice known as “brahmacharya,” which the monks of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya follow.

While it is often translated as “celibacy,” the practice is aimed more expansively at developing inner control over one’s senses to attain spiritual perfection and immerse oneself in God.

The discipline of ‘brahmacharya’

Brahmacharya is described in many premodern Indian texts, including the Yoga Sutra, dating to the early centuries C.E. This text outlines eight successive stages of yoga aimed at reaching mental tranquility through focus on God. Progress toward higher stages of yogic practice—such as “asana,” postures; “pranayama,” breathwork; and “dhyana,” meditation—hinges on the steadfast observance of “yama,” a code of conduct governing the yogi’s interaction with others. The practice of yama includes avoiding violence, dishonesty, theft and greed, and cultivating brahmacharya.

In this text and others, brahmacharya involves physical and mental practices that are observed differently by lay and monastic members of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain religious communities. Lay disciples typically uphold the vow of brahmacharya by maintaining fidelity toward their spouse. For monks and nuns, it often takes the form of absolute celibacy.

From ancient times, various monastic orders have followed a more expansive form of brahmacharya, one that restricts eight types of engagement with the opposite gender. This includes not only physical and verbal but also mental contact, where “mental” means sustained, deliberate thought. Through this practice, monastics endeavor to lead a life that is focused on God.

Textual explanation and practice

Brahmacharya in the broader sense is an important practice in a foundational text that I have studied, called the Swāmīnī Vāto, which explains the core teachings of Swaminarayan, who lived from 1781-1830 and is revered in the Swaminarayan community as God.

The Swāmīnī Vāto notes the central position of brahmacharya among the five vows that Swaminarayan Hindu monks take upon initiation: overcoming desire, greed, taste, attachments and ego. Swaminarayan monks, who practice the eightfold version, see it as an important way to help eradicate all traces of desire and remain singularly focused on God.

By relinquishing marital relationships and family ties, Swaminarayan monks explain that they also seek to reduce claims to private attachment on their time and attention, allowing them to dedicate themselves more fully to devotion, spiritual counseling and other social work. They move from place to place, meeting devotees and traveling between temples, conducting rituals and addressing religious congregations consisting of both men and women.

In all such public spaces, they avoid direct eye contact with women, as that is understood as a form of connection, without requiring women around them to alter their presence or behavior.

According to BAPS theologians and textual traditions, brahmacharya is an individual choice, not a moral critique of others. While monks have relinquished family life for themselves, they recognize and support the family as central to people’s lives and practices.

Eightfold brahmacharya follows a similar logic: Monks adopt the discipline focusing on their own attention, desires and conduct, but they do not expect this of others. The discipline does not make a judgment about the worth of women. This ideal is made explicit in BAPS texts that affirm women’s equal spiritual standing and entitlement to religious practice and liberation.

The controversy

The current leader of BAPS, Mahant Swami Maharaj, consecrated a new Swaminarayan Hindu Temple in Bussy-Saint George, a suburb of Paris, on Sept. 6, 2026. Leading up to the consecration celebrations, the community’s delegation of 100 monks visited the Eiffel Tower. Following the visit, their centuries-old monastic vows became the center of controversy.

BAPS has stated that it requested an early morning visit to minimize disruption for visitors or staff, given the size of their group. Moreover, in a comment to CNN, BAPS Paris noted, “It was never, at any point, intended as a request rooted in gender, and any suggestion to the contrary does not reflect the spirit or values of our fellowship or the delegation.” A small area of the observation deck was sectioned off, which is a common practice for large groups, but BAPS categorically denies requesting the removal of women employees.

The Eiffel Tower Operating Company, SETE, claimed that the delegation had requested a visit that would limit “interactions with women,” according to CNN affiliate BFMTV. The BBC reported that Ariel Weil, president of SETE, “blamed its managers for being ‘a bit overzealous’ in complying with the request without questioning whether it was ‘inappropriate.’”

In my view, the issue seems to be a disconnect between what BAPS requested and what SETE requested of its employees. Understanding the practice of brahmacharya helps explain BAPS’s request: The early morning visit likely would have limited their interactions with heavy crowds, including women. Indeed, BAPS monks’ practices have typically gone unnoticed before now, because they observe them on their own, without imposition on others, even in crowded spaces where women are present.

The episode and its subsequent media coverage reveal how personal religious disciplines can be rendered as demands for accommodation. This is especially the case within the context of French secularism, or laïcité, wherein public expressions of religiosity might have made people upset. In this environment, a little-known monastic vow can be easily misinterpreted. – The Conversation, 30 September 2026

› Prof. Bhakti Mamtora is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

Scientist proposes conciousness might be the fabric of reality itself – Humans

September 27, 2026September 28, 2026VOI

Consciousness remains one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries, and that understanding it may require researchers to rethink long-held assumptions about the relationship between mind, brain, and reality. – Dr. Christof Koch

For decades, neuroscientists have searched the brain for the biological basis of consciousness, assuming our thoughts, emotions, and subjective experiences emerge from networks of neurons.

But what if that assumption is incomplete?

That’s the provocative question explored by neuroscientist Christof Koch of the Allen Institute in Seattle.

Koch recently presented his ‘challenges’ to our understanding of consciousness at the Bial Foundation’s “Behind and Beyond the Brain” symposium in Porto, Portugal, in April 2026—building on a body of published work that includes this 2016 paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Koch explained to ScienceAlert that it may be time to rethink one of neuroscience’s deepest assumptions: that consciousness is something the brain produces.

Koch does not dispute the brain’s essential role in conscious experience.

Decades of research have shown that injuries, disease, anesthesia, and electrical stimulation can profoundly alter—or even eliminate—awareness.

Instead, he asks a different question: Does the brain create consciousness, or could it be shaping something more fundamental?

Despite remarkable progress in understanding how the brain processes information, neuroscience still faces a profound mystery, Koch argues.

Scientists can increasingly identify the neural circuits involved in perception, memory, emotion, and decision-making. Yet those discoveries still cannot explain why physical brain activity is accompanied by subjective experience.

As Koch writes in a new, as-yet unpublished essay shared with ScienceAlert: “Nothing in science explains how three pounds of matter, a piece of furniture of the Universe like any other, subject to the same natural laws, can love, hate, dream, imagine, fear or hope for its future.”

It isn’t the first time Koch has grappled publicly with this puzzle. In 2023, he conceded a 25-year bet with philosopher David Chalmers, admitting neuroscience was no closer to pinning down consciousness’s neural mechanism than when he made the wager in 1998.

To address that question, Koch turns to a philosophical framework known as analytic idealism, which proposes that consciousness may be a fundamental feature of reality rather than something generated by the brain.

Within this framework, the brain is viewed less as a producer of consciousness and more as a filter or shaper of conscious experience.

The ideas did not emerge from a single scientific experiment. Instead, Koch describes a deeply personal experience that fundamentally changed the way he thinks about consciousness and reality.

Several years ago, while sitting alone on a beach, he recalls the boundary between himself and the world dissolving, describing the experience as a timeless and universal reality.

In his essay, Koch describes the experience as “the most meaningful of my life,” writing that it “flipped my view of reality”.

Koch is careful not to present the experience as scientific evidence. Instead, he writes that it gave him “a view of Mind-at-Large” and prompted him to re-examine the metaphysical assumptions that had guided much of his scientific career, taking alternative philosophical perspectives more seriously.

He also acknowledges that such experiences are inherently subjective. But he argues they should not be dismissed simply because they are difficult to explain, suggesting they, too, are part of the phenomenon science is ultimately trying to understand.

In the essay, he points to developments in modern physics as another reminder that some of science’s deepest assumptions have already been revised. He does not argue that quantum physics explains consciousness. Rather, he suggests that the history of physics shows scientists have repeatedly been forced to rethink the nature of reality when new evidence emerged.

Koch argues that “our understanding of reality must be rebuilt on a simpler foundation, compatible with both the ‘objective’ outcome of empirical science as well as with ‘subjective’ experience.”

Koch argues that if current assumptions about consciousness prove incomplete, neuroscience itself may eventually require a similarly profound conceptual shift.

The ideas also have implications for artificial intelligence. If consciousness is not simply the product of increasingly complex computation, the path toward conscious machines may be more complicated than simply building increasingly powerful AI systems.

That does not mean future AI systems could never become conscious. Rather, he argues that the debate cannot be settled simply by making computers more intelligent or more computationally sophisticated.

Koch acknowledges that analytic idealism is not an established scientific theory but a metaphysical framework whose future depends on whether its ideas can be translated into empirically testable hypotheses.

As he writes, “The most important task for the future is to take these insights and translate them into empirically testable hypotheses.”

He argues that consciousness remains one of science’s greatest unsolved mysteries, and that understanding it may require researchers to rethink long-held assumptions about the relationship between mind, brain, and reality. – Science Alert, 9 August 2026

Can Devdutt Pattanaik save Hinduism from Western distortions? – David Frawley

September 23, 2026October 6, 2026VOI

Make certain, Pattanaik is no detached observer, but has a vested interest in the very negative interpretations of Hinduism that he now seems to question. He has so far shown little interest in any defence of Hinduism whether by Indians or Westerners, much less promoting its deeper Yoga and Vedantic teachings. – Dr. David Frawley

Devdutt Pattanaik is a popular interpreter of Hindu sacred stories, what are now, not always respectfully, called “myths”. In an old article “From Macaulay to Frawley, from Doniger to Elst: Why do many Indians need White saviours”, he claims that “Indians do not really need Europeans and Americans to tell them what Hinduism, Sanskrit or Vedas were, are or should be.”

Attacking both Western critics and Western defenders of Hinduism

The title of the article appears appealing given the many Western distortions of Hinduism. Yet strangely, Pattanaik criticises both Western defenders of Hinduism as well as critics, lumping them both together as if they were two sides of the same bad coin, suggesting that neither understands the Hindu tradition.

Pattanaik would like us to think that he is honouring this tradition of great yogis that has suffered so much from colonial, missionary, Marxist and neo-modern misinterpretations. But in the majority of his own writings, he himself follows the current politically correct Western scholarship that denigrates Hinduism at a cultural level and downplays its deeper philosophical and yogic dimensions. His comments on Hindu gods and goddesses are often in terms of modern psychology and leftist politics, as if these deities were human beings with personal problems and social biases, not symbols of transcendent and cosmic powers.

Now Pattanaik is suddenly critical of the same controversial Western scholars like Wendy Doniger and Sheldon Pollock that he has previously defended. The mythological approach he uses is an approach they also use and is very different from India’s own dharmic school of thought. Is he questioning that mythological angle that he has so extensively promoted?

Looking deeper, Pattaniak’s article betrays a subterfuge. His critique of Western defenders of Hinduism appears more strident than his questioning of anti-Hindu views. Clearly Western scholars defending Hinduism are his main target, and by implication the defence of Hinduism itself.

India connections of Western interpretations of Hindu Dharma

Pattanaik makes a point that one has to be born a Hindu to be a real Hindu that is connected to “birth” and “geography”, no doubt to discredit any Western attempts to speak for Hinduism. This is historically easy to disprove given the numerous Hindu temples and kingdoms from Angkor Wat in Cambodia to Vietnam and Indonesia whose populace were not simply born Hindus in what is now India.

Yet the deeper question in all such discussions is the nature of the interpretations given, not the skin colour of the person advocating them. Most important is the methodology that such interpreters follow. Individual scholars are usually representatives of schools of thought that must be examined overall.

The denigrating approaches of such as Doniger and Pollack have prominent Indian supporters, notably Marxists like Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib, whom Pattanaik does not mention. Similarly, the view of Hindu Dharma by Western Hindus has its roots in teachers from India. The books of Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swarup have framed much of the defence of modern Hinduism. Yet this trend goes back to Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda, Lokmanya Tilak and India’s Independence movement that challenged Eurocentric ideas of religion, culture and history.

Mahatma Gandhi’s criticism of Christian missionaries is also relevant here. It ultimately is based upon Vedic texts that address the nature of the mind and the meaning of human life in a very different manner than dominant Western schools of thought.

Pattanaik has tried to place Hinduism’s Western defenders on the “right” of the political perspective, with its critics on the “left”, forgetting that right and left in politics are Western views, not Indian and neither is dharmic. He reflects the statements of anti-Hindu writers who routinely label Hinduism as right-wing and regressive.

Pattanaik further describes Western defenders of Hindu Dharma as “authoritarian” and “Abrahamic” in approach, as if they were presenting a distortion of Hindu Dharma. This is also nothing new. The same charge is made by Luytens’ Delhi against any Hindu groups in India that have sought to proudly promote Hindu Dharma. Such verbal theatrics only shows that he remains ambivalent about presenting Hindu teachings in a respectful manner. He does not otherwise criticise Abrahamic traditions.

Problems with ancient history

Pattanaik seems to have a particular problem with the historical view of the Harappan or Indus Valley civilisation as Vedic, as supported by Western Hindus. Yet, this is also the view of the Archaeological Survey of India and its former director general Prof. B.B. Lal. It is the view of the Geological Survey of India based upon Landsat Satellite photography and numerous ground water studies of the long dry Sarasvati River. It is the view of India’s great gurus today. To call it into question because it is also a view of white Hindus is neither accurate nor sincere. It suggests that Pattanaik does not like the idea of a history of India that gives prominence to Vedic and Hindu contributions.

Is sadhana necessary to truly understand Hindu Dharma?

Hindu teachings, as in the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads, have at their core a yogic pursuit of higher consciousness, including experiences beyond the human intellect and its limiting dualities. They hold that the physical world is but an outer aspect of a multi-dimensional universe of consciousness, with our inner self having many bodies and many births and ultimately extending beyond all time and space.

Pattanaik does not seem comfortable with such yogic spirituality, which Doniger and company routinely ignore or dismiss, though he throws a few Sanskrit terms around in order to sound traditional. He is particularly unhappy with my claim that Yoga sadhana should be part of any authentic interpretation of Hindu texts. Yet that is not merely my personal view, it is found in all the great traditions of India that emphasise meditation over mere book learning. If sadhana is not part of one’s study of Hinduism, one can only claim to have the view of an outsider.

Is Pattanaik changing his views?

Pattanaik’s article is a cover-up for his own errors and prejudices. It is an effort to surreptitiously disown his own past with Doniger and company, perhaps out of fear of being judged politically incorrect by these Western critics that he has often kowtowed before in the past. Attacking Western defenders of Hinduism along the way affords him the appearance of being a neutral observer, and makes it more difficult for him to lump with what Doniger and company castigate as the Hindu right that they usually decry as fascist as well.

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

September 22, 2026September 22, 2026VOI

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.

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.

VOICE OF INDIA

History Politics Science Religion

Category india

Durga we worship, women we doubt – Tejusvi Shukla

Even the creator-god is Durga’s creation – Aravindan Neelakandan

Ma Durga is the innermost power of consciousness – David Frawley

What DNA reveals about 65,000 years of Indian ancestry – Meghna N.

How secularism has failed Hindus and India – Arvind Sharma

Fire Behind Folded Hands: The Gandhi India never understood – Acharya Prashant

The Eiffel Tower controversy and Hindu monastic practice – Bhakti Mamtora

Scientist proposes conciousness might be the fabric of reality itself – Humans

Can Devdutt Pattanaik save Hinduism from Western distortions? – David Frawley

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

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