Secular Hindu Quotes

And an equation is the same whether it's written in red or green ink

Hindutava's nationalism ignores the rationalist traditions of India, a country in which some of the earliest steps in algebra, geometry, and astronomy were taken, where the decimal system emerged, where early philosophy — secular as well as religious — achieved exceptional sophistication, where people invented games like chess, pioneered sex education, and began the first systematic study of political economy. The Hindu militant chooses instead to present India — explicitly or implicitly — as a country of unquestioning idolaters, delirious fanatics, belligerent devotees, and religious murderers

Religious or secular, all myths make profound sense to one group of people. Not to everyone. They cannot be rationalized beyond a point. In the final analysis, you either accept them or you don’t.

The Obama administration has a strange theory. Terrorism is a response of uneducated human beings who have been disenfranchised politically and economically. If we can solve the ‘root grievances’ of the poor and oppressed around the world, there will be no more terrorists, and Americans will be safe. This view is of course absurd. If poverty, lack of education, and political disenfranchisement were the causes of terrorism, then much of India and most of China would be populated by terrorists. But they are not. And this is because terrorism is the violent expression of ideology, not objective conditions—what has famously been called ‘propaganda of the deed.’ The terrorist’s ideology may be secular and political—communist or fascist, for example—or it may be religious—Christian, Islamic, or even Hindu.

It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy. England continues to maintain a national church whose religious head is also the country’s sovereign and whose bishops serve in the upper house of Parliament. India was, until recently, governed by partisans of an élitist theology of Hindu Awakening (Hindutva) bent on applying an implausible but enormously successful vision of “true Hinduism” to the state. And yet, like the United States, these countries are considered democracies, not because they are secular but because they are, at least in theory, dedicated to pluralism.

If you cannot be a human, instead you prefer to be a Christian, Muslim, Hindu or anything else, then how dare you call yourself a human!

Jinnah had chosen a Hindu, Jogendar Nath Mandal, as the country’s first law minister to affirm that secular lawyers and not theologians would run Pakistan’s legal system. But many of his followers could not comprehend this nuanced conception of a state.

The Aryans also composed two of the world’s greatest (and longest) epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which is eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey put together and three times longer than the Bible—all without the benefit of writing. These Vedic recitations, both sacred and secular, form the bedrock of Indian and Hindu culture. The

If only minorities vote for the Congress, how can we win ?' Raod said to a friend. In his book on Ayodhya, Rao blames Congressmen for a 'subconscious inhibition that any expression of [Hinud] religious sentiment on our part, even if we felt it strongly, would be seen as ''non-secular''. As a result, the BJP became the sole repository and protector of the Hindu religion in the public mind.

...Secularism has two meanings: the Western concept makes a clear distinction between functions of the State which includes politics and functions of religion which are confined to places of worship, public or private. This is the concept that Nehru accepted, preached and practiced. The other concept was equal respect for all religions. This was propagated and observed by men like Bapu Gandhi and Maulana Azad and lasted as long as the two men were alive. After that it deteriorated to a mere display of religiosity. If you were a devout Hindu you went to a Muslim dargah or threw an Iftar party to prove you were secular. If you were Muslim, you celebrated Diwali with your Hindu friends. Secularism was reduced to a sham display. Time has shown that as far as secularism is concerned, Nehru was right; Gandhi and Azad were wrong.

According to your holy book, every single Buddhist, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, follower of various minor traditions or sects, those who do not affiliate themselves with a religious tradition and the approximately 2.74 billion humans who have never had the 'privilege' of hearing the word of your Messiah will be sentenced to eternal damnation in a lake of fire—regardless of moral standings or positive worldly accomplishments. If this sounds like a fair proposition to you, then I bite my tongue—but I honestly believe that the majority of Christians do not agree with these doctrinal assertions, and instead categorize themselves as 'Christians' out of cultural familiarity or perhaps out of complete ignorance in regards to the topic.

Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Christian, you are that because of where and when you were born. If you are an atheist, you are that because of a book or two you read, or who your parents were and the century in which you were born. Don’t delude yourself: there are no good reasons for anything, just circumstances. Don’t delude yourself: you may describe yourself to others by claiming a label of atheist, Jew, evangelical, gay or straight but you know that you are really lots more complicated than that, a gene-driven primate and something more. Want to be sure you have THE TRUTH about yourself and want to be consistent to that truth? Then prepare to go mad. Or prepare to turn off your brain and cling to some form or other of fundamentalism, be that religious or secular.

The RSS was helpless because of the ideological power equation. Socialist secularism was the dominant ideology, while Hindu nationalism counted as politically incorrect. Those who swore by socialist secularism could afford to kick its alleged opponents around at will. The contrast with the Communists is striking. The Communists stood exposed as traitors in 1942-1947, when they informed the British government(a Soviet ally) about Quit India activists and served as a mercenary intellectual vanguard for the Muslim league by propagating economic and often secular-sounding arguments for Partition, once more in 1948-50, when they supported the separatist Razakar militia in Hyderabad and subsequently started an armed uprising of their own; and yet again in the run-up to the Chinese invasion of 1962, when they clamoured that "China's chairman is also India's chairman" and accused India of having started the war with China. But, they were always back on top within a short time, fully respected members of the democratic political spectrum. Better still, they managed even to make other parties implement much of the Communist agenda, from the nationalization of the banks to an unnecessary degree of hostility to the West, upheld by Congress and Janata governments alike. Such are the results when you make it your priority to control the ideological air space, rather than the ground level of work among the masses. Even worse(at least from a Hindu nationalist viewpoint) then the treatment which the Hindu nationalists received, was their own record as policy-makers.

We often associate science with the values of secularism and tolerance. If so, early modern Europe is the last place you would have expected a scientific revolution. Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you had travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe. If you had then sailed on to contemporary Paris or London, you would have found cities awash with religious extremism, in which only those belonging to the dominant sect could live. In London they killed Catholics, in Paris they killed Protestants, the Jews had long been driven out, and nobody in his right mind would dream of letting any Muslims in. And yet, the Scientific Revolution began in London and Paris rather than in Cairo and Istanbul.

The Koran is empathetic about the rights of other religions to practice their own beliefs. It unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians as a violation of Islam. It states that suicide, of any type, is an abomination. The tactic of suicide bombing, equated by many of the new atheists with Islam, did not arise from the Muslim world. This kind of terror, in fact, has its roots in radical Western ideologies, especially Leninism, not religion. And it was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist group that draws its support from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka, which invented the suicide vest for their May 1991 suicide assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Suicide bombing is what you do when you do not have artillery or planes or missiles and you want to create maximum terror for an occupying power. It was used by secular anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They bequeathed to us the first version of the car bomb: a horse-drawn wagon laden with explosives that was ignited on September 16, 1920, on Wall Street. The attack was carried out by Mario Buda, an Italian immigrant, in protest over the arrest of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It left 40 people dead and wounded more than 200. Suicide bombing was adopted later by Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Hamas. But even in the Middle East, suicide bombing is not restricted to Muslims. In Lebanon during the suicide attacks in the 1980s against French, American and Israeli targets, only eight suicide bombings were carried out by Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were the work of communists and socialists. Three were carried out by Christians.

In this simple observation about the nature of human consciousness lies a challenge that was taken up sometime in the course of Hinduism’s long development: focus the mind so that the tumble of extraneous thoughts is slowed, then stilled altogether. The practice that developed, which we know as meditation, is of unknown antiquity. It was certainly already in use when the Upanishads were put into writing circa –6C. An archaic form may be inferred from the Rig Veda, which takes the practice back at least to –1200. If recent arguments that the Rig Veda dates to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization hold up, then we must think in terms of an additional millennium or two during which some form of meditation was practiced. I have dated the culmination of the development of meditation to –2C because that is the most popular dating for the life of Patanjali, the Hindu sage who is seen as the progenitor of classical Yoga, an advanced system of meditation. Since its initial development in India, forms of meditation have become part of most religions and of a wide range of secular schools as well. In the West, despite the importance of forms of meditation in Catholicism and some Protestant Christian churches, the word meditation has become identified with some of the flamboyant sects that attracted publicity in the 1960s and 1970s. In some circles, meditation is seen as part of Asian mysticism, not a cognitive tool. This is one instance in which Eurocentrism is a genuine problem. The nature of meditation is coordinate with ways of perceiving the world that are distinctively Asian. But to say that the cognitive tool called meditation is peculiarly useful to Asians is like saying that logic—my next meta-invention—is useful only to Europeans. Meditation and logic found homes in different parts of the world, but meditation, like logic, is a flexible, powerful extension of human cognitive capacity.

Animal awareness is the perfect carrier of propaganda - it is the ideal facilitator of animal conditioning, while human awareness is the only civilized answer. Let me show you how animal conditioning through propaganda works. I'll mention a word, and you'll tell me what's the first thing that comes to your mind. And the word is - "terrorism". Here, the first thing a white american nationalist will think of, is "arabs". Ask an indian hindu nationalist the same question, and their first thought would be "pakistan". In the same way, israeli zionists would automatically associate the word terrorism with palestine. Like it or not, that's animal nature. Every moment you are bombarded with materials that have no relation to truth and humanity, as far as the civilized mind could see. Through cinema, through video games, through news - propaganda is everywhere. And no, I am not talking about some grand conspiracy. Apes, who still cannot look past the color of skin and language of tongue, do not have the brains to orchestrate some grand scheme of manipulation - all they can do is, simply peddle the same old rotten narrative of hate and fanaticism repeatedly, and the rest is taken care of by the primitive survival instinct of the ape brain. So, what's the way out? Simple - start using that grand instrument you carry on your shoulders, which you call a brain - driven by an actual civilized craving for uplift and illumination.

Yet it is far from impossible that the political revolution the Rajmata hopes to effect could in the long term change India from a tolerant secular democracy to some sort of ultra-nationalist Hindu state.

Other states also reoriented their telling of regional and national history. In Maharashtra, in the rewriting of history textbooks, a drastic cut was made in the book for class 7: the chapter on the Mughal Empire under Akbar was cut down to three lines.78 Uttar Pradesh simply deleted the Mughal Empire from some of its history textbooks,79 while the University of Delhi drastically reduced the study of this period in its history curriculum.80 In the syllabus of Nagpur University, a chapter that discussed the roles of the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Muslim League in the making of communalism has been replaced by another one titled “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Role in Nation Building.”81 Alongside official examinations in Uttar Pradesh, the Sangh Parivar organized a test of general culture open to all schools in the state. According to the brochure designed to help students prepare for this test, which Amit Shah released in Lucknow in August 2017, India was a Hindu Rashtra, and Swami Vivekananda had defended Hindutva in Chicago in 1893.82 In Karnataka, after canceling Tipu Sultan Jayanti, the festival that the state used to organize to celebrate the birth of this eighteenth-century Muslim ruler, the BJP government also dropped the chapter dealing with this historical figure from the class 7 textbook in 2019.83 This decision was made in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that had led the government of India to ask all states to reduce syllabi for students in classes 1 through 10 by 30 percent, in light of the learning challenges brought about by the lockdown.84 The decision of the Karnataka government, in fact, fit in with a larger picture. Under cover of the pandemic, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), India’s largest education board, decided that all over India “government-run schools no longer have to teach chapters on democratic rights, secularism, federalism, and citizenship, among other topics.”85 To foster assimilation of knowledge that amounted to propaganda, final exams have increasingly focused on the heroic deeds of Hindu icons and reforms initiated by the Modi government, even on the person of the prime minister.

Secular culture cannot be created by building domes on the walls of temples. There is no guarantee of peace if you follow Babar and Aurangzeb." "It is our good fortune that we saw the grand temple of Lord Shri Ram in our lifetime." “The temple was demolished by the invaders. Puja was going on in Gyanvapi Temple for hundreds of years but it was banned in 1993 by the UP government (SP) at that time.

BN Jog, a contemporary RSS author argues that even after the 1937 elections, though often mentioned as proof that the Muslim electorate was largely 'secular' because of the poor results for the Muslim league, had already disproven the Congress claim: most Muslim votes had gone to other Muslim-dominated parties, chiefly the Unionist party of Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan in Panjab and the Krishak Praja party of Fazlul Haq in Bengal. Even the supposedly defeated Muslim League had won 108 of the 492 Muslim-reserved seats in 1937, against 26 for Congress. So, Jog concludes, the Muslim vote was largely motivated by sectional interests rather than by commitment to the national struggle.

Even as India's left-lib ecosystem, planted by 'Muslim by culture' Nehru and fertilized by 'Christian by birth' Sonia, sprints on the congregational track, the right-wingers tend to plough their opinions in lonely furrows on the lines of Hindu infirmities.

Fight as brave lions for sacred inclusivity, not for saffronication as domesticated cows.

Fight as brave lions for sacred inclusivity, not for saffronication as domesticated cows. Fight for justice, rejuvenated by reason, not for prejudice, decreed by apeman vows.

In India, in the aftermath of the bloodbath of the Partition massacres that spread across the subcontinent at the time of independence from British rule and the creation of the states of India and Pakistan—Hindus massacred by Muslims, Muslims by Hindus, somewhere between one and two million people dead—another group of founding fathers, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, resolved that the only way to ensure peace in India was to remove religion from the public sphere. The new Constitution of India was therefore wholly secular in language and intention, and that has endured until the present moment, when the current administration seeks to undermine those secular foundations, discredit those founders, and create an overtly religious, majoritarian Hindu state.

Shah Bano, a sixty-two-year-old Muslim mother of five from Indore, had been divorced by her husband in 1978. She filed a criminal suit in the Supreme Court, in which she won the right to alimony from her husband. This was a landmark secular judgment in which the court decided that maintenance was payable even if it were in conflict with Muslim personal law—Sharia. India seemed to be moving towards a uniform civil code—one that did not distinguish between Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Sikh.

One good way to listen is to listen with a sacred text: a psalm or a prayer, for instance. The Hindu spiritual writer Eknath Easwaran showed me the great value of learning a sacred text by heart and repeating it slowly in the mind, word by word, sentence by sentence. In this way, listening to the voice of love becomes not just a passive waiting, but an active attentiveness to the voice that speaks to us through the words of the Scriptures.

Throughout the decades after Independence, the political culture of the country reflected these ‘secular’ assumptions and attitudes. Though the Indian population was 80 per cent Hindu and the country had been partitioned as a result of a demand for a separate Muslim homeland, three of India’s eleven presidents were Muslims; so were innumerable governors, cabinet ministers, chief ministers of states, ambassadors, generals, and Supreme Court justices. During the war with Pakistan in 1971, when the Pakistani leadership was foolish enough to proclaim a jihad against the Hindu unbelievers, the Indian Air Force in the northern sector was commanded by a Muslim (Air Marshal, later Air Chief Marshal, I. H. Latif); the army commander was a Parsi (General, later Field Marshal, S. H. F. J. Manekshaw), the general officer commanding the forces that marched into Bangladesh was a Sikh (General J. S. Aurora), and the general flown in to negotiate the surrender of the Pakistani forces in East Bengal was Jewish (Major-General J. F. R. Jacob). They led the armed forces of an overwhelmingly Hindu country. That is India.

A Harvard-trained economist called Subramanian Swamy recently demanded a public bonfire of canonical books by Indian historians — liberal and secular intellectuals who belong to what the R.S.S. chief in 2000 identified as that “class of bastards which tries to implant an alien culture in their land.” Denounced by the numerous Hindu supremacists in social media as “sickular libtards” and sepoys (the common name for Indian soldiers in British armies), these intellectuals apparently are Trojan horses of the West. They must be purged to realize Mr. Modi’s vision in which India, once known as the “golden bird,” will “rise again.

Why I am Human (The Sonnet) Some explain why they are catholic, Some explain why they are atheist, Some explain why they are muslim, Some explain why they are socialist. Some explain why they are jew, Some explain why they are buddhist, Some explain why they are hindu, Some explain why they are humanist. I heard plenty people explain, Why they are what they are, But I'm yet to hear one person say, First I am human, all else later. What is this mad obsession with all the ism! Why can't we be just human, plain and simple!

There is no such thing as a modern christian nation, modern islamic nation, modern hindu nation, modern atheist nation and so on. A modern nation is a secular nation, if not, it's not modern, but medieval.

Part of this struggle involves an unrelenting critique of liberal multicultural “tolerance” (in the West as much as the rest), which despite all pretenses, prioritizes dominant white European culture (or in such countries as India, dominant Hindu culture), while patronizingly “tolerating” others (see Iqtidar and Sarkar 2018). Here, Muslim culture is fixed and stereotyped, most often reduced to a religious category, thereby ignoring the dynamic, diverse, and indeed secular mix that makes up the “Muslim world” (both outside and inside the “West”). What is most often missing is a properly politicized view of Muslim culture (or indeed culture writ large), in which political-economic antagonisms play a key role: thus, violence against women is not the result of some pathological religious practice, but most often imbricated with unequal state property/inheritance laws (and their lack of enforcement) and/or male domination in the advancing cash economy (Visweswaran 1994, 510; Salhi 2013). A universal politics worthy of its name cannot, as a result, engage in a purely “cultural politics” that avoids the key question of the politicization of the economy; this would merely play into the hands of postpolitical global capitalism, which, as underlined already, seeks to keep culture and economy apart. Linking the two spheres is precisely what enables universality: seeing the antagonisms of culture/identity (struggles of representation, violence against women, queer rights, racialization) as intimately linked to the antagonisms of global capitalism (socioeconomic and spatial inequality, environmental catastrophe) is what opens the door to shared struggle. It helps establish bonds of solidarity between those who struggle for justice in the West and those who participate in the same struggle in the “Muslim world” (and elsewhere). Perhaps those of us Westerners engaging in universalizing struggles can learn from the political vitality and truculence of the “Muslim world”: at a time when engagement, energy, and commitment to change the system are often so fickle in the West, the Islamic resurgence, despite often being misdirected, can teach us something about a refusal to be so easily co-opted and seduced by Western hegemony. The challenge, though, is to channel such “rage” to the right target, that is, to make it anti-systemic rather than anti-symptomatic.

Despite the carving out of Pakistan (and what is now Bangladesh) in the name of political Islam, and the secessionist insurgency seen in Kashmir due to similar motivations, so-called secular India did not adopt common personal laws. This happened even though Nehru changed, and rightly so, the Hindu personal laws by passing the Hindu code bills in 1955–1956. While the Hindu laws were made progressive, Muslim laws were left untouched.

Discipline of the Sikh, Enthusiasm of the Christian, Brotherhood of the Muslim, Nonviolence of the Jain, Senility of the Buddhist, Groundedness of the Hindu, Rationality of the Atheist, Resilience of the Jew - Take the good from everyone, Mind expands through assimilation. Past errors mustn't continue as tradition, Oneness is divinity, division is damnation.

The Indian Sonnet All through history India has provided sanctuary, To the persecuted, shunned and alienated of the world. Everyone from everywhere has toiled in India's making, Many cultures beat together within the Indian heart. Of course, there are peddlers of intolerance and hate, Those who have been trying to build an extremist nation. These primitive apes fail to think with their pea brain, Of the word "hindu" the sanatana texts bear no mention. The ancient citizens of India had no organized religion, Life was just an expression of nonduality or undivision. Indus valley is a rare land that assimilated all, Without ever spreading the tentacles of invasion. Many fervor, many faiths, thus India is made. India without secularism is India of the dead.

End of Fear (Sonnet 1172) Where the end of fear ends all barrier, Where biases no longer run amok, Where end of assumption sets forth ascension, Where heritage no more wreaks havoc, Where the head is without bent, and the heart is never skint, Where the spine is without dent, and the eyes are without squint, Where Christian, Muslim, Sikh 'n Jew, sit and share a cup of stew, Where Buddhist, Atheist, Jain, Hindu, live and laugh as one life crew, There beyond, where sentience lets no storm to brew, Out of the fossil, into the fervor, I shall meet you.

Where Christian, Muslim, Sikh 'n Jew, sit and share a cup of stew, Where Buddhist, Atheist, Jain, Hindu, live and laugh as one life crew, There beyond, where sentience lets no storm to brew, Out of the fossil, into the fervor, I shall meet you.

Dalitbahujan structures, though they encompass a far larger number of people, indeed the whole working mass of India, is treated by brahminical literary, political and legal texts as nonexistent. As a result, even historians and social scientists from other parts of the world constructed Indian culture and history either in conformity with brahminical theocracy or critiqued it in its own terms without comparing it with the secular and democratic social systems of the Dalitbahujans. If only that had been done, every observer (if not from India, at least from abroad) could have realized that India has always been divided into two cultures and two civilizations: the Dalitbahujan and the brahminical. But this fact has been systematically glossed over.

One Spirit, Many Vessels (Sonnet 1021) Christ was not a christian, Vyasa was not a hindu. Mohammed was not a muslim, Abraham was not a jew. Buddha was not a buddhist, Confucius was not confucian. Zoroaster was not zoroastrian, Naskar is not naskarean. Nanak was not a sikh, Mahavir was not a jain. All that we ever wanted is, To remind the humans to be human. Move past the person, and delve into spirit. There you shall discover, divisions do not exist.

I am secular yes, But I AM ALWAYS 100% HINDU, I WILL NEVER EVER CONVERT MY NAME OR ANYTHING THAT SYMBOLIZES MY CHARACTER OR HINDUISM< I WILL NEVER EVER CHANGE FOR ANY REASONS SUCH AS MONEY OR PASSION OR WOMEN

But, look at it from the Hindu angle: Hindus had the good grace to give asylum to the Christian refugees in AD 345, allowing them to maintain their separate identity in full freedom for seven centuries, and now the thanks they get for it is that visitors of the Saint Thome cathedral are told about fanatical Brahmins murdering the noble founder of Indian Christianity. And then the secularist establishment makes it worse by blocking the public's access to the scholarly vire and continuing to instil the blood-libel legend. It is highly significant for the power equation in India that this state of affairs is possible at all.

The path of truth is the path of religion, but this path is not a christian path, a jewish path, a muslim path, a hindu path or any other kind of sectarian and tribal path. The path of truth, that is, the path of religion has no label of tribalism.

In the 1940s, Congress—the dominant secular party that led India to independence from Britain, and was assailed by both Jinnah and the RSS—heroically withstood the demand of aggrieved Hindus to respond to Pakistan’s birth by turning India into a Hindu state. Nehru, as India’s first prime minister, frequently raced to scenes of communal clashes on his own, often chasing vengeful Hindu and Sikh refugees expelled from Pakistan without regard for his personal safety. ‘If you harm one single hair on the head of one Muslim,’ he told a mob plotting a massacre of Muslims, ‘I will send in a tank and blast you to bits’.

Hinduism" and the "mainstream"; how frequently are these words juxtaposed, and made synonymous, with each other by the ruling political party! "Mainstream": the word that would mean, in a democratic nation, the law-abiding democratic polity, is cunningly conflated, in the newspeak of our present government, with the religious majority; and those who don't belong to that majority become, by subconscious association and suggestion, anti-democratic, and breakers of the law. Ironically, saffron is the colour of our mainstream. Saffron, "gerua": its resonances are wholly to do with that powerful undercurrent in Hinduism, "vairagya", the melancholy and romantic possibility of renunciation. At what point, and how, did the colour of renunciation, and withdrawal from the world, become the symbol of a militant, and materialistic, majoritarianism? "Gerua" represents not what is Brahminical and conservative, but what is most radical about the Hindu religion; it is the colour not of belonging, or fitting in, but of exile, of the marginal man. Hindutva, while rewriting our secular histories, has also rewritten the language of Hinduism, and purged it of these meanings; and those of us who mourn the passing of secularism must also believe we are witnessing the passing, and demise, of the Hindu religion as we have known it.

It is only when you stop calling yourself a Hindu, that you rise as a true Hindu, it is when you stop calling yourself a Christian, you rise as a true Christian, it is when you stop calling yourself a Buddhist, you rise as true Buddhist.

to remember this in a country that has long been mesmerized by the romantic figure of ‘the renouncer’, even before the Buddha came along.6 My mother, however, was spot on in recognizing ‘my third stage melancholy’. During my second stage, I had felt as though I was waking up each morning, going to work, and feeding my family—only to repeat it the following day, as my children would after me and their children after them. What was the point of it all? Now in my third stage, I wanted to find a better way to live. Meanwhile, my friends and acquaintances were incredulous. ‘So, what is this I hear about wanting to go away to read old books?’ one asked me at a dinner party. ‘Don’t tell me you are going to turn religious on us!’ exclaimed another. My wife began to explain my idea of an ‘academic holiday’ to some of the guests, who reciprocated with suitable looks of sympathy. ‘Tell us, what books are you planning to read?’ asked a retired civil servant. A self-proclaimed ‘leftist and secularist’, who had once been a favourite of former prime minister Indira Gandhi, he had the gruff, domineering accent of an English aristocrat, not surprising in a former civil servant of the old school. I admitted reluctantly that I had been thinking of reading the Mahabharata, the Manusmriti, the Kathopanishad perhaps, and ... ‘Good Lord, man!’ he exclaimed. ‘You haven’t turned saffron, have you?’ The remark upset me. Saffron is, of course, the colour of Hindu right-wing nationalism, and I wondered what sort of secularism is it that regards the reading of Sanskrit texts as a political act. I was disturbed that I had to fear the intolerance of my ‘secular’ friends as much as the bigotry of the Hindu Right, which had become a force in Indian politics over the past two decades with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Religion may be as powerful an engine of identity as the nation; indeed, in some cultures, religious identity may be far more powerful than national identity. In integrist religious fundamentalisms, the violent promotion of the unity and dynamism of the faith may function very much like the violent promotion of the unity and dynamism of the nation. Some extreme forms of Orthodox Judaism regard the state of Israel as a blasphemy because it was established before Messiah came. Here religious integrism fully replaces national integrism. Fundamentalist Muslims offer little loyalty to the various secular Islamic states, whether presidential or monarchical. Islam is their nation. For Hindu fundamentalists, their religion is the focus of an intense attachment that the secular and pluralist Indian state does not succeed in offering. In such communities, a religious-based fascism is conceivable. After all, no two fascisms need be alike in their symbols and rhetoric, employing, as they do, the local patriotic repertory.

One can have local fealties, and also a sense of being part of a larger loyalty. But, the dichotomy was created deliberately, so as to debunk any claim to civilisational consciousness. An ancient civilisational footprint would lead to the verifiably factual claim that it was dominantly Hindu, and that would jeopardise the present-day need to downplay this in the interest of ‘preserving secularism’. Hence, historical objectivity must be sacrificed on the altar of a perceived sense of political correctness. Objective historians are today willing to accept this reality. Dr Upinder Singh writes: ‘One of several explanations of the name Bharatvarsha connects it with the Bharata people, descendants of the legendary king Bharata, son of Dushyanta and Shakuntala. Cosmography blends with geography in the Puranas. Bharatvarsha is said to consist of nine divisions (khandas), separated from one another by seas. But the mention of its mountains, rivers and places—some of which can be identified—suggests that the composers of such texts were familiar with various areas of the sub-continent, and perceived them as part of a larger cultural whole [emphasis mine]’.23 Surprisingly, for all his protestations, Khilnani also accepts this. He says: ‘Equally significant was India’s archive of images of political community, which related culture to polity. In the Brahminic traditions, for instance, the Puranic literature expresses a sense of the sub-continent’s natural geographic frontiers, reflected in a sacred geography mapped out by tirthas, pilgrimage points scattered across the land, and encompassed by the idea of mythic realms like Aryavarta or Bharatvarsha.’ Moreover, he contradicts himself when he seeks to confine this cultural polity only to ‘Brahminic traditions’.

Compulsion of religion is a thing of the past, conversion of faith, trivial as changing clothes; mark of a holy being is not belief, but behavior - clothes, creed, all wither, not character's glow. Christian on Sunday, Atheist on Monday, Buddhist on Tuesday, Sikh on Wednesday, Hindu on Thursday, Muslim on Friday, Jewish on Saturday, try the rest the next day.

The ingrained hostility to India’s Hindu civilisation also stems from the ill-informed claim that this is essential to preserve the nation’s secular fabric. Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate, is an ardent votary of this school of thought. In his book The Argumentative Indian, he argues that those who speak of a Hindu civilisation ‘are the promoters of a narrowly Hindu view of civilisation’.2 While conceding that ‘these old books and narratives have had an enormous influence on Indian literature and thought’—a rather supercilious way of describing thousands of years of civilisational achievement—he nevertheless views ‘the harking back to ancient India with the greatest suspicion’. The key to his thinking lies precisely in this inadvertent confession. For him, the very attempt to revisit ancient India is ab initio a tainted exercise, a matter of the greatest suspicion. This is an a priori conclusion, influenced by factors extraneous to the independent value and need of such a project. For a person of his intellectual calibre, to dogmatically label anyone wanting to ‘hark back’ to ancient India as a Hindu fundamentalist is, to put it politely, deeply disturbing.

The Hindu civilisation’s thought processes were never overwhelmed, even when its people were conquered. This is important, because monuments can be destroyed, but the fortress of ideas is imperishable. The core of this thought process was spiritual, as distinguished from simply religious practice. The spiritual vision both transcended and guided religious rituals, and spilled over into the secular realm. This did not make it a religious civilisation. The spirituality was more about ultimate truths, an exploration of the world of ideas, and not a manual only for religious worship. This spiritual churning could have a religious counterpart, but would survive even without it. As Rabindranath Tagore says: ‘In reality, our history had deeply serene and contemplative phases—for the longest period of time—periods not without war or turmoil, but essentially grappling with pivotal concepts in the realm of thought [emphasis mine].’2 Sri Aurobindo also speaks about ‘an ingrained and dominant spirituality, an exhaustive vital creativeness and … a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence … each at a high intensity of action … the stamp put on her by that beginning she has never lost

A.K. Warder, Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, University of Toronto, who has no interest in whitewashing either side of the conflict, writes: ‘The Turkish conquests of more than half India between 900 and 1300 were perhaps the most destructive in human history. As Muslims, the conquerors aimed not only to destroy all other religions but also abolish secular culture.’2 Will Durant, the well-known chronicler of civilisations, is as categorical: ‘The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history … its evident moral is that civilization is a precious thing whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians.’3 The degree of physical destruction is vouched for by noted art historian Heinrich Zimmer too, who laments that in north India ‘very little survives of the ancient edifices that were there prior to the Muslim conquest: only a few mutilated religious sites remain.’4 Amartya Sen concedes that ‘the slash and burn culture of the Muslim invaders … devastated several cities and ruined many temples, including particularly famous ones in Mathura, Kanauj, and (Somnath).’5 He also acknowledges the account of the Arab–Iranian traveller Alberuni who accompanied Mahmud to India, of this carnage. ‘Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed these wonderful exploits, by which Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions.’6 However, he believes that the Hindutva movement is deliberately highlighting Muslim destruction ‘through motivated selection and purposefully designed emphases as well as frequent exaggeration’.7 He is in a hurry to move away from the barbarism of the Muslim invasion to the undeniable and welcome syncretic elements of Hindu–Muslim culture that developed much later and over time. It is possible that some politically affiliated sections of Hindu society are seeking to deliberately dwell on Muslim atrocities of the past in order to create religious divisions and exploit them for their own benefit. Such an approach is wrong and needs to be countered. However, it is equally wrong to gloss over history and falsify it for present-day ‘secular’ imperatives.

Falsified history nurtures its own mythologies. A breed of writers and intellectuals still persist in trying to portray the Islamic invasion as some kind of great syncretic carnival, where the invaders came and partook of the local sweetmeats, and the conquered had a happy morsel of biryani, while both sat down to work out the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb that we so value today. The bathos of this imagined utopia works only on the ignorance of facts or deliberate distortion. The case of Amir Khusrau (1253–1325 CE) is instructive. Many people believe that he was a mystic, a Sufi poet, the spiritual disciple of his contemporary, the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya; he is regarded as the progenitor of Hindavi, a language that moved away from Persian and dipped liberally into Braj Bhasha, the language of the common masses; he is seen as having enabled Khari Boli, the precursor to the Hindi spoken today; he is also widely known as the ‘father’ of Urdu and the qawwali, and possibly the inventor of the sitar and the tabla; his admirers have given him the title of ‘Tuti-e-Hind’ or the Parrot of India; his love for India has been extolled; and his qawwalis are still very popular across India. But there is another aspect to Amir Khusrau. He was a prominent member of the court of five Sultans who ruled from Delhi, the most important among whom was Allauddin Khilji. In this capacity, he wrote extensively about their conquests and victories and their destruction of the temples of the infidels. In his book, Khaizan ul Futuh, he describes how ‘the kick of Islam’ destroyed the beautiful temple of the dancing Shiva at Chidambaran. When Malik Kafur, Allauddin’s general, attacked the Chidambaran temple—to exactly quote Amir Khusrau’s triumphant language—‘the heads of brahmans and idolators danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet, and blood flowed in torrents. The stone idols called Ling Mahadeo, which had been established a long time at the place and on which the women of the infidels rubbed their vaginas for satisfaction, these, up to this time, the kick of Islam had not managed to break. The Musalmans destroyed all the lings and Deo Narain fell down, and other gods who had fixed their seats there raised their feet and jumped so high that at one leap they reached the fort of Lanka.’10 The same tone and language is there in his descriptions of other such desecrations. Amir Khusrau is an interesting case study. Undoubtedly, his creative output shows that he had assimilated some aspects of Hindu civilisation (his mother was a Hindu), especially in the areas of language and music. At the same time, he provides sufficient proof of his approval of the destruction of Hindu temples and his hostility to the faith of the infidels. Unfortunately, those who seek to whitewash history, dwell only on his contribution to the composite ‘secular’ culture of India. This distortion of history through deliberate amnesia is wrong and needs correction, because it is becoming increasingly futile to hide the truth. The correct appraisal would be to appreciate his cultural contributions to the ultimate development of a syncretic culture, while accepting that this did not change his hostility to the Hindu religion, nor did it represent any reduction or mitigation in the continued destruction by Muslim rulers of Hindu religious and cultural artefacts.

One excess leads to another, and votaries of the other extreme depict Muslim rule as only one of devastation and destruction, completely devaluing the significant cultural exchange that was also partly its consequence. Both sides then deliberately discount historical truth, and shadow-box with the fictions they want to live with. The sane alternative is to accept history as it happened, acknowledge the traumatising impact of the Muslim destruction of Hindu civilisation, recognise the inestimable loss that it caused to the collective assets—physical and intellectual—of a very significant part of our history, and accept that a great deal of that destruction was due to the religious fanaticism of the Islamic rulers. Hindus were ruthlessly subjugated and institutionally discriminated against by the Muslim state. The advent of Islamic rule broke the continuity and evolution of a great civilisation; it disrupted the creative rhythm of that remarkable period of history; it destroyed a great deal of its cultural artefacts; and, it provided the first example in Indian history until then, of such widespread and violent religious intolerance. True secularism can only arise from a reconciliation with history, not suppression of truth, for that only serves to strengthen the extremism of the counter narrative. As Amish Tripathi argues: ‘Denial invariably leads to repressed truth finding expression in the ugliness of hatred and anger, as we see in some parts of India today. It’s healthier in the long run for societies to accept, confront and then learn to handle the truth.’24

The Drunken Polyglot (Sonnet 2300) I never hankered for booze or drugs, you know why - because I'm already drunk, with the most hard-hitting, brain-altering contraband in history - I'm ever consumed with languages and cultures. Latin Passion, Turkish Woundlight, Nordic Thunder, Celtic Wonder, Afro Grit, American Ambition, Arabian Adamance, Chinese Ingenuity, Indian Nonduality - like rivers running eager to meet in sea, cultures converged to bring me to life. I am vast beyond the spell of tribe, I am the ruin of all resurging reich. Call it Reich, Empire or Uncle Sam - Zionist State or Hindu Rashtra - Animal Kingdoms are found everywhere, still, reason is to reichs what phenyl is to floor.

There is a surprising consensus within the Indian political system regarding economics. There is no disagreement between the Congress and the BJP about the economy along Western left–right lines. All parties are statist, suspicious of free markets, wary of close association with big business (though relying on them for backhanded financial support), generous with entitlements and reservations, and not overly concerned with fiscal responsibility. The traditional right– left divide is drawn across secular–Hindu nationalist lines, not economic ideology.