The way of life Hindutva forgot: Dharma, diversity, and the Sanatana condominium

By Dr P.K. Gupta* 

ॐ अपवित्रः पवित्रो वा सर्वावस्थां गतोऽपि वा। यः स्मरेत् पुण्डरीकाक्षं स बाह्याभ्यन्तरः शुचिः।। ॐ पुण्डरीकाक्षः पुनातु, ॐ पुण्डरीकाक्षः पुनातु ॐ पुण्डरीकाक्षः पुनातु। (Whether impure or pure, or having passed through any and every condition, one who remembers Pundarikaksha, another name for Vishnu, becomes pure, both outwardly and inwardly.)

The concept of "dharma" has no exact equivalent in English. While religion generally refers to belief, worship, and faith concerning the sacred, "dharma" encompasses moral duty, justice, compassion, social order, and the principles that sustain life itself.

The Mahabharata presents "dharma" not as a fixed code but as a dynamic, living principle. When Yaksha, having taken the lives of his four brothers by the edge of a pond, put the question to Yudhishthira, son of Dharma and eldest of the Pandavas, the answer he received was this: "dharma" is the truthful path defined by the most knowledgeable sage of an age, the path that humanity then follows. Embedded in this answer is the idea that "dharma" is not static: it changes its expression with time even as its essence endures.

For Yudhishthira, "dharma"  is what holds life together, a meaning carried in the very word: "dhāraṇād dharma ity āhuḥ," "dharma"  is so called because it upholds." It is not simply about being good. It functions at the level of the individual, as self-control, and at the level of society, as duty and the maintenance of collective order. When dharma breaks down, the world itself falls apart. Within this holistic vision are several layers. Compassion sits at the centre: "ānṛśaṃsyaṃ paro dharmaḥ," "non-cruelty is the highest dharma," for without empathy, rules degenerate into violence. Yudhishthira also acknowledges that scripture itself is not univocal: "śrutayo vibhinnā," "the Vedas differ" among themselves. The ultimate test he proposes is simple: does this sustain and protect life without cruelty? If the answer is yes, it is "dharma." In effect, Yudhishthira's "dharma" is ethics fused with social responsibility, compassion, and context, all held together in service of life.

European thought arrived at a related but distinct formulation. Writing in 1793, Immanuel Kant argued that true religion is rooted in morality, not ritual. Empty rites, claims to secret knowledge, or purely emotional experience degrade authentic faith into servile obedience or superstition, a perversion in which the believer seeks God's favour through means other than moral conduct. Kant identified four counterfeits through which people attempt to be religious without being moral: idolatry, the worship of images; theurgy, the seeking of miracles and magical thinking; theosophy, fanaticism and mysticism; and demonism, superstitious fear and empty observance. Much of what passes for contemporary Hindu and "Hindutva" practice, it can be argued, indulges all four without the accompanying moral seriousness Kant demanded, and without the effort to genuinely improve the lives of citizens.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines religion as belief in something holy and worthy of reverence, through which a society addresses its ultimate concerns about life and what follows death. Émile Durkheim, writing in 1912, took a more functional view, describing religion as any system of practices that unites a body of people into a single moral community.

India's mystics, across centuries, repeatedly reached beyond the boundaries of organised religion. Gorakh Nath in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Basaveshwara in the twelfth, Narayan Swami in the eighteenth, the thirteenth-century Rumi, Kabir, and the fifteenth-century compilation of the Guru Granth Sahib all, in their own idiom, stripped away Sanskritic metaphysics and replaced it with devotional poetry in the language of ordinary people. Rumi's Sufi doctrine of "wahdat al-wajud," the unity of being, closely mirrors Advaita Vedanta: where Vedanta declares "aham brahmasmi," "I am the divine reality," Sufism speaks of "fana," the annihilation of the ego into the divine beloved. Kabir went further, explicitly bridging Vedantic and Islamic mysticism, worshipping a formless absolute he called, interchangeably, Ram or Allah, and preaching an equality that led him to attack the caste system head-on, unlike much of the Vedantic tradition before him.

The Guru Granth Sahib opens with the Mool Mantar and the Japji Sahib, affirming a single, uncaused, omnipresent reality that is at once immanent and transcendent, a formulation that closely echoes the Upanishadic idea of Brahman. "Ik Onkar, satnaam, karta purakh, nirbhau, nirvair, akaal moorat, ajooni, saibhang, gur parsaad. Jap. Aad sach jugaad sach, hai bhi sach naanak hosi bhi sach." There is one God, whose name is truth, the creator, without fear, without hate, timeless in form, unborn, self-existent, known by the Guru's grace. Meditate: true in the beginning, true through the ages, true here and now, Nanak says, forever true.

The passage continues to reflect on the limits of intellect and ritual in reaching this truth: "sochey soch na hove je sochey laakh vaar, chupey chup na hove je lai raha liv taar, bhukiaa bhukh na utree je bannaa puriaa bhaar, sehas siaanpaa lakh hoe ta ik na chalai naal." By thinking, one cannot comprehend God, even by thinking hundreds of thousands of times; by remaining silent, inner silence is not obtained, even by remaining absorbed in continuous meditation; the hunger of the hungry is not appeased, even by piling up loads of worldly goods; hundreds of thousands of clever tricks avail nothing in God's presence. "Kiv sachiaaraa hoiyai kiv koorhai tutai paal, hukam rajaaee chalnaa naanak likhiaa naal." How then is one to become true, how is the veil of falsehood torn away? By walking in harmony with the "Hukam," the divine order, already written, says Nanak.

The reformers of the nineteenth century, figures such as Raja Rammohan Roy, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, and the Prarthana Samaj, took this Vedantic inheritance and turned it against social evils, while also answering the critiques levelled by Western Christian missionaries. Rammohan Roy drew on the Upanishads to argue for a purely monotheistic Vedanta, one that offered no support for idol worship, polytheism, or the subjugation of women, and he campaigned for the abolition of sati. Vidyasagar, a formidable Sanskrit and Vedantic scholar who was, in practice, an agnostic humanist, held that metaphysical speculation on Vedanta meant nothing if it did not relieve human suffering; he turned his energies instead to women's education and to legalising widow remarriage. The Prarthana Samaj, led by Mahadev Govind Ranade and inspired both by Roy's Brahmo Samaj and by Marathi Bhakti saints such as Tukaram, used a Vedantic foundation to drive institutional reform, focusing on education and the fight against caste.

A later generation of monks, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and Rama Tirtha, transformed classical Vedanta into what came to be called Practical Vedanta, converting a philosophy once confined to the forest hermitage into an instrument of social and global action. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa lived out the Vedantic maxim "ekam sat viprāḥ bahudhā vadanti," "truth is one, sages call it by various names," practising Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity in turn. Vivekananda went further, declaring that God resides in the poor, the illiterate, and the broken, in "daridra narayana," and arguing that to seek one's own liberation while society starves is itself a form of selfishness, making service to others a core Vedantic duty, an emphasis that finds its parallel in the idea of "seva" within Sikhism and Christianity. Rama Tirtha, meanwhile, taught a joyous and practical form of Advaita, urging individuals to recognise their own inherent divinity as a way of overcoming fear, weakness, and colonial subjugation, an emphasis not far removed from Gandhi's own thinking.

The teachings of these figures are spiritually continuous with classical Vedanta in their vision of a single, unified reality underlying all existence. But they are not identical in application. Classical Vedanta was concerned chiefly with individual, internal liberation, or "moksha," within existing social structures. Modern Vedanta reframed service, equality, and compassion as the very means of union with the divine. The Bhakti movement's mystics and reformers, for their part, actively dismantled ritualism and orthodox boundaries, treating the unity of the divine as a mandate for social equality, education, and human rights.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's landmark study, "The Hindu View of Life," published by Oxford in 1926, described Hindu philosophy and practice not as a fixed dogma but as an experimental, evolving approach to reality grounded in intuition and inner realisation rather than rigid intellectual boundaries, a definition broad enough to suggest that anyone practising it, whatever religion they formally profess, is in some sense Hindu. The Supreme Court of India, in a series of landmark judgments beginning in 1995, characterised Hinduism in similar terms, as a way of life rather than a specific creed.

Centuries of philosophical debate and reform have crystallised into an enormous range of interpretations, translated over time into distinct practices, rituals, and beliefs, together expressed under the single word Sanatana. Each regional and community variant defines God and worship in its own way. This condominium of Hindu practice extends well beyond India, encompassing communities native to Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Yazidi and Kurdish communities of Iraq, Bali in Indonesia, and communities in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia, each of which has contributed something of its own to the spiritual inheritance of Hinduism. The very nature of this practice is secular in temperament. Its defining pillar is diversity: it inherently accommodates, tolerates, and absorbs different philosophies rather than insisting on a single one.

It is this existential substance of Hinduism, plural, absorptive, and resistant to dogma, that stands fundamentally opposed to the narrower, North Indian political project that presents itself today under the name of Hindutva.

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*Contact: guptapradeepkumar698@gmail.com