Sanatan Dharma

Published on 7th January, 2022, in Times of India. Sanatan means something that is timeless. Dharma in colloquial parlance is religion. It can also mean culture and civilisation. So, sanatan dharma can mean “timeless civilisation”. In the Gita, Krishna describes the knowledge he shares as sanatana, timeless. Hindutva — a word that was invented in the late 19th century by Chandranath Basu — insists it is sanatan dharma, and so does not need reform. Chandranath Basu, like many Bengali intellectuals, opposed the social reforms spearheaded by the likes of Raja Rammohan Roy, who invented the term Hinduism in the early 19th century. In other words, ..

Published on 7th May, 2017, in Mid-Day. In universities around the world, there is an implicit acceptance of teleology, that human culture is moving from the primitive to the refined, from underdeveloped to developed, much like moving towards the Promised Land described in Abrahamic mythologies. But are they referring to the psychological or the technological? Contemporary time is viewed as an improvement over colonial and industrial times, which was an improvement over the dark feudal ages of Christendom, which was an improvement over pagan times. This is how history is taught in the West. We are better than the past as we have better laws ..