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Articles
Upanishads As Against Dharma-shastra
In the Upanishads, the word brahmin is about inner realisation. In Dharma-shastra, the word brahmin is about birth status and purity. …
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Articles
Upanishads As Against Dharma-shastra
In the Upanishads, the word brahmin is about inner realisation. In Dharma-shastra, the word brahmin is about birth status and purity. The early Upanishads were composed between 600 BC and 200 BC, while the early Dharma-shastra were composed between 200 BC and 500 AD. The former is more spiritual. The latter is more legal. …
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Articles
Sanatan Dharma: A Hinduism That Defines Itself Through Food ‘Purity’
Notably, the term “satvik” food does not appear in Ayurveda, yet it has become central to the Sanatan Dharma movement. North Indian temples now demand that no meat-serving establishments operate within 15 km of their premises. This dietary politics points to the real character of the movement: Sanatan Dharma is essentially a vegetarian Hinduism, promoted by Brahmin, Bania, and Jain lobbies of north India, whose food culture does not reflect the practices of the rest of India…
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Articles
Imagining Hinduism Without Caste
For centuries, what we now call Hinduism was never a single religion. It was a civilisation organised through caste. Each caste had its own gods, rituals, food rules, taboos, and ideas of the sacred. Diversity was not accidental; it was structural. To imagine a caste-free Hinduism is therefore to imagine uniformity. Who defines it then? …
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Articles
Did Missionaries Construct the Buddha We Know?
The Buddha had drifted through European writing for centuries before scholarship took hold of him, and the early portraits were wildly varied…
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Articles
Beyond Karma: Subaltern Tales of Caste Origin
When the missionaries came to India, they argued that Hindus accept social hierarchy because they believe their birth is the result of past actions. Karma promoted fatalism. This interpretation led many anti-caste reformers to reject karma itself. The Jataka tales describe the many previous births of the Buddha, showing how good deeds over lifetimes led to Buddhahood. Karma is central there. But Navayana Buddhism rejects karma, as it does not align with the doctrine of free will and social justice…
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Articles
Of Jains And Jews
The comparison between Jains in India and Jews in Europe reveals two remarkably similar minority communities with profoundly different historical destinies. Both occupied economically influential positions disproportionate to their demographic size. Both cultivated strong internal discipline, dietary codes, educational traditions and merchant ethics. Yet while Europe repeatedly produced violent anti-Semitism culminating in genocide, India never generated a sustained exterminatory anti-Jainism. This reveals a civilisational difference…
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Articles
India Between Empires: A Reality Check
India has always been sandwiched between East Asia and West Asia. From the West, came horses. From the East came gold. India itself was the land of cotton – it had neither metal nor horses…
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Articles
Tantra of the Wheel of Time
Compiled in the early eleventh century as Muslim armies pressed into northwest India, the Kalacakratantra — the Wheel of Time Tantra — is one of the clearest cases in religious history of a sacred text designed as a political response to a contemporary threat. …
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Articles
A Tamil Reimagining of the Ramayana
Kambaramayanam is one of the most celebrated works of Tamil literature. Composed by the poet Kamban around the ninth century in Tamil Nadu, in the time of Chola kings, it is a lyrical retelling of the Ramayana filled with rich poetry, elaborate metaphors, and deep moral reflection. …
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Articles
Yama’s Journey from Vedic King to Cosmic Accountant
Yama is the Hindu god of death, accountability, and the afterlife. Often ignored, his history is long and complex, reaching back to Vedic, Indo-Iranian, and Indo-European mythological traditions…
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Articles
How India and Persia Shaped Each Other
Connections between India and Persia stretched back to prehistoric movements of people, long before written history. Genetic and archaeological evidence suggests that populations linked to ancient Iranian farmers moved eastward into the subcontinent around 10,000 years ago, interacting with older forager communities. …
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Articles
How Bravery, Devotion Soften Caste Boundaries In Folk Stories
Not all ballads and epics are written by Brahmins or in Sanskrit. Across India, folk stories about gods, heroes, and ancestors did not only entertain. They carried arguments about rank, dignity, and who belonged where. …
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Articles
Re-centring the Hindu Goddess
Re-centring the goddess is not anti-male. It is pro-ecosystem. It reminds us that festivals are contracts with land, water, animals, and labour — especially women’s labour. When we reduce Diwali to a warrior’s homecoming, we miss Lakshmi’s audit of how we earned, spent, hoarded, and gave. When we make Navaratri a fashion parade, we forget the seed in the pot, the sprout on the windowsill, and the choreography that once honoured soil…
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Articles
Today’s Sanatan Dharma prefers ‘trad’ Bhisma
The Trans Bill signed by the President of India aligns with the commander of the Kauravas, not Krishna. The Kauravas were more aligned to Christian Evangelists, not “woke” Krishna…