Imagination, and the Distance I Feel as a South Indian Hindu

The recent political storm around Udhayanidhi Stalin’s remarks on Sanatana Dharma once again exposed how impossible it has become in India to separate religion from ideological performance. His earlier speech, where he compared Sanatana Dharma to social diseases that needed to be eradicated, triggered outrage across the country, especially among Hindutva organizations and North Indian political commentators who immediately framed the statement as an attack on Hinduism itself. More recently, his remarks in the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly reignited the same tensions, not merely because of what he said, but because of what his words symbolized within the larger conflict between Dravidian politics and Hindu nationalist politics. For many outside Tamil Nadu, the reaction was simple: Sanatana Dharma had been insulted. But for many within the Dravidian political and cultural tradition, the critique was aimed less at spirituality itself and more at the social hierarchies, caste structures, and political uses of religion historically associated with the term. The outrage surrounding these speeches revealed something deeper than a political controversy. It revealed the growing inability within contemporary India to distinguish between Hinduism as lived faith and Hindutva as ideological identity. It also revealed how any criticism of social structures associated with Hindu traditions is now rapidly reframed as civilizational betrayal.

The reaction from actor-politician Pawan Kalyan further intensified this atmosphere. His warning that there would be consequences for those speaking against Sanatana Dharma, particularly in response to Udhayanidhi Stalin’s comments, demonstrated how quickly religious discourse in India now shifts into the language of confrontation and threat. What was especially striking was not simply the anger itself, but the assumption underlying it: that criticism of Sanatana Dharma, even from within India’s own anti-caste and Dravidian political traditions, must automatically be treated as hostility toward Hinduism itself. This collapsing of all distinction between social critique, political disagreement, and religious hatred is precisely what makes the current discourse around Sanatana Dharma so volatile. Once a religious idea becomes inseparable from political identity, disagreement itself begins to appear dangerous. In that atmosphere, debate gives way to emotional mobilization, and spirituality slowly becomes subordinate to ideological loyalty.

I grew up Hindu, but not in the way Hinduism is increasingly performed in India today. I did not grow up around aggressive public declarations of faith, nor around the constant conversion of religion into political spectacle. The Hinduism I knew in the South was quieter, more local, more layered into everyday life. It existed in temple festivals tied to harvest seasons, in grandmother stories whispered after dusk, in the smell of oil lamps, in village shrines, in Theyyam performances, in the deep emotional intimacy people carried with local gods and goddesses. It was not organized around civilizational conquest or cultural dominance. That is why the modern invocation of “Sanatana Dharma” often feels alien to me, not because I reject Hindu traditions, but because I do not recognize my experience of Hinduism in the increasingly loud and homogenized political identity now being constructed around it.

One of the central problems with the current discourse around Sanatana Dharma is the assumption that Hinduism has always existed as a singular, unified, self-conscious civilizational identity stretching seamlessly across thousands of years. The phrase “Sanatana Dharma” is undoubtedly ancient, but its modern political deployment is far more recent than its defenders often acknowledge. Historian Peter Heehs points out that while the term existed in earlier Sanskritic traditions, it did not historically function as the universal self-description of all Hindus in the modern sense. [Peter Heehs, A Brief History of the Eternal Religion: A Genealogy of Sanātana Dharma] What is now being presented as timeless continuity is, at least partly, a modern reconstruction shaped by colonialism, nationalism, identity politics, and the need to create a consolidated religious category capable of competing with other organized faiths and modern political ideologies.

Peter Heehs is an American historian and scholar best known for his work on Indian nationalism, Sri Aurobindo, and the historical evolution of Hindu thought and identity. Associated for many years with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry, Heehs has written extensively on how modern ideas of Hinduism and Sanatana Dharma were shaped during the colonial and nationalist periods rather than existing as completely fixed categories since antiquity. His work is often significant because it challenges romantic civilizational narratives by tracing how religion, identity, and nationalism were historically constructed, negotiated, and politically mobilized in modern India.

This becomes clearer when one studies the historical formation of Hinduism itself. Karel Werner, in A Popular Dictionary of Hinduism, describes Hinduism not as a single coherent religion but almost as “a kind of coalition of religions.” [Karel Werner, A Popular Dictionary of Hinduism] Hindu traditions evolved through centuries of accommodation, absorption, contradiction, and synthesis. Vedic ritualism existed alongside folk worship, goddess traditions, tribal cosmologies, yogic practices, philosophical speculation, devotional movements, and local cults. Buddhism and Jainism influenced Hindu thought just as Hindu traditions later absorbed and reshaped elements from them. [Werner] This historical fluidity is important because it directly contradicts the modern political desire to present Hinduism as a single doctrinally unified civilization with one cultural center and one ideological voice.

Karel Werner was a Czech-born scholar of Indian religions and Sanskrit studies known for his extensive work on Hinduism, yoga, and comparative religion. He taught for many years at the University of Durham and became widely respected for presenting Hindu traditions not as a monolithic religion, but as a historically layered and internally diverse civilizational phenomenon. His writings often emphasize the evolutionary and synthetic nature of Hinduism, tracing how Vedic traditions, folk beliefs, philosophical systems, devotional movements, and local cults gradually merged into what is now understood as Hinduism. Werner’s work is especially valuable because it resists simplistic or politically sanitized portrayals of Hindu identity and instead foregrounds its complexity, plurality, and historical development.

As a South Indian, this flattening feels deeply familiar because it often operates through a North Indian cultural framework being projected as the national standard of Hindu identity. The gods themselves carry different emotional and cultural meanings depending on geography. Murugan in Tamil Nadu does not occupy the same symbolic space as Ram in North India. The ritual world of Ayyappa devotion is culturally distinct from the triumphalist aesthetics surrounding contemporary Ram politics. The fierce village goddesses of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the local deities tied to land and ancestry, the ritual ecstasies of Theyyam, the syncretic overlaps between local traditions and Hindu practice, all these occupy a different religious imagination from the highly standardized version of Hindu identity now circulated through television, social media, and political campaigns. Yet increasingly, North Indian symbols, Hindi slogans, and North Indian ritual aesthetics are treated as if they naturally represent all Hindus.

Brihadeeswarar Temple, built by the Chola emperor Rajaraja I in the 11th century, stands as one of the most extraordinary examples of South Indian Hindu civilization outside the framework of modern political Hinduism. Dedicated to Shiva, the temple was not merely a religious space but also a center of administration, art, music, dance, economics, and cultural memory during the Chola period. One fascinating detail often overlooked in contemporary “Sanatana Dharma” discourse is that the temple inscriptions are deeply rooted in Tamil political and cultural life rather than in any idea of a homogenized pan-Indian Hindu identity. The temple employed dancers, accountants, musicians, priests, and artisans, functioning almost like a self-contained urban institution. Even today, Brihadeeswarar feels distinctly Dravidian in aesthetic, scale, and cultural imagination — a reminder that Hindu traditions in the South evolved through regional histories and local civilizational energies, not through a single centralized religious narrative.

This is where the political deployment of Sanatana Dharma begins to feel less like spirituality and more like cultural consolidation. The issue is not faith itself. The issue is uniformity. David Smith, in Hinduism and Modernity, argues that both “Hinduism” and “modernity” are themselves intellectual constructions shaped through historical processes. [David Smith, Hinduism and Modernity] He notes that Hinduism became increasingly self-conscious through its encounter with colonial modernity and European systems of categorization. [Smith] Ironically, many people who loudly reject “Western categories” now describe Hinduism using profoundly modern Western frameworks: a unified religious identity, a centralized civilizational consciousness, standardized symbolism, and mass political mobilization. Much of contemporary Hindutva resembles nineteenth-century European nationalism far more than the fragmented and internally contradictory religious cultures that historically existed across the Indian subcontinent.

The obsession with proving Hinduism “scientific” further exposes this modern anxiety. Ancient Hindu metaphysical traditions did not need validation from NASA, quantum mechanics, or pseudo-scientific reinterpretations of mythology. The Upanishads were not trying to compete with particle physics. Hindu philosophical traditions historically approached myth symbolically, cosmologically, poetically, and metaphysically. The current need to insist that every epic story encodes modern science reveals not civilizational confidence but postcolonial insecurity in a world where scientific rationality became the dominant language of legitimacy. What makes this particularly exhausting is that many South Indian ritual cultures historically embraced ambiguity without discomfort. Contradictions between local myths and pan-Indian narratives coexisted naturally. Folk traditions blended seriousness with absurdity, devotion with theatre, spirituality with performance. Ambiguity was not treated as weakness. Ideology, however, dislikes ambiguity because ambiguity resists control.

B. R. Ambedkar remains one of the most intellectually uncompromising critics of caste hierarchy and Brahminical social order in modern India, and his importance cannot be reduced to symbolic reverence or electoral tokenism. What made Ambedkar formidable was not merely his anger toward oppression, but the clarity and structural rigor of his political thinking. He understood caste not as isolated prejudice but as an organizing principle embedded within social, religious, and economic life. Yet my discomfort with many contemporary Ambedkarite movements comes from the sense that Ambedkar himself is often invoked more as moral symbolism than as part of a coherent political program. Large sections of modern Ambedkarite discourse appear fragmented, reactive, and ideologically scattered, oscillating between identity assertion, online outrage, electoral opportunism, and selective alliances without a sustained long-term political direction. The tragedy is that Ambedkar’s intellectual seriousness frequently exceeds the seriousness of many who now speak in his name.

Any serious discussion of Sanatana Dharma must also confront caste honestly, and this is precisely where contemporary defenses become evasive. A common response today is that caste was merely a colonial distortion or that the original varna system was fluid and non-hierarchical. Colonialism undoubtedly hardened caste categories administratively, but it is intellectually dishonest to pretend caste oppression did not exist before colonial rule. Anti-caste movements emerged from within Indian society because caste humiliation was materially experienced by millions. Periyar did not need Europe to critique Brahminical domination. Ambedkar did not require colonial tutoring to recognize structural inequality. Narayana Guru’s interventions in Kerala arose from lived social realities, not imported ideology. As someone from the South, where caste has profoundly shaped social life, I find it impossible to romanticize “civilization” while selectively erasing histories of humiliation and exclusion. The problem with many modern defenses of Sanatana Dharma is that every historical injustice is dismissed as “not true Hinduism,” while every philosophical ideal becomes the “real essence” of the tradition. But civilizations cannot be judged only through metaphysical poetry. They must also be judged through their historical structures.

What concerns me even more today is how criticism itself is increasingly treated as betrayal. A civilization genuinely confident in itself should be capable of enduring scrutiny. Instead, criticism of Hindutva is frequently reframed as hatred toward Hinduism itself. Critiquing caste becomes “anti-Hindu.” Questioning historical myths becomes evidence of a “colonial mindset.” Political disagreement is interpreted as civilizational hostility. This is not intellectual confidence. It is ideological fragility. And from a South Indian perspective, the emotional style of contemporary political Hinduism often feels culturally alien. The loudness of it, the constant public performance, the militarized devotional aesthetics, the transformation of gods into election symbols, the reduction of spirituality into spectacle — none of this resembles the Hinduism many of us inherited. The gods I grew up with did not need constant public assertion. They existed quietly in ritual worlds older than the modern nation-state.

This is not an argument that South Indian Hinduism is somehow morally superior. The South contains its own histories of caste violence, patriarchy, communal tensions, and political manipulation. But there remains a meaningful cultural distinction. Dravidian political movements, particularly in Tamil Nadu and parts of Kerala, created a historical skepticism toward Brahminical authority, North Indian cultural dominance, and Hindi imposition. Even among personally religious people, there often remained discomfort toward overt religious nationalism. That discomfort still survives. Many South Indians experience contemporary Sanatana Dharma discourse not as inclusive civilizational belonging but as a demand for cultural absorption into a homogenized national identity.

What makes this transformation especially tragic is that Hindu intellectual history contains extraordinary traditions of philosophical inquiry, skepticism, and self-critique. The Upanishadic spirit was exploratory rather than doctrinally rigid. Indian philosophical traditions historically thrived on debate. Contradiction was tolerated. Multiple truths coexisted. Yet contemporary political discourse increasingly rewards certainty over inquiry and emotional loyalty over intellectual openness. A tradition once capable of absorbing difference now often appears threatened by disagreement itself. That is not the psychology of spirituality. It is the psychology of nationalism.

Remember Ranveer Singh's public mockery of Kantara and the ritual form of worship in South India? If not, check the video on YouTube here. Ranveer Singh Comments On Rishab Shetty @ Goa Film Festival Closing Ceremony | Kantara Movie

I still remain Hindu, but my relationship to Hinduism feels culturally separate from the aggressively nationalized version currently dominating public discourse. I find more spirituality in quiet temple corridors than in televised outrage. I find more truth in acknowledging contradiction than in pretending a pure and unified civilizational past ever existed. If Sanatana Dharma truly means an eternal search for truth, then it must remain open to questioning, reinterpretation, and self-critique. Otherwise, what survives is not dharma, but ideology wearing the mask of eternity. @ManuKurup References

[Karel Werner, A Popular Dictionary of Hinduism]

[David Smith, Hinduism and Modernity]

[Peter Heehs, “A Brief History of the Eternal Religion: A Genealogy of Sanātana Dharma”]

[RMA Saleem, “Hinduism, Hindutva and Hindu Populism in India”]

[Supriya Gandhi, “Modern Hinduism and the Emergence of Hindutva”]

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