BHARATA BHARATI

We saw some of the most brilliant minds coming out openly in support of a national narrative of Bharat. Girilal Jain, Arun Shourie, Meenakshi Jain, Koenraad Elst, Swapan Dasgupta, et al created a new kind of intellectual capital in the times when it was a crime to identify oneself with Hindutva and Bharatiya culture. – Ratan Sharda

This was supposed to be the review of a new book Nastik: Why I am not an Atheist by Kushal Mehra. But somehow, when I reflected upon the book launch in Mumbai with brilliant young intellectuals like Harsh Madhusudan, Abhijit Iyer Mitra, and Ami Ganatra, I went on a tangent even as I reviewed this book.

The last few years have been quite satisfying when one sees more and more young thinkers rooted in Bharatiya philosophy or Hindu ethos putting their pens to paper, or fingers on the keyboard. The spark was lit long back by Ram Swaroop and Sitaram Goel who questioned the Western Leftist models and put Abrahamic ideologies and Marxist history under their microscopes. First-generation RSS pracharak Babasaheb Apte started the movement for rewriting Bharatiya itihas in the 1960s with his interpretation of dashavatara and the initiation of the search for the Saraswati river.

Dharampal, the veteran Gandhian came up with books written on the basis of British documents that demolished the British contention that India had nothing to offer except poverty, dogmatism, casteism, and ignorance. Unfortunately, his books vanished from bookshops and libraries never got a chance to buy them. I was lucky to get PDF files from the net before they were reprinted recently.

RSS pracharak Deendayal Upadhyay, the founding general secretary of Bharatiya Jana Sangh, presented a purely Bharatiya model of political economy—Ekatma Manav Darshan—Integral Humanism (though it is not an ‘ism’, it is ‘darshan’ or philosophy). Dattopant Thengadi, one of the best intellectuals of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), elaborated this philosophy. He also created labour organisations like ABVP and Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh that were inspired by Bharatiya culture and shunned the established Leftist model of destructive student and labour unionism.

All this happened during the Nehruvian era. Those were still the days of Marxist monopoly that had distorted Bharatiya history and intellectualism beyond recognition, copy-pasting Western arguments with hardly any original work. So, these powerful decolonising efforts did not become mainstream. The scene changed dramatically with the rise of the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir movement.

We saw some of the most brilliant minds coming out openly in support of a national narrative of Bharat. Girilal Jain, Arun Shourie, Meenakshi Jain, Koenraad Elst, Swapan Dasgupta et al created a new kind of intellectual capital in the times when it was a crime to identify oneself with Hindutva and Bharatiya culture.

On the other side of the planet, Rajiv Malhotra launched an intellectual war against the most powerful Left, anti-Hindu academic centres in the USA. Many academicians like S.N. Gangadhara joined the growing ranks of Indic intellectuals who refused to accept the Western worldview. These scholars took the battle into the Left fortresses. The Left academia tried to swat Rajiv like an irritating fly, but his intellectual rigour and countering of the Left anti-Hindu lobby made them sit up and begin responding to him. This was also the time when there was a frontal assault on Hindu dharma with terms like “saffron terror” and “Hindu terror”.

This upset many Hindus. This is when younger Bharatiya intellectuals began taking note of this strange aversion to anything Hindu and Bharatiya.

Researchers like Sanjeev Sanyal rewrote Indian history with a different perspective with academic rigour. Writers like Amish Tripathi and Ashwin Sanghi used the magical world of ancient Bharatiya literature to weave together fiction that echoed with the young.

Then came 2014. It can be called the year when Bharatiya intellectuals rooted in Bharat felt liberated. We began seeing a number of writers rise. Finally, publishers began to see some value in publishing them and enjoyed a huge upsurge in sales of books based on Hindu Dharma and sanskriti. The challenge to the Western, Marxist narrative began taking shape in the true sense. Left intolerance became an important reason for an immaculate researcher like Vikram Sampath to pen landmark books. Hindol Sengupta, another young intellectual, added his own weight to this rising intellectual capital. We had Aravindan Nilakandan and RSS pracharaks like Sunil Ambekar and Nandakumar presenting Hindutva in contemporary terms.

There are scholars like Sandeep Balakrishna and Sandeep Singh who talk about the dharmic framework for our history and public policies. Sandeep Balakrishna has revived the works of great historians who were banished from library shelves and wrote books that strengthened the Bharatiya narrative. Aabhas Maldahiyar and many other bright young researchers have begun writing history books with deep research. We have Sahana Singh and Bhaskar Kamble bringing to us the glory of our education and knowledge systems and have scholars like Ami Ganatra presenting old wisdom of our itihas of Ramayana and Mahabharata in new ways that tune well with the current generation.

There are many ‘secular’ writers too who milked the Bharatiya itihas and stories like Ramayana to make money. I began reading a best-seller retelling of Ramayana, where the writer in his preface wrote, “With this book, I have snatched Ram away from the communal forces.” Naturally, I dropped it.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a representative list in view of limited column space. I have not touched the genre of political writing. Nearly all these books are an outstanding addition to the knowledge banks of our young citizens. They present objective, well-researched history, challenge the Western Left narrative, present the Indian knowledge system, or defend the Bharatiya worldview against aggressive Left attacks.

However, very few Indic writers presented new models for our dharmic society and our nation based on the foundation of Dharma. I can talk about M.R. Venkatesh whose Retaining Balance argued for a new Bharatiya economic model based on family as the basic unit of any economic policy. He talked of purely Bharatiya framework for the rule of law in Bharat. And then Kushal Mehra, a well-read intellectual but a greenhorn in writing, hits the scene.

For a person who began writing very late in life with an urge to present Hindutva and RSS to a wider audience and bring its ideas to the mainstream literature when the non-Left and Right-wingers were still shunned and seen as untouchables of the intellectual world; it has been an exhilarating experience.

So far, predominant writings from non-Left schools have been within the framework of Western challenge. However, Kushal has presented his own framework for one of the most contentious issues of human society—atheist vs nastik, or atheism vs nastikata. He has set the terms of engagement in the Eastern world’s framework; choosing not to make the Western worldview as a benchmark to respond to. This is the importance of Kushal’s work.

While pointing out the follies of religion, he asserts that it is necessary for human society. He is not ready to throw the baby out with the bath water. A vacuum created due to the strong atheist movement in the Christian world has led to the rise of a dangerous infection called ‘Wokeism’. Nature abhors vacuum, he reminds us. His confidence and comfort in his Hindu skin and readiness to engage the West through our own construct is the most remarkable part of Kushal Mehra’s Nastik: Why I am not an Atheist.

Kushal doesn’t argue to win an argument. He just puts forth the viewpoints of the Western world, the analysis of the Abrahamic religion vs the Dharmic worldview. He dispassionately criticises both Abrahamic and Sanatani religious practices. He then goes on to show the distinction between a nastik and an atheist objectively and asserts that one can be a nastik but still be dharmic and a Hindu; while one cannot be atheist and still be a follower of any Abrahamic religion. A Hindu can be a nastik but he can still be calm and accepted equally calmly by his society.

This book must be read by the young followers of different branches of Sanatana Dharma and various sampradayas, who are sceptical about their own religions and who think it is cool to say “I am an atheist” or “I am ‘spiritual’ but not religious”, etc, without actually understanding his/her own religion. After reading this book, he/she will get a new insight into his/her own religion and dharma, and still have an open mind to be an astik or a nastik. It should also be read by Abrahamics who have turned ex-Muslims and ex-Christians to understand that being angry with one’s own religion and turning ‘woke’ only takes you down a blind alley and into another cult that is anti-society. You cannot build a good society based on hate or negativity.

Kushal’s book, to me, signifies the rise of the young Bharatiya thinkers in a true sense who are now confident in arguing with the world on their own terms from a dharmic perspective and creating their own paradigms.

Go ahead and read Nastik: Why I am not an Atheist to feel confident about our philosophies and your beliefs, and then follow the path that would make you a better human being who feels connected to his/her society and family. – News18, 9 May 2024

› Dr. Ratan Sharda is a well-known author and political commentator. He has written several books on RSS like RSS 360, Sangh & Swaraj, RSS: Evolution from an Organisation to a Movement, Conflict Resolution: The RSS Way, and has done a PhD on RSS. 

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