Hinduism, Hindutva, and the People Who Lit My Mind
11 Dec 2025 Share on:
On the night of 3rd February 2006, at almost exactly half past eleven, a twenty-five-year-old version of me sat down with a small notebook and tried, in the way one sometimes does at that hour, to write out a list of the people who had genuinely shaped the way I thought about the world. The list was short, and now feels rather grand in retrospect — Lord Krishna, Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Ram Prasad Bismil, Premchand, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, and Dr. Manmohan Singh — but it was the list I had at the time, and it felt honest in the way that lists made late at night sometimes do.
One more name joined that list almost at the end of the entry: Dr. Karan Singh. I had just come across his articulation of the difference between Hinduism and Hindutva, and it had quietly rearranged the furniture in my head — in a way that took me, in fact, the better part of two decades to fully unpack, and that I want to try, finally, to write down here.
The rare people who touch both mind and heart
I have always been a little suspicious of the word “inspiration”, because most of the speeches that one is told to find inspiring tend to evaporate at roughly the same speed at which one walks back to the parking lot afterwards. Every once in a while, however, you encounter a person whose words refuse to evaporate; they begin instead to do slow, patient, occasionally annoying work somewhere inside the way you think, challenging you on points you had taken for granted and quietly educating you on points you had not yet realised were relevant. They take up residence on whatever mental shelf one keeps for ideas that might be useful later, and they refuse to be filed away.
Each of the figures on the list above was, to me, an instance of that kind of person, although for different reasons. Krishna’s conversations in the Gita are, on close reading, a long argument that doubt is not a moral failure but the proper starting point for ethical thought, and that has stayed with me. Gandhi’s stubborn insistence on non-violence demonstrated, more clearly than any abstract theory could have, that an inner discipline applied steadily over time can become a political force in its own right. Bhagat Singh and Ram Prasad Bismil offered, between them, an example of courage that refused to wait for ideal conditions and acted under whatever conditions were actually available — which is, in the end, the only kind of courage that ever turns out to matter. Premchand, in his fiction, did the unglamorous work of dragging everyday Indian life into literature and forcing us, as readers, to look at it without the filters we usually use. Nehru and Patel did the equally unglamorous work of turning what had been impossible theory into a functioning state, often in spite of each other. And Kalam and Manmohan Singh, in different ways, represented a quiet, technocratic ideal that I have come to value more as I have got older — intelligence without theatrics, competence as a form of public service.
What I took from this crowd of giants, taken collectively, was not really a formula for living. It was, I think, something closer to a way of approaching the world: to question what one has been told, to try to feel one’s way into the position of people who are not oneself, and to stay curious about the world for longer than the news cycle, on its own, encourages.
Karan Singh’s contribution, when I came across it later that same evening, was to give me a vocabulary for a distinction I had been groping toward without quite being able to name. The distinction, in his hands, was deceptively simple — Hinduism, he suggested, is best understood as a way of seeking, while Hindutva is a project of identity — and the cleanness of that pairing is one of those things you only really notice once it has, almost without permission, started to clarify everything else you have been reading on the subject.
Hinduism: river, not fortress
The Hinduism that I, like most people of my generation, grew up with did not arrive as a rulebook of any sort. It arrived as the stories that my elders told us in the evenings, as bhajans drifting in from a neighbour’s open window, as temple visits in which the spiritual half of the experience was usually entangled, perfectly happily, with the street-food half, and as a slightly vague habit of folding one’s hands in the direction of any image that looked relevant before an examination, on the apparent assumption that one might as well not take chances. It was, in retrospect, messy, contradictory, generous, and almost entirely tolerant of one’s own ambivalence: one could argue with God, ignore God, or quietly convert God into a metaphor for something more abstract, and no part of the surrounding tradition was much interested in coming to confiscate one’s ration card over the choice.
What Karan Singh did, in his writing and his lectures, was to put sharper language to something I had only previously felt. Hinduism, in his account, is best described as a civilizational habit of searching, comfortable in a way that few traditions of comparable age have managed to be with a thoroughgoing multiplicity of deities, of philosophies, and of paths. One can be drawn to the non-dual silence of Advaita, to the emotional surrender of Bhakti, to the disciplined practice of Yoga, or to a calm agnosticism that still treats the tradition with respect — and all of these positions can, in principle, sit around the same metaphorical kitchen table and argue with each other late into the night without any of them needing to be expelled from the room.
The point of saying this, I should be careful to add, is not that Hinduism is flawless or somehow superior to other traditions. Its history is, like every long history, littered with its own injustices, its own blind spots, and its own embarrassing chapters that no honest account can wave away. The point is, rather, that at its core it contains the tools required to correct those injustices from within — the debate, the commentary, the reinterpretation, the dissent that has always come from inside the tradition rather than from outside it — and that capacity for self-correction is what, in the end, makes the tradition feel to me more like a river than like a fortress: ancient, meandering, periodically polluted, and yet, at each stage of its history, capable of renewing itself.
Hindutva: when a river is turned into a wall
Hindutva, set beside the Hinduism described above, is something quite different, and the difference is not, in my reading, primarily theological. It is structural. Where Hinduism, at its best, is preoccupied with questions about the nature of reality, of the self, and of duty — questions that the tradition has, in characteristic fashion, allowed to remain partially open across centuries of debate — Hindutva is preoccupied instead with the question of who properly belongs and who does not, which is a political question with a political answer, and one whose answer must, by the logic of the project, be unambiguous. The first is, in essence, metaphysical and ethical, willing to live with the fact that not every important question has a settled answer; the second is political and majoritarian, and is uncomfortable — often actively hostile — in the face of any answer that admits of qualification.
Once one has noticed this difference, it becomes, in my experience, difficult to stop noticing it. Hinduism, taken as a tradition, has historically been able to live alongside other faiths, to learn from them, and at times to absorb their ideas into itself without feeling its own coherence to be threatened by the encounter. Hindutva, by contrast, requires a more or less permanent sense of external threat in order to justify its own existence; without an enemy of one kind or another, it does not really have a purpose to fall back on, and its rhetoric reflects this consistently. Hinduism, as a posture, tends to invite the practitioner to look inward and to undertake the much harder work of transforming themselves; Hindutva tends to invite them to look outward, and to begin to suspect their neighbours.
The same contrast plays out at the level of intellectual content. Hinduism, as it has actually been practised over centuries, is vast enough to comfortably contain the Gita, the Upanishads, the Charvaka materialists, the Bhakti poets, the Sufi-infused traditions of medieval north India, and the very large number of local deities with their own stories that any visitor to a small Indian town will eventually run into. Hindutva, in its public form, attempts to compress that whole library into a single political slogan — and, as is generally the case when something rich is compressed into something simple, what is lost in the compression turns out to be precisely the parts that made the original worth defending.
Why Karan Singh’s distinction still matters
Back in 2006, sitting with that notebook, I do not think I fully grasped the political weight of the distinction Karan Singh was drawing. What I knew, at the level of feeling rather than analysis, was that it felt right, in some way that I could not yet articulate, for someone to be able to say: “I love Hindu philosophy deeply, and precisely because of that, I reject the narrow, exclusionary nationalism that is so often done in its name.” That formulation seemed, to my younger self, to do justice to two things at once which the rest of the public conversation seemed determined to put in opposition — affection for one’s own tradition, and a refusal to allow it to be turned into a weapon.
Almost two decades later, in a period in which every identity in public life seems to be being steadily sharpened into a weapon of one sort or another, I think the stance feels, if anything, more important than it did then, rather than less. What it offers, in the end, is a third path between two more familiar ones — between, on the one hand, a self-hating rejection of one’s own culture as if there were nothing of value in it, and on the other, a credulous worship of a mythical golden past which, on close inspection, never quite existed. The third path, which Karan Singh expressed better than I have ever managed to, is something closer to a rooted openness: an attitude that is secure enough in its heritage to be honestly self-critical, and humane enough in its relations with others to refuse the easy temptations of identity politics in either direction.
That is the reason I quietly added Karan Singh’s name to that short list of mine on the night I first encountered his work. He did, in the end, what good teachers in my experience tend to do: he gave language to a discomfort I had already been carrying around without being able to name, and he made it clear that loving a tradition and resisting its misuse are not, as they are sometimes presented, contradictions to be reconciled. They are, when one looks at them honestly, two faces of the same obligation.
Where this leaves me today
Nearly two decades after that late-night notebook entry, I find that my relationship with faith has become, on the whole, more agnostic, more questioning, and from time to time more impatient than it once was. The basic architecture, however, has stayed remarkably stable. I remain, as I was then, more interested in Dharma as a lived everyday ethic than in any of the more elaborate theological structures that are sometimes built on top of it; the tradition continues to give me a sense of identity which I do not feel any need to apologise for. I remain, just as steadily, suspicious of any ideology — religious, political, or otherwise — which appears to require a permanent supply of enemies in order to maintain its own coherence, on the grounds that an idea which cannot survive a peaceful neighbourhood is rarely an idea worth defending in the first place. And I continue to feel, with something close to conviction, that if a person’s conception of God cannot coexist with someone else’s conception of God, or with their honest absence of one, then the problem on close inspection is not with the neighbour but with the conception of God being defended.
What Hinduism, on its better days, gives me is a generous supply of metaphors, stories, and philosophical instruments to think with — and the freedom to use them carefully or carelessly, depending on the question at hand. What Hindutva, on its worse days, attempts to do is to compress all of that complexity into a political loyalty test, and to demand that one declare, in advance and in public, which side of a fence one is on. I have, on the whole, become reasonably clear about which side of that line I want to stand on, and the longer I think about it, the less it feels like a difficult choice.
The version of me who sat with that notebook in 2006 was, I think, under the impression that he was just writing down a list of impressive people whose ideas had stuck with him. What he was actually doing, in retrospect, was something rather more consequential: he was choosing the intellectual ancestors he wanted to be answerable to, even if he would not have used those words at twenty-five. I am still, two decades later, trying clumsily to make myself worthy of that lineage — a lineage in which courage, curiosity, and compassion count for more than flags and slogans, and in which a tradition is something one tends and renews rather than something one weaponises. If Hinduism is, as I have come to believe, more like a river than a fortress, then I would rather spend my time learning, however imperfectly, to swim in it, than spend it helping anyone build walls around it.