This post was inspired by an earlier post of X.T.M where he mentioned that this question generates a lot of traffic for BP.

If we consider the literal definition of Paganism, the question becomes quite simple. Historically, the term “Paganism” was not used to describe religious beliefs prior to the 20th century. It first emerged in the context of Early Christianity, serving as a pejorative for the folk religions still practiced in the rural regions of the Roman Empire. By this definition, it’s clear that Hinduism does not fit the label of Pagan.

However, in contemporary usage, many Neo-pagans view Paganism as a neutral descriptive term, applicable to all cultures that are philosophically incompatible with the three Abrahamic faiths. The question whether Hinduism can be considered Pagan in this broader sense is not so simple since most Hindus assert belief in a singular God or multiple manifestations of one God (30 percent and 60 percent, according to PEW surveys).

To start answering this question, we need to pinpoint the philosophical foundation of Hinduism. Thankfully, this isn’t too complicated, as several Vedic verses touch on this theme (e.g. Brihadaranyaka 4.4.18 and 4.4.22), all leading to the same conclusion. These verses indicate that the essence of all spiritual paths in ancient India revolves around Adhyatma (the doctrine of enlightened self). The central concept of Adhyatma is Atman—an ancient, observer consciousness believed to be deeply embedded within each of us. The ultimate aim is to attain Moksha, i.e. to awaken and realize this concealed enlightened self. Now, if we were to bring the God of Abraham and Atman together on a talk show, asking them to explain their doctrines to the audience, it might go like this:

God : I am the all powerful God. 
Atman : I am your peaceful inner self.

God : I am the true creator of everything that you perceive.
Atman : I am the true experiencer of all that you perceive.

God : Submit to me unconditionally and obey all my commands.
Atman : Become one with me and be liberated.

God : If you are loyal to me I will take to heaven after you die.
Atman : Whenever you see yourself as me, the Earth looks like heaven.

God : Initiate force against others if they oppose your faith.
Atman : Mix with others if they oppose initiation of force.

Even in these highly simplified versions one can clearly see that the Atman doctrine is Pagan if we apply the more inclusive definition of Paganism. It can also be viewed as a branch of Pantheism. In Adhyatma the analogue of impersonal supreme God is Brahman, the entire universe seen from an enlightened perspective. Since experiencing Brahman is same as experiencing one’s Atman, many experience oriented spiritual traditions use them as interchangeable terms. So when Hindus talk about one God, the are referring to the impersonal God, not the God of Abraham.

Please note I am a dentist — not a geneticist — and I do not claim formal expertise in this field. I have a long-standing interest in history and look to archaeogenetics as one of the best tools available for addressing some of the most enduring questions about South Asian origins and identity.

Credit is due to the many researchers, bloggers, and science communicators who have made this field accessible — including Razib Khan (whom I haven’t met, though he happens to be a fellow Bengali), who’s writing first inspired me to engage deeply with these questions.

I first got into Ancient Indian DNA space when the research from the Rakhigarhi woman’s DNA was published- shedding light on IVC genetics for the first time. Prior to that Indian society had no idea how to scientifically answer questions like whether the “Aryan-Invasion” was real. Everything you heard or read was just some dude’s opinion.

If the Aryan invasion was real didn’t the Indus Valley civilization prove the indigenous but conquered “Dravidians” were the ‘superior’ culture builders and the Aryans were the barbarians?

If they spoke Dravidian languages, did it mean they looked South Indian… and that after the invasion they were all somehow transplanted into the actual South of the peninsula – while the Indus region was taken over by… White people??

These were the conundrums that filled my mind and it was due to the work of some of these excellent pioneers in the genetics field (Shinde, Narasimhan, Reich and Razib) that I went down the rabbit hole of answers.

At some point as more research came out about the Indus people and the genetics of the caste system, there seemed to sprout the idea dimly apparent but visible if you looked – that Dravidians themselves as a language group may not be native to India.

Now I wasn’t completely sold. Like many of you I wonder why it can’t be the other way around.

Why did neolithic Iranians have to come into India – why can’t it be that neolithic northwest Indians went to the Iranian plateau? I don’t have all the answers, and it’ll take a while for all the questions to be settled. Till then I try to keep my biases in check and follow the research.

A paper came out in Nature in October shedding light on the possible genetic basis to the origins of the Dravidian language family.

Novel 4400-year-old ancestral component in a tribe speaking a Dravidian language | European Journal of Human Genetics

The researchers sampled a small tribe – the Koraga from Southern India speaking a Dravidian language.

Now we all know the main cline of Indians come from Steppe, Indus farmer and AASI in the literature.

New finding from this paper: Proposed fourth ancestral component — which they call “Proto-Dravidian” ancestry — found in the Koraga, which branched off around 2,400 B.C.

The origin of this ancestry seems to lie in the region between the Iranian plateau and the Indus Valley before the arrival of Indo-European languages. It persists in diluted form in many South Asian communities (not just in the tribal population) today, especially Dravidian speaking ones.

The researcher purport this may provide support to the Elamo-Dravidian language family hypothesis, which would provide a common source of languages for all populations derived from Neolithic Iranians back to one of the centres (Zagros) where farming was invented.

What does this research imply about the ancestry of the IVC people and what language they spoke?

What does it imply about the so-called “Indus farmer” component of Indian ancestry?

The Indus farmer as one of the three key sources of Indian ancestry was thought to represent the core ancestry of the IVC.

This study with the Koraga finds a distinct 4,400-year-old branch of the main Neolithic Iranian and not identical to the core “Indus Farmer”. Genetically it’s closer to current Dravidian speaking rather than Indo-Aryan speaking populations.

There might have been two (or multiple) Iranian-related influxes into the subcontinent:

• An earlier, associated with Neolithic spread of agriculture (≈ 7000–5000 BCE → the IVC base population),
• at least one later sub-branch (~2400 BCE) that corresponds to this “Proto-Dravidian” ancestry.

So, the IVC population may have contained multiple Iranian-related sub-lineages, one of which could have seeded the Proto-Dravidian gene pool that persisted in southern India.

The 4,400-year-old date inferred for the Proto-Dravidian ancestry roughly matches the mature-to-late IVC period (2600–1900 BCE).

While genetics can’t “prove” a language, the chronological and geographical overlap adds circumstantial weight to the idea that the language(s) of the IVC were Dravidian or Proto-Dravidian in nature.

Wasn’t the mature period of the IVC already in full swing 4,400 years ago?

The Indus Civilization wasn’t a single static population—it extended from Baluchistan and Sindh up to Haryana and Gujarat, and its regional sub-populations may have had slightly different genetic mixtures.
Local differentiations could easily occur within that 700-year mature phase.

So the “Koraga-like” branch could represent:

• a southern or interior offshoot of the broader IVC population, or
• the southernmost fraction of IVC peoples who moved into peninsular India as the civilization urban centres declined (post-1900 BCE).

What does it suggest about Brahui or Burushaski or Nihali languages; the three “mystery” languages?

Brahui – the case is strengthened for this language to be a relict of an IVC-era language and not a recent back migration from South to North. These speakers genetically have the same ancestral components of the Indo-Aryan speakers around them rather than the amplified “proto-Dravidian” component that you would expect from migrants from the South.

Burushashki – Fits a scenario where it could descend from a pre-Indo-Aryan, pre-Dravidian language of the upper Indus region — maybe a branch of the same broad macro-family that included IVC languages.

– may preserve a northern dialect of the IVC-era linguistic landscape — an (adopted) sister, not daughter, to Proto-Dravidian which survived in a mountain redoubt while Indo-Aryan took over the plains.

Nihali – may descend from one of these pre-Munda, pre-Dravidian forager populations, preserving fragments of a Mesolithic or Neolithic substratum language.

This fits with the new study’s timeline:

• the IVC-Dravidian connection crystallized after 2600 BCE,
• but eastern and central India already had long-established hunter-gatherer cultures with minimal Iranian-farmer input.

Nihali probably represents a pre-agricultural linguistic substrate, not Dravidian or IVC-derived at all — more of an AASI linguistic survivor.

The roots of what became Jati

I won’t go too in depth as the field here is still a lot of theory without definitive answers – this paper taken with Narasimhan (2019) and Shinde (2019) finds that at least 4,400 years ago IVC was already a genetically distinct and relatively stable mix of Iran-related farmer ancestry + South Asian forager ancestry, with internal substructure.

• Significant regional genetic variation between different Indus sites

• Long-term persistence of ancestry profiles — meaning mixing across the entire IVC zone was not completely random.

Does that mean “caste”?

Not strictly in the Vedic sense with Varna, Jati as far as we can see but it could mean that:

• There were endogamous or semi-endogamous groups within the IVC.
• These groups likely corresponded to occupational, regional, or lineage divisions, rather than religious varnas.
• The cultural habit of limiting marriage circles could therefore be much older than the Indo-Aryan social codes that later memorialized it as varna–jati.

• The original social boundaries may be linked to pre-agriculture tribal or kinship identities that were maintained even throughout the period of early urbanization/integration.

We know from the paper: 50,000 years of evolutionary history of India: Impact on health and disease variation – India has long been a reservoir for human DNA.

Old groups are preserved alongside but separate from the new… far longer than other subcontinents where homogenization cause their disappearance.

This was true for archaic hominins living in India before Out of Africa (according to the archaeological record) and continued to be true afterward even through to the coming together of these different groups as they built the first cities.

————————————————–

This paper does not settle the origins of the Dravidian languages or linguistic identity of the IVC.

It’s my first article so if people want to share feedback – please feel free and keep it respectful – thanks. If there is interest I have more ideas planned like the history of endogamy in South Asia and the intersection across culture, politics and identity from the perspective of a second generation Indian (West Bengal) Australian.

Warm Regards,

Dr Rajorshi

Continuing on, X.T.M says that “India’s post-Independence settlement created structural ambiguity” and cites four factors in particular:

• Upper-caste Hindu political dominance at the center
• Muslim demographic concentrations with limited elite integration
• A constitutional secularism that promised equality while leaving communal structures intact
• No acknowledgment that the Muslim League’s victory posed a legitimacy problem

I think his key insight is this: “The constitution guaranteed rights. It could not guarantee renewed political consent.”

The issue as I see it is that the Indian state took the most half-hearted, wishy-washy approach towards the problem of integration. It allowed Muslims to construct bastions of political power while at the same time dividing Hindus along caste and linguistic lines. It allowed criminal elements, many from a Muslim background, to dominate perhaps its most significant sector — the arts — and spread messages of the innate goodness of Indian Muslims and Pakistanis (which is only being suppressed due to both governments’ actions) and the need for peace between Hindus and Muslims, thereby constructing an illusory palace to beguile secularized urban Hindus, while behind the silver screen they fund terrorist attacks in India. The murder of Gulshan Kumar comes to mind as (seemingly) among the least of these crimes, but that he was killed outside a temple is like having salt poured into the wound and mud slung at one’s face. What to speak of 26/11 which has already been talked about, especially recently.

Again, as I mentioned previously, I don’t think the overwhelming issue is that Muslims were allowed to maintain particular political fiefdoms — it’s that Hindus were stymied from establishing systems of political power based on traditional models. When talking about ‘independence’, Moldbug (2008) in chapter 2 of An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives suggests that:

“One test we can apply for independence, which should be pretty conclusive, is that the structures of government in a genuinely independent country should tend to resemble the structures that existed before it was subjugated—rather than the structures of some other country on which it may happen to be, um, dependent. These structures should be especially unlikely to resemble structures in other newly independent countries, with which it presumably has nothing in common.”

Ignoring that the modern idea of statehood (with which some people seem to be rather obsessed) was attached — sometimes rather hastily — onto folk groups who still inhabited the first or second stages of Deleuzoguattarian social organization (1. the primitive territorial machine, 2. barbarian or imperial representation), if we think of the modern state as a kind of social technology, this renders the rebuttals Moldbug makes to to progressive sentiments in this part of An Open Letter about as logical as a complaint that electricians in the Gulf states don’t wire houses ‘Arabicly’ — sure, there might be differences in plug shape, voltage, wattage, etc. between houses in Dubai and D.C., but the general concept and purpose are the same. Electricians in Oman aren’t going to be spelling out “Allah” in copper anymore than their counterparts in Omaha are going to be connecting wires to say “Christ is King”.

That said, I do think there is some merit to his point in the Indian situation. Moldbug approvingly brings up the example of Botswana as one of only two truly independent post-colonial African countries and how its people elected as their first president Seretse Khama, who had been king of the Tswana people since the age of 4 and, much like the INC elites, was a British-educated lawyer by training. Similarly, his party, the Botswana Democratic Party, had been the predominant political power since their independence. Since Moldbug wrote An Open Letter back in 2008, the BDP’s dominance came to an end in 2024 after the largely left-leaning Umbrella for Democratic Change coalition took power. It could thus be argued that despite being heavily based on British poltical forms, the Botswanan state managed to maintain a particularly Batswanan character in a way that India either couldn’t or didn’t. The Indian republic tried to secure the loyalty of the leaders of the princely states and kingdoms of the subcontinent by replacing Britain as the source from which patronage would flow the form of the ‘privy purse’. Ironically, this is not unlike what Moldbug suggests in his blogpost ‘Method and apparatus for safe and effective regime change’ (September 13, 2007) when he talks about discharging and ‘lustrating’ former officials and employees of the American government — that is to say, forbidding them from taking up any official position in the new government. For the sake of brevity, I will use lustration to mean this forbiddance along with the actual removal from office and dissolution of titles.

In short we can sum up the Moldbuggian process of lustration in four short steps:

1. Repeal & replace all laws, regulations, policies, procedures, and personnel (“including all formally unofficial organizations that may in fact have become quasiofficial”!)
2. Create a public database which notes the identity of every former government employee
3. Offer these former officials a Persilschein — an unconditional amnesty for whatever they may have done earlier
4. Prohibit any former official from holding any position in the new government

Lastly, Moldbug suggests that these lustrated officials should:

“…receive any accrued pension benefits, preferably in a lump sum, so that there is no permanent relationship between them and the new government. If anything, these benefits should be increased, so that former officials—many of whom will be unsuitable for any productive employment—suffer no great or general hardship.”

Why does Moldbug consider these steps important? ‘Rebooting’ the government without total lustration is like only dipping your toe into the Rubicon: you’ve already committed treason against the Roman Republic — death is your due anyways, so you may as well go all the way and become the Divine Caesar. He also notes that by not lustrating you are simply ignoring human nature:

“Once your new government contains any employees of the old government, it’s very likely to end up containing most of them. In which case, why bother?”

He points to Poland as a good example of this principle:

“Poland is in the midst of a lustration controversy right now—many people who were successful and influential in Communist Poland have, perhaps unsurprisingly, become successful and influential again.”

In hindsight, we can see that the Indian state, and specifically the heirs of the INC failed on every single one of these fronts to lustrate the Indian government from the officials of the British era.

First, they never even removed all previous personnel (in the form of the Indian royals), much less all laws, regulations, policies, or procedures right from the start. Instead of a one-time payment and the severance of any future relationship, the Indian government offered the aristocrats of the principalities certain continuous privileges and allowances, among which was the privy purse. Then, instead of keeping this vow, the government in 1971 under Indira Gandhi abolished the already gradually shrinking privy purse and their titles as “Ruler”.

Second, as Moldbug pointed out, elites tend to recover from setbacks and rise back to their former status. In China, for example, Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ led to the seizure and redistribution of land and other resources from wealthy landowners — along with a good deal of murder and slaughter. But, this ressentiment-fueled degringolade (to use a Moldbuggian word) seems not to have the permanent effects Mao and the other bandits seem to have desired. Rather:

“…a group of scholars based in America, Britain and China find that Mao’s social re-engineering had a less lasting impact than might be supposed. The grandchildren of the pre-Communist elite have largely regained the status their families once enjoyed. They are a lot more educated and wealthy than other households. Their values and attitudes also differ from the descendants of those who had lower social standing before 1949. They are less bothered by inequality, more entrepreneurial, more pro-market, and more inclined toward individualism and a belief in success through hard work.

…They found that by 2010 the incomes of descendants of the pre-Communist elite were 16-17% higher than those born into families that were underprivileged before 1949. They were also more likely to have completed secondary and tertiary education. They performed significantly better in maths tests.”

– ‘The families of China’s pre-Communist elite remain privileged’, The Economist, September 17, 2020

Instead of either eliminating the institution of Indian royalty in one fell swoop (through total lustration and lump sum remuneration) or formally enshrining them as ceremonial figureheads in the English way, the Indian republic instead the path of half-measures, letting them sup at the teat of state patronage for decades before trying to wean them off by strength.

Of course, we should not be taken aback to learn that the old aristocracy did not exactly let this go without raising a finger. While the republic’s judiciary were of the mind to reject the same initiative brought forth by it’s president one year earlier, Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, got it passed through the the legislature thus enshrining it into law as the 26th amendment to the republic’s constitution. This too-late republican overreach led to a score of former nobles taking up in politics, and while some might have failed their bids for election, others, like the Scindias, seem to have found success on both the Congressi and conservative-reactionary sides of Indian politics.

Dirty War in Balochistan

Let’s take a look at the other theses put forth by X.T.M in this piece.

His second thesis is that “The Muslim League won. Then most Muslims stayed.”

How should we understand this? It could be said the sons of Abraham — and perhaps especially those in the line of Ishmael — are meant to stay untethered from bonds to the land upon which they live, seeing as they are (at least supposedly), nomads from the sand? I think the best description of the Islamic invaders of India comes from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972/1977). Speaking of the ‘Barbarian Despotic Machine’ which supplants the ‘Primitive Territorial Machine’ (which I take to be synonymous with localized Hindu communities, even if it isn’t a perfect fit):

“The founding of the despotic machine or the barbarian socius can be summarized in the following way: a new alliance and direct filiation. The despot challenges the lateral alliances and the extended filiations of the old community. He imposes a new alliance system and places himself in direct filiation with the deity: the people must follow. A leap into a new alliance, a break with the ancient filiation—this is expressed in a strange machine, or rather a machine of the strange whose locus is the desert…” (p. 192)

Furthermore:

“And new perverse groups spread the despot’s invention (perhaps they even fabricated it for him), broadcast his fame, and impose his power in the towns they found or conquer. Wherever a despot and his army pass, doctors, priests, scribes, and officials are part of the procession.” (p. 193)

What the barbarian despotic machine takes over does not need to map perfectly onto the model of the primitive territorial machine, because as D&G explain:

“In theory the despotic barbarian formation has to be conceived of in terms of an opposition between it and the primitive territorial machine: the birth of an empire. But in reality one can perceive the movement of this formation just as well when one empire breaks away from a preceding empire; or even when there arises the dream of a spiritual empire, wherever temporal empires fall into decadence. It may be that the enterprise is primarily military and motivated by conquest, or that it is primarily religious, the military discipline being converted into internal asceticism and cohesion.” (p. 193)

As we can read in Derryl N. Maclean’s “Religion and Society in Arab Sind” (1984), Sindhi, and by extension, Indian society was pretty complex and developed past being a purely localist social model, but D&G’s historiography still works in this case because of fact that it is more a repeating historical tendency than a singular concrete event.

In any case, theoretically, the invaders should have no attachments to the land itself and the ways of the folks that lived upon it, marking and being marked by them. Of course, by the time we come to Partition, Islam in India is already centuries old and the Muslims in the subcontinent have had a long time to settle down, whether by force or self-will, and undergo the process of marking and being marked by the land they have lived on for generations. The shape this has taken is at times immediately recognizable — dargahs, masjids, mausoleums, beards, burkhas, linguistic registers — and at others, more subtle — genotypes, phenotypes, diets, fabrics.

Whatever the Muslims of pre-Partion India may have said they thought about about their supposedly insurmountable differences with their Hindu neighbours in the abstract sense, it shouldn’t have surprised us that, in their revealed preferences, they valued memories, sentimentality, and attachment to what they had known for generations over political and theological consistency. Of course, this is only all too human. But, it is also, in a sense, all too pagan.

Unfortunately for them, they were caught in a double-bind of sorts and were unable to perfectly reconcile their burgeoning sense of Indian-ness with the identity they had used to define themselves for centuries. Of course, as X.T.M says, the Congress deeply failed both them and India as whole through the sort of selectively secular course it tried to steer the newborn ‘nation’-state through. Whether that was due to the sheer self-delusion of an elite class hopped on premium-grade Anglo Liberal copium or willful malice is a question for another day. What does matter most, in a sense, is the results— the continuation of the British-origin Muslim Personal Law and Waqf related acts, both have been the source of controversy and problems in recent years.

I will say, don’t mistake my mention of the Congress’ permitting these to continue to be a critique rooted in liberal ideas of equality before the law or secular legalism. Kabir, in response to whom X.T.M wrote the original piece, may care about secularism, but I don’t. The issue with how the Congress handled Muslim integration doesn’t lie in the fact that they implemented different law codes — it lies in the fundamental dialectical tension that arises from the construction of the categories of Muslim and ‘Hindu’, wherein the latter simply means anyone who is not a Muslim (or Christian), thereby establishing the Muslim as a sort of protagonist in the new Indian social drama, as he is made the sole bearer of a concrete identity whereas the Hindu is made out to be a more nebulous sort of entity, more of an abstract, anonymous force suffusing Indian society than a person himself.

Again, I don’t say this out of any wish that Hindus should also transmogrify ourselves to be thus legally ‘captured’. Only that we should recognize the legacy of Islamic and Anglo law in the modern Indian legal system, as well as the fact their forms seem to rhyme and resound with each other in ways that seem to render them more powerful than even the will of the Hindu majority of India at times (if any of those things even exist).

I don’t think I’ve ever read such a succinct diagnosis trying to get to the root of India’s issues, much less such a novel one (at least to me). For these reasons, if nothing else, I think X.T.M’s idea merits a deeper look.

I am largely in agreement with the author that diversity in and of itself is not at the heart of India’s troubles if only because it seems to have always been a factor in Indian society for as far back as we have history. Indeed, “diversity” and differentiation seem to me to be a mark of the continuity of Indian civilization from the earliest days of our forefathers. If this, our patrimonial diversity, has become a bane to India, it is to the India that plays at being a modern nation-state, democracy, and republic — not to the India of uncountable Gods, saints, and heroes, each at the heart of their world, ruling over the innumerable hamlets that dot the country and the uncountable kindreds that dwell within them. As Diana Eck (2012) puts it: “The profusion of divine manifestation is played in multiple keys as the natural counterpart of divine infinity, incapable of being limited to any name or form, and therefore expressible only through multiplication and plurality.” (India: A Sacred Geography, p. 48).

It is the second half of the author’s initial hypothesis that I think is the most important bit to dissect. Something about this diagnosis does not strike me as entirely accurate.

It is true that Partition split the Indian folk, namely, Hindus and Muslims, but the shape that this split took is a rather curious and, at least for me, unexpected one. According to the Pew Research Center’s June 29, 2021 report titled Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (Sahgal et al.), when asked whether Partition was a good or a bad thing for Hindu-Muslim relations in a 2019 survey, 43% of Indian Hindus saw it as good while 37% of them saw it as bad. Indian Muslims? Quite the opposite. Only a third (30%) of them saw it as helping communal relations while almost half (48%) saw it as actually harmful.

While Partition may have been the bloody birth pangs of the Indian State and been a very real source of deep pain to the actual humans affected by it, what ails the folks of India is, I think, altogether something else. As to what exactly this is, I will come back to it towards the end of this essay.

X.T.M’s second hypothesis is something I actually agree with. such as the idea that the “two peoples” (Hindus and Muslims) could have lived together. We have seen time and time again that incomers to India have, over time, flowed into the great folksea that ebbs and flows upon our lands like trickles of glacial melt joining with the ocean, at once both one and sundry.

There is data to support this as well. In the same Pew report I cited above (Sehgal et al., 2021), the researchers found that while both Hindus and Muslims wish for segregation in their personal lives, as can be seen in the high percentage (over two-thirds) of both groups who want to stop intermarriage, the fact that most Indians’ friends tend to be from their own religious communities, and 45% of Hindus would not want a neighbour from at least one of the other major religions (Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, & Christian) — a figure matched by 36% of Muslims, when it comes to what folks believe, there seems to be a surprising degree of similarity that crosses religious lines. The report revealed that an equal percentage of Indian Muslims believed in karma as did Indian Hindus (77%), along with over half of Indian Christians (54%), two-thirds of Buddhists and Sikhs, and 75% of Jains. Around one-third of Muslims and Christians said they believed in reincarnation as opposed to (and I found this very weird) only 40% of Hindus, 18% of Buddhists and Sikhs, and 23% of Jains). A similar level of belief in the purifying power of the Ganga was found among the two Abrahamic faiths. Needless to say that none of these ideas could be considered orthodox doctrine in any tradition of Islam or Christianity, and any adherence to them by followers of those religions in India immediately opens up a flood of questions one could ask.

Could it be the result of a superimposition of a Muslim or Christian layer onto a Hindu-Buddhist base such as happens when a linguistic superstrate is built atop a conquered population leading to the adoption of vocabulary and grammatical features from the linguistic substrate? Or, could it be like the speculated spread of retroflex consonants, which, while found in languages in many parts of the world, are particularly concentrated in India? Perhaps it’s a consequence of Hindu demographic domination over the last several decades causing it to serve as a sort of ‘prestige dialect’ among Indian religions? In any case, I don’t think we can discount the probability that a generally convivial attitude between Hindus and Muslims could have been maintained prior to Partition.

As such, I am generally in agreement with X.T.M’s argument that what happened was largely because of the will of the political elite. What I do take issue with is the rather ludicrous oversimplification of the so-called ‘Hindu’ side as the “Brahminical–Congress elite”, not only because it is patently untrue in terms of the actual people who led the Congress. Let’s take a look at some of the founding and early members. There are:

Bengali Brahmins

• S. Banerjee (Rarhi Kulin)
• W.C. Bonnerjee (Rarhi Kulin)

Bengali Kayasthas

• A.M. Bose
• B.C. Pal
• R.C. Dutt
• Sri Aurobindo

Western Indian Brahmins

• B.G. Tilak (Chitpavan)
• G.K. Gokhale (Chitpavan)
• K.T. Telang (Gaud Saraswat)
• M.G. Ranade (Chitpavan)

Muslims

• B. Tyabji (Sulaimani Bohra, of Arab descent),

Parsis

• D. Naoroji
• D.E. Wacha
• P. Mehta

Southern Indian Brahmins

• C. Vijayaraghavachariar (Iyengar)
• G.D.S Iyer
• P. Anandacharlu (Telugu, adopted by a Tamil Brahmin in Madras)
• S.S. Iyer

Others

• L.L. Rai (Agrawal Jain, Punjab)
• S.R. Mudaliar (Sengunthar, Chola vassals & merchant guilders, Tamil)
• V.O.C. Pillai (Vellalar, powerful tribe in society & politics, Tamil)

By focusing on the ‘Brahminical’ nature of the Indian National Congress, X.T.M papers over the very real internal differences between these Brahmins — for example, the fact that Gaud Saraswat Brahmins have historically had their status contested by their neighbors to the north in Marathi lands and to the south in Malayali ones, or the sectarian distinctions between Iyers and Iyengars. This sort of ‘unionism’ is as pernicious when applied by outsiders as it is by insiders to the Hindu fold because it flattens out the differences given to us by the Gods and our Fathers. Worse, such oneness only makes us easier to be understood, governed, and thus, captured.

Elites often do whatever they can to stay in power, even if comes at the cost of honour, legacy, or tradition, a phenomenon we can see at work in the way that the Godrej India Culture Lab, which has, among other things, become “one of the most LGBTQIA+ inclusive companies”, helping to produce A Manifesto for Trans Inclusion at Workplace, and hosted a ‘transgender’ dance performance in 2015 which just so “happens to fall within Transgender Awareness Week in the US”.

In the words of Mencius Moldbug (2007),“A nation is genuinely independent of America if its domestic politics are not correlated at all with American domestic politics.”

The Godrej Group was founded by a Bombay Parsi, Ardeshir Godrej, who was influenced by Naoroji’s ‘drain theory’, or the idea that British rule was but a system of economic exploitation enriching England at the cost of India. In response, he built a major industrial powerhouse at the dawn of India’s ‘independence’. It’s quite sad, then, when we see what has become of the name he built.

What’s more, Godrej is just one example of a Parsi success story in post-British India. Indeed, one could just as easily paint a picture of the foundation of the Indian National Congress as a scheme engineered by wealthy and powerful Bombayites, Parsis, and Bengalis with the aid of southern Indians to maintain their supremacy — were one inclined to such speculation. Oddly enough, it is these same regions (the old Bombay and Madras Presidencies) and communities that seem to have maintained much of an economic advantage down to the present day. The Tata Group, for example, was founded in 1868 by Jamsetji Tata, a Gujurati Parsi born into a Zoroastrian ‘Brahmin’ family who took up business instead. We regularly see Tamil and Malayali sophists online crowing about how great and advanced their states are, especially compared to those in the North, and Bengali chauvinists sneer at their ‘BIMARU’ neighbours. Maybe they all have good reason to. I can’t say for sure. But what I can say is that from a certain point of view, it looks like northern Indians have consistently been on the lower rungs of the Indian social ladder since even before Partition.

Instead of intangible and shaky concepts like ‘caste identity’ perhaps we can find observable material factors that underscore possible similarities between the founding members of the INC. What, if anything, united the 72 (and isn’t that a curious number?) founding members of the Congress? Perhaps it was the fact that most of them were lawyers, and of the remaining, several were journalists. Pretty much all of them were British-educated and conversant in English, as well as many being polyglots and highly skilled in other areas of life, suggesting high intelligence and capability. Of course, these factors were not merely coincidental, but a feature of the founding. Naturally, when forming any institution, you would want the best and the brightest — and probably the wealthiest too. These would all have been factors that drew them to Allan Octavian Hume, a key member in the foundation of the INC and of whom I think we all should learn more. He seems to be a singularly fascinating figure from that period, both for his seemingly genuine pro-Indian feelings and occultist leanings. Perhaps I will write more about him later.

In any case, laying the blame at the feet of the “Brahminical–Congress elite” as though they, for whatever faults they did have, are equally as responsible for what followed in 1947 as their Pakistani counterparts is simply slander.

I am perplexed about how we can assess an AI-generated poem as inferior to a human’s. As when we read a poem, we read it for its content, irrespective of anything else. The emotional valence of Iqbal’s Shikwa has nothing to do with his circumstances; whether he were a general in the British army or a debauched drunk, the poem would still be there to be read, cherished, and savoured. Extending this logic, how can AI-written poems be rated lower simply because they were not written by a human? I don’t know.

Anyone who wants to explain their take on this.

Originally Published: February 03, 2025

Part 1.2

The philosophy of Land and the idea of God

The nirīśvaravādi ādi-accelerationists no doubt consider our usage of the word ‘God’ and countless references to ancient myths and texts a serious breach of the philosophy and a perversion of its ideas. Though we are not interested in soothing their fears, the objections they will raise must nevertheless be wrestled with, as Landian Accelerationism portrays itself a purely materialist philosophical system, which, although not often talked about at present, is properly referred to as ‘libidinal materialism’. Thus, we must descend into the ‘sublime basement’ of Land’s philosophy before we may return once more to the heady poetics of Meltdown. His system of thought is most comprehensively laid out in the opus The Thirst for Annihilation (Land, 1992b), which makes it clear that his philosophy follows in the wake of the Nietzschean ‘death of God’, something he explicitly states when he assembles a theoretical machine linking Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and, most importantly, Bataille to himself. As Mackay and Brassier put it in the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (Land, 2012): “Land allied himself to a line of renegade thinkers – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille – who mocked and disparaged academicism and wielded philosophy as an implement for exacerbating enigma, disrupting orthodoxy, and transforming existence” (p. 2-3).

The deepest groundwork of Land’s philosophy is, however, that of Immanuel Kant and his transcendental idealism. According to the entry for this thinker on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Transcendental idealism is a theory about the relation between the mind and its objects. Three fundamental theses make up this theory: first, there is a distinction between appearances (things as they appear) and things as they are in themselves. Second, space and time are a priori, subjective conditions on the possibility of experience, and hence they pertain only to appearances, not to things in themselves. Third, we can have determinate cognition of only of things that can be experienced, hence only of appearances, not things in themselves.

A quick remark on the term “transcendental idealism” is in order. Kant typically uses the term “transcendental” when he wants to emphasize that something is a condition on the possibility of experience. So for instance, the chapter titled “Transcendental Analytic of Concepts” deals with the concepts without which cognition of an object would be impossible. Kant uses the term “idealism” to indicate that the objects of experience are mind-dependent (although the precise sense of this mind-dependence is controversial; see 2d2 below). Hence, transcendental idealism is the theory that it is a condition on the possibility of experience that the objects of experience be in some sense mind-dependent.” (Jankowiak)

In the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (Land, 2012), Mackay and Brassier state that:

“At the core of Land’s thought are the works of Immanuel Kant. Land is a brilliant reader of Kant and several of the texts gathered here evince his rare gift for isolating the essential components of Kant’s labyrinthine philosophical machinery. Moreover, Land uncovers the source of their conceptual power by demonstrating their productive inte­gration with, and purchase upon, the extra-philosophical.” (p. 6)

In addition to these ‘pūrvācāryas’ (‘previous teachers’) the philosophy of the libidinal materialist sampradāya (‘philosophical line of succession’) is also thrown back in time to ancient Greece, linking with the materialism of the pre-Socratic, Anaximander, thus constructing an eternal ‘doctrine’ of “the textual return of that which is most intolerable to mankind” (p. xxi).

Libidinal materialism is a philosophy with four core tenets:

1) The complete dehumanization or impersonalization of nature

2) Ruthless fatalism

3) The absence of moralizing

4) Contempt for common evaluations

Although these four principles provide us with a useful starting point to conduct our inquiry into the philosophy of libidinal materialism, and thus, the oeuvre of Land, they are still quite complex. We will have to come back to them at a later point, after we have unpacked the foundations of the classical accelerationist worldview, and discuss the implications for Hindus.

Therefore, let us first attempt to understand what libidinal materialism is not, so that we may more accurately identify what Land thought. Simply stated, despite its name, libidinal materialism is not merely another form of physicalist naturalism. What does this mean?

The Cathedral of physicalism

While naturalism is considered a fairly vague term in contemporary philosophy, it could be summarized as the idea that all of reality is contained within nature which precludes the existence of anything supernatural (Papineau, 2020). By the mid-Twentieth Century, it seems that the debate was settled and naturalism came to be accepted as the standard metaphysical position among a great many philosophers (Papineau, 2020). That being said, despite the proliferation of naturalist ideas, it appears to be less a singular system of thought than a spectrum, with some thinkers who have looser ideas of what nature means on one end, while those with stricter definitions, possibly influenced by closer contact with the natural sciences, on the other (Papineau, 2020). Naturalism can generally be considered to have two fundamental aspects: 1) the ontological, or the hypothesis that there are no supernatural substances in nature — which constitutes the sum total of reality; and 2) the methodological, or acceptance of the authority of the scientific method for the investigation of reality (Papineau, 2020). Physicalism, on the other hand, can be briefly defined as the idea that everything which exists is physical (Stolijar, 2021). Although there are more details one could delve into regarding either of these positions, the summaries provided should suffice for our purposes here.

Land (1992b) refers to the thermodynamic theories of Ludwig Boltzmann, which argue that the production of the observable material universe is explainable through probability. The cosmogony of libidinal materialism is fundamentally predicated on the twin concepts of entropy and negentropy. Entropy — disorder — is a term derived from the study of heat and thermic engines and refers to the base state of a system in conformity with the chance distribution of its elements. To Land, the concept of entropy completely upends older understandings of the clockwork universe by rendering all the mechanisms of natural processes subordinate to the motors that drive them, namely “thermic difference, energy flux, reservoir, and sump” (p. 37). Negentropy — negative entropy or negative disorder — is order, which Land (1992b) says is an “evanescent chance, a deviation from disorder, a disequilibrium” and equivalent to power, which is an “aberration” (p. 37). This is what he refers to as the “mega-motor” of Nietzsche, Freud, and Bataille’s ideas of desire.

For Land (1992b), the greatest problem with physicalism is the fact that it contents itself with replicating a secularized version of the same prejudices or assumptions maintained by its predecessor, the (Catholic) Church — what Moldbug would refer to as the Moldbuggian ‘Cathedral’ of its time. Land scoffs at the fact that the supposedly scientific and materialist orthodoxy of Western intellectuals still hews to the frame built by their Christian ancestors despite the death of God, as well as their reduction of matter into a purely inert and passive element:

“The basic problem with physicalistic thinking is easy to formulate; it remains implicitly theological. Regression to a first cause is an inescapable consequence of the physicalistic position, which thus remains bound to the old theological matrix, even after the throne has been evacuated by a tremulous deicide. The physicalistic contention is that matter receives its impulsion or determination from without; through the combination of an essential lawfulness that transcends the particular entity and the influence of external bodies or forces. Any ‘intrinsic’ process (such as decay) results from the expression of natural laws, whilst all extrinsic process results from the passive communication of an original cosmic fatality (probabilistic physics makes no essential difference here, since the mathematical—hence formal and extrinsic—determination of probability is no less rigorous than that of causal necessity). Physical matter is therefore unambiguously passive, exhausted by the dual characteristics of transmitting alien forces and decaying according to the universally legislated exigencies of its composition.” (p. 37-38, emphasis added)

A protestant materialism

In his project to uncover the secrets of desire, Land works to unravel every thread that makes up the fabric of Western civilization between modernity and antiquity. This is ‘deconstruction’ with an aim towards zero — a howling hunger that leaves nothing of human hands in its wake, be it sacred or secular.

Indeed, it is precisely zero itself which would come to stand for the annihilating fury of Land’s revolt against the academy. One of the greatest points of conflict between Land and the academic consensus was on the meaning of numbers themselves and the related matter of number practices. By the reckoning of Mackay and Brassier in the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (2012), Land’s zero was the most important munition he could bring to bear in his war against the intellectual establishment. Land’s path was marked by the breaking-down of logic (logos) and the building-up of numbering (nomos) into a sort of ‘schizonumerics’, thus ‘breaking past’ (Gr. skhízō, ‘to split’) the stratifications of the system, based on D&G’s ‘stratoanalysis’, the study of the differences between the potential and the actual (p. 21-23). According to this field of study, “All ‘real form’ proceeds from a differential stratification, in which a stratum selects only a subset of its substratum.” (p. 23). Landian numbering also tries to break away from the day-to-day, ‘domesticated’, mathematical understanding of numbers. This understanding, Land argues, is stratified along the grounds of place-value. As Mackay and Brassier put it:

“Where literacy, logos, which must be handed down from above, is synonymous with patrilinearity and law, numeracy, according to Land, belongs to a spontane­ ous cultural intelligence, to ‘socially distributed ordinal competences’, which open up humans to an outside of logos. Following Deleuze’s inventive reinterpretation of the Timaeus in Difference and Repetition, ‘Mechanomics’ reiterates how the procedures of selection that ‘split’ number and render it over to mathematics, beginning with that which forms ordinal (sequencing) numbers into ‘equal’ cardinal units, leave a ‘problematic’ remainder which is relayed to a ‘higher’ number type or scale. Thus is achieved a local neutralisation of difference through sequestration and deferral, and the problematic ‘energy’ of number is constricted and rendered into the safe hands of a specialised discipline at the same time as popular numerical practices are relegated to the realm of naive trivia. Land argues that place-value formalises this dissociation of different scales that is constitutive of stratification, creating redundancy, and using zero as its marker. Place-value zero corresponds to a stratification: a negative feedback understood as the pleasure principle, or principle of maintained identity, which registers and relays traumatic force through the indexes of interiority and threats to the maintenance of identity.” (p. 24)

Land’s (1992b) libidinal materialism is a complete rejection of the academy and places him in opposition to the ideas which had come to dominate the philosophical establishment of his day. To Land, the physicalism which came to occupy the void left by the ‘death of God’ in Western society, despite its scientific pretensions nevertheless followed along the tracks laid down by the theological system that preceded it (the original ‘Cathedral’, if you will) by seeking to reduce the great variety of material phenomena into a singular physical substance. In contrast to (what Land sees as) the continuation of the anthropocentric trajectory of Christian civilization which has only nominally moved past a geocentric orientation, libidinal materialism can be understood as a heliocentric, “sun ridden”(Hickman, 2012), vitalist theory of truly cosmic proportions. In the ‘Editors’ Introduction’ of Fanged Noumena (2012) Mackay and Brassier explain that “Land’s con­tempt for orthodoxy was no disingenuous pose struck whilst ruthlessly pursuing advancement. With a complete absence of academic ambition, he willingly paid the price for his provocations, both personally and professionally.” (p.3)

Land (1992b) expands on Bataille’s ideas (see Introduction) surrounding the concept of the solar and its relationship with death, sacrifice, waste, and excess, spinning that web of ideas into a theory of the energetic processes which drive the world. In this worldview, production is identified with death and seen as a means to manage the excess of energy received from the sun, thereby linking Bataille’s ideas of ritual sacrifice with the autonomous processes of capital:

“Bataille tells us that the universe is energetic, and the fate inherent to energy is utter waste. Energy from the sun is discharged unilaterally and without design. That fraction of solar radiation which strikes the earth resources all terrestrial endeavour, provoking the feverish obscenity we call ‘life’.

Life appears as a pause on the energy path; as a precarious stabilization and complication of solar decay. It is most basically comprehensible as the general solution to the problem of consumption. Such a solar- or general-economic perspective exhibits production as an illusion; the hypostatization of a digression in consumption. To produce is to partially manage the release of energy into its loss, and nothing more.

Death, wastage, or expenditure is the only end, the only definitive terminus.” (p. xii)

In contrast to this overarching drive towards waste, is posited the concept of utility, which has “no sense short of an expenditure which escapes it utterly” (p. xii), thereby rendering it ‘relative’; Land sees the fundamental error of Western history as the continuous drift of the meaning of utility away from the sense of relative utility towards a paradoxical absolutism steadily “colonized” by a “slave morality” which orients utility towards service to humanity, thus redefining the ‘good’ using this standard. Derived from this concept is the Landian reformulation of the Kantian terms ‘immanence’— here used with a meaning synonymous to ‘base matter’ (a Bataillean term) or ‘flows’ (a Deleuzoguattarian term)— and ‘transcendence’— redefined as a localized resistance inhibiting dissolution separated from the whole solar energy flow.

Land’s libidinal materialism is not merely a rejection of the academic consensus of his day, however. Rather, he ruptures the very fabric of the Western tradition and seeks to make a clean break from the burden of its inherited beliefs and assumptions, no matter which form they have taken. As a result, he is not content to simply rail against his fellow academics on what seems to him to be the rather superficial differences in their thinking, but like the Nith-hewing Snake flying back on corpse-laden dark wings to the new world tree after the Twilight of the Gods, seeks to strike at the very roots of this established order by examining how it sprouts from the devastated trunk of Western Christianity.

Nowhere is this aim more obvious than when Land (1992b) levies the rather grave accusation of being “theological” against the physicalist establishment in the academy. One of Land’s major points of departure from their consensus is at the definition of matter:

“Libidinal matter is that which resists a relation of reciprocal transcendence against time, and departs from the rigorous passivity of physical substance without recourse to dualistic, idealistic, or theistic conceptuality. It implies a process of mutation which is simultaneously devoid of agency and irreducible to the causal chain.” (p. 41)

Land (1992b) says that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan would call this process ‘drive’, which serves to explain rather than presuppose causality. Libidinal energetics is thus not a transformation of theories of desire as lack (theology), but a transformation of thermodynamics, the sense of ‘energy’. As we saw earlier, the opposition to a construction of desire as lack is something Land inherits from D&G and drives his antipathy for the physicalist cathedral. Given this definition of theology, Land’s distaste for it makes sense. Throughout his writing, Land (1992b) regularly contrasts theology with religion; the latter tends to be described as a more ‘vital’ phenomenon in which action — sacrifice — is central, while the former is akin to a crystalization or intellectualization of the other, more concerned with word games, logic, and rationalization

More recently, Land has even taken aim at the sciences themselves. He reconceptualizes the natural sciences as being fundamentally linked with capitalism; furthermore, both processes are posited as actually being opposed to their own immanent drivers, namely scientists and capitalists, respectively:

“I think that natural sciences and capitalism are different aspects of the same thing. Both are an effective self-propelling mechanism that gives the Outside a selective function in a domain considered, that domain being perpetually expanding, depending on how much autonomy you’re seeing. In that sense to be on the side of the natural sciences is to be on the side of the Outside.…Science is orientated against scientists, capitalism is oriented against businesses. These are processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive destructive criticism with some kind of selective criteria, which means they push things in a particular self-propelling direction.” (Bauer & Tomažin, 2017).

Though more concerned with the failings of the modern academic establishment, Land (1992b) nevertheless takes the time to excoriate its overtly religious antecedents — with special focus on Protestant Christianity. In fact, he singles it out as one of the biggest exceptions to the traditional ‘wasteful’ pattern of traditional societies (including Catholic Christianity):

“…(the projection of) the most extreme possible refusal of expenditure. Bataille accepts Weber’s conclusions concerning the relationship between the evolution of capital accumulation and the development of Protestantism, seeing the Reformation critique of Catholicism as essentially a critique of religion insofar as it ‘functions’ as a means of economic consumption, or as a drain for the excess of social production. The Protestant repudiation of indulgences—as well as its rejection of lavish cathedral building and the entire socio-economic apparatus allied to the doctrine of salvation through ‘works’—is the cultural precondition for the economy closing upon itself and taking its modern form. Bourgeois society is thus the first civilization to totally exclude expenditure in principle, opposed to the conspicuous extravagance of aristocracy and church, and replacing both with the rational or reproductive consumption of commodities.” (p. 57)

Protestant Christianity is seen as wholly complicit with the bourgeois and capitalist logic of accumulation over expenditure for Land (1992b):

“In The Accursed Share Bataille outlines a number of social responses to the unsublatable wave of senseless wastage welling up beneath human endeavour, which he draws from a variety of cultures and epochs. …Reform Christianity alone – attuned to the emergent bourgeois order – is based upon a relentless refusal of sumptuary consumption. It is with Protestantism that theology accomplishes itself in the thoroughgoing rationalization of religion, marking the ideological triumph of the good, and propelling humanity into unprecedented extremities of affluence and catastrophe. It is also with Protestantism that the transgressive outlets of society are de-ritualized and exposed to effective condemnation…” (p. 65-66)

In the fourth chapter of TFA, titled ‘Easter’, Land (1992b) makes it very clear what he feels about Christianity as a whole:

“There is only one sane and healthy relation to Christianity; perfect indifference. Mine is not of that kind. My detestation for the Christian faith exhausts my being, and more. I long for its God to exist in order to slake myself as violence upon him. If there are torments coming to me I want them, all of them; God experimenting in cruelty upon me. I want no lethargy in Hell, rather vigour and imagination. Oh yes, it is all very wretched, and if I am grateful to Christianity it is for one thing alone; it has taught me how to hate.” (p. 78)

Land’s ‘protestantism’ should not be seen as a reformation or attempt to purify an extant system or doctrine that has fallen into obsolence or decadence, but a pure and utter nihilistic ‘atheology’. His theses are not an effort to redeem the Cathedral upon whose doors they were nailed but a sabotage maneuver executed to throw open the airlock of the academy and expose its protected environs to the incomprehensible harshness of the Void. It is closer to a complete Gnostic revolution in philosophy than it is a return to Dharma.

We ought to be even more cautious when adapting and adopting ideas from Land, despite their similarities to certain aspects of Hindu teachings. As he remarks about the nature of Bataille’s work, the same could be said to hold true about his:

“The illimitable criminality driving Bataille’s writing’s provokes no hint of repentence within it, but that does not make him a pagan, which is to say juridically: unfit to plead. Lacking the slightest interest in justification, innocence is not an aspiration he nourishes. He is closer to Satan than to Pan, propelled by a defiant culpability. Bataille is altogether too morbid to be a pagan, and yet, despite what is in part a reactive relation to Christianity, the thought of necessary crime is an interpretation of the tragic, and of hubris. Tragic fate is the necessity that the forbidden happen, and happen as the forbidden.” (Land, 1992b, p. 63, emphasis added)

There are those among our kindred in the diaspora who have truly converted to some sect of Cathedralist Urianism in order to ascend the status hierarchies of their new homes and lord over its natives. As a result, they have drawn a great deal of ire towards our community as a whole for the way they speak of and treat the natives of the West. It does not take a seer to know that if the ‘Cathars’ they have been suppressing manage to seize real power, it will not bode well for any of us caught in their sights. We will be tarred with the same brush, whether it be due to tacit agreement, general arrogance, or utter incomprehension. One need only recall the various ways we have been attacked, slandered, and humiliated by various online actors (some of whom should ostensibly be our allies) in the past year. And the provocations of the Cathedral, especially in the spheres of education and the news media are too numerous to list¹.

Our line of flight out from this order cannot be found by identifying ourselves with any of the factions involved in this internecine struggle. Their father is not our Father and they are not our brethren. Our only concern is for the wellbeing of Hindus — and that too as a means to the end of sacrificing everything in the world to the Gods. That which falls outside of this intentionally narrow perspective is only to be taken note of as a help or a hinderance to this end.

^{1. See Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (Malhotra, 2011) and Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America (Ramaswamy, De Nicolás, & Banerjee, 2007) for a more in-depth exploration of this topic.↩}