Hindu philosophy – Brown Pundits

Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries

We were at a beautiful midnight Janmashtami celebration last night. The words that came to me were magical and timeliness.

Nothing in that room was untouched. Popular Hinduism has spent eight centuries trading with Islam, and vice versa. What was interesting was that at midnight, following baby Krishna’s birth (which was beautifully staged), the Mandir decided to have a birthday cake with the kids cutting it and singing happy birthday. It was a clever nod to modernity and a way to keep these young British Asian (Sindhi) kids tied in to their culture.

Can Dharma fight back?

Continue reading Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries

Open Thread: The Courtesy Guidance & the Two Factions (Majority vs. Minority)

BP’s two Factions in light of its “Bharat” underpinning?
What defines the “Majority”?
What does Courtesy Mean in an online forum?

The majority, described

Now that we are Brown, that is Bharat, Pundits, all of us who are the majority share things in common. Five come to mind, and they should be front and centre:

Hindu by birth or Hindu by marriage (broadly Upper Caste social milieu).
India’s borders can never be reduced. Some, myself included, are very much in the Akhand Bharat camp; I see Iran to Indonesia as one vast Indic, Hindu Continental sphere.
Hinduism was oppressed under the Anglo-Islamicate legacy, which has been a mixed blessing at best (that is a most charitable view). The LeLi Brahmin view that we should have been grateful to be chattel under Despots, who professed Islam, is odd.
Dharma has space for all, and that more Hinduism does not mean less secularism; as well as an inclination for more Hindu-Indic symbology in the national discourse.
Broadly supportive of the current government of India and sceptical towards RaGa.
Partition was a mistake and the two-nation theory was not a good idea. Pakistan has not succeeded.

That defines the majority to a very strong extent, and the minority is defined by being against these positions, in whatever combination. We have such a strong majority that all of us agree with it, including the full admin team.

It just so happens that even if I’m not Hindu by birth, I’m definitely Hindu by marriage. My entire social reality, where I engage with Brown people, is Hindu, so I have become an acculturated Hindu. A fortnight ago I said the divide here was ideological, not sectarian; the last week taught me the map is older than the ideology. It’s not Saffron or Crescent, left liberals or right wing. It is the majority versus the minority, and in a weird way we are converging towards what is modern-day India, and really mapping that.

The minority Continue reading Open Thread: The Courtesy Guidance & the Two Factions (Majority vs. Minority)

The End of Pre-colonial Modernity and it’s Present Implications

Disclaimer: This is my first post here, and writing is not my strong suit, so it is very poorly thought out and kinda can be rambling in certain bits. Kinda stream of thought way of writing with some repetition here and there, also kinda missing a citation. Please just bear with me here.

Historical context

During the late 1400’s to early 1500’s, a new figure appeared in the philosophical tradition under the name of Raghunatha Siromani. He was a brahmin of ordinary origin with a point of interest, except for the fact that his grandfather, Sulapani, wrote a minor commentary about a Sanskrit Smriti. He studied at a university in Mithila that was the centre for Brahmanical learning, and he even went on to be a chancellor at the institution; however, he found it to be too conservative and chose to return to his original home in what is modern-day Nadia in West Bengal. This hometown was part of the Bengal sultanate that was presently ruled by the liberal minded Hussain Shah, who multiplied institutions in Brahmanical ones. In this open environment, Raghunatha would go on to rewrite the entire field of logic and indirectly begin what can be considered the earliest forms of Modernity within South Asia.

Before we go any further, we need to understand what Raghunatha’s works were and conduct a broader examination of their social implications for the time. Also, I will be abbreviating Raghunatha Shiromani with the initials RS for the rest of this discussion to make it easier to write.

Skepticism and Reason in the School of New Logic

Basically, RS was a part of the Navya Nyaya school of philosophy that was originally founded by Gangesa in the first half of the 14th century, when he unified the traditional school of Nyaya (logic) and Vaisheshika (metaphysics) together in his magnum opus, the “Tattvachinatmani” (Jewel of thought on the Nature of things). RS, during his lifetime, wrote multiple commentaries or Bhasya on multiple historical texts such as the Nyaya sutra, Nyayakusumanjali, and Gangesa works as well. Traditionally, the Bhasya is supposed to provide clarification about grey areas and expand on the pre-existing literature, but there was always a degree of deference to these ancient works, and one couldn’t understand the precepts that were presented.

RS on the other hand extensively challenged a lot of these assumptions as he did a thing that the author Janardan Ganeri calls “being in a discussion with tradition”, where activity challenges some of the pre-existing states made in the work using logic and reason to ensure the arguments being presented isn’t simply considered as true due to traditional rather there is a logical basis for the points being made. What RS was doing here is shifting the onus of inquiry into the hands of the individuals and challenging the traditional norms that were previously set in place. He doesn’t reject tradition completely, but he emphasizes the need for skepticism and examination of ideas through a lens of neutrality. I am just doing a direct quote from his works, which can explain his point:

“The demonstration of these matters, which I have carefully explained, is contrary to the conclusions reached by all the other disciplines. These matters spoken of should not be cast aside without reflection just because they are contrary to accepted opinion; scholars should consider them carefully. Bowing to those who know the truth concerning matters of all the sciences, bowing to people like you [the reader], I pray you consider my sayings with sympathy. This method, though less honoured, has been employed by wise men of the past; namely that one asks other people of learning to consider one’s own words (Inquiry into the True Nature of Things 1915: 79,1-80,3; trans. Potter 1957: 89-90).”

Continue reading The End of Pre-colonial Modernity and it’s Present Implications

India That Is Bharat: The Exceptional Uniqueness and the Dual Identity

This is a Brown Pundits Precedent Post.

We have been asked, repeatedly and in good faith, why Brown Pundits appears to handle criticism of India with more care than it handles criticism of Pakistan. The charge is that we hold a double standard. It deserves a direct answer.

The answer is that we do hold a distinction, and we are not embarrassed by it, but it is not the distinction the charge assumes.

The Distinction

Pakistan is roughly seventy-nine years old as a sovereign state. India as a sovereign state is roughly seventy-nine years old as well. As nation-states under international law, as signatories to the United Nations, as entities with currencies and armies and foreign ministries, the two are pari passu. We treat them that way and we will continue to treat them that way. On every question that applies to nation-states as nation-states, the two sit at the same table and get the same scrutiny.

But India is not only a nation-state. India is also a civilisation, and the civilisation is not seventy-nine years old. The civilisation is, give or take the archaeological argument one prefers to have, somewhere around five thousand years old. It stretches from the Indus Valley through the Dravidian-Aryan synthesis, through the Vedic period, through the great classical flowering, through the medieval syntheses, through the colonial rupture, and into the present. One can argue the exact nature of the continuity. One cannot plausibly argue that the continuity is not there. It is there in the same way it is there for China. It is there in the same way it is there for Egypt. It is there.

This is not a claim about superiority. It is a claim about category. Pakistan is a sovereign state. India is a sovereign state and a civilisation. The two facts do not cancel. They coexist.

The Civilisational Peer Group Is Short

How short is short. At the level of a nation-state that is co-terminus with a multi-millennial civilisation, the peer group is essentially India and China. Two entries. Iran and Egypt have the civilisational depth but have been transformed by the Greco-Arab conquest, in an unalterable fashion. Greece has the civilisational depth but the modern Greek state is a nineteenth-century construction with limited political continuity to the ancient polis; the Ottoman interlude was equally determinative. Israel is a unique case and we will come to it.

That leaves India and China. Two countries on the planet where the nation-state is also the civilisation, where the sovereign political entity today is a recognisable continuation of the same cultural-linguistic-religious matrix that produced its earliest texts, and where the ordinary citizen, with some education, can read something written two or three thousand years ago in a language that is still a living vehicle of the culture.

That is not a small claim. It is also not a nationalist claim. It is simply a descriptive one.

The Indian Exception Continue reading India That Is Bharat: The Exceptional Uniqueness and the Dual Identity

nos ancêtres les Hindous

A pattern has emerged in these comment threads that deserves naming directly. When the Hindu hammer retreats, the space does not become neutral; it becomes anti-Hindu. The two are not the same thing, and conflating them is itself a form of intellectual dishonesty.

Hinduism is one of the most theologically complex systems humanity has produced. It is the root of Dharmic civilisation, the origin point of concepts, reincarnation foremost among them, that have radiated as far as East Asia, Southeast Asia, and arguably into the mystical strands of Abrahamic tradition. The sages, the philosophers, the vast literature: none of this coheres with the dismissal now fashionable in certain quarters, that Hinduism is simply a colonial administrative category, a British label slapped onto undifferentiated paganism.

This is the Pakistani foundational ideology speaking. It must deny Hindu civilisational continuity, because acknowledging it makes Temple destruction look like what it was: a pattern, not a series of unrelated incidents. It must deny that India had a civilisation, because if India had one, then the last pre-British colonisers of South Asia were Muslim; and that sits uncomfortably with postcolonial victimhood framing. The logic is circular and self-serving, but it is internally consistent. One cannot claim the mantle of the oppressed while being the penultimate oppressor.

The Dravidian Continue reading nos ancêtres les Hindous

Is Hinduism Pagan ?

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.

Pāṇini, the “Glitch,” and a Note From an Old Cambridge Friend

I received a message from a publicist this week. The name caught my eye because I knew the scholar from Cambridge years ago. The subject of the email was simple: a new book on Pāṇini and the old claim that something in his system “doesn’t work.”

For two and a half millennia, scholars have argued that Pāṇini’s grammar, the first true computational system for language, contains a flaw. His treatise gives a compact system for generating correct Sanskrit forms. But in cases where two rules seem to apply at the same time, most readers assumed the system breaks. Textbooks describe this as a “conflict problem.” Generations of commentators tried to patch it with exceptions, hierarchies, or interpretive workarounds.

The new book, Pāṇini’s Perfect Rule (December 2025), argues that the flaw was never there. The author, Rishi Rajpopat, claims the system already contains a rule for solving the conflict. According to him, Pāṇini didn’t leave a hole; modern readers simply looked in the wrong place. If his reading is right, the entire architecture of the grammar becomes visible as a single machine; elegant, compact, and self-consistent.

There are two parts to this story. Continue reading Pāṇini, the “Glitch,” and a Note From an Old Cambridge Friend

Meltdown Bhāṣya: Verse 1.1.1 (Part 1.3)

The philosophy of Land and the idea of God: The Cathedral of physicalism, A protestant materialism

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). Continue reading Meltdown Bhāṣya: Verse 1.1.1 (Part 1.3)

Does India need more Radhakrishnans? Is it getting them?

This opinion piece on the Print’s website lays out a familiar argument about shifting academic focus towards Indic heritage against excessive hagiographic obeisance at the altars of ‘western’ scholarship. But apart from the standard diatribes, the name Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan jumped out for me.

Where are the Radhakrishnans of our time?

Mahabharata war and Yuga cycles

Anyone who is slightly familiar with Hindu mythology or Hindu cosmology knows that ancient Indians were fond of extremely large time periods. According to traditionalists the war of Mahabharata happened more than 5000 years ago (3102 BCE). A Yuga is supposed to last for 1.08 million years. A Yuga cycle, consisting of 4 Yugas, is 4.32 million years long. Who came up with these numbers ?

The story behind these numbers is quite interesting. Although the word Yuga goes back to Vedic age, Vedic texts do not mention these numbers. The specific numbers were first introduced by Aryabhata, who was born in 476 CE. According to his definition a new Yuga begins whenever all five visible planets along with the Sun and the Moon have zero celestial longitude (we are using the current terminology here, Aryabhata used the word Yugapda to denote a Yuga). The first verse of Aryabhatia, his only surviving work, states the following :

Aryabhatia 1.1 : In a yuga cycle the revolutions of the Sun are 4,320,000, of the Moon 57,753,336, of the Earth eastward 1,582,237,500, of Saturn 146,564, of Jupiter 364224, of Mars 2,296,824, of Mercury and Venus the same as those of the Sun.

The accuracy levels of these estimates are reasonably high, ranging from 99.9 percent (period of Saturn) to 99.999 percent (period of Earth’s rotation). It is possible to get this level of accuracy from 20-30 years of naked eye observations. Not surprisingly, the exact numbers are all wrong. Assuming an error margin of 0.3 degrees for an observation, one needs 3600 years of sky watching to count the exact numbers of revolutions in 1.08 million years. Aryabhata definitely knew this but he also accepted the traditional view that the current Yuga started during the war of Mahabharata (Aryabhatia 1.3). Seven astronomical objects having celestial longitudes close to zero is a very strong condition, and the initial estimates he obtained from 20-30 years of observations were good enough to rule out all years in the past few thousand years except 3102 BCE. So he concluded that the beginning of the current Yuga and Mahabharata war happened in in 3102 BCE.

Aryabhatia 3.10 : When three Yugas and sixty times sixty years had elapsed (from the beginning of the Yuga cycle) then twenty three years of my life had passed.

Since he could directly see the positions of the celestial objects during 499 CE vernal equinox, the assumption that they all had zero longitude in 3102 BCE meant having observations separated by 3600 years. This allowed him to make extremely precise claims about their periods. At the same time he was forced to increase the length of a Yuga to 1.08 million years to ensure that all the celestial objects make complete revolutions.

Why did he come up with the concept of Yuga cycle and how did he know that we are in the fourth Yuga of the current Yuga cycle ? This is related to two abstract points corresponding to apsidal and nodal precession of Moon’s orbit. Aryabhata wanted to include them in the list of celestial objects but his initial estimates showed that their celestial longitudes were closer to -270 degrees and 180 degrees in 3102 BCE. So he introduced a 4.32 million years long Yuga cycle and assumed that we are in the fourth Yuga.

How do we know all these details ? As remarked earlier, Aryabhata’s model was not accurate enough to go 3600 years in the past and detect a Yuga changing moment. However if we calculate the positions during 499 CE equinox using modern technology and apply Aryabhata’s model to go back another 3600 years, then celestial longitudes of the first seven objects become close to zero. The probability of this being a pure coincidence is less than one in a billion. The only logical conclusion is that Aryabhata was born in 476 CE and his definitions and methods were as described above.