The Hindu right-wing nationalists seem to have abandoned the term Hindutva in favour of Sanatan Dharma for gearing up for the next level of esoteric and cultist politics. Hindutva was a poorly defined idea that tried to convert the precepts of Hinduism into a creed that closely resembled the Abrahamic religions. But there were far too many claimants for Hinduism against whom, Hindutva did not have an impregnable defense and hence one puts forth the Sanatan Dharma. Let us see what it means.

Sanatan means the eternal. What can be eternal unless it is some kind of naturalism, where humans are born in a state of Nature, or natural freedom, where freedom means lack of opposition from anything because s/he is fully aligned to the cosmos. In practice this can mean a set of pagan practices those which existed before any form of textually or ecclesiastically organized religion. However, the term Sanatan has been used more politically to contest something related to human will in a political outcome. Krishna uses Sanatan Dharma to ask Arjun to kill his natural relatives because he is in a war of morals. Morals, a human, and a political construct is placed as the natural value over what really is the natural, namely the family.

Sanatan Dharma was the bogey raised by Bengali Brahmins to uphold every possible heinous act against humanity. Sati, child sacrifice, human sacrifice and cults of killing were paraded as being instances of Sanatan Dharma. Here, not naturalism but Sanatan meant the eternal truth as drawn from the Goddess, usually Kali. Rammohun Roy was the first one ever to coin the term Hinduism in 1816 to contest the eternal truth justifying murder and, in some cases, even genocide. Hinduism was pitted against Sanatan Dharma. Ever since the days of the Brahmo Samaj and the slew of reforms that followed across India, Sanatan Dharma came to mean the pre-reformed Hinduism. Bankim Chandra has the Sanyasis and Fakirs say that now the Mussalman regime is over, the Company will help Indians protect the Sanatan Dharma, here he means the ascetics, who because of their asceticism claim to be purer Hindus. Louis Dumont, in his seminal essay on Renunciation echoes a similar observation that Sanatan means the open space (not liminal) of the individual and her Divine beyond the compulsive rituals of worship. In this opinion, the authentic/natural/eternal religion is only to be recognized as the eternal and intransient.

Somehow, all through the period of social and religious reform, the idea of Sanatan Dharma has resisted a reformed Hinduism. Sanatan Dharma is thus a resistance to a modernized Hinduism, or an assertion of those who have been unable to grasp modernity and have remained unadapted to the many social changes which those better adapted could make use of. Modernity has undoubtedly created inequalities, between those who could access its opportunities and those who could not. Sanatan Dharma, like the Hindutva nationalism is the assertion of losers, a search for a paradigm that would place them at an advantage over their better off fellows by undoing all the victories of a reformed religion and it adaptive powers to modernity.