There are many enthusiastic young scholars and teachers who imagine that the Sanatan dharma of India is the core of its ancient wisdom and knowledge and hence India exerts or should exert a moral power as in the eponymous epithet of the Viswa guru. It is that there are no scholars or researchers of the Sanatan dharma, and should you pick up books bearing the same title, each book is likely to say something totally different from the rest. Hence, not only is there no single author of Sanatan dharma but there also seems to be no compilation with universal consensus. However, there are various combinations of the Puranas, Manusmriti and the Upanishads smattered into patchworks claiming eternity from the spirit of the Vedas. The texts are basically pagan and like all pagan texts claim to have been written by an eternal order lying at the base of all things manifest. There is neither the clarity of Confucius nor the elegance of Buddhism, though the Sanatan Dharma purports to be these as well. This is, however, not the point of our discussion because presented in this manner, then far from being the Viswaguru we would appear more as self-gloating fools.

If the scholars are keen to present the uniqueness of the Indian wisdom, then let them understand the point of uniqueness of this wisdom. There have been two distinct occasions when foreigners have eagerly sought Indian wisdom; monks came from China to India to study the Buddhist texts and then scholars and philosophers came from the west to learn about the Hindu wisdom. In the first instance, the texts were Pali, in the second case, it was Sanskrit. The Fort William College and the Asiatic Society of India were instrumental in providing the much-needed push for the search. In both the above instances, the search for Indian thought systems were looked up because it was thought to fulfill some deep doubts within the systems of China and later of Europe.

The Chinese Empire, long guided by Confucius needed a revolution when the ruling empire was overthrown by newer wannabe dynasties which now needed newer systems of philosophy. Buddhism fitted the purpose. The importance of Buddhism emanated from it being the religion of emperors, whether in India or in China and across Central Asia and later in southeast Asia. Even in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, Buddhism returns as a colonizing ethos in Ladakh, Nepal, Bhutan and Sikkim.

In case of the West, Renaissance was the start of modern philosophy which immediately encountered the doubts and even guilt of disobeying God. Reason could not always defy faith without an innate feeling of hurting God, especially the Christian God, whose son had sacrificed his life for the sins of the adherents. Islamic civilization has even till date not been able to move out of faith into reason; if they have to excel in science then there would be Muslim scientists but not followers of the religion. Europe faced this dilemma of whether to shun faith and embrace reason or whether to keep both complementary to each other. It was this paradox that drew them to the Indian wisdom.

The Indian wisdom, whether it be the Vedas, or the Upanishads, or the dharmashastras, is unique in its Godlessness. There is not only no idea of evil as Manusmriti spells out clearly, but also no sense of the Divine. There are two sets of interventions in human life – those pertaining to the species or biological existence, life, birth and death and the other is about marriage, relationships, dealings and exchanges with other humans. Biology operates on universal laws of the Universe, guiding all matters. The social is one which the Dharmashastras command, civil law in the days of the Manusmriti, but customs, codes, constrains in the medieval age of Muslim rule.

Modern Europe’s transformation out of its medieval ties constituted a change in its civil laws, institutions, management of everyday life and bringing with it many changes in the human body, especially the pandemic of plague due to greater human contacts. There were voyages and colonies and hence exposures to societies and cultures fundamentally different from their own. To many European philosophers, especially of Britain and America, or the English-speaking nations, the ancient Indian wisdom of the dharmashastras, the Vedas and the Upanishads held promise. Europe was better developed in science and if the Indian sciences were sought at all centuries later these were in the form of exotic alternatives. Indian science and arts, in other words its secular contributions to civilization were Orientalized, it was its religion that the West came seeking. The interest of the West was ancient religion, and not the temples and rituals of India in late medieval times which is when they met us.

The Muslim rule threw India off gear because here the valiant kshatriya warriors met armies whose strength they could not match. The Muslims came with weapons and wheels, fast moving cavalry and foot soldiers. They conquered and ruled and even in the places in which they did not rule, Muslims spread their methods of administration and extraction of surplus. The scale of politics, economy and society changed and expanded. The Hindu power centres were shattered and together with racial discrimination of the conquerors towards the conquered, the Hindus felt endangered. The Muslims damaged the Hindu Universe and soon, in the form of syncretism, much of Hindu thought invented personal God, Krishna being the prime among those. The Sultanate did not allow any public display of religion but in the 15^th century, the establishment of the Mughal rule allowed every form of religious practices. Temples were built, deities invented, superstitions conceived, and epics were written, but what never evolved were shastras which supported higher thoughts of organization. Wisdom in India remained ancient, not evolving any further after the Sultanate and neither revived with the Mughals. These suggested that the Hindus no longer remained in command of their civilization, culture and politics.

The Renaissance, which started in Bengal as the Bengal Renaissance also, like other resurgences looked to the past beyond the medieval. Expectedly then, we discovered secularism, true to the godlessness of our religion. Our secularism made the ancient religion modern and made it lucrative for the world to follow. Unfortunately, the rise of the right wing on the platform that Hinduism is in danger fears secularism and hence fears its own ancient wisdom. Fearful of its own history, the right wing distorts it to suit an agenda of medievality of a Hindu assertion against the Muslim domination and forgetting while during this period, Hinduism lost its power and went about being defensive. What the right wing tries now is to claim ancient wisdom, its own understanding that is locked in the memories of medieval times. Hence it projects the dark ages of Hinduism as being Viswa Guru; no wonder we have no takers and instead are short of being laughed at.