There is a verse in the Rig Veda, in the Nasadiya Sukta, the Hymn of Creation, that ends not with a declaration but with a shrug. After asking who really created the universe, the poet says that perhaps even the highest being in the highest heaven does not know. Perhaps he does not know.

Sit with that for a moment. This is not a fringe text smuggled in by some modern rationalist to embarrass the faithful. This is the 10th mandala of the Rig Veda, among the oldest and most revered layers of Hindu scripture, and it ends in open, dignified uncertainty. Not atheism exactly. Not theism exactly either. Something more honest: agnosticism, offered as prayer.

This is the inheritance many of us have quietly misplaced?

A Civilisation Built on the Argument, Not Just the Answer

Modern Hindus, especially the urban, WhatsApp-forwarded, festival-obsessed variety, often imagine ‘Sanatan Dharma’ as a single, settled thing. One God, or one idea of God, one correct way to worship, one correct way to dress, one correct way to be seen being religious. Anything that questions this is treated as an attack from outside, from missionaries or George Soros, from the Left, from the West, from anywhere but within.

But this picture would have baffled the rishis themselves.

Ancient Bharat did not have one Hinduism. It had darshanas, literally “ways of seeing.” Six major orthodox schools, ‘astika darshanas’, engaged each other in centuries of rigorous, often brutal philosophical combat:

1. ‘Nyaya’ built formal logic and epistemology, asking how we can even know what we claim to know.

2. ‘Vaisheshika’ did early atomic theory, breaking reality into its physical constituents.

3. ‘Samkhya’ proposed a dualist universe of consciousness and matter without needing a creator God to make the system work.

4. ‘Yoga’, in its classical Patanjali form, was a technical discipline of mind, not a devotional cult.

5. ‘Mimamsa’ obsessed over ritual and Vedic authority.

6. ‘Vedanta’, itself later splintering into ‘Advaita’, ‘Vishishtadvaita’, ‘Dvaita’, and more, argued for centuries about whether the self and the divine are one, partially one, or entirely separate.

These schools did not politely coexist. They wrote entire treatises refuting each other. Shankaracharya’s ‘Advaita’ was built by dismantling rival positions point by point, in the Sanskrit tradition of ‘purva paksha’, where you must first state your opponent’s argument so accurately and so fairly that even they would agree you have understood them, before you are permitted to refute it. Imagine applying that discipline to a modern Twitter or LinkedIn argument? Imagine being required to steelman the person you disagree with before you are allowed to disagree?

The Astikas Who Doubted, The Nastikas Who Belonged!

Even more striking is what Bharat did with [outright] ‘dissent’.

The ‘Charvaka’ school, also called ‘Lokayata’, was materialist and skeptical to the bone. It rejected the authority of the Vedas, denied an afterlife, mocked the entire economy of priestly ritual as a livelihood scheme for those who could not find honest work, and insisted that only direct sensory perception counted as valid knowledge. This was not a whispered heresy hiding in a cave. Charvaka arguments are preserved, quoted, and seriously engaged with in Sanskrit philosophical literature for over a thousand years, because rival schools felt obligated to answer them rather than simply ban them.

Buddhism and Jainism, the ‘nastika’ or ‘heterodox darshanas’, rejected Vedic authority altogether, rejected the idea of a creator God as central to liberation, and built entire civilisational movements out of that rejection, movements that Ashoka the Great himself embraced and spread across the subcontinent and beyond. And yet these traditions are not remembered in Indian history as foreign invaders of the mind. They are remembered as Bharat arguing with itself and often winning global influence by doing so.

This is the deeper point. Sanatan Dharma was never a religion of one book, one commandment, one enforced orthodoxy policed by an institution with the power to excommunicate. It was, at its intellectual peak, a shared civilisational space in which theists, atheists, dualists, non-dualists, ritualists, anti-ritualists, logicians, and skeptics all called themselves participants in the same unfolding conversation. Dharma was not a fixed answer. It was a method for continuing to ask the question honestly.

What Rituals Were Actually For?

None of this means ritual, murti puja, temple worship, or bhakti were unimportant or lesser. They were central, and remain central, to how most people live a religious life, and there is nothing shameful about that. The ‘bhakti movement’, from Kabir to Mirabai to Tukaram to the Alvars, produced some of the most emotionally profound devotional literature in human history, often written by people from marginalised castes who were shut out of Sanskritic learning entirely and who used devotion itself as a form of social protest.

But even bhakti had teeth. Kabir mocked both Hindu priestcraft and Muslim orthodoxy with equal, gleeful irreverence. He was not interested in performing identity for an audience. He was interested in truth, and he was willing to offend everyone equally to get there.

The difference between then and now is not that rituals existed then and do not exist now. The difference is that ritual used to sit inside a much larger, argumentative, self-critical tradition. It was one register among many, not the only register. Puja was accompanied by philosophy. Bhakti was accompanied by satire. Faith was accompanied by doubt, and doubt was not treated as betrayal.

The Shrinking of a Vast Tradition

Something has narrowed, right?

Walk through much of urban Hindu religious life today and you will find enormous energy devoted to visibility. Grand processions engineered for drone footage. Temple architecture competing for record books. Religious identity performed loudly on social media through symbols, hashtags, and outrage cycles, but rarely through actual textual engagement with the Gita, the Upanishads, or the darshanas that built this civilisation’s intellectual reputation in the first place.

Ask the average enthusiastic participant in a religious political rally to explain the difference between ‘Advaita’ and ‘Dvaita Vedanta’, or to explain what the Charvakas actually argued and why later thinkers took them seriously enough to refute at length, and you will often be met with silence, or worse, hostility for even asking. Somewhere along the way, being a good Hindu became about being seen performing certainty, not about the harder, older, more Vedic work of pursuing understanding.

This is a civilisational loss, not a political one, and it should worry people across the political spectrum equally. A tradition that produced Nagarjuna’s devastating logic, Adi Shankara’s dialectics, and the Charvakas’ materialist provocations has been reduced, in significant pockets of contemporary practice, to a competition over who can be most visibly offended on behalf of a faith that historically prided itself on being able to survive any argument thrown at it.

Political Hindutva, as a project of cultural assertion and civilisational pride, is not the enemy of this older tradition, and it should not be treated as such. National confidence, historical correction, and pride in a genuinely extraordinary intellectual inheritance are entirely legitimate and, frankly, overdue. But confidence without curiosity curdles into brittleness. A tradition secure in its own greatness should have no fear of debate, satire, or internal criticism. It was, after all, built by people who relished all three.

Secularism Was Not Imported, It Was Practiced…

There is a common argument today that secularism is a Western import, alien to Indian civilisation, and that it weakens Hindu identity. This deserves honest scrutiny rather than reflexive agreement or reflexive rejection.

Ashoka’s edicts, carved in stone across the subcontinent over 2000 years ago, explicitly instructed respect for all religious sects and warned against praising one’s own faith by denigrating another’s, because doing so harms one’s own faith more than it helps it. Akbar’s ‘ibadat khana’ hosted Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian, Muslim, and Christian scholars in the same room, arguing, not to convert each other, but to understand each other. The Bhakti and Sufi movements freely borrowed each other’s metaphors, poetry, and even saints, producing shared devotional figures still revered across community lines today.

Pluralism, tolerance, and the coexistence of radically different metaphysical positions within a single civilisational conversation is not a Nehruvian invention or a colonial graft. It is arguably one of the oldest and most distinctly Sanatan contributions to political and philosophical thought anywhere in the world. To abandon it in the name of protecting Hindu identity is, ironically, to abandon one of the very things that made that identity so intellectually formidable to begin with.

Reclaiming the Argument, Not Just the Identity

None of this is an attack on faith, on ritual, on temples, on festivals, or on the legitimate pride Hindus today take in a civilisation that has survived invasions, colonisation, and centuries of attempted erasure and still stands. That pride is earned and it deserves to be worn openly.

But pride should come with curiosity, not instead of it.

The invitation here is simple and, I would argue, deeply conservative in the truest sense of that word, conserving what was great about this tradition rather than a flattened, defensive caricature of it. Read the ‘Nasadiya Sukta’ and sit with its doubt. Read a Charvaka fragment and notice that your ancestors took materialism seriously enough to argue with it for a thousand years instead of banning it. Read Shankara’s ‘purva paksha’ method and ask whether you have ever extended that same intellectual generosity to someone you disagree with online. Ask a pandit, a swami, or a fellow devotee a genuinely difficult question about karma, free will, or the problem of suffering, and notice whether the room welcomes the question or flinches from it?

A civilisation that once had room for Nyaya logicians, Charvaka materialists, Buddhist and Jain heterodoxy, Advaitin non-dualists, Dvaitin dualists, and bhakti poets who mocked priests to their faces was not a fragile civilisation. It was among the most confident and intellectually generous the world has ever produced. Reclaiming that confidence, in its fullest and most argumentative form, is not a threat to Sanatan Dharma. It may be the truest way of honouring it.

Perhaps he knows. Perhaps he does not know. The Veda itself was comfortable saying so. We might be too?

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

Long or Short, get news the way you like. No ads. No redirections. Download Newspin and Stay Alert, The CSR Journal Mobile app, for fast, crisp, clean updates!

App Store –  https://apps.apple.com/in/app/newspin/id6746449540 

Google Play Store – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inventifweb.newspin&pcampaignid=web_share