Answering Critics

Was 'Hinduism' invented by the British? Conceding the word, contesting the claim

Hindu' began as a Persian word for a river. 'Hinduism' is an English coinage first recorded in 1786, and the census officials who counted Hindus admitted in their own reports that the category barely worked. All of that is conceded here in full. What it does not establish is the next step, because doxographers were unifying the schools in Sanskrit from the fourteenth century, poets were writing hindu dhamma against turaka dhamma by about 1400, and al-Biruni described Hindu belief as one system around 1030.

No founder, no council, no creed, and still one tradition: what actually holds Sanatan Dharma together

A religion with no founder and no creed looks to an outsider like a label of convenience. It is not. The binding agent is a shared method: an agreed vocabulary, an agreed theory of what counts as evidence, a canon hierarchy, and a convention that made you argue your opponent's case before your own. The article also states what that costs, because nobody can settle a dispute and nobody can disown anyone.

August 11, 202616 min read

How many gods are there?' Yajnavalkya answered in public, and Max Muller had to invent 'kathenotheism

Vidagdha Shakalya asked Yajnavalkya how many gods there are, and got seven answers descending from 3306 to one. That dialogue is the tradition answering the counting question itself, close to three thousand years early. The 33 crore figure rests on a misreading of koti. Max Muller did not coin henotheism, Schelling did; the word Muller minted was kathenotheism. The names are many, and the reality they open onto is one.

August 11, 202615 min read

The god arrives, and then the god leaves: what pran pratishtha and visarjan show about murti puja

Before a clay Ganesha can be lifted and carried to the water, someone has to ask the god to leave. That is not a figure of speech but a procedural requirement in the ritual manuals. Hindu practice keeps two classes of image, movable and immovable, and specifies for each whether the presence is invited, retained or released. The grammar of those rites tells you precisely what the image is taken to be.

Bali: animal sacrifice in Hinduism, why it persists, and the tradition's own long argument against it

Hindus are often assured that their religion does not sacrifice animals. It does, in specific Shakta temples on specific days, and any defence that begins with a denial collapses on contact. The stronger answer is that the case against bali was made inside the tradition long before anyone outside it objected, and that temples across India have been quietly substituting gourds and coconuts for centuries.

If karma settles everything, why does Krishna leave the decision to Arjuna? The fatalism charge, answered from the texts

Krishna argues his whole case and then, at Gita 18.63, tells Arjuna to ponder it and act as he likes. The tradition splits karma into three portions and holds only one fixed. Real fatalism had a name, niyati, and belonged to Makkhali Gosala, whom the Buddhists and Jains both refuted. What is true in the charge is the sociology, not the doctrine.

Gargi interrupts: the women of the Upanishads and the dharmashastra that later shut the door

In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad a woman halts the tradition's most formidable debater, and the Rigvedic index names women among its seers. Centuries later Manu denies women independence and strips the Vedic formulas from their rites. Both records are genuine, and only a narrow claim survives them.

August 10, 202614 min read

Sati: a practice with almost no scriptural ground, condemned from inside long before it was banned

Rigveda 10.18.8 tells the widow to rise and rejoin the living. Bana put a case against widow-burning into a Sanskrit romance in the seventh century, and Medhatithi called it forbidden suicide in the ninth. It happened anyway, overwhelmingly in one region, and the law that ended it was signed by a colonial governor-general after a campaign led by a Hindu reformer.

August 10, 202614 min read

The Manusmriti problem: what the text actually is, and how the British turned a smriti into a statute

Manusmriti 9.3 says a woman is not fit for independence. It is not an interpolation and there is no defence of it. The defence runs elsewhere: a dharmashastra is smriti, one of many, contradicted by the others, subordinate to shruti and overrulable. What made this one function like a statute was Halhed, Jones and the Anglo-Hindu courts.

August 10, 202613 min read

Purusha Sukta: The Four Varnas From One Body, and the Two Ways That Hymn Has Been Read

Critics of caste do not cite the Gita. They cite Rigveda 10.90, where the four varnas come from the mouth, arms, thighs and feet of the cosmic Purusha. The hymn will bear an organic reading. It has also been read as a ladder for two thousand years, by Hindu law-books and Puranas rather than by outsiders, and that half of the story cannot be skipped.