• What is intent behind secularising Indian Festivals? Why is it important and beneficial for Indians to rediscover Indian Knowledge Systems?

This article has three authors i.e. Gautam R. Desiraju, Deekhit Bhattacharya and Anshuman Panda.

As Hindu festivals approach and the cascade of faith, frolic and fun becomes palpable, so does the jarring caterwauling of those opposed to Sanātana Dharma.

Some of these notables discover the virtues of jīvarakshā and protection of animals after posting videos of non-vegetarian delicacies all year, while others become crypto-missionaries to sully the devatās around which our festivals are centred. Still another cohort exists that will argue tooth and nail to claim somehow that these were, in fact, regional festivals which were ‘Hinduised’ later—never mind that these ‘regional’ identities did not even exist till we were well into the British colonial era. 

So, we have assertions that Pongal is merely a harvest festival, even though it occurs just after downpours that preclude any harvests. Similarly, one hears that Rāma worship is alien to Bengal and is an imposition by Hindi speakers, never mind Rāma’s unbroken worship in Bengal since at least the Gupta era, and never mind that the names of the priests who consecrated the zenith of Bengali faith, Dakshineshwar Kālībārī, as well as his brother, were Rāmakumāra Chattopādhyāya and Prabhū Rāmakrishna Paramahamsa.

Then there are those Shakespeares who believe what is in a name, and casually rename Hindu festivals like Deepavali into ‘Jashn-e-Chirag’. They dare not extend the same courtesy to non-Hindu festivals, for the consequences are well known. Halloween is another latest addition to this panoply of secular ‘festivals’ and our enemies both play the trick and enjoy the treat, if you get the meaning.

Let’s be crystal clear: the ideas, triggers, and directions that marshal the decrepit flights of fancy discussed above have their origins and handlers in the West— to break Bhārat. This is hardly new—colonialists have understood that to break the spirit of a nation, the people must first be deracinated; they know that such uprooting requires the destruction of the knowledge and ways of life that have sustained that nation. 

Festivals, which by their very nature oppose societal fracture, are the last visible embodiments of a culture’s knowledge. Thus, the colonizer craftily attempts to secularize them, in order to erase the memory of the old culture.

As the German jurist Puchta had stated: "Custom is, for the people that established it, a mirror in which that people may recognise itself". Render such customs superfluous or reprehensible in the minds of the nation, and the nation itself dissolves away into an amorphous morass—ideal for slavery.

The above process of national destruction has, across time and regions, required Quislings and saboteurs. Indeed, the shared constant trivialisation and obfuscation of these atrocities by deep-state-controlled Wikipedia, the silence of the Ashraf intelligentsia that is as animated on the plight of Palestine as it was when the Ottoman Caliph was ousted, and the many Bhāratiyās-in-name-only, who say they are spiritual but not religious, that corrode us from within, is telling.

The Spaniards, pioneers in cultural conversion, achieved their goals not just through brute force—what began as shadowy alliances with tribes and cliques blossomed into marital alliances, from which emerged the Mestizos, that is to say, progeny of mixed race. These Mestizos became intermediaries and executives for the handful of Europeans to complete their conquest and cultural triumph. By the time the British properly arrived in India, Victorian prudishness made it repugnant for an entire class, such as the Mestizos, to arise, leaving Anglo-Indians as a microscopic minority throughout India, mostly reduced to junior railway employees and engine drivers. 

Macaulay devised a potent substitute in 1835—he proposed the creation of mental Mestizos. It is these Macaulay Mestizos, variously known as Brown Sepoys, Brown Sahebs, WOGs, or today’s Lutyens and Khan Market gangs (across party lines), who became the nervous system through which the British mind ruled, and continues to rule all of India. While ‘Great’ Britain atrophied and died, the Macaulay Mestizos were left behind as the predominant political elite in India, and being programmed to find beauty, meaning, and morality only in the West, they have continued their colonial project with zest and enthusiasm with their fake English accents. They continue to flourish today. 

Unsurprisingly, their destruction of our education system and their complete hostility to anything Bhāratīya in it has remained in place, with one ideologue after another presiding over the Ministry of Education, since independence, barring a single lone exception.

We know what the Macaulay Marxist Mestizos do. However, why do they do it? What goal is served by secularising Bhāratīya festivals? It is not to do with petty electoral politics. For there are hordes of committed distortionists in Bhārat who infest social media and beyond. In effect it is  a transnational Deep State that is working against Bhārat. The deeper intent is to prevent Bharat from re-discovering itself and thereafter, realizing potential.

To understand this phenomenon we must appreciate that whilst politics is influenced by economics, geography and history the political realm has an element of its very own. The concept of the political, as termed by Carl Schmitt, has an independent existence. The nature of politics, which is the root of all sustainable power, is the ability of a nation to identify itself as an in-group and exclude others as an out-group. It is a matter of swayambodha and shatrubodha.

After all, as Sun Tzu says, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” 

The goal behind the hectoring indignations wrought by the mental Mestizos is not merely to rile up Hindus; it is to prevent Bhāratiyas from coalescing and recognising themselves as a coherent in-group, from having shared histories, outlooks and interests. It is to prevent us from excluding extraneous elements from ruling over Bhārat, directly or otherwise.

The drive to entrench sectarianism and prevent adherents of Sikh, Jaina, and Buddhist traditions from rediscovering their historical relation of oneness with Hindus is one such manifestation—the love of the Hanumāna Nātaka that Guru Govind Singh had, and the seamless intermingling of Brahmins with Buddhist siddhas—are far cries from the divisions that have been drawn today. 

Indeed, the singular focus of forces within and outside the country since the Rāma Janmabhūmī movement has been to derail and dissolve the incipient emergence of political consciousness in Bhāratiyas.

The crystallisation of swayambodha will dispossess the remnants of the Macaulay Marxist Mestizos from their positions of political power and cultural superiority. Further, their masters will lose what has arguably been the most effective means of controlling India, thereby undoing a historical project that began with the importation of the first foreign missionaries De Nobili and Caldwell and continuing with foreign-educated elites attempting to reshape Bhāratiya society into an ersatz, indistinct, fractious, and thus weak, imitation of the West.

We can now truly comprehend the nature of the ‘secularisation’ of Hindu festivals, and the many vectors through which it is thrust upon us and the real danger that it poses to the emergence of a resilient Bhāratiyata.

The moral and cultural confusion that our enemies desire is designed to ultimately prevent the conceptualisation of any concrete sense of Hindu identity, eliminating the possibility of the formation of a political community that can defend Hindu interests.

It is ultimately an expression of the post-Enlightenment universalism of the West, in which the West exalts its thought, culture, aesthetics, and even identity as the only valid identity. At the heart of this universalism lies the cult and worship of the individual—individual rights, individual choices, and individual selves. 

Bhāratiya thought and Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), where contextuality is celebrated and community life is identified as the basis of our civilization, stand diametrically opposed to attempts by our Mestizos and secularists at decreeing ontological monopolies. 

At the heart of our living civilizational ethos are festivals that serve to bridge theory and praxis, practitioners and laymen, and the individual and community.

Indeed, festivities, or parvakālas, lie at the very heart of imparting, reinterpreting, and transmitting civilizational knowledge from generation to generation. This transmission mechanism allows Bhāratiyatā to survive and adapt, as it has through the trials and tribulations of a millennium of invasions. One only needs to look at the central role played by Ganesh chaturthī and Kālī pujā in the Indian independence struggle to gauge the potency of this mode of knowledge dissemination and recontextualisation.

Divorcing our festivals from our Devatās should not be mistaken for universalization. The Western mode of universalization by secularization is neither true universalism, nor does it serve to provide any spiritual succour. It only serves to digest traditions into a meaningless glob of homogeneity, which is the debris of the modern man cut off from his roots. Our festivals, like our knowledge traditions, are universal by the very nature of our divinities, whose doors are open to all those who seek sincerely irrespective of the path. They don’t need colonial re-imaginings.

We emphasise that wars are fought in the ether today and not on the battlefield.

These wars are much cheaper than pitched battles on the ground and with the advent of AI, have taken on a more sinister and dangerous character. It is trivial for the US Deep State to throw small change into Lutyens, for one US dollar is equal to 90 Indian rupees and the purchasing power of 90 Indian rupees in India is vastly greater than that of one US dollar in America. Clumsy attempts to destroy a culture by the likes of Bhaktiyar Khilji, Hernán Cortés and Heinrich Himmler  are unnecessary today in modern India—the Marxist Mestizos already exist, sipping gin and drooling over Lahori kebabs in their well-known hangouts in central Delhi. All they need is the latest toolkit from their masters and they diligently get to work.

IKS is particularly vulnerable to such invidious attacks because so much of our knowledge has come through oral transmission.

The lack of written documentation especially during the last 200 or so years needs to be corrected and there is a need to establish a bank of written documentation at all levels from simple textbooks to scholarly, peer reviewed articles. One cannot and should not allow a gang of vacuous dilettantes to derail a magnificent system of knowledge acquisition and dissemination that might be weak today but not, in any sense, destroyed.

It is in these areas that our government should engage itself in an agenda that is not for this or that political party but for the strengthening and consolidation of the living Bhāratiya civilization. It requires thinkers to identify the underlying unity across India and connect the dots.

The authors are IKS researchers based in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.

To read all articles by Gautam R Desiraju and Others on IKS

Read Mysteries, miracles and dogmas in Christianity

Read The Origin of CHRISTMAS, Traditions and Practices

Read Easter Traditions

To read all articles on Indian Festivals

Also read

1. Decolonization of the Supreme Court

2. Is Sikhism a Colonial Construct

3. Samkhya and Buddhism  

4. Meaning of Secularism

5. Impact of Hindu Science on Ancient and Modern Worlds

6. A very brief history of Indian Science

7. What happened to Universities of Nalanda, Vikramsila, Valabhi, Odantapura