charvaka and marx
one thing i've noticed about a lot of hindu nationalists is that they simultaneously claim ownership over thousands of years of indian civilization while reducing that civilization to a political project that is barely a century old.
it's genuinely strange.
they'll spend hours calling marxism a foreign ideology, materialism a western import, and leftists "anti-indian," yet one of the oldest materialist traditions in the world developed right here.
long before marx, engels, or even european enlightenment thinkers, india had the charvakas (lokayata). they rejected the authority of the vedas, denied karma and rebirth, dismissed the soul, criticized priestly authority, and argued that reality should be understood through the material world rather than supernatural claims.
marx didn't invent materialism.
what marx gave us was historical materialism: a method for understanding how societies develop through changing material conditions and class relations. but materialist philosophy itself has existed for thousands of years, and india was one of its earliest homes.
so when hindu nationalists dismiss every materialist idea as some western conspiracy, they're erasing their own intellectual history.
that's because hindutva doesn't really engage with indian philosophy.
ancient india wasn't a civilization built on unanimity. it was built on argument. buddhists challenged brahmanical authority. jains rejected vedic ritualism. charvakas rejected religion altogether. different schools debated everything from metaphysics to ethics to politics.
that wasn't a weakness.
that was indian civilization at its most intellectually alive.
hindutva, on the other hand, collapses all of that complexity into a single nationalist narrative.
and that's because hindutva isn't hinduism.
it's a modern political ideology.
hinduism is an umbrella of philosophies, traditions, rituals, regional cultures and schools of thought that evolved over thousands of years. it has no pope, no universal creed, no single institution that speaks for every hindu.
hindutva is a twentieth-century nationalist project concerned primarily with constructing a hindu nation-state and a unified political identity.
those are not the same thing.
it's the same reason one mustn't equate zionism with judaism.
judaism is a religion and a civilization. zionism is a modern political ideology.
many hindus support hindutva, many reject it, and millions simply practice hinduism without viewing it through the lens of nationalism.
reducing hinduism to hindutva weakens hinduism.
what makes this even more ironic is the economic side of it.
a lot of hindu nationalists aggressively defend capitalism as though it's some eternal feature of indian civilization while simultaneously attacking marxism for being "foreign" and, their favorite word, "anti national."
capitalism itself is no less a product of modern history than marxism is.
you cannot spend one breath condemning ideas because they originated in europe and then spend the next defending free-market capitalism, another european historical development, as though it were sanatana. its intellectually inconsistent and convienent for the status quo.
every ruling ideology tries to present itself as timeless, natural and civilizational rather than historical. class interests become national interests. political projects become sacred traditions. history gets rewritten to make existing power structures appear inevitable.
that's precisely what ideological hegemony looks like.
the tragedy is that india's intellectual heritage is far richer than the version promoted by hindu nationalism.
a civilization that produced charvakas, buddhists, jains, bhakti radicals, anti-caste thinkers, rationalists and countless regional traditions cannot honestly be represented by one organization or one ideology.
if your version of "indian civilization" has room only for ideas that reinforce a modern political project, then you're not defending history nor are you defending culture.
a civilization that confident in itself shouldn't need its own intellectual diversity erased in order to survive.
