'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam' and the Way of the Jackal

It was barely two years ago when the entire country was plastered with posters featuring the G20 logo, accompanied by pictures of a beaming Narendra Modi. The logo was adorned with a blooming lotus, the Bharatiya Janata Party's symbol, and carried this uplifting message: वयुधैव कुटुम्बकम्, ONE EARTH. ONE FAMILY. ONE FUTURE. 

India's G20 logo.

Not unexpectedly, Modi milked this motto for all its worth in his opening remarks at the G20. He reminded the foreign heads of state and other guests that the global conduct of this “mother of democracy” is “rooted in the fundamental principle of 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,' which means 'world is one family.'”

This Sanskrit phrase, वयुधैव कुटुम्बकम्, is second only to the other maha-mantra of Hindu nationalists: एकं सद्विप्रा वदन्ति, the Existent is one, the sages express it variously, a verse from the Rg Veda. Both these phrases are thrown around endlessly – and unthinkingly – to prove the openness, the tolerance, the wholeness, the ecological wisdom, and the cosmopolitanism of the “eternal” Hindu civilization.  

No one can deny that the mantra of vasudhaiva kutumbakam expresses a noble, cosmopolitan sentiment: the world would indeed be a better place if we treated it as one big family. If India practiced – today, or ever in its history – what this mantra preaches, no one would deny the nation the moral superiority that it so badly craves. But who in their right minds can deny that the India that treats its non-Hindu minorities as second-class citizens, and its poor and lower orders as dispensable, does not practice what it so piously preaches to the rest of the world. 

The question is whether vasudhaiva kutumbakam has ever meant what modern-day interpreters claim it means. Was this phrase originally meant as a moral injunction to extend the same love to everyone that one has for one’s family? Is there any evidence that the sentiment that the entire cosmos was one big family is something that Hindus have lived by in the past, or live by today? 

To answer this question, one has to locate vasudhaiva kutumbakam in the context it appears in the sacred literature of the Hindus. One thing is for sure: it is nowhere to be found in any of the Vedas, the gold standard for Hindu beliefs and practices. Some claim to find it in the so-called “Maha-Upanishad,” which, if it exists, is not a part of the 10 principal Upanishads that Hindus consider canonical. 

So, where does this mantra come from? It makes its appearance in a story in the Hitopadesha, where a cunning jackal mouths a noble-sounding shloka to get close to a deer that he wants to have for dinner!  It was never meant as an injunction to love others as you love your family. It was rather a case of the devil quoting the scripture, or equivalently, a rogue donning a saffron robe and smearing his forehead with a big tilak. 

The provenance of vasudhaiva kutumbakam in the Hitopadesha was established by professor Brian Hatcher, a scholar of Hinduism at Tufts University in the United States. I first became aware of the Hitopadesha connection after reading his 1994 essay on the subject. This provenance and the plot of the story in which the famous words appear are worthy of closer examination, as they lay bare the danger of taking lofty Sanskrit phrases out of context and turning them into badges of Hindu wisdom and exceptionalism. 

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As with most of Hindu sacred literature, it is hard to say definitively when and where Hitopadesha was composed; the accepted timeline is anywhere between the 9th and the 15th centuries. According to the authoritative Sanskrit-Bengali-English text edited by Lakshi Narayan Nyalankar and published in 1830, a raja named Sudarsana in Pataliputra invited a pandit by the name of Vishnu-Sarma to teach niti-shastra (ethical and moral precepts) to his wayward sons. (There is no trace of the said raja in historical records, and nothing is known about Vishnu-Sarma either.) Vishnu-Sarma creatively spun didactic stories with deer, crows, jackals, tortoises, vultures, and other rather learned and talkative animals. It is these stories that have come down to us as Hitopadesha, which translates into “beneficial instruction.”

Now for the story: Once upon a time, there was a deer and a crow who were great friends. A jackal spotted the deer and wanted to eat him. He knew that the crow would warn the deer before he could get to him. So, he decided to befriend the duo. The crow, being worldly wise and very smart, was suspicious of the jackal’s motives. The crow proceeds to narrate a story of how a crafty cat pretended to be a saintly vegetarian and ended up eating the birds it had befriended. The conclusion the crow drew from this murderous cat was that one should be wary of inviting strangers into one’s midst.

The jackal got annoyed at such comparisons and said to the crow: “Listen, my friend, you, too, were once a stranger to this deer. Now look at the two of you. You’re bosom friends.” The jackal then proceeds to recite a Sanskrit verse which reads as follows: 

The narrow-minded ask, “Is this person one of us, or is he a stranger?” 

But to those of noble character, the whole world is one family. 

These high-minded words impressed the deer and the crow, and they, not wanting to appear narrow-minded, allowed the jackal to live with them. The misadventure continues: the deer gets trapped in a farmer’s net, with the jackal waiting in the wings; the crow manages to set the deer free; the jackal falls into the farmer’s trap and meets his maker.  All's well that ends well!

The phrase “to those of noble character, the whole world is one family” – to the udarcharita, all of vasudha is thus a kutumbh – is hardly a lofty call to live ethically and humanely in this story. On the contrary, it is a sly scheme of a schemer. If there is a moral to the story, it is not that the world is a family, but rather, you should not lower your guard when someone makes lofty declarations.   

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When our nationalists piously cite these Sanskrit words, they are following the jackal’s way. Like the jackal, they use high-minded words to further their Hindu supremacist ends while harbouring murderous hatreds. They wow the world with Sanskrit shlokas, while they go about systematically unraveling the multi-faith fabric of this country. 

Even more problematic – and more consequential — than the bad faith of our current Hindutva regime is how Indian scholars have honed the art of reading all that is worthy of emulation in the modern world back into the Great Tradition of Sanskritic Hinduism. That we can so smoothly slide from the words of a sly trickster in the Hitopadesha into the language of cosmopolitan humanism is the result of a scholarly tradition that began with the 19th-century Hindu Renaissance. In the spirit of anti-colonialism, nationalist intellectuals developed the fine art of stretching Hindu philosophical concepts in all directions to encompass the new and revolutionary ideas born in the modern age. The ancestral concepts were denuded of their original intent and context and filled in with those features of the modern West that were seen as conferring prestige and power – scientific rationalism, equality, democracy, and other such virtues. Thus, the old was turned into the “mother” of the new, and the new turned into something ever present in the “eternal” dharma. 

It is through such sleights of hand that a Hindu Golden Age of an enlightened, democratic, rational (even “scientific” in the modern sense of the word) polity was constructed. While this Golden Age imagery may help us puff up our chests with pride, it does nothing to make us more enlightened, democratic, or rational. The problem is that these values are not the real values that the people of India live by today or have lived by in the past. To think that the traditional Indian cultural universe was democratic or “scientific” is no different from interpreting the jackal’s “noble-mindedness” as a message of brotherly love. 

Unfortunately, this romantic rewriting of traditions extends beyond the Hindu nationalists. The postcolonial Left that battles the cultural after-effects of colonialism in the name of the non-modern masses (the  “subaltern”)  is also guilty of reading a uniquely wholesome communitarianism and a non-reductionist, holistic rationality in India’s indigenous traditions. If the Hindu nationalists are guilty of projecting their cultural chauvinism into history, the postcolonial Left is guilty of projecting its disillusionment with the project of modernity and the Enlightenment into the subaltern life-world.  As I argue in my new book, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason, both are fighting the same battle for a non-Eurocentric “alternative modernity” that is rooted in indigenous conceptual categories. While the Hindu nationalists trace all indigenous concepts and practices to our Vedic heritage, the postcolonial Left looks for them in the local knowledge traditions of the marginalised, as if the two evolved in water-tight compartments. 

The quest for indigeneity, whether from the Right or the Left, can only lead to nativism and claims of exceptionalism. What is needed is a clear-eyed assessment of our past and present so that we learn to distinguish between the jackal’s way and what it would take to create a truly egalitarian and cosmopolitan culture at home and in the world. 

Meera Nanda is a historian of science.

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