S.K. Arun Murthi 
Udhayanidhi Stalin and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) confrontation over remarks on Sanatana Dharma made by the former has triggered a raging controversy and much has been written on this. The heading of this interview of Karthick Ram Manoharan expresses how the BJP may defend sanatana dharma without defining it.
The logical question that arises is, how can one defend something not knowing what they are defending? But this is exactly how the BJP is defending its position in this controversy.
This, in fact, was the position of a particular brand of Hinduism that emerged in the 19th-century history of India, where orthodoxy became a signifier of such a brand. The BJP seems to be asserting that particular position of sanatana dharma, a position that captures an orthodoxy and regressiveness in the name of tradition, and one that the Sangh parivar is so anxious to preserve.
It should come as no surprise that for the BJP, it is this position of orthodoxy that matters; sanatana dharma’s meanings and definitions do not.
The sharp exchange between Udhayanidhi and the BJP, particularly of their IT cell chief Amit Malviya on this issue, foregrounds a meaning-position dichotomy of the phrase ‘sanatana dharma’ – i.e. it points up the wide gap between the understanding of the pre-19th century meaning of the phrase and its 19th century position as a signifier of orthodoxy.
Knowing that this position is embarrassing to defend, sanatana dharma is often couched in terms of moral values and defended by maintaining an elevated tone.
Recently, a judge of the Madras high court, Justice N. Seshasayee, seems to have adopted such a tone in the wake of the present controversy, while posing a series of rhetorical questions as: “Should not a citizen love his country? Is he not under a duty to serve his nation? Should not the parents be cared for?”
A package of such common sense human values, responsibilities of an individual and standards of behaviour and conduct is brought forward, labelled as sanatana dharma and then defended.
Also Read: What Is Sanatana Dharma?
Udhayanidhi’s sharp criticism of sanatana dharma was definitely not against such values, but was actually directed against the position of orthodoxy, a position that underlies the politics of Hindu nationalism or the Hindu rashtra.
It would be significant to understand the kinds of meanings associated with this phrase ‘sanatana dharma’, very briefly, and see the distinction between this understanding and the position adopted by the Hindu orthodoxy of the 19th century, in which the phrase got appropriated to refer to Hinduism in its entirety.
Meanings of sanatana dharma
Vaishali Jayaraman, a scholar, has given an exhaustive coverage of the various meanings of sanatana dharma and the contexts of its use from her study of Sanskrit classical literature like the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Puranas and the Dharmashastras.
Even she, who appears to be favourably oriented towards this pre-19th century concept of sanatana dharma, notes that the concept is “vague in the extent of its definition”, and doesn’t find a uniform meaning in her analysis of classical texts. Further, the phrase has never been used as a self-description or characterisation of any one religious group or tradition among many in these texts.
There is a wide range of connotation of the phrase ‘sanatana dharma’ in these classical texts, and the following marks its semantic variations (for a detailed textual analysis of meaning one can see here. I just list out some):
a) Social etiquette
b) Denotes a list of duties of the king with several dos and don’ts he should follow. The protection of varnashrama dharma (a rigid social order of four castes where the lowest, the shudra, serves the three higher castes – brahmin, kshatriya and vaishya) is one of his very important duties.
c) It is constituted by a mix of different dharmas
d) Principles of a specific concept, like truth
e) A social norm that enables one to act according to a set of rules
f) A general principle or a universally accepted value for an individual to follow
g) A general way of the world, an observation or truth
h) Duties and responsibilities of an individual at both a personal and professional level.
Also Read: Saakhi: Sanatana Dharma on Caste, Dissent and Democracy
However, the Mahabharata doesn’t provide a synoptic account of sanatana dharma. This phrase, as a philosophical and ethical concept, was also not taken up for critical reflection.
In the classical literature of earlier times, sanatana dharma carries various connotations, with emphasis on the idea of the rigid social hierarchical order of caste. Later, in the 19th century, the sanatani movement gained significance from the traditionalist’s encounter with the missionaries and the Hindu reformers.
Orthodoxy of Sanatana Dharma
In the classical literature, Sanatana Dharma was never a term of self-description or self-assertion signifying a religious identity. Nor does this phrase mark a constituency holding a certain religious position before the late 19th century.
Pandit Shraddha Ram Phillauri and Pandit Din Dayalu Sharma were the two leaders who pitched aggressively the idea of the orthodox brand of Hinduism as sanatana dharma. Their opponents were, primarily, Hindu reformists and Christian missionaries. As Kenneth W. Jones, a distinguished scholar of South Asian history, notes in his essay, “Two Sanatan Dharma Leaders and Swami Vivekananda: A Comparison”:
“During the nineteenth century, there arose throughout British India a series of religious movements that can loosely be labelled as defensive of the various religious traditions then dominant.
Among Hindus such groups were classed as ‘Sanatanists’, defenders of sanatana dharma, the Eternal Religion. They saw themselves as champions of orthodoxy who fought all attempts at religious and social reform. Sanatanists have also been labelled as opponents of change, enemies of ‘modernisation’ and Westernisation, thus reactionaries attempting to stem the tide of history.”
Shraddha Ram very strongly advocated for the caste system and also the idea of untouchability that follows from it. He uses the term “dwij dharm” for the three upper castes and “neech admi” for the shudras. The extent of his extremely toxic and regressive views can be gauged from what he says in one instance:
“Meeting, touching, eating, drinking with them is forbidden in our shastras. Should we meet them through force, or need or error, then doing prayaschit [atonement] is necessary. Then as far as possible we Hindus should remain distant from them.” (quoted from the above essay of Kenneth W. Jones).
The views of Sharma, the other leader, in this regard are no different. This was the orthodox position that was defended as sanatana dharma. The signifier was the orthodoxy and not the eternal values – as it is sometimes made out to be by appealing to the etymology of the phrase. It is this position that the movement assumes is predominant than the meaning.
As John Zavos, a scholar of South Asian religions, argues, this idea or position is a “prominent feature of modern Hinduism in accounts of political and social history”. That position was one of traditional orthodoxy. The Dharma Sabhas of the nineteenth century were primarily instrumental in creating and nurturing the force of orthodoxy.
This orthodoxy became an important constituency, politically, in articulating modern Hindusim of the orthodox kind (of the Dharma Sabhas) in the public colonial space, as against the reformist kind of modern Hinduism of the Samajas (primarily the Arya Samaj and the Brahma Samaj). Sanatana dharma thus became a signifier of orthodoxy, as Zavos contends.
One has to note that there is a major shift in the meaning of sanatana dharma, from the one laid out in the classical literature to the one that finds expression in the discourse of 19th-century orthodox Hinduism. In this discourse, the phrase was used as a self-description of one’s religious tradition. In this self-description, it becomes important how others perceive this tradition.
Also Read: Sanatan Dharma: An Ideology or the Entire Hindu Community?
The idea of sanatana encapsulates the idea of ancientness, eternality, permanence and universalism. Dharma was some kind of law that holds a universal order which subsumes the social order. In their mode of self-representation and self-description, these characteristics were drawn upon only to project the idea of the greatness of this religion that has persisted over a long period of time.
Sanatana dharma becomes a signifier of a position of, as Zavos terms it, “amorphous homogeneity”, but underlying this homogeneity is the rigid and regressive orthodoxy.
It emerged as a symbol of orthodoxy in the Dharma Sabhas’ articulation of its own brand of Hinduism, and as Zavos further argues, without developing a “doctrinally coherent and universally recognisable set of beliefs”.
Such a position of the orthodoxy of the 19th-century focused on practices and structures which clearly upheld caste hierarchy, the subjugation of women and all other regressive ideas. These elements came together to stand for tradition, and the Dharma Sabhas of 19th-century India aggressively supported it under the umbrella of sanatana dharma.
Eradication of regressive orthodoxy, not genocide
Udhayanidhi called for an eradication of the regressive orthodoxy of the kind that prevailed in the 19th-century , because it was clearly discriminatory. Amit Malviya leaps from this remark by Udhayanidhi on sanatana dharma – that it must be eradicated and not merely opposed – to claim that “he is calling for genocide of 80% population of Bharat, who follow Sanatan Dharma”.
Genocide is a word coined by Raphael Lemkin, by whose indefatigable lobbying the UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). In its definition, genocide is an act intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
If Malviya terms Udhayanidhi’s calling for eradication as genocide, then his (Malviya’s) understanding presupposed that sanatana dharma is a religious group, which he further follows up by saying that 80% of the population of Bharat are followers of this dharma.
Also Read: The Challenge to Sanatana Dharma from a Radical Politics of Emancipation
It is here that one needs to question Malviya’s or the BJP’s understanding of the phrase. Do they subscribe to a very specific meaning of sanatana dharma, or to a positional sense of the orthodoxy of the Dharma Sabhas?
It appears from the presupposition of his statement that it is the latter, because it is in this sense that it is represented as a constituency, and Malviya’s statement referring to 80% of the population being its followers also clearly demarcates an identifiable sense of religious constituency.
If this be the case, then the implication is clear that it is the position of the orthodoxy of the 19th-century Dharma Sabhas’ type that the BJP supports in its defence of sanatana dharma.
Further, it is significant to note that this notion of Hindu orthodoxy was later transformed politically in the hands of V.D. Savarkar as Hindu nationalism calling for a Hindu rashtra. So when Udhayanidhi calls for the eradication of sanatana dharma, it is not only the regressive orthodoxy, but also this idea behind the politics of a Hindu rashtra that he is calling for the eradication of. It is in this way that his statement has to be viewed.
S.K. Arun Murthi has taught philosophy in the Humanities and the Social Sciences department, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, Punjab.