Why I am a Hindu

By Shashi Tharoor

11 min read

Why does it matter? Because the loudest defenders of Hindu pride often understand Hinduism least.

Shashi Tharoor starts every morning in prayer to Ganesh. He keeps statues on every shelf in his home. He completed a three-week south Indian pilgrimage at fourteen with his head freshly shorn at a temple. And he has been routinely called "anti-Hindu" — not by atheists or colonial critics, but by fellow Hindus who claim to be defending the faith. That accusation is the wound this book is written to address. Tharoor doesn't argue back from outside the tradition; he argues from deep inside it, drawing on a philosophy that, unusually among the world's major faiths, never claimed to hold the only path to God. That's why the political movement now speaking loudest in Hinduism's name is worth examining carefully: Tharoor argues it is systematically destroying the very quality that made the religion philosophically distinctive.

The Faith That Couldn't Eject Its Own Atheists

Hinduism has no mechanism for declaring a heretic. This isn't an administrative gap — it was never designed in because no one designing the tradition thought that way. The Charvaka philosophers make that clearer than any theological argument could.

The Charvakas were ancient Indian materialists who treated mainstream Hindu belief with contempt. They denied heaven, rebirth, and the soul. They accused the ritual specialists of their era of inventing the sacred texts as a professional convenience — a livelihood for men who lacked both understanding and energy. Their most pointed challenge: if a sacrificed animal ascends to paradise, what stops a devotee from sending his own father the same way? These were not fringe cranks quietly tolerated at the margins. The Charvakas were recognized as a legitimate school within Hindu philosophical thought, their arguments preserved in texts compiled by the very opponents who disagreed with them. No council stripped them of their standing because no authority possessed the power to try.

This was structurally impossible. There's no Hindu Pope, no Vatican, no catechism, no binding creed. A Hindu can accept or reject the Vedas, worship one god or many or none, fast or eat meat, observe ritual or ignore it entirely. The faith produced devoted monotheists and committed atheists and classified both as genuine practitioners.

Every Hindu God Is a Different Sketch of the Same Unknowable

In 1671, the French traveler François Bernier tried to interest a gathering of Brahmin scholars in Christianity. Their response surprised him. They weren't offended. They didn't argue that Christ was a false god or his followers damned. They explained, with apparent puzzlement at his insistence, that God might well have appointed several paths to heaven — his path might be good for him, just as theirs was for them. What they couldn't accept was his premise that one path must be right and all others error.

This wasn't diplomacy. It was the logical conclusion of a specific philosophical architecture.

At the summit of that architecture sits something that cannot be described, which Hindu texts acknowledge directly. The Upanishads close with "neti, neti": not this, not this. The Kena Upanishad says that those who think they've grasped it haven't, and those who know they haven't are closer. When a sage is pressed to define God's nature, he falls silent and calls that silence his answer. Brahman is without form, without gender, without qualities: everywhere and in everything, impossible to pin down as any particular thing.

Which means any picture of the Absolute is partial by definition — not wrong, just incomplete. The 330 million deities of the Hindu tradition aren't competing truths. They are different sketches of a face that cannot be drawn, each valid for the worshipper who finds meaning in it, none complete. A ten-armed warrior goddess, an elephant-headed remover of obstacles, a blue-skinned flute player: different handles on the same ungraspable thing. So is, a Hindu would add, a man on a cross. If your image carries you toward the Absolute, there is nothing to argue about.

A father in the Chandogya Upanishad makes this concrete. He asks his son to dissolve salt in a bowl of water, then taste it throughout and try to pull the salt back out. The water is equally salty everywhere; the salt cannot be separated. God is like that, the father says: present throughout creation, impossible to extract and hold apart from it. The individual soul and the universal spirit are as inseparable as salt and water once dissolved. What you worship and what you're reaching for are, in the end, the same thing.

That's why Bernier's Brahmins responded as they did. They weren't being diplomatically vague. They were stating a precise conclusion: if the Absolute is everywhere and has no fixed form, any path sincerely directed toward it is already pointed the right way.

Caste Blindness Is a Privilege Only the Upper Castes Can Afford

At eleven years old, Shashi Tharoor was cornered at the top of a school staircase by the son of a famous Bollywood actor, a boy who would himself become a screen idol, and asked a question he couldn't answer: what caste are you? Tharoor stammered that he didn't know. The boy stared at him in genuine disbelief. "You don't know? Everybody knows their own caste." That evening, Tharoor went home and demanded an explanation from his parents, who had raised him in deliberate ignorance of the whole business. His father had dropped the Nair caste name at college in response to Gandhi's urging and never looked back. The Bollywood heir never spoke to Tharoor again at school.

Tharoor spent decades treating this as a satisfying outcome: proof that the rational, nationalist response to caste was simply to stop seeing it. He hired staff without asking their caste, socialized without tracking affiliations, married outside his caste. He thought this was the modern Indian ideal: judge people by ability and character, not by accident of birth.

Then an eighteen-year-old Dalit blogger named Tejaswini Tabhane dismantled that comfortable position. Her argument is precise: caste governs the distribution of resources and opportunities in Indian society. An upper-caste person benefits from that distribution whether they notice it or not. Refusing to acknowledge those unearned advantages isn't enlightenment — it's a way of pretending the mechanism doesn't exist while continuing to benefit from it. For the Dalit, caste means humiliation, deprivation, and an identity imposed from outside. For the upper-caste person, caste blindness is a luxury unavailable to anyone at the bottom. Tharoor's response: "I have to concede she is right."

The clearest proof that her argument is structural rather than spiritual comes from what religious conversion fails to do. A survey led by researcher Amit Thorat found that 27% of Indians still practice Untouchability: refusing to allow Dalits into their kitchens or near their utensils. That finding is damning enough. What made it stranger was the breakdown: 23% of Sikhs, 18% of Muslims, and 5% of Christians reported the practice too. Sikhism and Islam are explicitly egalitarian faiths. Thorat's conclusion was blunt: conversion had not led to the change in mindset anyone had hoped for. "Caste identity," he said, "is sticky baggage."

The Thinkers Who Kept Hinduism Open Every Time History Tried to Close It

Think about two ways a river responds to a boulder dropped in its path. One response: water banks up against it, pressure building. The other: the current finds a channel underneath and flows around. Hinduism, over a thousand years of existential crisis, chose the second response every time.

The first major test came with the Islamic invasions around 1000 CE. When Mahmud of Ghazni raided India seventeen times in three decades, looting temples and destroying shrines, a defensive faith might have hardened into exclusions and purity codes. Instead, the Bhakti movement emerged: poets like Kabir, a Muslim weaver, carried the philosophical core into vernacular song. The faith absorbed the pressure and came out singing.

The second test was colonial rule — more corrosive because it came wrapped in the language of progress. British administrators and missionaries dismissed Hinduism as idol-worship mired in superstition. The defensive response would have been to retreat and harden. Swami Vivekananda, standing before the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893, chose something else.

He walked into that hall as the representative of a tradition the colonizers had caricatured, and instead of defending it, he explained what it actually contained. The Vedas, he told his audience, are not books in any familiar sense; they record an accumulated body of spiritual laws — not commandments to obey but patterns in existence that any person, in any tradition, might independently discover — the way the law of gravitation existed before anyone named it and would persist even if everyone forgot it. The critical difference from every religion in that room: Hinduism could never promise that correct belief alone leads to salvation. The faith means realisation, not memorizing doctrine but becoming what the doctrine points toward.

Tharoor traces his own lineage from Shankara, the eighth-century philosopher who codified the doctrine that the human soul and the universal spirit are ultimately one, through the Bhakti poets to Vivekananda to Gandhi. Gandhi drew on that inheritance directly: the non-cooperation movement was built on ahimsa, the principle of non-harm at the Gita's core, which let a philosophy become a politics without demanding belief or drawing borders. What held the chain together wasn't a fixed doctrine. Every time history applied pressure, the tradition went deeper rather than smaller.

The RSS Chief Who Called Nazi Germany 'a Good Lesson for India'

Hindutva is a 20th-century political ideology built on European racial nationalism. The man who made that clearest was not a critic but its principal architect.

In 1939, M. S. Golwalkar, who would lead the RSS for three decades and become Hindutva's dominant intellectual voice, wrote approvingly that Germany had "shocked the world by purging the country of the Semitic Races." Race pride at its finest, he called it, "a good lesson for us in Hindustan." This wasn't a fringe comment buried in a footnote. Golwalkar went on to argue that non-Hindus in a Hindu nation faced exactly two choices: dissolve completely into Hindu culture, or remain with no citizenship rights, no privileges, wholly subordinated to the majority. Muslims he classed as invaders; Jews and Parsis, who "knew their place," he tolerated as guests.

Golwalkar was building on a framework Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had laid a generation earlier. Savarkar coined the term "Hindutva" in 1923, and his definition of a Hindu required three simultaneous conditions: India as your motherland, India as your ancestral land, and India as your holy land. That third requirement carried all the weight. A Muslim or Christian born in India, loyal to India, raised on the same soil: if their faith directed them toward Mecca or Jerusalem, Savarkar's formula excluded them by design. He also made something clear that would surprise his own followers today: Hinduism was merely "a fraction, a part of Hindutva." The spiritual tradition was raw material for a political project.

Tharoor's central charge is that Hindutva betrays the tradition it claims to represent. Classical Hinduism was built on the impossibility of a single binding creed: no authority could declare a heretic, no council could expel a school, the Charvakas could mock the Vedas and still be catalogued as a legitimate philosophical strand. Hindutva requires the exact opposite: a single identifiable god, a principal text, a fixed boundary around who belongs. It reshapes Hinduism into the exclusive, enemy-defining, doctrinaire structure that Hinduism, by its own philosophical nature, could never have become. Tharoor calls this "Semitising" the faith, forcing it into the mold of the very traditions its advocates claim to oppose.

The irony is precise. Hindutva presents itself as the defense of Hindu civilization against foreign corruption. What it built was a political ideology modeled on European racial nationalism that required Hinduism to become what its supposed enemies already were.

That claim to defend Hindu civilization is also a claim to speak for all Hindus. Tharoor is a Hindu and a nationalist. In his usage, those words mean something other than what the RSS would claim. A Hindu nationalist, he says, has replaced a path toward the cosmos with a badge of worldly political identity. The RSS — the Sangh — does not speak for him.

The Muslim Artist Who Loved Hindu Gods More Than Their Self-Appointed Guardians Ever Did

In 1996, a mob walked into an Ahmedabad gallery and destroyed M. F. Husain's paintings. The charge: a Muslim artist had depicted Hindu goddesses in the nude. Husain had spent fifty years doing exactly this — painting Indira Gandhi as Durga, Madhuri Dixit as the apsara Menaka, threading Hindu mythology through everything he made. He'd grown up in Pandharpur, a major pilgrimage town, absorbing the tradition from childhood. His work wasn't provocation. It was the art of a man who had drawn his entire imaginative life from Hindu India. The paintings in question had hung publicly for twenty years without a single complaint.

What followed was a coordinated legal campaign designed not to win but to wear him down. Lawsuits accumulated across jurisdictions until courts attached his home and property. By the time he left India, Husain was nearly ninety-one. He died in exile in London.

Delhi High Court Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul disposed of the cases in 2007 with a ruling that doubled as a history lesson. Hindu temple sculpture from Khajuraho to Konark had depicted erotic figures for over a thousand years. The Shiva lingam resting in the yoni represents the union of cosmic forces — creation made visible. The Kama Sutra is Indian, not imported. The prudishness being enforced in Hinduism's name had no roots in the ancient tradition. "India's new puritanism," Kaul wrote, "is being carried out in the name of cultural purity" by people pushing the country toward a squeamishness that would have baffled the artists who built Khajuraho.

The sexual reticence Hindutva enforces entered Indian culture during the medieval period and hardened further under Victorian colonial rule. It is not ancient. The men who drove Husain out were, as Kaul put it, "far more Puritan, in the Christian sense of the term, than Hindu."

Husain, the Muslim who loved Hindu gods, had been working within the tradition all along. His persecutors had imported the very foreign values they claimed to be defending India against.

What 'Hindu Pride' Actually Means When You Follow the Philosophy to Its End

Is "Say with pride that we are Indian" a retreat from religion, a secular liberal backing away from Hindu identity under pressure? That is the obvious read. Tharoor's answer is that it is the opposite: the counter-slogan is where the theology leads.

Tharoor takes the challenge seriously: proud of what, exactly? The answer comes as an alternating current. He is not proud of Hindus who have raped Muslim women or burned people alive and celebrated the remains. He is not proud of those who have collapsed the philosophical inheritance of the Upanishads into the tribal self-congratulation of identity politics. But he is proud of Hindus who understand that a country which denies itself to some of its people ends up being denied to all of them — and proud of those who recognize that Hindu communalism, because it wraps itself in the flag of nationalism, is the most dangerous sectarianism India produces.

Every prior section of this book has been building toward a single theological conclusion: if Brahman is present in every person without exception — the way salt dissolves into water and cannot be extracted back out — then a Hinduism that excludes or demeans others is not just politically wrong. It is internally incoherent. Indian identity follows from the philosophy. It is not a concession to secularism; it is what Advaita Vedanta actually implies about who belongs. You cannot hold that God is in everything and simultaneously act as though some people are less entitled to the soil they were born on.

What the Hideous Crone Knows

The warrior in that Puranic parable rides out expecting Truth to look like a princess. She doesn't — she's old, toothless, sheltering in a cave, and she answers every question exactly right. When he leaves, she asks him to tell the palace she is young and beautiful. A tradition that tells this story about itself has already immunized itself against fanaticism, because fanaticism is precisely what the parable names: mistaking your picture of the thing for the thing itself. Garv se kaho ki hum Indian hain — "Say with pride that we are Indian" — isn't a liberal compromise or a retreat from belief. If Brahman runs through every person, inseparable and irretrievable, then that sentence is where the philosophy lands, not where it flinches. You cannot hollow out the humanity of others and call it devotion. The tradition, at its most honest, never gave anyone that instrument. What it gave was wonder — and wonder has no use for enemies.