What’s sanatana about Hindu Dharma?

Poorva Paksha

To everything (turn, turn, turn)/

There is a season (turn, turn, turn)/

And a time for every purpose under heaven.

At least, according to folk legend Pete Seeger, whose 1959 song was elevated to a number one hit in 1965 by the Byrds. Turn, turn, turn, the world keeps turning, the times change, new things come into being, old things pass away.

Is anything, then, Sanatana -- permanent and unchangeable?

Many argue, virulently, that Hindu Dharma is sanatana, essentially immutable. Though there is, of course,a fair bit of disagreement on the essential content of this dharma, as well as its textual foundations.

In the late 1940s/early 1950s, Babasaheb Ambedkar’s efforts to secure the legal equality of women under Hindu family law were objected to by orthodox-leaning Hindus who argued that patrilineal succession was essential to Sanatana Dharma. Basically, savarna groups like the Hindu Mahasabha refused to tolerate Ambedkar’s attempt to grant Hindu women equal rights to inheritance, divorce, and so on, fearing the erosion of core – that is, sanatana – Hindu values like the sanctity of marriage and lineage. Ambedkar’s view was that what was actually being accorded sanctity and permanence was gender and caste inequality; in other words, Brahmanical patriarchy.

When the Hindu Code Bill was finally scuttled, Ambedkar resigned from his position as Law Minister, delivering one of his most famous addresses: “To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, untouched…is to make a farce of our Constitution, and to build a palace on a dung heap. This is the significance I attached to the Hindu Code.” Upon hearing such words, a reactionary today might cry out: Was Ambedkar calling Sanatana Dharma a dung heap?!

To everything (turn, turn, turn)/

There is a season (turn, turn, turn)/…

a time to break down/…

a time to cast away stones.

After Ambedkar resigned as Law Minister, he threw himself into a research project that would provide a methodical rebuttal to the savarna orthodoxy’s dubious claims regarding the unchangeability of Hindu Dharma. This took shape as the posthumously published book, Riddles in Hinduism, which opened: “The Brahmans have propagated the view that Hindu civilisation is sanatana, that is, unchanging. This view has been reinforced by [orientalists] who have said that Hindu civilisation is static. In this book, I have attempted to show that Hindu society has changed…and that oftentimes the change is of the most radical kind.”

The kind of ‘radical’ changes that Ambedkar documented in his book included the move from Vedic himsa to Upanishadic ahimsa: from mandating bloody sacrifices to the “essential value of non-violence”; from Vedic beef-eating to the modern lynching of beef-eaters; from Vedic bestiality (immortalised in temple statuary) to modern claims of “the sanctity of marriage”. Hindu Dharma has thus been far from sanatana — and indeed some of the most prominent changes may be found in the evolving Dharmashastras themselves. What was mandated as eternal dharma in the Manusmriti was often not mandated in other legal texts that preceded or succeeded it.

It should be kept in mind that his razor-sharp rationalism was not directed only at Hinduism. As can be discerned from the opening pages of The Buddha and His Dhamma, another posthumously-published book that he began writing alongside Riddles. In it, Ambedkar applied the same analytical rigour to Buddhist dogma that he had done to Hindu dogma. And indeed, the Buddhist orthodoxy was none too pleased, either.

The discomfort with Ambedkar’s trenchant rationalist revaluation of religious traditions continues to this day, not only by thin-skinned Hindus who take offense at Riddles, but also by those tasked with defining what, if anything, might be deemed sanatana in Buddhism. When I had the privilege to meet the Dalai Lama, I asked him what he thought of Ambedkar’s The Buddha and His Dhamma. The Dalai Lama replied slowly, pensively, with great kindness in his eyes: “He is, maybe, too radical”. He then wished peace upon me, and to my surprise — but why should it have been? — upon Ambedkar’s memory as well.

Ambedkar’s ire was not directed at the notion of a sanatana dharma as such, but at one that insidiously sanctified inegalitarian values over constitutional ones. Rhetorically radical, perhaps, but if we cut through the noise, it’s probably something most of us would be willing to sign on to.

To everything (turn, turn, turn)/

There is a season (turn, turn, turn)/

And a time to every purpose, under heaven/

A time to gain, a time to lose/…

A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.