Re-Visiting the Psychological and Structural Frameworks of a Dhārmika State: Part One: Past Tense

#1. Jettison the irrational self-hate we feel for our collective pasts. This is a dead weight.

#2. Jettison our irrational love for the West. This is a distraction.

Both these attitudes have been carefully curated within us by the British and now the Americans through their education and media arms. 

Breaking free of them requires us to reconfigure the operating systems that have been running in our heads (at least in the heads of our elites) for the past couple of centuries. 

It is only when these tasks are accomplished that we will be able to see clearly and prepare the ground for an authentic non-reactionary Hindu future. 

In this essay, I am not arguing for the centralized institution of the Mānava Dharmaśāstra in modern India, but I am using a reference to it as a way to open my argument.

 

Unlike the Quran or the Bible, the Mānava Dharmaśāstra is an inward-looking document — a code for people who adopt it, not a manifesto for expansion.

It is therefore that one cannot accuse the Mānava Dharmaśāstra of being oppressive and exclusionary at the same time. The people who were excluded could not possibly have been oppressed by it (simply because they were excluded), and the people who were oppressed by it could not possibly have been excluded by it (otherwise, they could not have been oppressed). 

We have to start in reverse. All humans since the dawn of time, especially in the Ārya lands, have been free. This is evidenced by our diversity and by the presence of the full spectrum of human form in Bhārata — ‘stone-age’ communities, forest dwellers, nomadic tribes, agriculture-adjacents, agricultural folk, agriculture-enabled folk, and urban folk all living in daily proximity with each other over millennia. Not one group of people ever tried to enslave or erase any other group, either physically or culturally, unlike what was witnessed in every other complex civilization on the planet (including in Africa). The harmonic collaboration between our diverse population groups was the hallmark of our self-consciously moral society. No other evidence of the Ārya large-heartedness is required, and we will not be taking any more accusations on that front. That discussion should be closed for all Hindus, for all time to come.

That this was a land of freedom since the dawn of time, where the primary assumption was that every human was born free (in a temporal sense), needs to be our starting point. Megasthenes’ assessment of our people should be taken at face value — “All Indians are free, and not one of them is a slave. The Indians do not even use aliens as slaves, and much less a countryman of their own.”1

Every social manifestation of dharma begins from this starting point: How do free peoples maintain their freedom so that maximum good accrues to a maximum number of people? What kind of socio-economic configuration would be needed? What kind of responsibilities would have to be assumed? 

That some version of this covenant was successfully arrived at and extant in classical Bhārata is evidenced by how fiercely every one of our communities resisted the Abrahamic occupations of Bhārata. Even the so-called ‘oppressed’ and ‘excluded’ communities fought tooth and nail against the foreign impositions. Why? Why did they not see the coming of the Abrahamic religions as emancipatory if their lives had been so wretched? Would not these fierce communities have fought for their freedom earlier if indeed they had been oppressed? It is obvious that the harmonic indigenous arrangement that existed in classical times was a deal acceptable to all, and we fought the foreigners now not because they were foreign, but because they had violated the internal rules of liberty that Bhāratīya society had functioned under since time immemorial. This is also evidenced by the fact that all kinds of foreign ideologies and tribes found a home in Bhārata if they accepted the terms of the tacit covenant that guided all community life and inter-relations here. In other words, if they chose to live in Bhārata like Bhāratīyas, even though they might follow a non-indigenous value system. Our problems specifically arose when some non-indigenous value systems saw the dhārmika covenant as being antithetical to their own value set. That is, they saw it as their bounden duty to interfere with and, if possible, destroy all trace of the existing dhārmika covenant. 

The sentiment of ‘live and let live’ was so ingrained in us as free people that we did not understand, and in fact have still not understood, the nature of the anti-dharma desert ideologies and their modern cultural offshoots. This leaves us vulnerable. But I digress...

Back to the Mānava Dharmaśāstra (MDS). 

Obviously, as free people, communities that found the MDS oppressive never adopted it, and that was acceptable and fine. This cannot possibly be called exclusion. It was merely a voluntary opting out. This also cannot possibly be called oppression, because it was a freedom to chart one’s own destiny. That freedom was embraced by hundreds of nāstika, vanavāsi, pastoralist, and agriculture-adjacent tribes who either chose to live outside of the code, had their own codes, or chose to pick and choose whatever aspect of the code they found useful. This is real and true and cannot be ignored. The mere existence and thriving of so many of these communities over millennia is proof of non-coercion.

Okay. So, what about everyone else?

Now, the people who chose to adopt the MDS, on the other hand, seemingly submitted themselves to a certain form of unfreedom via rigid behavioral constraints, but since this was done voluntarily, it was acceptable and fine, and we can safely assume that they did not find the laws oppressive (because they chose to opt in). And certainly they were not excluded. 

So, what is the source of our national confusion?

Claim 1 - “The followers of the MDS forced others to do work they hated doing.”

In my opinion, this is a misreading of pre-modern economic life, which revolved around community and inherited skills. Economic mobility would require a coming together of community-wide consensus, opportunity and aspiration. This happened on many occasions, but by and large it was a rare event. Would all the practitioners of a particular storytelling tradition suddenly decide one day to be toddy-tappers? Where would they learn the skills? What would happen to their inherited skills? What would their kula-devatā say about that betrayal? What about the already existing toddy-tapper community? Would they appreciate this sudden imbalance in the economic landscape? Understand how things worked in pre-modernity. The gargantuan post-industrial economic surplus that runs today’s conveyor-belt education system, anonymous certification boards and ‘eternal growth’ factories did not exist in the past. They could not have existed. It is therefore that in pre-modernity, systems of distribution, sharing and conflict fire-walling were moral.

Claim 2 - “Certain groups were never allowed to follow the MDS even though they dearly wanted to.”

In my opinion, this is a misreading of reality itself. Very few (if any) would choose to give up liberty to consciously ‘oppress themselves’ by voluntarily adopting a straitjacket code of ritual constraint. That remains the case even today. The people who cry about exclusion do not actually want to spend twelve years in a Veda Pāṭhaśālā or a Śilpa Vidyālaya, and the rest of their lives never having a taste of alcohol or having sex only for procreation or what have you. Their protest is largely performative. But it is true, in nobler times, several communities adopted the code in stricter and stricter forms, and they were respected by the rest of society for their self-denial. All communities were always free to adopt the code of self-denial and ritual purity. And in fact, many did. It was not something that could be ‘given’. Of the many communities that did, some are today classified as OBC, BC or SC but would have qualified as Vaiśya, Kṣatriya, or Brāhmaṇa in classical times. It is the tragic reality of the 19th century that many communities that traditionally had adopted the code were forced to relinquish their ritual stewardship of it during that century of impoverishment. Until even a hundred years ago, the yajñopavīta and the śikhā were common sights across Bhārata, cutting across a diversity of tribes, including priests of all kinds, medicine men, chieftains, potters, weavers, carpenters, even leather workers and agriculturalists. None were ever persecuted for this apparent transgression, which tells us that: one, this was not viewed as a transgression at all, which undermines the exclusion narrative, or two, there was no central system to punish transgressions, which undermines the oppression narrative. But, whatever be the reasons, it is clear that the values of self-denial and discipline that these markers represented were widely held to be aspirational by almost all Bhāratīya communities, regardless of how ritually disinclined they might be. 

There was no central ‘Department of Ritual Fitness’ that determined who was worthy of ritual-ready ācāra and who was not. Communities had to decide for themselves if they wanted to take on ritual responsibilities, which came with a long list of behavioral constraints. And the reason why, over a period of time, these decisions became ‘birth-based’, was simply because pre-modernity was rooted in community-life and community by definition is birth-based... and ācāra and its transmission is obviously communal. There is no school where it is taught; it is picked up from the community via imitation. This phenomenon is not hard to understand.   

The raising of our civilizational aspirations from the material plane (strength, wealth, power) into the ritual and behavioural plane was, in fact, a masterstroke of societal intelligence. It avoided ethnic strife (so common in other civilizations), it led to self-regulation of community life, nationwide access to higher spiritual purpose and the universalization of the means for conflict-resolution. In other words, widespread puruṣārtha. It can, in fact, be argued that this directing of societal aspiration from the material plane towards the ritual plane was the cornerstone of our societal moral imagination, and when we despise it today under the influence of European memes, we desecrate everything good about our ancestral genius.

The story of our impoverishment by the Turks (through war, plunder and taxes) and the eventual manipulation of our self-image by the Brits is a tragedy yet to be told. The final nails in the coffin of our harmonious society were hammered down by the late 19th century:  

1) The closure of our indigenous schools that robbed us of access to our common self-knowledge

2) The nationalization of the Commons that robbed us of access to the means of production and...

3) The emergence of the Industrial Revolution, coupled with the denial of that knowledge to our communities via military and legal action by the British.

The communities of hand and land were worst affected and fell away from the economic map by the start of the 20th century, making it impossible for them to perform their traditional duties of stewardship. It is these communities, many later classified as Criminal Tribes, who are today harvested by missionaries and leftists in their adhārmika crusade for human souls. Those of us who belong to these communities should contemplate this history of violence and disenfranchisement. And those of us who belong to other communities, too, should contemplate this history of violence and disenfranchisement because it resulted in the erasure of indigenous wealth creation and all the old systems of patronage that supported every other arm of society. None of us is exempt from the effects of that fall and the tremors that continue to rock us… and indeed, will continue to rock us until we come consciously to a place of national reckoning.

We know now that these actions by the British were followed by social engineering, religious mischief and geographical engineering culminating in the formation of Pakistan, which was designed to cut Bhārata off from both Central and South East Asia, limiting our resource bases, markets, and ultimately, our cultural influence. Why then should we trust the fictitious story of depravity that they told us about ourselves?

So, to recap, what is read as oppression in the modern today was actually a pre-modern arrangement that ensured community-based transfer of knowledge, wealth and identity.

And, what is read as exclusion in the modern today, was actually a pre-modern template for non-coercion, that ensured liberty to live in community as per one's own traditions.

Unfortunately, our reprogrammed Abrahamic minds of today fail to comprehend this reality.

But, once we accept these explanations as perhaps, maybe, just maybe true, then we can move on to say that what we had at the end of the 18th century, before the British kicked our backsides, was indeed an organic, self-regulated arrangement that had widespread acceptance (albeit degraded by 800 years of an on-off war with Turks and Timurids).

The ‘system’, or should I say arrangement, which is the more commonly used indigenous phrase — vyavasthā — offered our society many advantages. It provided artha surety to all, catered to a spectrum of kāma needs, pointed towards spiritual goals, and offered the emotional safety of community identity. It was participative and collaborative. There was reasonable mobility within limits imposed by pre-modern economics and community expectations. In other words, puruṣārtha.

The oppression and conflict we see in some debased circles of our society today lie downstream of the artificial re-configuration of that harmonic arrangement into a European-style feudal pyramid via the zamindari system designed by Lord Cornwallis. The simultaneous impoverishment of the majority of our artisanal and nature-centric communities via de-industrialization and resource-nationalization resulted in them literally becoming labor for hire bereft of access to their traditional means of production and thus their traditional sense of ownership, independence and purpose. We see now that our fallen state today (that is, the ‘caste system’ as we know it now) is not a function of our traditional arrangements, but can be traced, in fact, to the collapse of those very arrangements in more recent times.

Let us now ask if Christians constantly bemoan the fact that their religion gave them the great evils of slavery, colonialism, genocide and the holocaust? No, they do not. What they do instead is double down on the message of Jesus (no matter how hypocritically). Similarly, it is absurd for us Hindus to constantly judge the highest ideals of our religion by the failure of humans to uphold them (that too under severe duress), rather than double down on holding our people up once again to those highest of ideals – Harmony and Niṣkāma Karma.

Though freedom in the form of mokṣa is our highest individual ideal, there is precious little discussion about this ideal when it comes to Hindu community life. I have argued earlier that the idea of a centralized state or centralized religion was purposefully avoided by the ṛṣis in their civilizational design to avoid Mātsya Nyāya. We know that Mātsya Nyāya is adharma. But why? What is the higher purpose that such a principle serves? Mātsya Nyāya is essentially unfreedom. That is, its operating principle is to concentrate power in some places via suppression of freedom elsewhere. As Aseem Shrivastava says in his 2025 book The Grammar of Greed:  

So any theology that foregrounds an anti-Mātsya Nyāya stance is essentially a theology of Liberty. Not the Liberty of the Western Enlightenment, but a Liberty built on the assumption of responsibility that appreciates that Liberty is either for everyone or for no one. Such a stance requires everyone to sacrifice a sufficient degree of unfettered license to gain a partial parcel of a true and shared Liberty, not just for themselves but also for their brothers. Within this understanding of Liberty lies two other hidden truths — that a society built on the foundation of such a true Liberty also offers Equality and Fraternity of a particular sort. The Equality offered is an equal access to Liberty for communities (via the quelling of Mātsya Nyāya and thus the delivering of puruṣārtha). The Fraternity offered is apparent in the demand that we limit our urge to excess and unfettered license in order that everyone gets their share of true Liberty, an act of sacrifice for our brothers.

So, unlike the European Enlightenment that can offer Liberty, Equality and Fraternity to society only on the back of economic/military expansionism and political/religious centralization (both adhārmika), the Liberty, Equality and Fraternity of Dharma is achieved by the voluntary assumption of responsibilities and limits in a determinedly decentralized state/religion. Our diversity can now be read as the worldly manifestation of an anti-Mātsya Nyāya principle in action. The inefficiency and complexity that are downstream of such a stance are the price our ancestors were willing to pay to avoid centralization of power in favor of a distributed Liberty housed within self-sufficient communities. By embracing this idea of a true distributed Liberty, they also showed themselves to be votaries of a dhārmika Equality and a dhārmika Fraternity. This is why these ideas have such strong traction in the minds of Hindus. We know instinctively (from our dhārmika upbringings) what is just and what is unjust. Except now, we are so confused in our coloniality that we blame our dhārmika arrangements for our current debasement while embracing the adhārmika Western systems that actually brought us to this current impasse.

The core organizing principle runs as follows: The Rāṣṭra is comprised of Deśas3. The Deśas are comprised of bio-regional community-webs which we can call Grāma, but might be large enough to be a group of Grāmas which we can call a Grāma-constellation. Each Grāma-constellation was to be self-sufficient, granting it freedom from central control, thus ensuring localized dhārmika Liberty. Within that Grāma-constellation, professional and cultural specialization gave every community part-ownership and a stake in the whole, which ensured dhārmika Equality. Strict rules guided the interplay of sub-specializations, ensuring that collaboration became essential for the thriving of the whole, which ensured dhārmika Fraternity. Any study, of say, a temple festival in a still traditional corner of Bhārata will display all of these characteristics — Liberty via self-sufficiency, Equality via corporate-ownership, and Fraternity via specialization and collaboration.

These ideas came to me after I had written this essay (which is why the post-script), while I was listening to Ashish Gupta ji of Jeevika Ashram, who was paraphrasing the words of Guru Ravinder Sharma Ji4. He emphasized how we were not just an agricultural society, but an industrial one (not the industry of the Industrial Revolution, but industry born of a non-exploitative, participative worldview). He went on to point out that all our technologies were distributed, simple and of natural origin. By virtue of their distributed nature, they ensured collaboration and distributed power/wealth. By virtue of their simplicity, they were easy to learn and transmit, allowing all people to plug into the market economy. By virtue of their natural origin, they were easy to build and run with raw materials accessible to all. This democratic aspect of technology, I had never really considered until that moment. And it truly brought home the idea that it is not just political/cultural decentralization that matters, but also technological decentralization.

I have argued at length in earlier essays about the decentralized state as a prerequisite for freedom. I have also argued at length about the modern Tech-State being a force for unfreedom in our age, but I see now that it is not just high tech that enslaves, but also tech concentration that enslaves. The more complex that technology grows, the more exclusive the group that controls it and the more powerful that small group of gatekeepers grows. There has never been a time in history when so few knew so much about the technologies that so many use. This is Mātsya Nyāya, or at least, the foundation of it.

We see now that, for people who believe in a true shared Liberty, both state and technology need to be decentralized and distributed widely.

I am aware that decentralization of state and technology is unlikely to happen until a global cataclysm of some kind occurs, so we will continue to pursue a centralized state and centralized high-technology to be strong enough to stand up to our adhārmika rivals. The use of an essay such as this, then, is not about figuring out what needs to be done now, but about acting as a warning to Hindus and people of goodwill that we should not drink the Western kool-aid even though we understand its rules and live in a world built by it. We should carry a memory of who we really are and manifest that true self in part when we are in community and eventually as a whole post-collapse of this technocratic order.

Note: Parts two and three, Present Imperfect and Future Continuous, will be published soon. 

1. Indica, Megasthenes, circa 300 BCE 

2. The Grammar of Greed, Aseem Shrivastava, 2025 

3. Terminology courtesy Shankar Bharadwaj 

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnbS_4jtYZw
   Ganesh Vandana Parivar, Indus University, Talk by Ashish Gupta, 2025