To Be Hindu Is to Be Secular

To be Hindu is to be secular. To be secular is to be Hindu. No two ideas have been more misunderstood, more deliberately divided, or more urgently in need of reunion. In the Indian mind, faith and reason were never enemies. They were siblings in the same eternal search. The Hindu civilization did not invent theology; it invented curiosity. It did not demand conformity; it celebrated contradiction. What the modern world calls “secularism”—the right to question all authority, to live ethically without priestly permission—was born not in Europe but in the philosophical plains of ancient India.
(In the Indian sense, secular does not mean anti-religious. It means the freedom to think without dogma and to act with compassion beyond creed.)

The Rig Veda, humanity’s oldest surviving text, begins not with worship but with wonder. The Nasadiya Sukta, that haunting hymn of origin, asks the first truly secular question in world literature: “Who really knows? Who can here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?” It dares to doubt even the gods: “Perhaps it was formed, perhaps it was not. The one who looks down on it— even he may not know.” That is not blasphemy; that is philosophy. The poet is not denying divinity—he is denying certainty. He is asserting that truth, even divine truth, must remain open to inquiry. In that moment, India made reason sacred.

The Upanishads took that seed of skepticism and raised it into metaphysics. They defined God not as an object to adore, but as an abstraction to explore. “Neti, neti”—not this, not this. Every definition is stripped away until only awareness remains. “Tat Tvam Asi”—Thou art That—does not command belief; it commands recognition. The divine is not above you, it is within you. This is not the language of dogma but of discovery. When Western religions said “believe or perish,” the Hindu sages said “know, and you are free.” The Upanishadic God is not a monarch demanding loyalty; it is consciousness seeking comprehension. The highest act of worship is thought itself.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna transforms this spirit of inquiry into a doctrine of freedom. “Whichever deity one worships with faith, that faith I make firm.” There is no blasphemy in worshipping differently. Truth is not a monopoly of any prophet or scripture. One may worship Vishnu or Shiva, Devi or none at all—the moral law of dharma remains unbroken. Krishna’s words are a direct refutation of theological totalitarianism. No prophet in the deserts of the Middle East could have said it, for they were bound to revelation; Krishna was free in realization. In that one line, Hindu civilization separated itself forever from the psychology of exclusivism.

Then came the Buddha—the serene rebel who turned metaphysics into morality. He refused to discuss creation or God, calling such debates distractions from the real problem: suffering. He said, “I teach only suffering and the end of suffering.” That single line is the declaration of secular ethics: compassion without commandment, morality without metaphysics. The Buddha was not a destroyer of religion but its purifier. He replaced sacrifice with sympathy, ritual with reason, priesthood with personal responsibility. If secularism means ethics independent of theology, then the Buddha was its first saint.

Nāgārjuna, the philosopher who followed, gave this ethical rationalism its dialectical spine. In his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, he showed that all phenomena arise only in dependence upon others—that nothing possesses independent, eternal essence. This is not nihilism; it is empirical realism. It is the understanding that everything exists only through relations, causes, and conditions. Nāgārjuna’s method is closer to modern logical empiricism than to any religious dogma. He exposed metaphysical absolutism with mathematical precision. His ontology is dialectical, his ethics compassionate, his method scientific. He stands as proof that India once built a civilization where spirituality and skepticism walked hand in hand.

For this reason, it is philosophically improper—and politically suicidal—to judge Hinduism by the Abrahamic standard of “one God, one Book, one Prophet.” Those categories are not measures of truth; they are instruments of control. They belong to cultures that feared pluralism, that equated diversity with danger. Hinduism never feared diversity; it was born in it. The Charvakas, the materialist school, denied the afterlife. The Jains postulated an infinite universe without creator. The Buddhists dismantled the self. And yet all were part of the same civilizational conversation. To define Hinduism in Semitic terms is to amputate its plural soul and replace it with a single idol called uniformity.

If you say a Hindu cannot be secular, or a secular person cannot be Hindu, you are not defending Hinduism—you are suffocating it. You are turning a civilization of seekers into a congregation of believers. You are draining oxygen from a system that breathes through debate. That is exactly what the enemies of Hinduism want: to transform a philosophy into a theology, to convert reason into ritual, to reduce a culture of argument into an army of slogans. Once Hinduism is defined by revelation instead of realization, it ceases to be Hinduism at all. It becomes another imported monotheism dressed in saffron.

True Hinduism demands no uniform ritual, no blind allegiance, no hysterical exhibition of faith. It asks only for the relentless pursuit of truth and the compassionate practice of life. You do not have to chant mantras or wear symbols to be Hindu. You only have to think honestly and live kindly. To be Hindu is not to belong to a cult but to participate in a civilization of reason. The Gita does not command submission; it teaches discernment. The Upanishads do not threaten damnation; they teach introspection. The Buddha does not demand obedience; he demands mindfulness. And Nāgārjuna does not preach belief; he teaches analysis. Together, they form the grand secular spine of Indian civilization.

Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, India’s philosopher-president, expressed this essence with luminous clarity:

“The theist and the atheist, the sceptic and the agnostic may all be Hindus if they accept the Hindu system of culture and life; for there has been no such thing as a uniform, stationary, unalterable Hinduism whether in point of belief or practice. Hinduism is a movement, not a position; a process, not a result; a growing tradition, not a fixed revelation.”

In that one passage, Radhakrishnan rescued Hinduism from its priests and returned it to its philosophers. He saw what few politicians and pundits understand even today: Hinduism survives because it changes; it thrives because it doubts. Theologies die of certainty. Civilizations live by self-criticism. The West called that secularism. India called it dharma.

To be Hindu, then, is not to defend a creed but to defend the freedom of inquiry itself. A Hindu who rejects reason for fanaticism ceases to be Hindu. A secularist who rejects compassion for cynicism ceases to be secular. The two are bound by moral logic. Both affirm that truth must be tested, that love must be practiced, that power must be questioned. Hinduism without secularism is authoritarian; secularism without Hindu tolerance is soulless. Together they form the oldest alliance between reason and reverence known to humankind.

Therefore, let it be said clearly: the oxygen of Hinduism is doubt. Its bloodstream is diversity. Its heart is reason. Its breath is compassion. To demand that it choose between faith and freedom is to misunderstand both. Hinduism is not a fossil from antiquity; it is humanity’s longest-running experiment in how to think without fear and live without hate. To be Hindu is to be secular—because both mean the same thing: to keep truth open and compassion alive.

Citations

1. Rig Veda 10.129 (Nasadiya Sukta).
2. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.3.6; Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7.
3. Bhagavad Gita 7.21–22.
4. Samyutta Nikaya 22.86; Majjhima Nikaya 63.
5. Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, trans. Kalupahana (1986).
6. S. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926), pp. 48–49.