This article was originally posted on the RightVIEWS Substack.

That the Indic system is different from the system operating in India is becoming clearer by the day. J Sai Deepak’s book is an effort in this direction. I just completed reading J Sai Deepak’s excellent first book India, that is Bharat. JSD explains how our Eurocentric lens was forced upon us. I quote J Sai Deepak more because he has referenced various books and papers. In those books and research papers, you will find the various threads and rabbit holes you want to explore to ascertain this reality.

I want India to be true to its Dharmic roots in a modern context. While what I suggested in my earlier post titled Acharya Chanakya sent an email remains true, it will be critical to decolonize our mindset before we embark on a journey of interpretation of our Indic past and our possible Dharmic future.

The obvious next step is to understand that there are three elements when we come to this realisation.

Where are we?

We are definitely within the Christian concept of social and political order. The Euro-centric Christian thought tints everything from our values to political institutions.

We must determine our experience through our own lens within this dissonance between the Euro-Christian imposition on our dharmic existence.

While we have a good handle on where we are at this time, we need more work to understand our experience in the context of the dissonance between Euro-Christian rules and dharmic existence.

What does an ideal dharmic socio-political reality look like?

We are not examining how it looked in the times of Chandragupta or during Vedic times, but how should it look TODAY, NOW?

Equally, our understanding of how dharmic society should look like TODAY is quite limited. Partly, we do not know how it looked during various times since civilisation emerged in Bharat. These remain avenues for exhaustive research.

How to go from here to there

How to transition from a Euro-Christian imposed society to a dharmic society? Do we compare and contrast with the current, and what should be? This is the quintessential “from here to there” question.

Finally, from here to there is a question that can make or break any nation. A pragmatic approach must be envisioned and imagined. The task of conceptualising and imagining needs the aid of fiction writers of superior calibre to imagine society as it could be and envisage its problems.

Let us look at this diagram. We are around point C.

The challenge is where we go next? I think the best way forward is to go towards point D. To achieve this we will need efforts on five fronts:

1. Understanding History = We need to understand the roots of our civilisation – when it started, how it became glorious, what society we had, what were our institutions like, etc.

2. What part of our accumulated knowledge is relevant today = It includes knowledge about social systems, foods, health, sociology and figure out what is relevant today and for the future. This has to be answered through experiments and validation.

3. Combine the accumulated knowledge with today’s knowledge & INNOVATE = Again we will have to use experimentation and scientific validation to combine the entire knowledge base to solve today’s and future problems.

4. Imagine a society at Point D = We should ask fiction writers, social scientists and thought leaders to imagine an Indic society at Point D – how it will look and what it will be like to live in such a society. We need them to imagine our future institutions, our society, our polity and our lives in general.

5. The grind – Trial and Error = With such knowledge and dream of Indic society at point D with us, we need to make the journey. During the journey, we will make mistakes, we will have to build tolerance.

I think we have a lot of these elements in our minds today. We need someone to articulate them and soon we will be on our way.