Dharma- Hinduism and Religions in India

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Chaturvedi Badrinath is known for his `authoritative works on the Mahabharata, and on the central place of dharma in Indian thought. His Swami Vivekananda: The Living Vedanta continues to inspire readers with a fresh perspective on the man who was the living embodiment of the Vedanta he preached.

In Dharma: Hinduism and Religions in India, Badrinath argues that Indian civilization is a ‘Dharmic'one. Dharma has always been translated, wrongly, as ‘religion'.

The concerns of Indian philosophy are the concerns of human life everywhere. Badrinath talks about the history of the words 'Hindu' and 'Hinduism', Islam in relation with Hinduism, the issues that arose from the spread of Christianity in India, Jainism and Buddhism as part of dharma and darshana, and explains why organized violence in the service of religious fundamentalism is the very negation of religion with its reverence for life.

Thought provoking, perceptive and challenging many long-held notions, Dharma is a must-read for anyone who is interested in India, the interaction of different religions over centuries in this land, and the underlying unity of all life.

CHATURVEDI BADRINATH (1933–2010) was born in Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh. A philosopher, he was a member of the Indian Administrative Service, 1957–89, and served in Tamil Nadu for thirty-one years. He was a Homi Bhabha Fellow, 1971-73. From 1989 onwards, for four years, the Times of India published his articles on Dharma and human freedom every fortnight. In 1999, at Weimar, he gave a talk on 'Goethe and the Indian Philosophy of Nature'; and contributed to an inter-religious conference at Jerusalem, with the Dalai Lama.

Chaturvedi Badrinath's other published books are: Dharma, India and the World Order: Twenty-one Essays (1993, Saint Andrew Press, Edinburgh, and Pahl-Rugenstein, Bonn); Introduction to the Kama Sutra (1999, Roli Books, New Delhi; translated into German, French, Italian and Dutch); Finding Jesus in Dharma: Christianity in India (2000, the Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, ISPCK, Delhi); Swami Vivekananda: The Living Vedanta (2006, Penguin, Delhi); The Mahabharata: An Inquiry in the Human Condition (2006, Orient BlackSwan, Delhi) and The Women of the Mahabharata: The Question of Truth (2008, Orient BlackSwan, Delhi).

He passed away in 2010-a day after winning the Sahitya Akademi Award for his book The Mahabharata. In 2016, a collection of his essays, Unity of Life, was brought out by Oxford University Press.

The core of Chaturvedi Badrinath's intellectual work can be stated in one word: dharma. For over four decades, he wrote about dharma, the varied contexts in which its essence could be grasped and the fact that Indian civilization could not be understood except through the prism of dharma. The work of studying and explaining the vast importance of dharma took place amongst other complicated strands in his life: long periods that were spent in original and intense thinking about the verses in the Mahabharata ran concurrent to carrying out his duties as an officer of the Indian Administrative Service or fighting the Government of India in court.

In Dharma: Hinduism and Religions in India, Badrinath concerns himself with dharma as the fundamental principle underlying Indian society, which must be understood if any dialogue is to succeed with Semitic or Abrahamic religions. He explains the qualities that serve to make it the foundation of order, in the personal and the collective; the very foundation of human life. He goes into the history of the words 'Hindu' and Hinduism' to make the point that the word 'Hindu' does not appear in the ancient texts and that when it did appear in the eighth century-it was a name coined by the invading Arabs. Things were then further complicated by the wrong notion that there is a religion called Hinduism. By ‘religion', Badrinath means “a belief in God as the creator of the universe, a central revelation of God, a messenger of that revelation, a central book containing the life and sayings of that messenger of God, a central code of commandments, a corpus of ecclesiastical laws to regulate opinions and behaviour in the light of these, and a hierarchy of priesthood to supervise that regulation and control.

This concept of religion forms no part of the Dharmic language. There is only dharma, and a civilization that for millennia saw itself in terms of dharma, not religion. If we have adopted and accepted these words, as stated by the Shankaracharya Sri Jayendra Saraswati in conversation with Badrinath, we have also had to deal with the consequencesour wrong understanding of ourselves as a society and some crucial misunderstandings by the two major religions who made their home in India. Unravelling those, and remembering that it is human beings who are in dialogue, not religions, are the first steps towards productive exchange.