Readers’ comments: As inheritors of the sanatan dharma, how can we foster a questioning people?

Will the Brahmins, steeped in the Manusmriti and the Upanishads, find spiritual outpourings in the verses of poets of the Bhakti movement like Ravidas, Bhagat Namdev, Guru Nanak, Kabir and others (“Counterview: India’s past deserves more than apologia or amnesia”)? How will they accept the critique of the caste system in its entirety by the poet-saints of the Bhakti movement? Is Bhakti movement poetry a continuity of Vedic poetry? It is a criticism at the social and spiritual level. Bhakti poetry is inclusive. Manusmriti and the other Brahmanical texts are exclusive – they exclude on the basis of the caste system. – Onkar Singh

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This is more angst at imaginary wrongs than a scholarly deliberation. Anyone who reads NCERT history books will get the feeling that India has cultural unity and continuity. What the author refers to as “Hindu metaphysics, logic, grammar, and aesthetics” are not necessarily Hindu alone. Those ideas have evolved in a crucible of competing philosophies and practices of Budhhism, Jainism, Islam and not to forget the pre-Aryan beliefs and practices. – Srinivas.

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The very point of a pluralist ethos is that you are free to see in the Constitution roots in pre-Islamic ethics and the like. Another person may see in it a modern,…

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