Why I Am a Hindu

What makes Hinduism unique among the world’s major faiths? In his book, Shashi Tharoor argues that the essence of Hinduism lies not in fixed dogma, but in pluralism without rigidity. It has no single founder, no one sacred text, and no papal authority. Instead, it thrives as a civilisation of overlapping beliefs, practices, and cultural habits that stretch across millennia. You encounter a religion that invites questioning, accepts contradictions, and regards truth as multiple rather than monopolised.

No single creed, but shared ethos

Tharoor opens by describing Hinduism as a civilisation-wide conversation rather than a codified creed. The Vedic epigram “Ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti”—Truth is one, sages call it by many names—captures the spirit. A Hindu can revere Vishnu, Shiva, or Shakti, or even reject all gods, and still remain within the faith’s tent. This absence of central authority creates unusual flexibility: festivals, rituals, and deities vary regionally and individually. Yet beyond diversity lies a unifying temperament—a comfort with paradox and coexistence.

Tharoor contrasts this with religious traditions built on revelation and exclusivity. Unlike monotheisms that often draw boundaries between believers and non-believers, Hinduism nurtures active tolerance—a willingness to see divinity in many forms and to approach ultimate reality through multiple routes.

Philosophical core: Brahman and Atman

The metaphysical backbone of Hinduism is the relationship between Brahman (the cosmic absolute) and Atman (the individual soul). The Upanishads teach that these are ultimately identical—a claim that underpins the famous adage, “You are That.” Tharoor explains that this principle allows a profound spiritual democracy: divinity is accessible within every being. Philosophical schools then refine this truth differently—Advaita Vedanta sees absolute nonduality; Ramanuja and Madhva offer qualified variations; and the Bhakti saints translate metaphysics into love.

Hindu thought recognises two faces of the divine: nirguna Brahman (the impersonal, formless absolute) and saguna Brahman (manifested and personal). This duality explains why some meditate on silence while others celebrate Krishna’s flute. Both paths lead inward toward self-realisation, or moksha—liberation from ignorance.

Many paths, one destination

Spiritual practice mirrors this philosophical inclusivity. Tharoor revisits the classical yogas: jnana (knowledge), bhakti (devotion), and karma (selfless action). Through Vivekananda’s synthesis, he shows that these are complementary rather than rival routes; you can blend intellect, love, and service according to temperament. The four Purusharthas—dharma, artha, kama, moksha—outline life’s goals from ethical duty to ultimate release, balanced through the four life stages of ashramas. Hinduism, he insists, never asks you to renounce the world prematurely; it sacralises everyday life before transcending it.

From philosophy to practice

Rituals, pilgrimages, and festivals translate lofty ideas into lived experience. Temples serve as social and spiritual centres, while pilgrimages like the Kumbh Mela embody collective devotion. Everyday Hinduism ranges from morning prayers at home altars to mass celebrations such as Durga Puja or Onam. Even contradictory habits—vegetarianism and meat-eating, asceticism and sensual worship—fit within the spectrum. This elasticity, Tharoor notes, is not chaos but culture: a system sustained by an instinctive pluralism.

Faith, reason, and reform

Hinduism’s resilience lies in its internal self-critique. Reformers from Adi Shankara to Rammohan Roy, Vivekananda, and Gandhi have continually reinterpreted the faith for their age. Whether challenging ritualism, caste, or colonial inertia, each drew upon the philosophical reservoir rather than rejecting it. This capacity to reform without rupture allowed Hinduism to engage modernity while remaining recognisably itself.

The political shadow: Hindutva

Tharoor warns that contemporary Hindutva inverts this plural spirit. Its ideologues—Savarkar, Golwalkar, and Upadhyaya—redefined Hindu identity in ethnic and nationalist terms, turning cultural pride into political uniformity. This, he argues, is the opposite of Hinduism’s inclusive genius. Where Hinduism said, “Many roads lead to one truth,” Hindutva asserts, “One people, one culture, one nation.”

The book’s structure thus moves from spiritual essence to social realities and then to political distortion. It is both a celebration and a warning—a call to recover the tolerant, exploratory Hinduism that belongs to India’s civilisation rather than any ideology. Ultimately, you are invited to see Hinduism not as a static creed but as an evolving ecosystem of ideas, where curiosity and compassion remain the highest forms of faith.

To understand how Hinduism sustains such diversity, Tharoor dissects its conceptual architecture. You meet foundational ideas—Brahman, Atman, Karma, Dharma, and Moksha—that shape a worldview where life itself is a spiritual experiment. Unlike traditions that divide sacred from secular, Hindu thought weaves metaphysics into family, work, and ethics.

The unity of being

In the Upanishads, Brahman is the substratum of all existence. Atman is your inner essence. Realising their sameness dissolves the illusion of separation. Adi Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta builds an entire philosophy on this nonduality: knowledge destroys ignorance as light removes darkness. Yet later thinkers like Ramanuja offer softer versions—affirming devotion to a personal God while retaining the unity premise.

Paths toward liberation

Tharoor guides you through the three main yogas. Jnana yoga cultivates insight through meditation and reasoning. Bhakti yoga channels emotion into love of the divine: Mirabai’s songs or Chaitanya’s ecstatic dances embody this spirit. Karma yoga centres on duty—performing one’s work without attachment, as Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Vivekananda later added Raja yoga—discipline of mind—synthesising a practical creed for modern seekers.

What unites these paths is the conviction that spiritual growth is experiential, not inherited. Whether through scholarship, service, or song, the goal remains realisation of one’s divine potential.

Human aims and social rhythm

Hindu frameworks such as the Purusharthas (life aims)—dharma, artha, kama, moksha—and Ashramas (life stages) create moral balance. They remind you that pleasure and prosperity are legitimate when aligned with ethical duty. Stage by stage, life moves from learning (brahmacharya) to family (grihastha), withdrawal (vanaprastha), and renunciation (sannyasa). This sequencing grounds idealism in social realism.

Tharoor stresses that this system is not rigid law but poetic guidance. It humanises aspiration—teaching you to pursue worldly joy without losing sight of transcendence. As he notes, Hinduism does not reject desire; it teaches mastery through understanding, not suppression.

Abstract philosophy becomes tangible through worship, imagery, and narrative. Tharoor shows how Hinduism expresses metaphysical ideas via symbols—the elephant-headed Ganesh, the fierce Durga, the playful Krishna. These are not idols but interfaces to the divine, giving form to cosmic principles.

From the formless to the formed

Because Brahman is beyond form, the concept of avatara—God descending into the world—bridges transcendence and devotion. Vishnu’s ten avatars, from the fish Matsya to the saviour Kalki, illustrate cyclical renewal. The inclusion of the Buddha as an avatar demonstrates Hinduism’s capacity to absorb and reinterpret neighboring traditions (a syncretic trait Tharoor celebrates).

The Goddess and feminine power

Shakti, the feminine energy, animates the divine cosmos. Saraswati, Lakshmi, Parvati, Durga, and Kali personify knowledge, wealth, strength, and transformation. The Attukal Pongala festival in Kerala—where millions of women offer rice to the goddess—epitomises this veneration of female divinity as societal power. The message: creative and destructive energies are sacred complements.

Personal devotion and ishta-devata

Tharoor’s affection for Ganesh illustrates how Hindus develop personal relationships with the divine. The deity’s iconography—elephant head for intellect, broken tusk for sacrifice, mouse for humility—carries allegories for living wisely amid imperfection. Such intimacy sustains everyday religion even when abstract theology recedes.

Hinduism’s pantheon, he argues, is not polytheistic chaos but symbolic pluralism: each deity illuminates an aspect of existence. By engaging image, ritual, and story, you enter a participatory spirituality that celebrates imagination as a path to truth.

Religious life in India flows through temples, festivals, and pilgrimages that knit metaphysics to community. Tharoor describes how worship saturates geography and social life, transforming the mundane into the sacred.

Temples and home shrines

Many families maintain small shrines where gods share space with ancestors—visual proofs of religion’s domestic rootedness. Temples, from Chola architecture to Tirupati’s vast complex, serve as community hubs. Rituals like head-shaving or festive processions blur the boundary between private faith and public spectacle.

Pilgrimage and celebration

Journeys to sites such as Varanasi, Amarnath, and Prayag’s Kumbh Mela express both penance and communal joy. Millions converge not merely to seek salvation but to affirm belonging. Regional festivals—Onam, Pongal, Ganesh Chaturthi—turn moral stories into collective theatre, keeping moral imagination alive.

Everyday contradictions

Tharoor highlights contradictions outsiders misread as confusion: a temple that serves meat, a festival using alcohol, ascetic monks alongside sensuous dancers. These contradictions, he argues, embody Hinduism’s openness to human complexity. Even miracles like the 1995 “milk-drinking” statues reveal how faith, spectacle, and scientific curiosity coexist in contemporary India. The takeaway: religion here is not fossilised doctrine but a living, evolving conversation.

Perhaps the book’s most uncomfortable yet necessary discussion is caste. Tharoor confronts the dissonance between Hinduism’s spiritual unity and its social inequalities. He separates theology from sociology, showing how hierarchy hardened over time through misinterpretation and colonisation.

Origins and distortions

Early Vedic society divided functions, not worth; yet the later Purusha Sukta and Manu Smriti were used to justify hereditary privilege. British administrative mapping of jatis further rigidified fluid identities into census categories. Today, caste persists as social habit more than spiritual principle—proof of religion misused for power.

Voices of resistance

Tharoor recounts reformers who challenged injustice from within: Bhakti poets like Kabir and Tukaram fretted against hierarchy; modern figures such as Sree Narayana Guru and BR Ambedkar mobilised oppressed groups for dignity and rights. Gandhi spiritualised protest, calling for harijan empowerment while rejecting untouchability as sin. Yet Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism symbolised both rupture and aspiration—the desire for equality beyond inherited borders.

For Tharoor, real reform fuses social justice with internal renewal. Laws and quotas alone cannot erase centuries of prejudice; religion must rediscover its own egalitarian soul. Only then can its moral philosophy match its metaphysical depth.

From ancient gurus to modern godmen, Tharoor traces how spiritual authority evolved. The guru traditionally represents wisdom transmitted through discipline—a guide from ignorance to knowledge. But in today’s India, charisma and commerce often blur the sacred and the profane.

The true guru ideal

Classical figures like Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Ramana Maharishi embodied humility, austerity, and focus on inner realisation. Their disciples—Vivekananda and others—translated insights into social service. The guru–disciple bond here is pedagogical, not possessive; it liberates rather than enslaves.

The rise of godmen and deras

Contrast this with modern cults built around figures such as Sathya Sai Baba or Baba Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh. Their deras serve welfare functions—schools, food programs, identity for the marginalised—yet also risk personality worship and exploitation. Tharoor treats this ambivalence seriously: popular devotion meets systemic failure. When state welfare falters, people seek security in charisma.

He calls this a “God Market” where faith meets economics and politics. The challenge is not to dismiss all gurus but to discern genuine teachers from opportunists. Strong institutions and public accountability, not cynicism, are his proposed remedies.

Ultimately, the guru should be emblematic of knowledge, not spectacle. Tharoor’s plea is for spiritual authenticity—mentorship rooted in service and inquiry, not manipulation.

Hinduism’s internal flexibility has produced centuries of reform movements. Tharoor situates these within India’s confrontation with modernity—from medieval devotion to colonial critique and independence-era ethics.

Philosophical revolutions

Adi Shankara’s Advaita unified metaphysics under reasoned monism, promoting debate as sacred duty. Centuries later, Ramanuja’s Visishtadvaita and the vernacular Bhakti revolution democratised spirituality through local languages and heartfelt poetry. This lineage prepared Hinduism to absorb change without fracture.

Modern reform and global dialogue

Rammohan Roy’s Brahmo Samaj reasserted moral rationality and women’s rights. Dayanand Saraswati’s Arya Samaj revived Vedic authority yet promoted education. Vivekananda globalised Hindu ideals of harmony—his 1893 Chicago speech became a symbol of universalism. Gandhi then turned spiritual ethics into political method, linking ahimsa and satyagraha with dharma.

Tharoor concludes that reform is not alien to Hinduism—it is its heartbeat. Whenever orthodoxy stiffened, new interpreters reawakened the principle that truth is many-sided and progress arises from reinterpretation, not rupture.

Halfway through the book, Tharoor pivots from religious philosophy to political ideology. He distinguishes Hinduism’s spiritual elasticity from Hindutva’s ideological rigidity. Hinduism unites through diversity; Hindutva mobilises through exclusion.

From Savarkar to Golwalkar

Vinayak Savarkar’s 1923 manifesto redefined Hindu identity as ancestry and territory rather than faith. His tripartite formula—common nation, race, holy land—implicitly excluded Muslims and Christians whose sacred centres lie beyond India. Golwalkar, leading the RSS, hardened this into cultural nationalism that equated dissent with disloyalty. His controversial praise for Nazi unity illustrates the peril of mistaking spiritual coherence for racial purity.

Institutionalising ideology

Deendayal Upadhyaya’s “Integral Humanism” offered a more philosophical face, blending dharmic vocabulary with nationalism. It promised harmony of body, mind, intellect, and soul, yet demanded minorities assimilate into a Hindu cultural mainstream. The Jana Sangh and later the BJP adopted this as doctrine, turning metaphysics into political grammar. Tharoor notes the contradiction: a call for unity that denies genuine plural belonging.

Hindutva thus weaponises culture for power. What began as pride becomes program: redefinition of citizenship, rewriting of history, and recoding of secular space. Tharoor’s warning is clear—when religion becomes nationalism’s handmaiden, both faith and freedom suffer.

Tracing from the Hindu Mahasabha to the BJP, Tharoor narrates how Hindutva moved from fringe ideology to state policy. Structural analysis replaces moral panic: you see how electoral incentives fuse with cultural narratives to reshape India’s democratic institutions.

Mobilisation through religion

The Ram Janmabhoomi movement transformed mythology into mass politics. Advani’s 1990s rath yatra ignited fervour that culminated in the Babri Masjid’s demolition. Violence that followed fractured communities but galvanised political consolidation. By the time Modi rose to national power, Hindutva had recast itself as cultural patriotism rather than sectarianism—an image aided by economic populism and disciplined organisation.

State and symbol

Tharoor lists symbolic projects: renaming stations after ideologues, installing Savarkar plaques, rewriting curricula, redefining secularism as “appeasement.” Court rulings describing Hindutva as a “way of life” further blurred theology and politics. The result is a soft theocracy masked as cultural restoration.

Under majoritarian governance, he warns, constitutional ideals face pressure from ideological narratives. The challenge is less about belief than about democracy’s capacity to protect difference. He urges vigilance against projects that equate patriotism with a single religious identity.

Hindutva’s struggle for dominance extends beyond politics into culture, education, and science. Tharoor examines these “culture wars” as battles over collective memory.

Controlling history and art

Attacks on scholars like Wendy Doniger, exile of artist M.F. Husain, and Karni Sena’s assaults on film sets dramatise how dissenting voices are policed. Textbook revisions erase Muslim contributions and glorify mythic heroes. Even monuments like the Taj Mahal become contested symbols. By curating the past, ideology scripts the future citizen.

Science and pseudoscience

Tharoor draws a line between legitimate pride and delusion. Celebrating Aryabhata, Susruta, or zero’s invention is justified; claiming ancient aviation or divine plastic surgery is not. When ministers dismiss evolution or promote “Vedic science” without evidence, patriotism turns into pseudoscience. This undermines education and weakens international credibility.

The author urges citizens to defend intellectual freedom and scientific integrity as acts of patriotism. Real pride, he writes, lies in curiosity, not mythmaking.

Tharoor concludes with an appeal: Hindus themselves must reclaim their tradition from ideological captivity. The faith that once embraced difference is being narrowed into cultural nationalism. His alternative is a civic Hinduism rooted in pluralism, compassion, and constitutionalism.

Syncretism as strength

Across India you see shared shrines—Hindus lighting lamps at Sufi dargahs, Muslims visiting Amarnath, Christians joining Pongal. This syncretism, not separation, is India’s civilisational DNA. Vivekananda’s sarva dharma sambhava—equal respect for all paths—embodies the true Hindu spirit, one that sustains democracy’s diversity.

Civic faith and moral responsibility

Tharoor urges Hindus to assert identity through ethics, not exclusion. To declare proudly, “Garv se kaho hum Indian hain,” as faith and citizenship unite. Reclaiming Hinduism means opposing vigilantism, rejecting historical distortion, defending artists and teachers, and upholding secular law. These are spiritual duties disguised as civic acts.

The book ends where it began—with pluralism. Hinduism’s highest achievement is its refusal to close the question of truth. Tharoor leaves you with a challenge: protect that open question, for in doing so you protect India itself.