Avoiding Victimhood, Going on the Civilizational Offensive

प्रणाम. I hope that sharing my story here will be of some benefit for those reading.

I come from a Sikh family but got reading about Bharat's history and breadth of spiritual traditions soon after finishing University. The utter cultural and spiritual poverty in the "modern" world today had left a gaping hole of meaninglessness in my life (I'm Canadian). For three years since then I've travelled India, learnt some of its ancient visual art traditions (thangka/pahari painting), practiced actual yoga from an actual lineage, and begun to study Sanskrit texts from India's ancient universities. I see this as a natural extension of the work of spiritual evolution and moral refinement I must have begun many lives ago, even though for the first part of my life I was completely brainwashed by the West.

I see a glimmer of hope for Bharat to throw off the shackles of mental enslavement. It's faint, ever at risk of being snuffed out and buried by the breaking India forces, but unmistakably something has begun to shift. India will be free of extreme poverty by 2030. There is a recognition of the need to decolonize its education system. More important than ever, Indians are realizing their dignity again after 1,000 years of horror. If it was civilizational complacency that made India weak a millennium ago and allowed for its military and cultural defeats, the trend has certainly reversed.

The Sikh community which I've now distanced myself from is rotten with extremism. There's a near-universal Hinduphobia which I simply cannot stand. They have lost their spiritual anchor because they let a Christian scholar, among others, to corrupt all the bridges their culture had to Hindu civilization. (As an artist, I hope to help reverse this in some form). I've observed Sikhs brainlessly copying social justice rhetoric from the West and copying/pasting it onto their own context, which obviously turns themselves into perpetual victims and destroys any chance at their culture being relevant beyond identarian sectarianism.

The thing with Hinduism, however, is that it is perpetually and eternally relevant. Even across all cultures, environments, and times. Dharma is something humanity will always need no matter what. And it's this fluidity and non-attachment to identity markers that's helped our culture survive the past 1,000 years of constant military and cultural war that was forced onto us.

It's not that I'm trying to argue against Hindutva (as many idiotic and bigoted, deracinated "intellectuals" try to do) but a feeling of frustration that India actually believes the bullshit that the barbarians have heaped on it for the past centuries, and continues to do today. Humanity desperately needs a strong, resurgent, powerful, dignified, Dharma-centric Bharat if it's to receive the role model it needs to remember its own spiritual dignity. It's a task no other country has the potential to do. To help contribute to that cause, then, is a great honor considering the effects that India's civilizational renaissance would have on everyone else.

I feel an urgency to use whatever resources I have to renew India's immune system and view of itself, but I feel alone and isolated at the moment. As a young person without Dharmic elders in my community for guidance, in a country whose Indology scholars are almost all racist white supremacist Hinduphobes. The situation in India doesn't look much better at the moment - it is as though I am simply waiting for a big disruption to occur, so I can make my contribution in some form when the time is right.

It's almost hard to imagine what will come after Hindus heal from their near-perpetual trauma. What kind of institutions would India need to protect her culture and traditions? What kind of initiatives are needed to change the narrative on India's role in the world? Where can real Dharmic scholars with reverence for what they study congregate, collaborate, and envision a world that is both modern and dharmic?