Imagine three Americans writing about the Bible in the 21st century. One reads it literally. Another reads it as a sceptic. A third compares its stories with Greek myths. Now imagine an Indian professor putting all three in one box and declaring that White Americans are using Biblical lore to justify the values of Trump’s America. This would be termed as lazy Occidentalism: an outsider inventing a picture of the West while pretending to be neutral.
This rarely happens. The reverse always does.
It began 200 years ago. European scholars built a set of labels to explain India. Primitive and savage. Civilisation and superstition. Mythology and history. The labels were presented as neutral science. India supplied the stories, rituals, and people. Europe supplied the explanation. This was Orientalism. It has been criticised. But it persists, with new labels.
Today’s labels come from humanities departments of European and American Universities shaped by postmodern theory, a school of thought that treats “grand narratives” as stories built to serve power. The labels are neoliberalism, nationalism, essentialism, and invented tradition.
Take “Hindutopia”, a word coined by the Portuguese scholar João Pedro Oliveira in a 2025 paper in South Asian Studies. It joins “Hindu” and “utopia”, an imagined perfect place. Oliveira lumps together Indian writers of myth-fiction and mythology. He admits they differ in content, style, and politics. Yet he says they share one voice: they picture a Hindu world, credit everything good about India to it, and so serve the ambitions of the new middle class created by the 1991 economic reforms. In this work, even writers who contradict each other and hold politically opposing views are all forced into a single ‘Hindu’ box.
Notice the trick. Indian writers are scolded for building a broad category called the “Hindu worldview”. The scholar then builds a broad category of his own, “Hindutopia”. When a mythologist reads thousands of stories and finds patterns, he is accused of “essentialising”, meaning he squeezes a huge, varied tradition into one fixed core. When an academic reads three writers and finds something sinister in their fondness for Hinduism, it is called scholarship. The accuser does exactly what he accuses others of doing.
The trending word in academia “neoliberalism”. It shows the contempt clearly. Neoliberalism once meant Reagen-Thatcher economic policy: trust the market, cut government rules, sell state companies. Postmodern “woke” scholars, following the French thinker Michel Foucault, stretched it to the tendency to see people as economic assets, in need of improving productivity. Now choice, ambition, self-improvement, and climbing the social ladder all count as neoliberal. So if a modern retelling shows an ancient character making choices or rising in life, the writer is accused of dragging today’s market values into the past. As if choice did not exist when the Ramayana and Mahabharata were composed. As if there is a right way to see ancient epics, one that affirms postmodern presumptions about the past.
The 19th-century scholar believed his categories were universal while Indians were trapped inside “culture”. The modern scholar believes the same. The Hindu worldview is called a “construction”, something made up. Dharma must be “historicised”, meaning placed in its time and shown to have changed. Meanwhile neoliberalism, nationalism, identity, and mobility are used as if they were neutral measuring tapes with no history. But they have one. The humanities department itself grew out of Western history and Western myths.
Yes, comparisons between Indian and Western thought can be overdone. But pretending there are no differences is an insult to common sense. In the academy, pointing out differences is called essentialism. Praising the past is called romanticisation. Linking tradition to civilisation is called nationalism. Choice is called neoliberalism. Continuity is called “invented tradition”. Labels are used as weapons to shoot down any conclusion. A theory that can never lose has stopped being curious. It is fixed in smugness. More judgement, less reflection.
Christianity and Islam, built on belief in one God, seek to convert and to be universal. This is unlike Hindu, Han, and Shinto mythologies that are local, tied to their own land. Indian thought treats its stories as a community’s mind map of the world. Indian philosophy is comfortable with subjectivity and does not see itself as absolute. Apply that idea to the academy and neoliberalism becomes parochial, one more community’s truth, a Western myth. The belief that climbing the ladder is always good comes from a particular history. Suspicion of “grand narratives”, the big stories nations tell about themselves, grew from Europe’s own experience of fascism and empire. Yet the West rarely learns from outside. It prefers to teach.
This does not mean only Indians may study India as some nationalists insist. That would betray scholarship and create a new hierarchy. What is needed is equal scrutiny on both sides. If Hindu ideas need historical context, so do neoliberal ones. If the mythologist has a worldview, so does the critic. If “Hindu civilisation” is a construction, so is “Hindutopia”. If Indian writers must declare where they speak from, European theorists cannot float above history. Are they free of their Christian and colonial inheritance when they write a paper? Can they ever be?
The one who claims to expose power often turns out to serve it.
Posts on X: @devduttmyth
