Can India Be Modern Without Becoming Western?

There are two schools of thoughts prevalent in India today. That borrowing from other cultures is either treason or enlightenment. Either modern Indian society must hermetically seal itself against Western influence or prostrate itself before modernity's altar.

But can't we take something foreign and make it ours without becoming someone else entirely? Not syncretism—you know, where you glue together things that don't fit and call it culture or imitation—where you're just reading from someone else's script but Something else—where you actually break things down and rebuild them as your own.

A sort of assimilative appropriation. Think about eating. When you eat, your body doesn't just store the food as-is. It tears everything apart, grabs what's useful, throws out the poison, and rebuilds it all as YOU.

Today's Indian society can do the same with external influences but only if it knows what it is first. Because the modern Indian stance toward outside influence oscillates between two forms of suicide: paranoid rejection and eager dissolution.

The rejectionists treat everything non-Indian as contamination, anything that smells Western is napalm. The assimilationists want to become good global citizens so badly they'll adopt frameworks that systematically dismantle their dharmic civilization while calling it progress.

Both miss the point because you can't preserve living traditions by freezing them and you can't strengthen civilization by abandoning its foundations.

But before anything else, we must be precise about what Hindu society cannot absorb without destroying itself. First, exclusivism. The problem about the abrahamic thought isn't that Christians and Muslims believe their path is true but the claim that only one path, their path is true, which structurally requires your paths to be false. We cannot adopt this and remain Hindu as the core tenets of dharma are for a universal brotherhood and not one based on sectarian lines.

The second thing to reject is linear historicism aka the unscientific idea that time moves toward a single appointed endpoint, whether it be a Judgment Day or a Marxist revolution. This framework declares the rooted indigenous cultures as stuck in time with an impending need to "catch up" to wherever history's arrow points. It's a trap.

Another aspect of western modernity that we Hindus must reject is the reduction of existence to material mechanisms. You cannot adopt materialism-as-metaphysics and keep atman, moksha, karma, or any coherent sense of transcendent purpose. They're incompatible at the level of what reality is.

What else should we keep away ? Extreme individualism that disconnects people from family, community, and any sense of belonging to something larger. The Western self exists alone, separate from all relationships and while it may look like liberation, it is in reality an amputation.

I know what you're thinking: But don't we need individual rights? Don't we need to protect people from oppressive structures? Yes and dharma has concepts for this that don't require importing a metaphysics where isolated individuals are the base unit of reality.

The question isn't whether to engage with what's foreign, but how.
The West developed certain capacities that Indian society currently lacks like institutional discipline or the ability to build large-scale organizations that don't collapse into bureaucratic paralysis.

Hindu temples and educational institutions often suffer from weak administration and unclear accountability and adopting better organizational practices for them wouldn't compromise dharma.

Same for scientific methodology and technical innovation. Yes, we pioneered mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy and medicine but they developed systematic ways to refine how you investigate anything. That's valuable.

We can use those methods while rejecting the materialist metaphysics packaged with them. Take the tool but refuse the worldview.

Communication technology. Digital networks, modern media, global information systems— Hindu society needs them to counter hostile narratives, connect dispersed communities, and transmit dharmic knowledge at scale. The Luddite position here is strategic suicide.

But all of this only works if you have swayambodh—self-knowledge so deep you can tell what's essential from what's negotiable. Most Hindus don't have this. They know their grandmother's rituals, some festival calendar, maybe a few verses in translation. But the philosophical architecture—rta, karma, moksha, the nature of atman and brahman—remains fuzzy.

So when external frameworks arrive the Hindus can't evaluate them. They just accept or reject based on cultural reflex, not understanding.

You need to study your own tradition from within and not through colonial interpretations or missionary translations. You need to understand why dharma is structured the way it is, what problems it addresses and the reality it describes. Without this foundation, you will be negotiating from weakness.

And you need shatrubodh—the ability to recognize what's actually hostile to your existence. Think of it not as paranoia but pattern recognition. Some systems are designed to coexist and some to replace. For e.g. Abrahamic exclusivism requires eliminating other paths so that isn't a framework you can dialogue with on equal terms.

Shatrubodh means distinguishing between honest intellectual exchange and civilizational subversion disguised as dialogue. It means recognizing when seemingly neutral concepts for example.g. rigid church-state separation modeled on Christian contexts, carry embedded worldviews that conflict with how dharmic society organizes itself.

It's key to understand that ideas have consequences and that some narratives subtly delegitimize Hindu practices while normalizing predatory replacement frameworks.

Say Hindu society adopts modern scientific education. You don't just copy Western curricula. You frame scientific investigation within a worldview that recognizes consciousness as fundamental. You can teach inquiry methods while making clear that all knowledge ultimately serves self-realization. You can maintain guru-shishya relationships even within institutional structures without abandoning the transmission of lived wisdom.

You break down what's foreign, extract what's useful and transform it into something that functions within your own system. What remains indigestible gets expelled and what serves gets integrated so thoroughly it becomes native.

The alternative—cultural Frankenstein—is what happens when you bolt foreign elements onto yourself without transformation. You get institutions that don't work because they're designed for different civilizational assumptions. You get internal contradictions where borrowed concepts conflict with retained practices. In the end you are left with the worst of both: dysfunction from poor integration, and loss of coherence from partial replacement.

Hindu civilization is not a museum exhibit to be preserved unchanged. It's a living, growing thing that can respond creatively to new circumstances without losing its essence.

But this requires confidence.

Dharmic knowledge has weathered invasions, colonization, systematic delegitimization, and every variety of assault across millennia. Taking confidence from that, we can engage rigorously with foreign ideas without defensiveness.

The path forward can't be blind imitation or fearful rejection but conscious and surgical engagement. Take what strengthens you. Refuse what corrupts you and transform what you take until it becomes yours.

Living civilizations survive by remaining ruthlessly true to their own inner law while engaging creatively with everything they encounter.