5 min readMay 6, 2026 07:03 PM IST
First published on: May 6, 2026 at 12:30 PM IST
Sanatan Dharma is the most popular yet least understood term of contemporary Indian political discourse. Translated literally, it means “eternal religion”. Yet, the very framing reveals a paradox: The category of “religion” itself is a relatively modern invention, imported into India through colonial encounters.
In the 19th century, Japanese thinkers grappling with Western frameworks realised that “religion” was a category defined by conversion. You can convert to Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam; therefore, these qualify as religions. But Shintoism is not something one converts into; it is something one is born into, much like being Han Chinese. These are ethnic identities, hence not something you can convert out of. By this understanding, Hinduism is also an ethnic identity that one is born into, through caste, not a religion. No one can become a Hindu. But anyone can become a Muslim or Christian. Evangelising religions, therefore, threaten Hindu identity.
Indians did not have the luxury of defining their own categories. Colonial powers demanded to know what India’s “religion” was, and this pressure produced, in the early 19th century, the very word “Hinduism” — a term associated with reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who used the new framework to challenge social malpractices like child marriage, burning of widows, and the prohibition on widow remarriage.
The latter half of the 19th century saw a backlash against Hindu reformers. Traditionalists invoked the phrase “Sanatan Dharma” to assert continuity with an unchanging, eternal tradition. This explains the current obsession with 5,000 years of Hinduism and aversion to the fact that Aryans and horses came from outside India.
Around this time, writer-scholar Chandranath Basu coined the word “Hindutva”, which, in the 20th century, acquired powerful political meaning through V D Savarkar, who reframed it as a political ideology. The RSS adopted Hindutva as its organising principle, and the term rose to prominence following the BJP’s rise to power in 2014.
Over the last few years, however, there has been a noticeable shift towards “Sanatan Dharma” among BJP politicians. The reason is largely strategic: Hindutva sounds overtly religious, while Sanatan Dharma can be framed as cultural, allowing wider outreach, to include Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs. Yet, almost no one can clearly articulate what Sanatan Dharma actually means.
In Merchants of Virtue (2022), Princeton University historian Divya Cherian shows that 17th-century Rajput court chronicles were familiar with the term “Hindu”. It was defined by excluding the “Turk” or Muslims and the “achhep” or untouchables. This definition seems to have been endorsed by the powerful Jain and Vaishnav mahajans or merchant-bureaucrats in the Rajasthan-Gujarat region. It is precisely this region that today hosts some of the most powerful political-religious patrons in India, including members of the Vaishnava movement of north India.
It is about 2,000 years ago that the Prakrit phrase “dhammo sanatano” was found in the Buddhist Dhammapada. The Jain Acharanga Sutra uses this concept of the eternal in a framework of rebirth and karma. The same thought enters the Bhakti stream through the Mahabharata’s Bhagavad Gita around the same time.
The Bhagavad Gita was an innovation built on the earlier Upanishadic texts (c 500 BC), which had focused only on consciousness (purusha, jiva, atma, brahman). Gita complemented spiritual truth with a new idea: Material truth (prakriti) that it absorbed from Samkhya philosophy, or proto-Tantra. This focus on materialism led Gita to introduce terms such as satvik, tamasik, and rajasik. These became popular after the Gupta era (300 AD) alongside concepts such as varna (caste) and dvija (twice-born) of the Dharma-shastra. This is also when, as per genetic studies, caste endogamy entrenched itself in Bharat.
Notably, the term “satvik” food does not appear in Ayurveda, yet it has become central to the Sanatan Dharma movement. North Indian temples now demand that no meat-serving establishments operate within 15 km of their premises. This dietary politics points to the real character of the movement: Sanatan Dharma is essentially a vegetarian Hinduism, promoted by Brahmin, Bania, and Jain lobbies of north India, whose food culture does not reflect the practices of the rest of India.
This vegetarian-satvik identity quietly unites otherwise utterly divergent institutions — from Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram to RSS headquarters, which serve only vegetarian food in their canteens. The simplest working definition, therefore, may be this: Sanatan Dharma is the Hinduism that defines itself through the purity of satvik food.
Devdutt is an author and mythologist
Over the last few years, however, there has been a noticeable shift towards “Sanatan Dharma” among BJP politicians. The reason is largely strategic: Hindutva sounds overtly religious, while Sanatan Dharma can be framed as cultural, allowing wider outreach. (C R Sasikumar) 
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