Ideological tricks in the labyrinth of India’s civilizational discourse have been as insidious, as intellectually duplicitous, and as socio-politically divisive as the faked dichotomy of Sanatani versus Moolniwasi. This false binary, manufactured not by the native voices but by a handful of Marxist historians pretending to be messiahs of social justice, is an insidious attempt to divide the children of the same civilizational mother. It is, of course, an epistemological snare, a historical humbug, and a political juggernaut of revolutionary proportions.
This argument deserves both unpackaging and evisceration. So let’s start off by defusing the etymological red herring. The word Moolniwasi, or “original inhabitant,” is used with the full propaganda effect here, to indicate some kind of superiority of origin over the so-called “Sanatanis,” who leftist polemicists seeking to economize their invective have largely reduced to upper-caste Hindus or Brahmanical elites. The insinuation is disgustingly clear: that Sanatan Dharma, whose roots stretch back to a remote past, whose inwardness transcends time, is a foreign accretion; that Hinduism is an alien edifice built upon the “real” Indians. This story that has donned the rags of academic radicalism and represented itself as a righteous resistance to caste oppression is a Trojan horse. It is the ideological manifestation of divide et impera, a colonial artefact reincarnated in the postcolonial consciousness of India’s pseudo-intelligentsia.
One must ask: Who benefits? Not the so-called Moolniwasis who have their real struggles for dignity and social mobility robbed and channeled into a fabricated war against their own civilisational ancestors. Certainly not the Sanatanis, whose reaching, rythmed and horizontalizing spiritual inheritance, of plurality and metaphysical question and radical divinity of the being themselves, is damned as hegemonic oppression. The true winners are the leftist historians and their ideological offspring: those who inhabit the environment of endless grievance, atomized identity politics, and civilizational self-disgust. It is necessary to state most unambiguously that the Sanatan tradition, very much contrary to the oppressor of the so-called Moolniwasi, is the very crucible from which their philosophical, cultural and even spiritual self finds the heat that forges it. With its very name itself, Sanatan Dharma is eternal, but not in the sense of unchanging dogma but as a living stream of experiential wisdom. It is not the religion of the few but the civilization of the many. The one that is used by the leftists that says Sanatan Dharma was imposed on ancient indigenous Indians by “invading Aryans” is based on the today-abandoned Aryan Invasion Theory – a colonial invention that was fed by the racial pecking orders of genocidal Anglos and Gauls and inherited by marxists of various hues who discarded racial determinism in favour of their totalitarian theory of class struggle. They were making colonial epistemologies their own, even as they were declaring them decolonized. It’s the intellectual equivalent of demanding freedom waving about a Union Jack.
Now, let’s call a spade a spade: this story is historically and factually masturbatory. Genetic investigations of the last two decades, including the extensive research done by the Indian Genome Variation Consortium, have found that the Indian population is not a repainted version of specific racial groups, but a complex network of continuous gene flow and genetic mixing. The idea of distinct “Aryan” and “Dravidian” races, not to mention Moolniwasi vs. Sanatani schisms, is itself a colonial fantasy that has not survived any empirical test the modern science has found! And yet the Leftist historians, living in the echo chambers of the elite academia and editorial offices in Delhi have continued to tell the children that their gods were aliens, traditions were oppressive and ancestors were invaders. In any other culture this would be civilizational treason. In India, it is supported by government grants
Think of the academic environment created by people like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib and their followers. These veterans of Marxist historiography have transformed Indian history into a battle-ground of ideological vendetta. Their joint project has been the delegitimization of Sanatan Dharma and the erasure of what it has given to the world, and to tell every single page of Indian history as a morality lesson where the Brahmin is a villain and the moolniwasi the eternal victim. But what, pray, is this “Moolniwasi” identity? It’s a hazy brew that has no scriptural, archaeological or genealogical funds. It’s a political fiction raised to the level of moral fact. Your lack of awareness of it is richly comic: you sneer at the Purāṇas and Itihasas for being mythical and yet are the inventors of the grandest myth of modern historiography.
Let’s take a closer look with a sharper scalpel. Sanatan Dharma, in contrast to monotheistic beliefs, does not profess the monopoly of salvation and truth. It respects and honors the variety of belief, ritual, and metaphysical ways. It did not attempt to destroy tribal gods; it accepted them. It did not convert by force; it accommodated dissent. This is not the infrastructure of tyranny; it is the anatomy of diversity. While tribal people worshipped spirits and nature gods, Sanatan Dharma deified them as village deities and placed them in a pantheon called Grama Devatas. Even when other varied languages took birth, it sanctified them as Matrubhasha (mother tongues) rather than rivals of Sanskrit, but its offsprings. Those whom the Indians the British called Moolniwasi were not outsiders in this civilizational landscape; they were co-authors.
Indeed, the very ‘word’ Moolniwasi is not to be found in any classical Indian text. Even the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, and Dharmashastras, for all their complicated, controversy-riddled handling of varna and jati, never take recourse to this binary. Neither do the Bhakti poets or the Sufi saints or Buddhist philosophers who also pushed the boundaries of orthodoxy throughout history even as they reinforced the civilizational bond of Bharat.
So what are we to make of this ideological sleight of hand? It is no less than a moral and historical rip-off. It is a distortion that feeds on the real pain of historical wrongs, and particularly caste-based prejudice, and steers it not toward reconciliation or reform but toward civilizational fissures. Sanatan is the womb of reformers. From the Bhagavad Gita’s palettes that privilege karma over birth to the radical inclusivity of saints like Kabir, Tukaram and Ravidas, to the spiritual egalitarianism of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda, the inner voice of Sanatan Dharma has never been a quiet bystander in the face of injustice.
It is Sanatan Dharma which gave us Atmabodha (self-awareness), Viveka (discernment), Sangha (collectivity). These are not the idioms of tyranny but of transcending tyranny. But the leftist project would obliterate this civilizational grammar. Through the fiction of animosity between Moolniwasi and Sanatani, it innovates by turning the continuum of a civilization into a consensus of violence. The aim is not justice but disunity; not fairness but animosity; not truth but polemic. And here, on the final and most bitter note yet, is the supreme irony: the very forces that rail loudest about colonialism are the most loyal curators of its epistemology. Their learning is not founded in Bharatiyata but Berkeley. Their source of inspiration is not the Ganga, but the Seine. They do not offer obeisance to the sanctified flame of Agni, but pay homage to the paradoxical figures like Marx, Lenin and Foucault.
This, then, is ultimate treason. The Indian civilization, in all its contradictions, complexities and chiaroscuros, is not a battleground of invented binaries, but of abiding truths. That unity is not of similarity but of synthesis. And that unity must not be shattered by the unholy vendetta of the academic mercenaries who have exchanged truth for tenure and wisdom for ideology. In order to recover our historical memory, we need to be able to exhume facts from the cemeteries of propaganda. We have to teach our children to stop from not the politics of resentment but from the poetry of their inheritance. And we need to get that narrative back, not to oppress, not to exclude, but to include every Indian as the inheritor of the Sanatan legacy. For in reality, there is no Moolniwasi versus Sanatani. There is only Bharatiya. And that, dear reader, is not an invention. It is our parampara.

(Views expressed are personal. Dr Barthwal teaches Political Science in University of Delhi)