India, Jan. 11 -- The word Hinduism itself is not ancient. Neither is it native nor organic. The very suffix "ism" within the word Hinduism reeks of Western taxonomy aiming to confine the civilisation within rigid, dogmatic lines much like the Abrahamic religions of Christianity and Islam. Such a framework is violently alien to Sanatan Dharma, which never sought reduction into a closed creed.

The Hindu civilisational experience is fluid, plural, evolving, contradictory and unapologetically non dogmatic. As Atal Bihari Vajpayee observed in his 1998 interview with Javed Akhtar, India's secularism flows naturally from Hindu civilisation itself. Hindu thought binds no one to a single prophet, a single book, or a compulsory theology. One may ...