Are we ‘post-Hindu’ yet?

Kancha Ilaiah burst onto the Indian intellectual scene in 1996, with his now-famous book, Why I Am Not a Hindu. In that work, Ilaiah made a partly autobiographical case for why he, and his fellow Dalit-Bahujan (Shudra) brothers and sisters, feel nothing but anger and apathy toward Hinduism – the religion that had devalued their lives, their culture and their gods while also shutting them out from the 'high culture' of the twice-born castes. Nearly 15 years later, Ilaiah has written a new book making the case for why Hinduism itself deserves to die, and why the annihilation of caste will also annihilate Hindu dharma. India, he proclaims, is on its way to a 'post-Hindu' future, one he is himself trying to bring about and looks forward to with obvious delight.

The passage of time has clearly not moderated Ilaiah's passion, as the same burning anger at the injustices that have been heaped upon the Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasi communities animates both his books. Unfortunately, time has also not cured him of an essentialist, black-and-white style of thinking that is largely unconcerned with facts. The same stereotypical 'we good, Brahmins bad' style of thinking that reduced Why I Am Not a Hindu to nothing more than a self-righteous howl reduces Post-Hindu India to a wishful daydream that floats free of history – and, indeed, even of contemporary reality. Ilaiah has written a romance, rather than the analysis informed by social science that one would one would expect from a professor of political science at one of India's most renowned institutions for higher education, Osmania University in Hyderabad.