The word “dharma” is often bandied about rather casually today. In many North Indian languages, the eponymous term “dharam” is commonly translated as “religion.” This is indeed unfortunate. The English word “religion” comes from the Latin “religio,” and was used by some early Christian fathers to distinguish their faith from that of ‘ordinary people,’ who were referred to as ‘pagans’.
Ancient civilisations like the Hebrew, Indic, and Sinic do not even entertain the concept of ‘religion’. We have traditions. We do not have religions. Words like ‘Judaism’, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Sikhism’, ‘Jainism’, ‘Taoism’, and ‘Confucianism’ were introduced by Western scholars, influenced by Christian terminology, which seems to have been adopted in various forms during the early Umayyad period in Islamic contexts.
In Tamil discourse, we have gone a step further than our northern counterparts. The term ‘Sama-Dharmam’ is used as a political expression, roughly translating to “socialism” in English. How ‘equal dharmas’ can be linked with socialism, an idea that is associated with the Paris Commune of 1871, beats me. Yet, here we are. Using the word ‘dharma’ to signify either religion or a political ideology is our own contemporary creation, and I believe this is to our detriment.
Indic terms like darshanas, sampradayas, matas, margas, paramparas, and panths cannot be translated into English with precision. We just do not have the words that correspond to ‘religion’ or ‘ideology’. SN Balagangadhara, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium, has pointed out that by accepting and internalising ‘religion’ as something that we must willy-nilly engage with, we are doing ourselves a great disservice. It is time we start insisting that ‘dharma’ simply stands apart. Virtue, duty, charity, or that which sustains the cosmic order—even all of these are at best partial translations.
Dharma and artha
Noted author Gurcharan Das began his journey exploring the four Purusharthas or the four aims of human life in our traditions—Artha, Kama, Dharma, and Moksha—and rather tentatively suggested that he was going to study the Mahabharata, which focuses heavily on dharma.
According to Das, dharma may be the central fulcrum of our intellectual and spiritual traditions. In a conversation with me, he narrated how he was once mocked by “leftists” at a fashionable New Delhi cocktail party, for whom the very words ‘dharma’ and ‘Mahabharata’ smacked of religious obscurantism, with the wholesale adoption of Western modes of thinking to which the expression “religion” doubtlessly conforms. These leftists need to understand that we do not accept the word ‘religion’ as descriptive of anything other than what Christian scholars may have had in mind, and we see nothing obscure or obscurantist about the Mahabharata and its endless cogitations about dharma.
Dharma in Sanskrit, dhamma in Pali, dharmam in modern Tamil (or its cognate, aram in ancient Tamil) all stand for a central idea with which our Acharyas, Gurus, Rishis, Dasas, Vachanakaras, Alwars, Nayanmars, Vaggeyakaras, Bhashyakaras, Tippanikaras, Tikacharyas, and so many others have wrestled for centuries—even millennia. Verily, Das is part of a worthy intellectual tradition stretching into antiquity.
He has effectively demolished his ignorant critics by writing a delectable treatise on dharma. The standard Mahabharata stories that most of us have been taught portray Yudhishthira as a weak gambler who lets himself get outwitted. Our heroes were the strong Bhima and the dashing Arjuna, and, of course, the absent Pandava, the tragic Karna. It is to Das’s credit that he makes Yudhishthira the central figure in the epic drama of dharma. He is one character who embodies kala-dharma, aapat-dharma, yuga-dharma, raja-dharma, and, above all, manushya-dharma—a form that is characteristically Sukshma.
Sukshma can be translated as ‘subtle,’ but that fails to capture the ambiguity and ambivalence associated with the word. Yudhishthira, as a character, allows us to confront our inner demons of uncertainty and shadowy penumbras—in modern American parlance, the “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”.
To illustrate that we, as people, can never stop engaging with dharma, I recently came across a book titled Dharmanomics: An Indigenous and Sustainable Economic Model by Sriram Balasubramanian. As the reader may have guessed, this is a treatise on the relationship between dharma and economics. Using the Chola realm as his field of study, Balasubramanian argues that we in India have had a long tradition of intertwining dharma with artha—the two lodes of wealth creation and wealth management being interlinked. The Chola monarchy turns out to be an interesting one. Balasubramanian refers to the famous and oft-cited Uthiramerur inscription in Tamil Nadu to establish that the Chola dispensation was not heavy-handed with its subjects. The touch was featherlight. Communities, villages, and towns managed their affairs autonomously. Taxation was always moderate. Merchants and craftspeople were free to transact and, if anything, received royal support rather than being subject to rapacious exactions. Balasubramanian’s argument is that this attitude of the Chola kings was in keeping with the precepts of raja-dharma.
We also discover something that has rarely been focused on until now: Sreni Dharma. Srenis have often been translated as “guilds”. It seems to me an inept translation. Srenis were voluntary associations of individual merchants. They were more like modern chambers of commerce. The interesting thing is that unlike most modern chambers of commerce who keep lobbying for benefits, Srenis were committed to ethical behavior on the part of their members and ensured significant levels of philanthropy. Therein is the modern idea of corporate social responsibility well ahead of its time. Balasubramanian makes a strong case that without Srenis our country’s trade with the Far East would have been miniscule. He subtly suggests that there were, and perhaps are, within our own traditions, exemplars for our commercial behavior today. We need not rely only on imported models.
I would like to draw Balasubramanian’s attention to the fact that Sreni Dharma has not entirely disappeared from our complex land. In recent times, when the Satyam scandal happened, Som Mittal, former president of Nasscom, the trade association of Indian IT/BPM industry, requested member companies not to poach employees or customers for some time in order to make possible an orderly revival of Satyam Computers. Wonder of wonders—despite all the allure of modern ruthless capitalism, Nasscom member companies did accede to Mittal’s request. Satyam was saved. More importantly, the reputation of India’s entire IT Industry as a reliable partner was maintained. Member companies of Nasscom embraced Sreni Dharma much as their Chola Sreni counterparts did while trading with the Far East and insuring each other’s goods and shipments. The very existence of Srenis and their focus on mutually beneficial trade ensured that India’s influence in the Far East remained largely mercantile, cultural, and spiritual, not military and certainly not aggressive.
Balasubramanian’s next focus is on temples. Tamil Nadu till today remains the best example of surviving, thriving temple towns. Luckily, many of the ancient temples from the Chola times have not been destroyed. And even when they were desecrated, subsequent Vijayanagara, Nayaka, and Maratha rulers restored and reconsecrated them.
While conceding that temples were primarily focused on their sacred and spiritual missions, Balasubramanian argues that their economic by-products should not be ignored. Temples employed different categories of skilled laborers: sculptors, painters, ritualists, chanters, singers, musicians, dancers, gardeners, masons, garland-makers, jewelers, weavers, cooks, goldsmiths, bronze artists, coppersmiths, brass-workers, oil pressers, cowherds and so on. Large temples also attracted pilgrims from distant places. And pilgrims invariably needed to be housed and visit shops to buy keepsakes. The importance of pilgrims and pilgrimages in our long history can never be underestimated. While today’s lefty historians are welcome to quote the brilliant American scholar Diana L Eck on this subject, I prefer to quote our own Radha Kumud Mukherji who wrote about this phenomenon a century ago.
Also read: Sanatan Dharma is the way if the world is to be saved, rest is just cult
Dharmanomics
It turns out that as part of their philanthropic dharma, kings, merchants, srenis, and ordinary people made donations to temples. The walls of southern temples are crammed with inscriptions attesting to this. This accumulation of wealth made temples important economic actors. Many of them were efficient managers of the funds entrusted to them. Fiduciary correctness was ensured because rare indeed was the adharmic individual who would steal from a temple. (Although, I am not so sure about the commitment of our contemporary temple administrators to dharmic principles!) Temples ended up becoming depositories of the wealth of merchants and shrenis. They also became banks that lent to venture investors that invested in commercial ventures. Most Chola voyages would have had a temple as a private equity investor—just saying.
Balasubramanian’s point is that by its very nature, a temple’s association meant that ethical and welfare considerations were never absent from commercial activities. Rapacious profiteering would never do. Taking care of the needy pilgrim was a categorical imperative. In other words, that is the basis of dharmic capitalism or dharmanomics.
Balasubramanian’s earlier book was on Kautilya. This is a good sequel. He makes the broader point that we need to go back to our Indic obsession with dharma if we are to find answers to the ailments of contemporary market capitalism. It is a worthwhile endeavor and it highlights the good news that we have today in our country writers who are willing and able to dance with dharma.
My grandfather used to tell me that manushya-runa or debt to other humans is the most difficult to pay off. Writing in 1965, C Rajagopalachari, or Rajaji, has this to say: “Responsible individualism is the dharma which all our scriptures and the scriptures of all other nations preach. It is the oppuravu aridal which poet and philosopher Tiruvalluvar has stressed in his great Tamil classic. The responsibility of the individual to those around him is ‘oppuravu’. To know and always remember that responsibility is aridal. “
Tiruvalluvar has a whole canto dedicated to aram, the cognate of dharma. All of us who wrestle with manushya-runa and the meaning of the untranslatable dharma, perhaps can do no better than re-read Gurcharan Das with his affection for Yudhishthira, Balasubramanian with his love for Cholas, Srenis and temples, and Rajaji who never fails to astonish and stretching back in time to Tiruvalluvar, if for no other reason than a sentimental one. Valluvar was my grandfather’s favourite.
Jaithirth ‘Jerry’ Rao is a retired entrepreneur who lives in Lonavala. He has published three books: ‘Notes from an Indian Conservative’, ‘The Indian Conservative’, and ‘Economist Gandhi’. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)