Faith-tech wears the mask of decolonisation. It’s Brahminical revival

The same institutions selling Hindu heritage as entrepreneurial wisdom have a caste problem no one is talking about.

Representational image of a faith-tech app.

India has a new category of entrepreneurs: The faith-tech founders. From apps that deliver daily Gita shlokas to platforms offering live temple darshans. Startup pitch decks now invoke the Purusharthas—Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha. A wave of ventures led by so-called cultural translators is packaging Hindu philosophy for the modern economy. They’ve come to be known as Hindu religious entrepreneurs.

The pitch is compelling—after centuries of colonial capitalism that dismissed indigenous knowledge, India is finally building on its own intellectual heritage.

But this argument carries a fundamental blind spot. It conflates Hinduism with specific Brahminical textual traditions—the Bhagavad Gita, Vedas, Upanishads—while presenting this as universal indigenous reclamation. There is a question that this decolonising project has not yet asked—whose Hinduism is being revived? And who, once again, is being left out? For the roughly 200 million Dalits and 100 million Tribals in India, this is not a minor omission. It is the crux of the problem.

A decolonisation that ignores caste

The Bhagavad Gita. The Vedas. The Upanishads. These are the texts faith-tech is packaging for the modern consumers. What goes unacknowledged is that these are specifically upper-caste, Brahminical scriptural traditions and that for India’s Dalits and Adivasis, these texts have not historically been a source of liberation. They have been instruments of exclusion.

For centuries, Dalits were systematically and violently denied access to this scriptural knowledge—forbidden from hearing the Vedas, entering temples, and learning Sanskrit. The idea that packaging these texts into tech constitutes cultural reclamation for all Indians ignores Indian social history.

Dr BR Ambedkar spent his intellectual life making precisely this argument. In his writings, he contended that Hindu scriptures were not merely a spiritual resource but the very architecture of caste oppression. The Gita’s prescription of svadharma—one’s duty according to one’s place (caste) in life—was, he argued, a theological endorsement of the caste order. To celebrate these texts as liberatory without this reckoning is not decolonisation. It is a Brahminical revival dressed in the language of cultural reclamation.

The caste of Dharma and Artha

Proponents of faith-tech entrepreneurship often invoke the Purusharthas as a universal Hindu philosophy of life. But isolating these concepts from their historical application is intellectually naive.

Historically, the execution of Dharma and Artha was inseparable from Varna Dharma—the caste-bound assignment of occupations. Knowledge production and spiritual authority belonged to the priestly castes. Capital accumulation and trading were restricted to traditional merchant castes. Physical labour and service were forced upon the lower castes. Nothing much has changed on these fronts. Even leisure and pleasure—Kama—remain caste-constrained in practice, and so does Moksha, with lower castes historically granted little to no spiritual freedom.

When modern startups spiritualise entrepreneurial action as a “moral duty,” they risk romanticising a structural hierarchy that historically weaponised duty to restrict occupational mobility. My own research on entrepreneurial ecosystems in India finds that, for Dalit entrepreneurs, lower-caste identity functions as a moral disqualification from economic opportunity. So, without an explicit critique of caste, importing these frameworks into modern corporate governance can subtly validate the idea that certain groups are naturally suited for capital ownership, while others are destined for labour.

Faith-tech’s double exclusion

Much of the enthusiasm around faith-tech focuses on the beliefs and motivations of individual entrepreneurs. But entrepreneurship does not happen in a vacuum. Research on Indian entrepreneurial ecosystems shows that access to start-up capital, incubator networks, and mentorship is heavily patterned by caste. Dominant-caste communities such as Marwari, Bania, and Brahmin have access to professional networks and have accumulated social capital through generations of caste-endogamous economic cooperation. This structural advantage does not disappear when the venture happens to invoke the Vedas.

Introducing faith-tech into this mix creates an even higher barrier to entry for Dalit entrepreneurs. When business networks begin to overlap with temple custodians, religious scholars, and faith-based investor circles, access to capital becomes intertwined with religious and social proximity.

Dominant-caste founders already possess the cultural and social networks to navigate these spaces. A lower-caste founder, lacking these traditional ties and historically alienated from scriptural institutions, faces a double exclusion. They are locked out not just from secular elite networks, but now from spiritualised business ecosystems as well.

The irony of the knowledge commons

Faith-tech proponents argue that one of its distinguishing features is the rejection of intellectual property protections, treating ancient knowledge as a commons rather than a commodity. This is framed as a progressive, non-Western alternative to capitalism’s enclosure of ideas.

But this framing also has a blind spot. The primary reason scriptural knowledge was held as communal in traditional India was not to create an open-source utopia, but rather because it was strictly guarded within upper-caste lineages. The enforcement mechanism was not legal IP law. It was social exclusion and ritual prohibition. To champion the rejection of modern IP as innovation without acknowledging who historically controlled that knowledge commons is, at best, incomplete, if not misleading.

This same logic applies to the push to build a faith-tech ecosystem on Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) policy—the National Education Policy’s framework for reviving indigenous learning. The IKS initiative has been widely criticised by scholars as a Brahminical revivalist agenda that centres Sanskritic, upper-caste textual knowledge while marginalising the traditions of lower castes and indigenous communities. Building an entrepreneurial ecosystem on this foundation risks institutionalising those exclusions at economic scale.

The institutional spaces now invoking Hindu heritage and Indian Knowledge Systems as the basis for a new entrepreneurial culture are, in many cases, the same institutions making it structurally impossible for Dalit scholars and students to remain.

Decolonisation that does not address this contradiction is performing cultural reclamation while quietly closing the door on those who have most to gain from a genuinely plural knowledge order.

Moving toward inclusive innovation

None of this is to argue that Hindu philosophical traditions have no place in thinking about business and the economy. They do, and the challenge to Protestant-ethic-inflected capitalism is a worthwhile one. But a genuine decolonial project in Indian business must ask harder questions.

It must ask whose traditions are being translated, and by whom. It must ask whether the “patient, mission-aligned investors” proposed for faith-tech will be equally patient with ventures drawing on Dalit-Bahujan philosophy or Jotirao Phule’s critique of Brahminism, as they are with those invoking the Upanishads.

It must grapple with the reality that for hundreds of millions of people in India, the dominant textual tradition within Hinduism has not been a source of clarity in hard times. It has been the source of their hardship.

True decolonisation cannot mean swapping Western hegemony for domestic hierarchy. If faith-tech merely digitises ancient texts without actively dismantling the caste-based barriers to capital, networks, and authority, it will not disrupt global capitalism. It will simply merge the inequalities of modern technology with the historic inequalities of traditional social stratification. Decolonisation that recentres Brahminical texts while leaving caste intact is not liberation. It is a new hierarchy with an indigenous face.

Pardeep Singh Attri is an Assistant Professor in Strategy and Organisation at the School of Management, University of Bath (UK). He tweets at @pardeep_s_attri.