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What leads to a flourishing society? It mainly requires two things. First, the presence of systems that maintain existing ideas, traditions and material artifacts that are worth preserving. Second, the ability to come up with new ideas and artifacts that can be tested in a marketplace for them. These maintenance systems and marketplaces in turn require a combination of state, community building mechanisms and guiding philosophy to function properly. State helps enforce laws to punish and curb outright deviant behaviour and provides protection against external threats. Community building mechanisms lead to the creation of social conventions and trust between members. Philosophy provides frameworks to discuss new ideas and the zeal to try them out in marketplaces.
Current India lacks community building mechanisms that can work for heterogeneous populations living ecologically intensive lifestyles coupled with fluid nature of jobs and roles. Ancient India relied on the jati-varna system for community building. It worked as the nature of jobs and roles were largely family based allowing traditions to emerge and communities to form around them. Lifestyles were not ecologically very intensive and there were no major threats of expansionist ideologies. So, as long as people fulfilled their duties through jati-varna traditions, the society mostly worked. Swadharma in the form of varna-ashrama-guna Dharma is the framework that encapsulates most of these ideas.
This raises the question: what community building mechanisms can we use that are suited to the realities of the current times? The mechanism cannot completely rely on the existence of family based jobs and the traditions emerging from them. It has to take into account the presence of expansionist, often supremacist ideologies, which exploit the lack of unity among people. Further, given the ecological footprint of our current lifestyles, the task of preserving our ecology cannot be left to forces of nature or responsibility of few people. Everyone needs to contribute. In line with our philosophical traditions of using Dharmic abstractions and divinity to build societal constructs, I propose four sets of duties that everyone should follow in current times. Just like Char-Dham yatra is a way to get punya through pilgrimage, Char-Dharma can allow us to get the punya by serving the divine manifested through our society.
Sanrakshana Dharma (Preservation): Everyone should pick something worth preserving and take ownership of its maintenance. It may be a sacred or natural space such as temple, lake, forest, river, beach and wildlife area. It can be a traditional skill, art-form or historical place.
Samvaad Dharma (Networking): We need to form connections between different jaatis, professions, regions, people from different walks of life to form a more cohesive society. They can take the form of marriages, friendships, and various kinds of outreach events. These connections can help in forming trade, business and scholarly partnerships. They can help organize people for common societal causes. Each one of us can contribute by building such connections from time to time.
Saundarya Dharma (Aesthetics): Everyone should take pride in the quality of the work they do, and make sure that public spaces remain clean, free of litter and look aesthetically pleasing. It is our combined responsibility.
Seva Dharma (Service): Serving fellow community members through services such as teaching, skill development, medical help, volunteer work can help in creating more resilient communities, giving the members a sense of security.
I believe that by focusing on these duties, we can build a society better prepared for supporting human flourishing. These Char-Dharma based duties can be propagated by religious, cultural and spiritual organizations all over the nation, irrespective of the panth, puja and adhyatmik traditions they follow. We need to revitalize the same kind of zeal that we see in pilgrimages or in the initial spreading of vedic ideas throughout ancient India, into building a better society. Dharma is the timeless abstract idea, which requires new implementation details as and when the realities change. Time has come for us to add new implementation details suited for the realities of 21st century India.
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