Is Sanatan dharma a Pagan faith?

Many Sanatanis today like to describe Hinduism as the mother of all dharmic religions and sometimes even as the mother of all pagan faiths This obsession with the word ldquopaganrdquo is not native to India It comes from Europe and America In the 1960s and 70s hippies who disliked Judaism and Christianity or who wanted to weaponise Hinduism against Islam embraced this word and dragged it into Hindu conversationsThe word pagan itself has a strange history Early Christians used it to mean peasants rustic folk people outside the ldquoarmy of Christrdquo It carried a sense of backwardness But modern scholars now say the word comes from pagus the smallest administrative unit of the Roman Empire Those who worshipped local gods of the pagus were called pagansSeen this way religion can be divided into two broad categories One kind is tied to a place It honours local gods mdash spirits of hills rivers groves or villages The other kind transcends geography It builds on doctrine not landscape India has both Every region has its local gods But over these gods Vedic ideas detached from any single location take precedenceChristianity works the same way It started in Jerusalem then Rome became its centre but it does not depend on either city Islam too broke free of geography Its followers do not worship local gods They face Mecca and Mecca alone the seat of the god of ArabiaEurope before Christianity was full of local religions These were later branded pagan Over time pagans were imagined in very different ways Some called them noble savages close to nature Others called them wicked savages who had to be tamed In the 18th century with the rise of evolutionary theories people placed pagan religions somewhere between primitive savagery and refined monotheism Germans glorified their Viking ancestors as pure gods of the land uncorrupted by Christianity Admirers of Greece and Rome saw their paganism as sophisticated until it was supposedly polluted by ldquoeasternrdquo ritualsIn England the industrial revolution destroyed woods and groves So intellectuals mourned and romanticised the pagan past as a lost paradise In France less industrialised pagan nature worship looked sinister even satanic By the Victorian age when Christianity became increasingly puritanical paganism was recast as freespirited It was imagined as a religion of the body celebrating love and sexualityBut this pagan past was not remembered It was invented Christianity and modernity created the image of the pagan to suit their own needs Paganism became a mirror for anxieties about nature body and morality Pagans were the other Those who did not subscribe to their morality and ethics their way of being as prescribed by the Church Those who did not alignThe countless local gods of Hindu villages were never wiped out But they were reinterpreted Vedic and Vedantic doctrines were layered on them What was once a forest spirit became a form of Vishnu Shiva or Shakti In this way local faiths were whitewashed given a respectable Sanskritic coatingIn the 19th century many intellectual Hindus insisted that Hinduism was not pagan They shunned the tree and animal worship part of Hinduism and focused on Vedanta Today politicians have realised that vote banks believe in old village and tribal rituals Hence in the 21st century it makes sense to refer to Hindus as pagans distinct from monotheistic religions like Islam and ChristianityThe author writes and lectures on the relevance of mythology in modern times Reach him at devduttpattanaikmiddaycom