Exporting Our Philosophy, Forgetting Our Voice

At an upscale yoga studio in Berlin, a female instructor with ‘om’ tattooed across her wrists, chants, “asato ma sadgamaya” before her class begins.

At Harvard, a business school course quotes lessons from the Bhagavad Gita to teach resilience.

Meanwhile, in a London bookstore, a bestselling self-help guide reinterprets Carvaka Sutras in the language of trauma therapy and dopaminergic science.

Across the Atlantic, in a Japanese university’s classroom, a senior professor quotes Nagarjuna while unpacking modal logic. And in the financial district of Singapore, a mindfulness coach recites a verse from the Dhammapada before teaching hedge fund managers how to remain equanimous during market crashes.

Something strange and profound is happening. The world is drinking from India’s philosophical springs. We are, after all, the land that gave birth to the Upanishads, to Adi Sankara, to tantric mysteries, and yogic metaphysics. And yet, we hover on the periphery of the conversation that should be our own.

Neither the translators nor the participants, we have become mute witnesses to the rising global surge of wisdom that was once commonplace in our temples and households.  

Today, we stand unsure and ambivalent - half-ashamed, half-uncertain - watching the world bow to what we scarcely honour ourselves.

When Others Frame Your Thought

History tells us that Indian thought was never insular. It flowed like the Ganga - wise, generous, without force, yet unstoppable. Vedic chants were performed in temples in Cambodia and Vietnam. Kalidasa’s metaphors became colloquialised in China. Vedantic ideas shaped Daoist metaphysics. Nalanda’s teachings reached Korea and Japan. Traders carried Sanskrit speech and ideas into Arab tongues.

But today’s spread is of another kind. A commodified and calcified form of Indian knowledge is now being adapted. It is shorn of nuance and sanitized for virality. YouTube sensation and neurobiologist Andrew Huberman packages Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga - the eight limbs of spiritual discipline leading towards liberation - as ‘Non-Sleep Deep Rest’, a supposedly clinical protocol for performance optimization. Pranayama is no longer breath control, but oxygen efficiency. 

Worse still, our sacred texts face slander dressed up as critique. Slavoj Zizek, with a provocateur’s irreverence, declares the Bhagavad Gita a justification for violence. He views it myopically and ignores the context of the Mahabharata. A philosophical epic that dives into duty, mortality, liberation, and the self is reduced to a caricature. 

This is the cost of translation without context, the veritable double-edged sword of globalisation. On one hand, Indian thought is finally getting recognition and attention. On the other, it is being hollowed of its essence and true meaning. What remains is a beautifully wrapped shell. Marketable? Yes. But where is the soul, the rasa, the tattva? What is yoga without yama and niyama? What is Vedanta without neti-neti? 

The Absence of a Native Voice

In 1893, Swami Vivekananda electrified Chicago with words that carried the weight of five millennia worth of wisdom. He was not just a monk, but a philosopher-warrior, refuting Western misconceptions of Hinduism with brilliance. In 1919, Sri Aurobindo’s prose swelled with Sanskritic cadence, but he answered the deepest modern anxiety of alienation with a vocabulary that felt intimate and clinical. His seminal The Life Divine is the clearest distillation of Indian philosophical thought, a harmonious marriage of involution to evolution. 

The question here is: where is the new Vivekananda or Aurobindo who can act as a bridge between Plato, Ramanuja, Hegel, and the Upanishads? Where is the public intellectual who can quote Brihadaranyaka and Foucault in the same breath, not as a party trick, but as a mode of intellectual interrogation? Why does India still lack visible, public-facing philosophical voices with global fluency and native fidelity?

There are, of course, acharyas, monks, and gurus, but their audiences are spiritual or motivational, not intellectual. The few remaining Sanskrit scholars and pandits remain sequestered in mutts, distant from the vernacular of the age. There are brilliant Indologists, but most of them are European or American and often write to impress the West. This is not just an intellectual gap but a form of civilisational abdication.

Two reasons stand at the heart of this problem. 

First, the shadow of Antonio Gramsci’s cultural hegemony still looms large. Colonialism may have formally ended in 1947, but, cognitively, the Indian liberal intellectual elite remains tethered to the West’s standards. We internalised the colonial gaze and came to see our philosophy as outdated and our shastras as superstition. This is a form of neo-colonialism via intellectual inferiority. We write in idioms crafted for a different worldview and are trained to think that knowledge cannot be both rigorous and devotional. Who today, among the elite, can write a paragraph on the Isha Upanishad and link it credibly (and without force) to the digital fragmentation of attention? The answer is: no one. 

Second, and perhaps more tragically, we lack the requisite institutions to produce the correct people. Most Indian universities still teach philosophy as an afterthought. The syllabus remains ossified by stifling tradition: Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, and Wittgenstein. A single course in Indian philosophy is offered, as if to balance the ledger. Even then, the texts are taught in English, and Sanskrit is seen, if at all, as ornamental. The instructors are overburdened and underpaid, while students are training for exams, not critical reflection. Where are the academic journals that treat Nyaya logic with the same seriousness that the West gives Boethius? 

The soil lies rich, the seeds potent, but there is no gardener.

What Speaking for Ourselves Would Look Like

Beneath the gloss of pop-spirituality and productivity frameworks, the global interest in Indian thought is not superficial but existential. In an age of algorithmic anxiety and climate change, the world is hungry for non-Western frameworks. And, Indian thought offers the best alternative. Concepts like pratitya-samutpada (interdependent existence) and anasakti (non-attachment) offer a vocabulary that Western paradigms simply cannot reach.

We must capitalise on this. 

To ‘speak for ourselves’ does not mean parroting scripture or rejecting modernity. It means developing a confident and contemporary mode of Indian thought. 

Modern tools await; let us use them. Podcasts can carry the voice of Indian thought into a billion earbuds. YouTube can host debates on Sankhya and Stoicism. Instagram reels may seem like petulant vanity, but even in twenty seconds, one can plant seeds from which forests grow.

Institutions must follow likewise. We need endowed chairs in Vedanta. We need journals exploring comparative darshana. We need forums where epistemology is not just about Russell, but also about pratyaksha and anumana. We need school curricula that include Indian philosophy - not as an elective, but as a cognitive tool that helps young minds see the world differently.  This will produce a new generation of public intellectuals who are not just scholars or saints, but thinkers in the true sense. 

And above all, we need to own our legacy. Stop deriding it as superstition and outsourcing its interpretation. Simply, to be rooted is not to be regressive, and to be unapologetically Indian is not to be anti-modern. 

We Have Miles To Go Before We Sleep…

Let us not forget who we are. Not just a land of rivers and ragas but also of enlightened rishis and rigorous metaphysics. In the history of human existence, we are the only civilization that dared to ask the ultimate questions in an unquenchable pursuit of truth.

To reclaim our voice is less about nationalism and more about restoring inner alignment, for the danger is not that the world will get us wrong. It does get us wrong in plenty of fields. The real danger is that we will forget how to get ourselves right.