Kancha Ilaiah burst onto the Indian intellectual scene in 1996, with his now-famous book, Why I Am Not a Hindu. In that work, Ilaiah made a partly autobiographical case for why he, and his fellow Dalit-Bahujan (Shudra) brothers and sisters, feel nothing but anger and apathy toward Hinduism – the religion that had devalued their lives, their culture and their gods while also shutting them out from the 'high culture' of the twice-born castes. Nearly 15 years later, Ilaiah has written a new book making the case for why Hinduism itself deserves to die, and why the annihilation of caste will also annihilate Hindu dharma. India, he proclaims, is on its way to a 'post-Hindu' future, one he is himself trying to bring about and looks forward to with obvious delight.
The passage of time has clearly not moderated Ilaiah's passion, as the same burning anger at the injustices that have been heaped upon the Dalit-Bahujan and Adivasi communities animates both his books. Unfortunately, time has also not cured him of an essentialist, black-and-white style of thinking that is largely unconcerned with facts. The same stereotypical 'we good, Brahmins bad' style of thinking that reduced Why I Am Not a Hindu to nothing more than a self-righteous howl reduces Post-Hindu India to a wishful daydream that floats free of history – and, indeed, even of contemporary reality. Ilaiah has written a romance, rather than the analysis informed by social science that one would one would expect from a professor of political science at one of India's most renowned institutions for higher education, Osmania University in Hyderabad.
The thesis in Post-Hindu India is simple enough. It claims that of the world's four major religions, Hinduism "is on the course of a slow and sure death" because the "caste cancer" that the religion legitimises is eating it from the inside, making it cede ground to more egalitarian religions such as Islam and Christianity. Enabled by capitalism, globalisation and the spread of English education, Dalit-Bahujans finally have the option of waging – and winning – a civil war against the "spiritual goondas" (Brahmins, in other words) and joining religions that are more "spiritually democratic". Even when they do not officially leave it, Dalits-Bahujans have "no respect for Hinduism", Ilaiah argues. The rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Hindutva forces is only "pushing Hinduism toward its death", because it is trying to achieve a national and global stature for Hinduism without ensuring equality for the oppressed majority.
This leads to the other part of Ilaiah's book, which focuses on explaining the nature of the "caste cancer". According to Ilaiah, the pathology of caste, ostensibly sucking the lifeblood out of Hinduism, lies in the religion's inability to condone and institutionalise a "spiritual democratic course of equality and transformation within its inner structures". This raises the question of why Hinduism lacks this spiritual democracy, which Ilaiah evidently finds in abundance in all other world religions. According to the author, the fundamental problem lies in "Hinduism's inability to mediate between reason and faith". While the labouring Dalit-Bahujan castes embraced a rational and productive stance toward the world, Hindu Brahminism took an "anti-productive and anti-science ethic". The irony, according to Ilaiah, is that Brahminism touted its own parasitic lifestyle based on superstition as the way to purity and knowledge, while looking down on the "real" scientists, engineers and workers – the Dalits, Shudras and Adivasis. If India has to survive in this era of modernity and globalisation, Ilaiah argues, it will have to necessarily embrace the scientific ethic of its labouring and long-suffering 'lower' castes, thus turning 'post-Hindu' – a change that the author considers inevitable.