Atheism isn't a foreign import: India's own tradition of doubt

Charvaka was the most uncompromising voice, but Indian thought held a whole range of positions on god and scripture — far wider than 'religious vs not'.

Indian philosophy even had a built-in vocabulary for the divide: astika schools accepted the authority of the Vedas, nastika schools did not — a line drawn over scripture, not simply over belief in gods. Buddhism and Jainism, two of the most influential systems ever to arise in India, are nastika by that measure and function without a creator god. So the landscape was never a single devotional consensus. It was a noisy, centuries-long argument in which materialists, sceptics, ritualists and theists all had recognised seats at the table.

The 'always religious' story papers over a far livelier history.

What changed was not the presence of doubt but its standing. In the classical period, a materialist could state his case and a theist would answer it; disagreement was the texture of a confident intellectual culture.

The irony is that India's modern doubters stand in a very old line. Twentieth-century rationalist movements, secular reformers and outspoken non-believers were not importing a foreign attitude so much as reviving a domestic one with an address in Lokayata. Recovering that lineage is not an argument for or against belief; it is simply historical accuracy. A civilisation that produced both the Upanishads and the Charvakas, both temple and refutation, was never a monoculture of faith. Its real inheritance is the argument itself — the willingness to put even the highest claims to the test of reason and the senses.

Calling atheism 'foreign' does a quiet violence to India's intellectual history. It erases the Charvakas, recasts a 2,500-year argument as a recent intrusion, and narrows a vast, contentious heritage down to a single approved note. The cost is not borne by atheists alone; it impoverishes everyone's sense of what Indian thought actually was.

The deeper lesson is about what a tradition is for. India's classical greatness lay partly in its appetite for disagreement — in schools that sharpened themselves against rivals they took seriously enough to quote at length. A culture confident enough to preserve the arguments of those who denied its gods is stronger, not weaker, for it. Flattening that into 'we were always uniformly devout' trades a living debate for a comforting myth.

The thing worth keeping is the pluralism itself. Whether one ends up believing or doubting matters less than recognising that both moves are native here, with long and honourable Indian pedigrees. The future of a thinking culture depends on remembering that its inheritance includes the question mark as much as the prayer — and that, in India, it always did.