Connected World, Universal Values and the Hatred for Local

A person wondered why there is so much hatred against Brahmins.  But the hatred is not just against Brahmins; sometimes it is against Hindus as a whole.  The mutual hatred between Muslims and the Western world is beyond the scope of this article.   Brahmins in particular and Hindus in general do not exhibit so much hatred against any other groups but are still hated if we look at social media posts.  Indian cinema has been portraying Brahmins as the bad guys - not the typical strong man villain, but the cunning one.   For a few centuries earlier, it was the Jews.  During that period, in popular western literature Jews were the cunning villains.  We may get the reason for that if we understand the motive of universalizing religions. 

I see this as an influence of so-called universal religions like Christianity and the effect of a connected world where written communication became prominent.  Universalizing ideologies rely on standardized, easily transportable texts to scale up and convert new populations. In the absence of such mass communication, historical prejudices would have remained strictly local.

Jews and Hindus are the significant groups that hold up against the onslaught of Christianity and Islam.  The followers of these religions do not try to universalize them.  As far as Judaism is concerned, the identity is retained and ferociously preserved.  With Hinduism, no ideology can be universal.  Every social group can have its identity and every way of life is there for people to choose.  In simple terms, for a Hindu, the world is just fine being plural; it doesn't need ideologies to bring people under one umbrella organization like a church does.  So, Judaism and Hinduism are clear threats to the universalizing religions.   People of universal religions think that theirs is the norm and locals are abnormal.  So, it is natural for the converted to hate the locals.

But why Brahmins are hated as a special case?  Brahmins have established that a culture, spanning different languages, geographies, lifestyles, philosophies and beliefs is possible.  Adi Shankaracharya formalized the six religions and also had a philosophy that can coexist with them.  When the rapid growth of monastic Buddhism threatened to overshadow the diverse, localized traditions of the land, Adi Shankara engaged in rigorous philosophical debate, absorbing Buddhist dialectics to revitalize Vedic thought. By integrating these ideas, he demonstrated that conflicting philosophies could coexist within a single civilizational framework, establishing the plurality that universalizing ideologies seek to erase.

Critics frequently attribute anti-Brahmin sentiment to a legacy of rigid caste hierarchies and restricted social mobility. But, this perspective often overlooks a thousand years of foreign invasions, economic disruption, and colonial engineering that destabilized native social structures. Rather than a system of absolute suppression, historical data reveals a complex, fluctuating ecosystem of coexisting communities where political and economic power regularly shifted.

Using early nineteenth-century British colonial records, the historian Dharampal demonstrated in his book 'The Beautiful Tree' that indigenous education and economic survival were not the exclusive domains of a few elite groups; in fact, Shudras and other localized communities predominated in thousands of traditional village schools. By misreading this highly adaptable, pluralistic social structure as a monolith of absolute subjugation, modern universalist frameworks misattribute the systemic poverty left behind by colonial extraction to an inherent flaw within Hindu pluralism itself.

Brahmins are committed to this plurality and the civilizational state of Bharat.  They have preserved not just the peaceful coexistence but also the respect for various philosophies, theology and languages, which is the hallmark of the Bharateeya civilization.  That is what keeps the plurality intact in such a vast country.  Those who are upset at the plurality will naturally hate and ridicule them as it will be unsettling for them to see plurality succeed.