Read two verses of the Sivabharata and the same word is doing two different things. In one place, dharma is the order of the cosmos — the natural law of the universe, with adharma its shadow, a principle of demonic chaos.1 A few verses later, a Muslim is described as acting "according to the dictates of his own religion (dharma)."2 Same word. Now it means something close to the modern English "religion" — a human interpretation of the truth of things, one community's reading of the world set beside another's.3
That slide happens inside a single seventeenth-century war-poem, in honor of a Hindu king, written by a brahmin pundit. Nobody flagged it. Nobody footnoted the shift. The word simply carried two loads at once, and the listeners heard whichever one the sentence needed. James Laine's claim is that this is not a translator's confusion or a scribal slip. It is the actual structure of how Hindu and Muslim identity got drawn in early-modern India — and the reason that identity stays so hard to pin down four hundred years later.4
Start with the concrete texture of it. The poem can say Shivaji is "devoted to his own religion" and "assuming leadership of his own religion (dharma)."5 It can grant that a Muslim might "transgress his own Book" — his svapustaka, the Qur'an — meaning the man has a Book, a creed, a dharma of his own to be faithful or faithless toward.6 And the very same text, a few breaths away, paints Muslims as demons, as the chaos-principle that order exists to defeat.7 One word holds both the handshake and the slap. That is the object on the table here: a term flexible enough to extend recognition and withhold it in the same line.
Dharma in the Sivabharata carries two meanings that never get separated.
The first is the classical Sanskrit sense: order, moral law, the way things are supposed to run. In this sense dharma is cosmic and singular. There is one order, and adharma — its opposite — is not a rival order but a breakdown of order, a demonic chaos that righteousness exists to put down.8 Used this way, the word has no plural worth speaking of. There is the law; there is the violation of the law.
The second is newer and stranger: dharma as something close to the modern English word "religion." Here it means the interpretation, by human beings, of the truth of things — a community's account of the world.9 And this sense does take a plural. Once dharma means "a reading of reality," you can have more than one. The poem speaks of "two separate religions, two dharmas," with Muslims holding their own — its own principles, a legitimate alternative view of the world, even when the text sneers at it as mleccha dharma, the "religion of the barbarians."10
The two meanings sit on top of each other. The genius — and the danger — is that the same word performs both. When the poet wants to say a Muslim follows a real tradition with its own internal rules, he reaches for dharma. When he wants to say Muslims embody the chaos that order must crush, he reaches for dharma's shadow, adharma. The vocabulary lets him do both without ever resolving which one Islam actually is.
Laine reads this as the early stirring of a process that finishes much later: the pressure of Islam in India made Hindus more aware of their own identity, pushing the word dharma — "way of life" — toward din, the Persian-Arabic word for "religion."11 Shivaji and his contemporaries lived inside that drift. But it was the later narrators of his life — Paramananda, Mahipati, and eventually Ranade and Keluskar under British influence — who finished turning a Hindu way of life into a religion in the modern, bounded sense.12
Here is the machine inside the double meaning, and why it matters.
If dharma meant only cosmic order, there could be no such thing as a Muslim dharma. There would be order and there would be its violators, full stop. Muslims would simply be adharma — the chaos-principle, demons to be defeated. No recognition, no legitimate alternative, no second religion. Pure otherness.
If dharma meant only "religion" in the bounded modern sense, you would get clean pluralism. Two faiths, two communities, each with its own Book and its own rules, sitting side by side like two nation-states of belief. Difference, but no cosmic stakes.
The Sivabharata refuses to pick. It runs both at once, and that is what gives the text its peculiar double posture toward Islam. Through the "religion" meaning, it can grant Muslims their own dharma — a real tradition, internally coherent, something a Muslim can be faithful to or betray.13 This is the language of difference: you have your reading, I have mine. Through the "order" meaning, the same text can cast Muslims as the demonic adharma that righteous kingship exists to crush.14 This is the language of otherness: you are not another community, you are the chaos itself.
The hinge is that nothing forces a choice between the two. A poet — or a politician — can extend recognition in one verse and withdraw it in the next, and the vocabulary never registers a contradiction, because dharma was built to carry both. Laine's example bites here: Shivaji "saw religion as dharma" — broadly diffuse through culture, not a strict-constructionist theology.15 He read Hindu and Muslim not just as rival theologies but as whole subcultures, distinct ways of life.16 That diffuse, way-of-life reading is exactly what makes the word so elastic — and so usable. Because it never hardens into a creed, it can stretch to include a Muslim sultan as an honorary kshatriya one moment and brand Islam demonic the next, all under the same word.17
This is why Laine resists Stewart Gordon's clean picture of a tolerant, syncretic Shivaji who allied freely with Muslim states.18 Laine does not dispute the evidence. He disputes that "tolerance" and "otherness" are opposites here. Tolerant inclusivism — folding Muslim sultans into a Hindu cosmos as honorary kshatriyas — is itself a Hindu structure, one that can expand to absorb the outsider precisely as long as the Hindu frame stays on top.19 The double meaning of dharma is what powers that absorption.
The two meanings of dharma do not stand alone. They are the load-bearing column under a cluster of distinctions this corpus keeps returning to.
The difference-versus-otherness split runs straight out of it. Difference is what the "religion" meaning licenses — two dharmas, two readings, both real. Otherness is what the "order" meaning licenses — dharma against adharma, righteousness against demonic chaos. The same word feeds both registers, which is why a single text can hold both without breaking.20
The anachronism problem rides on it too. When Laine warns that "Hindu" and "Muslim" are contested categories — that we cannot assume seventeenth-century Maharashtrians carried bounded religious identities the way a modern Western observer means them — the dharma double meaning is his primary evidence.21 The word was mid-slide. It had not yet finished becoming "religion." To read it as if it already had is to import a later, Western category back onto a text that was still working the seam between cosmic order and human creed.
And the tolerance structure rests on it. "Tolerant inclusivism" only works because dharma stays diffuse rather than creedal. A strict-constructionist faith cannot make a Muslim sultan an honorary kshatriya; a diffuse way-of-life dharma can, because it absorbs rather than confronts.22 The flexibility that looks like tolerance and the flexibility that looks like demonization are the same flexibility, seen from two angles.
The double meaning of dharma is not a dead philological curiosity. It paid off in a courtroom, three centuries later, and the payoff is sharp enough to sting.
On December 11, 1995, the Indian Supreme Court handed down a ruling on whether the BJP could campaign on a platform of Hindutva — Hindu-ness. India's constitution forbids any party from campaigning on a religious platform. The Court found a way around the bar: it ruled that Hindutva referred to a "way of life" and was "not explicitly religious."23 It went further. It ruled that "Hinduism" did not refer to a specific religion at all.24 On that basis, a Hindu-nationalist party got a legal pass to run on an antisecularist, Hindu-nationalist program.25
Laine calls this ironic, and the irony is precise. Hindu "fundamentalists" — whose common objective is to expand the scope in which Hinduism operates across the culture — won by leaning on a classically liberal, Western definition of religion: religion as bounded theological creed, the thing institutional Western religion does with its doctrines and discourses.26 Because dharma has to do with "ways of life" rather than creedal theology, the Court could say Hindutva was not "religion" in that narrow Western sense — and so escape the constitutional ban.27
Watch what the word did. In the Sivabharata, the diffuse, way-of-life sense of dharma let a poet fold Muslim sultans into a Hindu cosmos. In 1995, the same diffuseness let a Court fold a religious-nationalist platform into the category "not religion." Both moves trade on the fact that dharma never hardened into a creed. The seventeenth-century elasticity that absorbed the outsider became the twentieth-century elasticity that dodged the secularism clause. Same structural property, opposite-looking outcomes.
The deeper turn is that the Court had to adopt a Western definition of religion to do it.28 To rule Hindutva "not religious," it needed a yardstick of religion narrow enough that a way of life would not register — and that yardstick is the European, theological-creed model, the very category that British-influenced narrators like Ranade and Keluskar had earlier helped graft onto Hindu identity.29 So the chain closes: Islam's presence pushed dharma toward din; British critical categories supplied the bounded model of "religion"; and a Hindu-nationalist court reached back for that bounded model to license its expansion. The "way of life" reading and the "religion" reading were never two stable poles. They were one elastic word, available to whoever needed which face of it.
You are the translator. The Sanskrit says dharma. The page in front of you needs an English word, and there is no single right one. You learn to read the sentence for which load the word is carrying.
| The verse says… | dharma means… | English that fits |
|---|---|---|
| "Shivaji upholds dharma; the demon-Muslims spread adharma." | cosmic order versus chaos | "righteousness," "the moral law" — singular, no plural possible |
| "The Muslim acts according to the dictates of his own dharma." | a community's reading of truth | "his own religion" — pluralizable, one of two |
| "Two dharmas, with the Muslims holding their own, even if it is mleccha dharma." | two bounded creeds side by side | "two religions" — recognition, however grudging |
| "He transgressed his own Book (svapustaka)." | a creed with a scripture to betray | "his religion," with the Qur'an as its text |
| "Shivaji, devoted to his own dharma, assuming its leadership." | religion-as-identity, a thing to champion | "his religion," tipping toward "his cause" |
Notice what your hand does as you fill the column. When the verse pairs the word with adharma, you reach for "order" and the plural dies — there is one law. When the verse gives a Muslim a Book of his own, you reach for "religion" and the plural opens — now there are two. The same five letters, and your English splits in two directions depending on the neighbor-words. You feel the seam every time. The discomfort is the data: the text has not decided either, and any clean English word you choose quietly decides for it.
You have flattened the double meaning — collapsed it into one tidy modern category — when you notice these signs.
You translate dharma as "religion" everywhere and the adharma-as-demonic-chaos passages start sounding like ordinary interfaith rivalry instead of a cosmic order-versus-chaos struggle. The metaphysical stakes vanish; you have imported bounded pluralism where the text meant cosmic war.30
You translate dharma as "moral order" everywhere and the verses granting Muslims "their own dharma" become incoherent — because there cannot be two cosmic orders. You are forced to read recognition as error, when the text plainly extends it.31
You assume the seventeenth-century author already had the modern bounded category "religion" sitting in his head, fully formed. You read the Sivabharata as if it were drawing borders between two faiths the way a census officer would — and you miss that the word was mid-slide, still half cosmic-order, the bounded sense not yet finished.32
You treat the 1995 ruling as a simple abuse of language rather than a live exploitation of a real ambiguity. You miss that the Court did not invent the "way of life versus religion" gap — it inherited it from a word that genuinely carries both, and from narrators who genuinely had not finished the conversion.33
You let "tolerant" and "demonizing" look like two different authors. The diagnostic catch: when the same text does both, you are not looking at inconsistency. You are looking at one elastic word doing both jobs.34
The strongest evidence is textual and specific. Laine names verses: dharma used for the natural law of the universe with adharma its demonic counter (the order sense); and dharma used for a Muslim acting on the dictates of his own religion (SBH 13.40), transgressing his own Book (SBH 12.114), and Shivaji devoted to and leading his own dharma (SBH 17.12, 19.30) — the religion sense.35 The two uses sit in one poem.
The standing tension Laine refuses to resolve: did seventeenth-century Maharashtrians "have religion" the way we mean it? His answer is yes-but-fluid. They felt there should be distinct boundaries between communities — the impulse was real — yet how comfortable any individual was with another group's cultural styles "remained widely variable."36 The word was sliding from "way of life" toward "religion," not arrived. So they had something, but not the clean bounded thing a modern Westerner means, and the page must hold that yes-but without collapsing it either way.37 Do not resolve it.
A second tension sits against Stewart Gordon. Gordon reads Shivaji as a tolerant syncretist who allied with Muslim states even against Hindu powers. Laine does not dispute Gordon's evidence; he disputes that tolerance and otherness are opposites, since inclusivism is itself a Hindu structure that absorbs on Hindu terms.38 Both readings stay live.
Open questions. Were there chronological, class, and caste differences in how the Hindu-Muslim boundary got drawn — was the diffuse-dharma reading an elite brahmin-pundit habit more than a popular one?39 If the bounded sense of "religion" was partly a British import (Ranade, Keluskar) but partly homegrown (Paramananda, Mahipati, in advance of British times), how much of the modern category is colonial graft and how much indigenous drift?40 And does the 1995 court's maneuver expose a permanent feature of dharma — that any state can pick whichever meaning serves it — or a one-time exploit?
Laine works the category "religion" knowing it is under heavy fire. Wilfred Cantwell Smith argued that "religion" as a bounded noun — a thing one has, like a possession — is largely a modern Western reification, and that older traditions lived faith without that container. Talal Asad pushed harder: there is no transhistorical essence of "religion"; the category itself is a product of a particular Western, post-Reformation, secular-state history, and exporting it onto other societies smuggles in Christian and colonial assumptions.
From inside Laine's actual procedure, you can feel where he meets them and where he pulls away. He converges with them on the diagnosis. His whole point about dharma mid-slide — that the bounded modern sense had to emerge, that British critical categories of "religion, interior and exterior, and nation" shaped the later narrators — is an Asad-flavored observation. He is watching the category get built, in real time, partly under colonial pressure.41 He would not disagree that "religion" is historically made rather than eternally given.
The tension comes when the critics' move would dissolve the word entirely — when "religion" gets called a pure colonial construct with no purchase on pre-British India. Laine will not go there. He finds the bounded sense already stirring in Paramananda and Mahipati, "well in advance of British times."42 If "religion" were nothing but a British import, that pre-colonial stirring could not exist — yet there it is in the text. So Laine keeps the word in play: contested, historically conditioned, mid-formation, but still doing real analytic work on a real seventeenth-century document. What this lets him see that a pure-construct reading cannot: the Sivabharata itself is caught in the act of making "religion" out of "way of life." You need the contested category to even describe the seam. Throw the word out and the seam becomes invisible — you lose the very thing Laine is pointing at.
The double meaning of dharma connects outward to three things this vault already tracks, and each connection pays a different way.
First, Religious Tolerance as Political Philosophy. The standard Western story makes "tolerance" the achievement of a secular state that brackets religion out of politics — religion privatized, the public square neutral. The dharma case runs against the grain. Here "tolerant inclusivism" is not a secular bracketing at all; it is a Hindu structure that absorbs the outsider on Hindu terms, folding Muslim sultans in as honorary kshatriyas so long as the Hindu frame stays sovereign.43 The handshake produces an insight neither side reaches alone: tolerance can be a mode of dominance, not its opposite. When the absorbing frame never has to give up its own primacy, "letting you in" and "ranking you below" become the same gesture. And the 1995 ruling completes the irony — the secular-state vocabulary of "religion versus way of life," the very vocabulary built to protect against religious politics, gets used to license it. Tolerance-talk and domination-talk turn out to share a grammar.
Second, Radical Reactionary Identity. Reactionary movements typically claim to be restoring an ancient, stable identity that modernity corrupted — recovering what was always there. The dharma history exposes the trick. The "timeless" Hindu religious identity that Hindutva claims to defend was, on Laine's reading, still being assembled in the seventeenth century and only finished under British influence in the nineteenth.44 The thing presented as primordial is recent and partly colonial in its very form. The insight that lands only at this intersection: the reactionary's "restoration" is often a first construction wearing the mask of recovery — and the more modern the category (here, bounded "religion" on a European model), the louder the claim to ancient pedigree, because the novelty is exactly what must be hidden. The 1995 court borrowing a Western definition to defend "eternal" Hinduism is that mask in legal form.
Third, Information Control and Propaganda. Propaganda's core move is the strategically ambiguous term — a word loaded to mean one thing to one audience and another to another, so the same utterance recruits opposed listeners and can never be cleanly pinned down. Dharma with its two meanings is a found, organic instance of exactly that mechanism, operating across centuries rather than across a single campaign. The poet can signal recognition (two dharmas) and demonization (dharma versus adharma) in one breath; the 1995 court can call Hindutva "not religion" while everyone hears "Hindu." The connection yields a sharp point: the most durable propaganda may not be a manufactured slogan but a real polysemy in the language, weaponized by whoever needs which face of the word. You do not have to forge ambiguity if the tradition already handed you a word that means two things — you only have to choose your verse.
Sharpest implication. A single word's failure to choose between "cosmic order" and "human creed" is not a quirk of Sanskrit — it is a usable political instrument that stayed loaded for four hundred years. The same elasticity that let a seventeenth-century poet both honor and demonize Muslims let a twentieth-century court call a religious-nationalist platform "not religion." Ambiguity does not get resolved by history; it gets inherited, and weaponized by whoever holds the bench.
Generative questions.
Is the "way of life versus religion" gap a permanent exploit in any tradition whose central category never hardened into a creed — and if so, which other traditions carry a dharma-shaped word waiting to be used the same way?
If the bounded modern sense of "religion" was partly homegrown (Paramananda, Mahipati) and partly British graft (Ranade, Keluskar), can the two strands even be separated now — or has the colonial category fused so completely with the indigenous drift that "what Hinduism always was" is unrecoverable?
The 1995 court adopted a Western definition of religion to serve a Hindu-nationalist end. Does every antisecularist project eventually have to borrow the secularist's vocabulary to win — and what does it cost the project to do so?