Religion & Power in India The Architects of Chaos The Brahminical Role and the Riddle of Morality How the custodians of Hinduism built a theology of convenient truths — and what it cost the civilisation they claimed to protect HYDERABAD | Special Report I n the long history of organised religion, few questions are as disorienting as a simple one posed by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar at the opening of his seminal work Riddles in Hinduism: why is a Hindu a Hindu? A Parsi can answer in a sentence. A Muslim can answer in five words. A Christian's answer fits on a bumper sticker. Ask a Hindu, and the question opens into a labyrinth — of competing gods, contradictory scriptures, incompatible philosophies, and a social order that claims divine sanction while being visibly constructed by human hands. This is not an accident. It is, Ambedkar argued, the product of a sustained and largely successful project of institutional design — one whose architect...