From fundamentalism to freedom

The background

I grew up in Leicester, in a household that was Hindutva before I knew that word. My father was active in the local branch of the Vishva Hindu Parishad. My mother ran a weekly satsang for women in our community. The house was full of murtis, incense, and rules. We were vegetarian not by preference but by religious law. We didn’t eat onions or garlic because they were considered tamasic — foods that promote ignorance and lethargy. I was not allowed to date, cut my hair short, wear Western clothes outside the house, or question my father’s authority on any matter, religious or otherwise.

People in the West tend to think of Hinduism as a gentle religion — yoga, meditation, namaste. And some expressions of it are. But the Hinduism I grew up in was rigid, hierarchical, and punitive. Caste was not discussed openly in our community, but its logic was everywhere: who married whom, whose family was respected, which surnames carried weight. My father was a Brahmin, and that fact structured his entire worldview. We were at the top of a divine ordering. Others were below. That was dharma.

I was a devoted child. I did puja every morning before school, touching my forehead to the ground before the family shrine. I memorized shlokas in Sanskrit without understanding them. I fasted on Ekadashi. I believed, deeply and without question, that the gods were real, that karma governed the universe, and that my duty was to fulfill the role assigned to me by birth: be a good Hindu daughter, marry a good Hindu boy, raise good Hindu children. The cycle would continue, and that continuity was sacred.

The cracks

I got into the University of Edinburgh to read philosophy. My father didn’t want me to go. He wanted me to study pharmacy at De Montfort and live at home. My mother, quietly and fiercely, insisted. She had never been to university herself, and I think she wanted me to have something she hadn’t. It was the first time I saw her overrule him. It cost her something, and I have never forgotten it.

Philosophy was the detonator. Not because it attacked Hinduism specifically — most of my professors barely mentioned it. But because it taught me how to think about claims, any claims, including the ones I had been raised on. In my first term, I encountered the problem of evil in the context of Christian theism, and I realized it applied with equal force to the Hindu concept of a just cosmic order. If karma is real, then every child born into poverty or suffering has earned it through past-life sins. That is not justice. That is victim-blaming dressed in metaphysics.

I began reading about the history of Hinduism — not the devotional version I had been taught, but the scholarly version. I learned that the caste system was not an ancient, unchanging divine order but a social structure that had been codified, rigidified, and weaponized over centuries. I read B.R. Ambedkar, the Dalit intellectual who had drafted India’s constitution and then publicly converted to Buddhism as a rejection of the caste hierarchy embedded in Hindu scripture. His critique was devastating: Hinduism, he argued, was inseparable from caste, and caste was inseparable from cruelty.

I also encountered the Hindutva movement in an academic context for the first time. I had grown up inside it, absorbing its narratives as truth: India was a Hindu nation corrupted by Muslim invaders and British colonizers, and its restoration required Hindu unity and dominance. In my politics classes, I learned to see this for what it was: ethno-religious nationalism, structurally identical to the movements I had been taught to condemn in other contexts. The VHP, the RSS, the BJP — these were not cultural organizations. They were political movements using religion as a vehicle for power.

The turning point

Second year, I took a course on philosophy of religion. We spent a week on the concept of faith itself — what it means to believe something without evidence, and whether that is ever epistemically justified. I wrote an essay arguing that it was, drawing on Hindu philosophy. My tutor gave me thoughtful feedback. She didn’t tell me I was wrong. She just asked: “Would you accept this argument if it were being made on behalf of a religion you didn’t already hold?”

I sat with that question for weeks. The answer was no. If a Scientologist had made the same argument — that faith is its own justification — I would have dismissed it immediately. The only reason I found it convincing for Hinduism was that Hinduism was mine. And that is not a reason. That is an accident of geography.

The final piece was the Manusmriti — the Laws of Manu, a foundational text of Hindu dharma. I had known of it but never read it. It prescribes specific punishments for different castes committing the same crime (Brahmins receive lighter sentences). It describes women as inherently dependent, requiring male guardianship at every stage of life. It endorses servitude for Shudras. My father kept this text in our puja room. I had touched my forehead to the ground in front of a book that described people like my university friends — people I loved — as spiritually inferior by birth.

I stopped praying. Not dramatically. I just stopped one morning, and the next morning, and the morning after that. The shrine on my desk in my university room gathered dust. I didn’t remove it. I just stopped facing it.

The aftermath

Telling my parents was a slow process rather than a single conversation. I stopped fasting. I stopped wearing the red thread. When I came home for holidays, I participated in family rituals mechanically, and my mother noticed. She asked, once, gently, if everything was alright. I said I was rethinking some things. She nodded and didn’t push. I think she knew.

My father found out when he saw a book on my shelf: Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. He held it like it was contaminated. He asked me if I had become “one of those self-hating Hindus.” I told him I didn’t hate Hinduism. I just didn’t believe it was true. He told me I was ungrateful. He told me that everything I had — my education, my opportunities, my life in this country — was because of the values Hinduism had given our family. He was not entirely wrong about that. But the values he meant were discipline, education, and family loyalty. Those are human values. They don’t require gods.

The community gossip was painful. In our circle, a daughter who rejects the faith is a reflection on the family. My mother heard whispers at temple. My father’s standing in the VHP was questioned. I carried guilt about that for a long time — not guilt about leaving, but guilt about the cost my leaving imposed on people I loved.

What helped

Philosophy — the discipline, not just individual philosophers. Learning to follow an argument wherever it goes, to distinguish between what I wanted to be true and what the evidence supported, to treat my own beliefs with the same skepticism I applied to everyone else’s. That training was the most valuable thing I received at university.

Stoicismhelped fill the practical gap that losing religion creates. Hinduism had given me a framework for daily life — rituals, ethical guidelines, a sense of cosmic order. Stoicism offered something structurally similar but grounded in reason rather than revelation. Focus on what you can control. Act with virtue. Accept what you cannot change. It was close enough to the discipline I had been raised with that the transition felt natural.

The ex-Hindu community is smaller and less visible than ex-Christian or ex-Muslim spaces, but it exists. Finding other South Asian atheists — people who understood the specific tangle of religion, culture, family honor, and caste that makes leaving Hinduism its own particular kind of hard — was important. They understood why I still cook my grandmother’s recipes, why I still love Diwali, why I can reject the theology and still feel a catch in my throat when I hear a Sanskrit mantra chanted well. The beauty and the beliefs are not the same thing, and learning to keep one while releasing the other has been the quiet work of the years since.

This is a composite account. Priya is not a real individual but a fictional character whose story is drawn from the common patterns of leaving Hindu fundamentalism. No single person’s experience is represented here, but the themes — caste critique, Hindutva politics, the role of philosophy education, and the entanglement of religion with culture and family honor — recur across many real accounts.