Imagining India Without Religion or Partition:
A Serious Essay About a Very Unserious Idea
CHAPTER 2 –
PIB (POTENTIAL INSANE BHARAT): HOW DOES A COUNTRY FUNCTION WITH NO RELIGION?
You know what is the biggest lie besides “Everything will be sorted after class 12th”?
That everything will be sorted after college? No obviously not but that how religion divides us. Does it? Religion is a mere social construct created to satisfy human loopholes, human mistakes and if not hitherto “beliefs” classified into categories which again justify, either mistakes or crimes. Religion in the first place is quite divided, 3 or more accountants, it’s almost like god’s HR work, but it is nice it is okay it is bad; everything is. The question is about India right now. Did religion divide us? Is religion capable of something like this? You know what time it is; it is setting time. Now imagine, if India is a metaphor, a feeling and religion is yet another feeling, a metaphor both completely parallel, will for the matter of fact be perceived in different realities by different people differently. That indicates the thing that holds these threads of hierarchies, meaning it is a flowchart with a creator of two metaphors, big metaphors. So, the real question is, how is the creator? Common people? God? Government? Brits? Jinnah? Gandhi? Continuing this loop of questions, if humans are controlling the functioning of both metaphors which may or may not be linked to each other then we are both capable of holding them accountable and being selfish and biased and create intentional disparities. If India is dividable, religion is dividable, humans are dividable. You know what is not? The creators of these notion on division. The game owners.
See you later, dividator!
Even if religion disappeared tomorrow, Indians especially Indian aunties would still find 700 new ways to discriminate: surnames, language, chai vs coffee, skin tone, caste, height, dosa pronunciation fights, sugar vs jaggery, fair-and-lovely trauma, Goa trip permissions. If I say “dosa” wrong, we might go to war.
Now close your eyes and imagine PIB, a country with a literal ocean named after it, mountains guarding it, agriculture feeding it, tech powering it, culture overflowing out of every border.
Without division, the subcontinent becomes too powerful. Like super super super powerful, I am out of words for this kind of a power, as I type my fingers burn, powerful, okay that sounded dramatic, but yes that powerful. Obviously, every other permanent member will a hundred percent be jealous. Because it’s like teenagers with incredible potential but terrible influencers.
Now imagine this:
SECTION 1: GOVERNING A COUNTRY WITH NO RELIGION
How does a nation function without, conversion laws, beef bans, temples, mosques, religious code of conduct, Hindu Marriage Act, Muslim Marriage Act, church weddings, nikah, pheras everything worth newspaper headlines, everything worth law and constitution? Who designs rites of passage? What is a “funeral” without religion? What is a “surname” without caste history? So will we be something? Will you be now finally known for you instead of externalities? Will you be the freest version of yourself, no last name no actual holding? The most “west” you can be or the most quilt-free you can be?
Let’s break it down:
Surnames become caste-coded again
Like,
Sharma — not just your next-door Sharma uncle and his son but all of India Sharma(s) will become North Indian upper class.
Sheikh — will become new Karachi and not only Bangladesh nepo-drama.
Singh — will become the big old Punjab, Haryana, Gurgaon, Delhi vibes not only this but Punjab so big these sectors will cover absolutely nothing of the real Singh.
Not only Bose but Das — will become Bengal medical drama in its truest form of big fish market.
Khans and Kapoor’s — like the usual filmy but filmy Lahore–Bombay royalty.
No religion but old caste flows return in new costumes.
Weddings become more hilarious, earlier at least it used to be a 3-day long vacation, where everybody but you are enjoying, food, delicacies it almost a like a big festival in the name of gifts and families more than love and bond. Like they say, biiiiig fat Indian weddings. Not considering India will be so big, and fat. Indian wedding will remain the same as they were?
Games and dances and kids running around? Not really.
There will be No pheras, no nikah, no church bell, only a universal marriage ceremony conducted. But what about the pride and class every Indian family carries? Are you disrespecting them by saying that their sons and daughters will have a court marriage?
WHAT A SIN! Without serving at least 600 hundred random people, and making my daughter and her husband meet these people and use all my daughters saving for the gifts and these 600 random people who will not only judge but give the best advice that there is, I will let this marriage proceed? The paan stall and the mithai stalls will be their sir but in this world of PIB, the universal marriage ceremony will be as follows:
Steps:
1. Find someone you love
2. Get them to marry you
3. Legalise your marriage
4. Eat good food
5. Get certificate
6. Take photo with Bugatti
7. Go home
8. Go on vacation
Marriage becomes a literal HR paperwork.
But should it be this easy? What about the old messy big fat Indian wedding? This is literally pseudo western wedding. Are you converting us? #LOVE-WEST
SECTION 2: CINEMA IN A RELIGION-LESS SUBCONTINENT
Movies and wedding and movies on complicated wedding scenarios, no better love dynamics is explained in Indian movies then in other movies. Dil Chahta Hai, Dil Dhadkne Do, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, but in Indian cinema and Indian life, it is always either Dil or Devdas and in politics it is just Dil or democracy. India loves a little Dil and drama.
Movies play an extremely important role in shaping and building life of everyone in India. From music to movies, it tunes us in ways unexplainable. Understandably, western cinema has more non-fiction, sci-fi movies but romance comes from Indian cinema, a cinema so big there’s Bollywood, Hollywood, Tollywood. Drama so intense, romance so beautiful, songs so iconic and legendary, dynamics a little questionable sometimes, but in the end, it is all laughs and wholesome.
The greatest story ever told, Sholay, nothing can beat it. Autobiographies made so interestingly that there’s a turnover of like 10 sequels in there, the only thing ever beating Bollywood is harry potter, but if we were ever to copy harry potter and made it our very own, trust me even Ms. Rowling would be question if he was harry pooter from Punjab or harry potter. There is something homely about Indian cinema, not only that of Indian cinema or Bollywood but Pakistani songs, like they say divided by borders but united by Atif Aslam.
But the real question is, will movies like Son of Sardar still exist?
A hundred percent yes, because Punjabi pride doesn’t need any religion.
But will Bajrangi Bhaijaan disappear? Maybe, maybe not, but it can be this nicely drafted fictional drama of two borders still being united irrespective of any disparities, the question raised will be are borders religiously made or for security?
On the other hand, Padmavat becomes a violent linguistic and regional epic and Article 15 becomes more relevant, caste becomes the central villain.
Instead, films like:
Kolkata vs Lahore, Decoding Caste in Bengalore, Punjabi Supremacy: Tractor of Justice, Chennai Express 2: Language War Edition, etc.
…will be made, leaving cinema more confined and more creative, because all these vague, cliché topics are out of the way, the only possibility now left is of finding problems and making them the utter cinema.
PIB becomes the cinematic universe of identity crises.
SECTION 3: FESTIVALS AND CALENDARS
A religion-less PIB has a far more complicated problem than “what will we celebrate?” The real question is deeper and almost uncomfortable: If religion disappears, and border identities disappear, what is left for a society to collectively mark in time?
Because festivals are not just holidays. They are civilizational memory devices. They carry history, mythology, astronomy, grief, triumph, and most importantly they carry continuity.
Without religion, the entire architecture of “time” gets shaken. Calendars are not neutral tools, they are worldviews. We treat calendars like stationery items. Like okay, one is on my phone, one on my laptop, let me set up a reminder for when my next Mid Sem exam is. But they are one of the oldest political-religious technologies created by humans.
Every major calendar is anchored in a theological center, like remember what we read in 7th grade, there AD and BC and Jesus Christ divides the scale which indicates, before Christ and the new time. But if that is the case, then why is different for Hindus and Muslims, etc.? it shouldn’t be?
It implies that we are all living in the same dialogue of true reality in different parallels. What is the real and what isn’t? it’s almost a lie of reality. What if this is the best sci-fi movie Indians could ever come up with. Anyway, let us put it all together:
- Gregorian Calendar – based on the birth of Jesus Christ
- BC/AD – Before Christ / Anno Domini
- Islamic Calendar – starts at Hijra (622 CE)
- Hindu Calendar – various Panchangs based on planetary cycles and myth
- Bengali, Nepali, Tamil calendars – tied to agriculture and cosmic moments
So a religion-less PIB cannot simply “keep” the calendar as it is. Because even the numbers we use to measure time are theological in origin. PIB now faces a strange crisis:
How do you measure a future when the past you’re referencing was built on religion?
A secular state can survive without temples and mosques. But it cannot survive without a shared timeline “innit”? (don’t put all the blame on the brits now)
Each date we nonchalantly type out, each birthday we mark, each crime exam I write about challenges the world view that exists because of one’s “God.” Whose “God” might that be? How could there be one exam that I am writing and there, in the room, may be the same date for all? What kind of mystical calendar exists? Is Elon Musk pulling my leg? “Is Elon Musk Unveiling the new calendar? Meta to Rule Us All?
“The Gregorian calendar is the software of the planet by default,” which is obviously not objective. It is a Christian dateline. It is a Christian dateline because the CE/BCE ‘Common Era’ is nothing but a Christian dateline with a different label on it. It is supposed to be a secular label because obviously the lessons from 7th grade cannot speak out again anymore, which is why I grew up within a boarding school that is part bully-system and part royalty; therefore, till this day I am torn about the dating system of the Gregorian calendar, the one that is being taught to all my days as a scholar at school or are we converted?
So here comes PIB with an existential crisis of its own: How can you measure a future when the whole building of your past was erected within a religious discourse that you are seeking to erase? It’s as if you’re taking a spelling bee and the word you must spell no longer exists, and you’re expected to spell it and smile at the judges as if nothing’s amiss. That’s the irony.
The Taj Mahal, for instance, is a good example of this. And it’s so painfully white, Indian teeth can hardly relate. Like, proper, shudh desi romance vibes, from white marble to white romantics, white aesthetic.
Just at least paint it yellow okay, give it some texture, add some locks like Parisian bridges, good coaster-style love letters you know, just something to reflect the mayhem of love today.
Because monuments are memorials, and memorials are religion. When PIB removes religion, everything changes overnight, and even the Taj Mahal is embarrassing, bewildered, and out “The point is,” destroy religion, and even stone itself will lose writing. The past becomes silent. No who exactly will call me, myself and I a wonder, now who will call this the Great Mughal Mission Impossible. And this leaves the future as a blank sheet of paper nobody knows how to date. It is ironic that a secular state can perform such dramatic actions as demolishing places of worship, rewriting the history of the schools, and prohibiting the use of religious identity but at the same time it is dependent on a common timeline for its existence.
You can get rid of the supreme being, but is it possible to get rid of the supreme being’s calendar? And, before the Indian subcontinent starts to put the blame for everything from the cricket craze to the problem of constipation on the British, let us be honest: even the calendars before the colonial period were not secular either. Hindu Panchang were exclusive to specific deities. The Islamic calendar counted according to the migration of the prophet. Sikh and Buddhist calendars were marked by saints and spiritual milestones. There has never been a “neutral” calendar in India.
Therefore, the secular PIB has no choice but to come up with a new thing: The timeline will not be on God, resurrection, prophecy, migration, or myth but on what?
National feeling? Farming? Stars? PIB’s foundation? The day Gandhi and Jinnah supposedly turned pals? Winning the first cricket World Cup? It all seems very random. It all seems a matter of politics. Because the calendar is the “memory blueprint” of a culture.
You need a Year Zero to think that you are making progress. You need the start of a new era to realize your present situation. Originally, festivals were linked to: the cycles of harvesting, equinox/solstice events, movements of planets, mythical births/deaths, the performance of rituals, and the taking of a break from the usual activities. If PIB takes away the holy, is there nothing left to be celebrated? Do Diwali, Eid, Durga Puja, and Christmas still partake? The answer is Yes but as a culture, not religion. Practices are older than teachings. Culture survives faith.
The festivals transition into commemorations, folklores, regional pride, and identity markers.
Durga Puja gets dubbed “Bengal Cultural Week.”
Diwali is called “Festival of Light Traditions.”
Eid turns into “Feast of Solidarity.”
Christmas is now “Winter Gift Day.”
The death of religion does not mean the death of Memory. In a borderless PIB, festivals are assigned to regions, not religions. And there is the main question: Who will be given the National Festival Status?
Punjab: “Baisakhi has to be a national event.”
Bengal: “Durga Puja is worth a week-long celebration.”
Sindh: “We are asking for a Monsoon Festival.”
Tamil Nadu: “It’s Pongal or forget it.”
Karachi: “Eid, but as a cultural event.”
Bihar: “Chhath has to be the national festival.”
Out of the blues, management of culture was harder than managing religion because it is possible to argue about theology. you cannot argue about identity.
A PIB that has no religion discovers the fact:
When God no longer shares the calendar, culture takes the place of God.
Republic Day and Independence Day are now the BIGGEST celebrations. Diwali, Eid, and Durga Puja are categorized as “non-religious cultural holidays.”
SECTION 4: THE TRUTH IS SECULARISM IS A LIE — YOU TELL ME?
“If the principle of equality is universal, who will do the work? If everybody is a slave, who will be the master?”
Nonetheless, even in a no-religion scenario, the social structure comes back via:
Caste, language, region, accent, class, education, tech vs non-tech, metro vs non-metro, skin tone
Religion is gone. Extension of different groups continues.
Secularism is a concept that in practice sounds nice, in theory, in textbooks, in the Preamble. But secularism does not get rid of the class system, rather, it changes the tags.
Truth 1: Secularism is a condition of the human race that wants to be equal It is not the case.
Human beings are after superiority, recognition, comfort, and validation.
Truth 2: Indian secularism is not synonymous with Western secularism
France prohibits symbols. America disjoins church and state.
India?
India threw up its hands: “We shall acknowledge all religions by meddling with all of them.”
Temple management? State-controlled.
Personal laws? Different.
Uniform Civil Code? In the future.
Caste? Forever.
Truth 3: Hierarchy is more a psychological phenomenon than a religious one, Remove “Hindu–Muslim” and folk will be partitioned into:
metro vs non-metro, IIT vs non-IIT, fair vs wheatish, English vs non-English, caste-old vs caste-rebranded
Humans hate flatness.
Truth 4: Constitution is secular; society is not
Society has a bias even before breakfast.
Truth 5: Secularism does not prevent you from being discriminated against; it only allows discrimination of a different kind
In the absence of religion:
Fair skin becomes God,
English becomes the holy text,
IITs become places of worship,
Jobs become religious ceremonies,
Marriage becomes a political matter,
Language becomes a battle…
Religion is dead. Humans take over the job.
SECTION 5: RACISM IN PIB — THE UGLIEST REALITY
Just because religion is taken out of the picture does not mean that discrimination will be gone; it would only be the case that people would think of even more fantastic ways to judge one another. For the PIB, a religion-less state is nothing, but a huge social experiment aimed at discovering the extent of Indian minds’ imagination in creating and managing inequality.
The criteria for discrimination would be anything from the person’s skin tone to the type of vowels they use, to their height, to their biryani recipe, or even how they say “dosa,” whether they take metro or auto, and what would be their choice of words for calling – “dude,” “bhai,” “da,” or “re.”
This is how racism transforms in PIB:
1. New Europe Introduced by Punjab-Sindh
In PIB, the leading character of the ‘New Europe’ is composed of the Punjabis and the Sindhis aka the ‘Nordic Bloc’ but with their tractors, milk, rap, and too many protein shakes. Wedding biodatas come out like:
Complexion: wheatish turning fair in winters.
Family: upper-class, fair, well-settled.
Looking for: someone who looks like a filter.
Europe is shaking!
2. Bengal-Bangladesh-Northeast: The Colourism Triangle
Bengalis, Bangladeshis and Northeasterners face a new racism not religious, not linguistic, but aesthetic policing. Features become politics. Skin tone becomes geography. Hair texture becomes social status.
Everything becomes the region-coded issue, not the religion-coded one.
And as a result, Bengalis who cannot suffer silently are responding by: writing five essays, staging a Rabindra sangeet protest, and calling everyone uncultured.
The Northeast does not retaliate. They just mute you….
3. Accents Are Transformed into Guns
Congratulations, you are in PIB, where how you speak determines your caste. The moment you utter “water”, people will immediately know your region, class, privilege, political leaning, and whether you have been abroad or not. Wrong pronunciation of “tomato” will be treated as a hate crime. Using “aap?” instead of “tum?” will label you as a Lahore resident.
4. Everyone Insults Everyone, With Academic Precision
The Punjabis nickname the Tamilians “silent people.” The Tamilians retort by dubbing the Punjabis “loud Bluetooth speakers.” The Bengalis consider every other ethnic group as “barbarians.” Karachi looks down upon Bombay as “the imitated version of Karachi.” Bombay maintains a facade of being above all this while internally suffering.
Is there a possibility of unity? Definitely not.
The PIB turns out to be a huge comments section, and Reddit with food that is better.
5. Racism is Powerful because Identity is Strong
It is impossible to wipe out a whole track of religion through the destruction of 5,000 years of aesthetic preferences, linguistic pride and regional superiority.
It changes forms. It mutates. It gets more powerful.
The reason is that the biggest truth of PIB is this one: Religion comes to an end. But racism has nine lives.
SECTION 6: THE CAPITAL — THE BLOODIEST POLITICAL DEBATE EVER
What is PIB’s capital?
No, seriously, WHAT IS IT?
Because choosing a capital is not administrative. It’s not geographical. Technically, It’s not logical either.
It’s emotional, It’s historical, It’s petty, It’s almost like identity politics on drugs
Every region has its argument:
Punjab: “We have land, agriculture, diaspora, airports, tractors, we deserve it.”
Kolkata: “Intellectual capital, cultural capital, Tagore, addak sessions, we deserve it.”
Karachi: “Financial centre. Coastal city. No debate.”
Lahore: “Heritage. Food. Architecture. We deserve it.”
Delhi: “Historically capital, and we’ve already bought all the property, we just need to own it now.”
Dhaka: “Population majority, isn’t this democra(c)y 101?”
Choosing one will be coherently equal to constitutional meltdown plus regional ego war plus a lot lot demographic tantrums and studying for student who will have NCERT.
PIB will end up with two capitals like South Africa (or five, because why not, PIB has the manpower). SO MANY PEOPLE!
Conclusion: The capital controversy will last longer than the Aryan Migration Debate.
SECTION 8: MATHEMATICS — THE ARYABHATA CRISIS PIB NEVER SAW COMING
As we say, everything is political and thus so, the moment politics and theories and religion disappears.
Mathematics becomes political.
Not joking, because imagine so much potential, so many people, what could go wrong?
1. Aryabhata Becomes a National Dream
You remove religion and suddenly the only uncontested god left is:
Zero.
Aryabhata becomes the Kishore Kumar of PIB. Every textbook begins with his face. People suddenly start giving to R.D. Sharma, All in One, etc. People start saying “Jai Zero” unironically.
2. A Battle of Mathematical Identities
PIB suddenly realizes the subcontinent produced: Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Ramanujan, Al-Biruni, Abdus Salam, C.V. Raman, Jagadish Bose and they are ALL in one country now.
A mathematical Avengers Assemble. Who is THANOS?
3. IIT Karachi vs IIT Bombay vs IIT Madras
The real riots begin here. Not about religion. Not about language.
About rankings.
QS Rankings will cause:
12protests
7 hunger strikes
3 student revolutions
6000+ memes
Maths Becomes a Cultural Weapon
Maths becomes the new divine language.
And Aryabhata becomes PIB’s new Prophet of Logic.
End of Chapter 2.
Turn the page.