We’re spiritual, right? We as in India. We believe we are spiritual and so does the rest of the world. We are spiritual the way the West is secular and scientific and Africa is poor and starving and China is oppressive and Antarctica is inhospitable. It is the general definition we have been assigned by the world as well as our own past.

Pop culture is full of references to Westerners who come to India to “find themselves” and to Indians who move Westwards and lose their roots and become corrupted. These cleanly labelled folders have contained our ways of thinking for a long time. So much so that we don’t often question them.

So I am going to question them today and imply, for the sake of argument, that perhaps India is materialistic and the West is spiritual. I am going to argue that the East-West cultural divide that we have all gotten used to because of popular culture, is bogus and that India may be seen as the exact opposite of the spiritual ideal that it is often considered to be.

I think that spirituality is not something defined by culture. A culture cannot be spiritual because it does not have a spirit. Sure, we can slap labels on a particular culture and play devotional music in the background and pan slowly across temples at dawn, but none of that is spirituality. It is only the appearance of spirituality.

Spirituality is more of an individual concern and may mean different things to different people. To associate it with a direction or a landmass or a population of people is not only wrong, it is also potentially dangerous because it births stereotypes that can be damaging in the long run. And there are those who believe that the spiritual label was applied to Indians to keep them from aspiring to anything resembling Western sophistication (that claim to sophistication is a different matter entirely of course). So perhaps consider this a thought experiment against Orientalism