Vaibhav Kharat
There comes a time in a society when it begins to eat its own body, mind, and soul, when cruelty starts dressing the robe of morality in sanctity, when people pray louder but feel emptier. In moments like this, I often think of an old myth: The story of the ‘Brahmarakshasa’. A learned Brahmin, whose arrogance and misuse of knowledge turn him into a demon. He remembers every mantra, but he has forgotten love, sympathy, empathy, and all the humanistic values he can think of. He guards the temple but cannot enter it himself —not because of his curse, but because of his ignorance. He is a scholar who has lost his humanity to evil.
The Brahmarakshasa, to me, is not just a myth. It is a metaphor for what happens when sacred spaces and knowledge become power without compassion and kindness, when wisdom turns into hierarchy. Before coming to the three recent incidents, i.e., the shoe thrown at the Chief Justice of India, the suicide of a Dalit IPS officer, and the lynching of a Dalit man in Uttar Pradesh, it is important to state that I am not reading myth as fiction. Thinkers like Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, Alwin Gouldner, and many others had already shown us that myths are sociology’s first and can be the last mirrors. Weber read Protestant myths to understand modern capitalism, showing us ‘how the hunger for salvation mutated into the hunger for accumulation’. Freud read Greek myths to reveal the ‘Oedipus complex ‘ to understand guilt, repression, and the way desire organizes our civilization. And Gouldner used the mythological metaphor of ‘Minotaur’, to acknowledge and expose that ‘Sociology’ can hardly be value-free or neutral. They all knew what we often forget that myths are not dead; they are living dreams, conscious-unconscious desires, suppressed thoughts that societies tell themselves to hide their fears. So, when I invoke and provoke the Brahmarakshasa, I am not talking about religion. I am talking about that deeper moral psychology of Indian society where sacredness becomes a weapon.
The Brahmarakshasa Within: The Individual’s Haunting
When the news came about the suicide or institutional murder of a Dalit IPS officer in Haryana, it barely lingered in public memory, and neither did the public feel sorry. It was registered as just another tragedy, another statistic, another loss. But those who could read between the lines saw something else: the slow suffocation of a man trapped between two moral worlds. He was everything the modern Indian state claims to value: disciplined, educated, meritorious, seasoned, devoted to duty. But beneath that uniform, he carried the invisible inheritance of caste, the subtle, relentless reminder that one can climb the institution but never quite belong to. Weber’s bureaucracy, in theory, is rational and impartial. In practice, in India, it breathes through the lungs of caste and casteism. The officer’s uniform may have been spotless, but the system he served was stained with hierarchies of casteism, stigma, prejudices, stereotypes, superior and inferior complexes older than the nation state itself. His death, then, was not a personal collapse or damage. It was a moral implosion of the institution itself. It was the point where constitutional ideals collided with Sanatan residues, i.e., the sacred violence of purity, discipline, and hierarchy based on one’s caste. The Brahmarakshasa here is psychological, i.e., the demon of alienation that lives in those who serve the system while knowing they will never be embraced by it. It is not outside the officer; it is inside the very structure he trusted and worked for. And that’s why his death does not feel like surrender, but like a protest. A silent rebellion against the impossibility of belonging.
The Brahmarakshasa in the Temple of Justice
Then came another moment or a warning, i.e., a shoe flying through the air inside the Supreme Court, aimed at the Chief Justice of India. Most people called it disrespectful. I saw it differently. It was not an attack on a person; it was an act of rupture, a symbolic rebellion against the rational and untouchable aura of judicial sanctity. The Indian courtroom, with its robes, rituals, and archaic language like “My Lord,” “Your Honour,” feels less like a democratic space and more like a remnant of feudal theology. The judiciary often projects itself as the final temple of justice, immune to critique. But that temple, too, has cracks. It is increasingly shaped by silence, deference, and the politics of selective and elective morality of inhumanity. That shoe, however crude the gesture, was a disturbance in the rituals of official order. A refusal to participate in the sanctity of an institution that has forgotten empathy. It was not rebellion against the law, but against the idea that law is beyond emotion, beyond pain. Here, the Brahmarakshasa takes institutional-structural form. It is not a ghost in the walls; it is the very architecture. The institution that feeds on reverence, that demands worship rather than accountability, becomes demonic in the Weberian sense, where rationality becomes domination, and sanctity becomes self-deception. In that courtroom, the Brahmarakshasa sat higher than the Constitution itself. And the thrown shoe, in its small rebellion, was an act of moral courage, an attempt, however messy, to remind the Republic that no human institution deserves divinity.
The Collective Brahmarakshasa: The Mob as Sanatani Unconscious
And then, the most chilling form, the mob lynching of a Dalit man in Uttar Pradesh. There is something unbearably ritualistic about it. The shouts of “Jai Shri Ram,” “Yogi ka Raj,” the recording of the act, the crowd performing ritual purity through murder, willingly. It feels less like violence and more like a dark ceremony, which Durkheim would call “evil collective consciousness ” or evil collective effervescence”. Freud once said that civilization rests on guilt, and that societies project their guilt onto scapegoats when they cannot bear it themselves. The lynching mob became the collective Brahmarakshasa, i.e., a society possessed by its own sanctity. It kills to feel pure. It turns murder into a moral duty and cruelty into practice. There is no individual here, only a crowd possessed by an ancient script. They do not kill because they are evil. They kill because they are afraid and terrified, afraid of impurity, of untouchability, of equality, of the trembling thought that their god might not be theirs alone. Henceforth, each act of mob violence, then, is not a breakdown of order but a reaffirmation of it. It tells us that the Brahmarakshasa does not live outside the Sanatan order. He is its unconscious. He is the moral logic that makes cruelty sacred, hierarchy natural, and compassion suspect.
The Haunted Republic
When I look at these three events together, the suicide of the officer, the shoe in the courtroom, and the lynching on the street. I see a pattern. The Republic is haunted, terrified, and flickering. Its institutions are not secular or sacred; they are possessed. The ghosts of hierarchy have simply changed costumes from the priest’s robes to the bureaucrat’s uniform, from the temple to the court. The Brahmarakshasa is not a myth of the past; it is the face of our modernity. It lives in the moral arrogance of power, in the indifference of the privileged, and in the silence of those who think neutrality is wisdom. And maybe this is the tragedy and comedy of our times that we have mistaken sacredness for goodness. We have forgotten that the sacred, when unexamined, can be the most dangerous form of violence. To name the Brahmarakshasa, then, is not an intellectual exercise. It is an act of ethical clarity. Because only when we name our demons can we stop mistaking them for gods. Until then, the Republic will remain haunted, dignified on paper, demonic in spirit. And the Brahmarakshasa will keep walking among us, through us, inside us, dressed in authority, armed with scriptures, feeding on silence.
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Acknowledgement: The author is thankful to Dr. Milind Dhaware ( Centre for South Asian Studies, SIS, JNU) for suggesting and discussing the theme of this article.
Vaibhav Kharat is a doctoral student at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, DU, Working on Buddha Viharas.
