A sabha is an assembly.
Our mark is a sabha drawn as a circle of voices. Every bar is a different person: a different length, a different opinion. Together they become a sun, the light of shared inquiry. It moves, it pulses, it never stands still, like a living tradition.
The circle
The sabha, where ideas are debated in the open.
The bars
Voices of every age: the elder, the student, the sceptic.
The bindu
The still centre: the question every conversation keeps returning to.
Who started HIPL
Prannv Dhawan
Co-founderPrannv Dhawan is an Advocate at the Supreme Court of India. A graduate of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, he has written on constitutional law, caste and politics for the Indian Express, The Hindu, Economic and Political Weekly, ThePrint, The India Forum and Frontline, among other publications.
Shivom Singh Lovell
Co-founderShivom Singh Lovell runs the Delhi Union, HIPL's debating partner, and is a student at King's College London.
Hinduism without adjectives.
We do not need adjectives for our Hinduism. We need to recover our faith on its own authentic terms — through the substance of how we actually build, serve, and govern.
Prannv Dhawan, "The Hinduism We Deserve"
HIPL starts from a simple idea: faith, culture and public life should be talked about with love, honesty and evidence, not left to slogans. For a generation, Hindus who care about public life have been asked to choose between a quiet piety that stays out of the public square and a loud identity politics. HIPL refuses that choice.
Instead it looks at what the tradition has actually built and who it has served: seva, institutions, reform from within, and a habit of argument as old as the texts. And it starts from one of the oldest lines in the Rig Veda, which is also the idea behind our sabha mark: ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti, truth is one, the wise call it by many names (Rig Veda 1.164.46).
Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan. Said with love, and meaning all three.
In his essay "Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan", Prannv Dhawan asks us to take three charged words out of the drawing-room argument and back to the chaupal, where for crores of people they are descriptions before they are ideologies: the language they speak, the faith they hold close, the country they call home.
Strengthen the language
Make Hindi a language of laboratories, law reports, medicine and code, so the Hindi-medium student has the same purchase on the republic that English gives the drawing room.
Deepen the faith
Measure the faith, in his words, "in what was built and who was served": institutions, clean ghats, honest temple accounts, a pujari paid with dignity. The ledger of seva.
Build the country
Patriotism as affection before assertion: a home people build for together, where no one's loyalty needs to be interrogated at a microphone.
Every Dialogue, Interview, answer and Exploration we publish has to pass one question.
Does it strengthen the language, deepen the faith, build the country?
The essay notes that the phrase was first written in 1892 by Pratapnarayan Misra of Kanpur, in his journal Brahman, a satirist who held prem, love, to be the supreme dharma.
Every question can travel.
A question
Someone asks one of the First 100 Questions.
A Dialogue, an Interview or an Exploration
Whichever format answers it best. Often a Reading Circle text follows.
Through the Dispatch
The best of all six, in your inbox every week. The website is where everything lives.
The smartest, warmest person at the chai stall.
Curious · Confident · Warm · Witty · Evidence-led · Open to disagreement
"What would you keep, and what would you rethink?"
Preachy · Defensive · Outraged · Jargon-heavy · Like a political campaign · Holier-than-thou
"Only true believers will understand this."
Sourced, labelled, checked.
No Exploration goes live without a writer, a fact-checker and an editor signing off. Sensitive entries also go to an outside expert reader.
Corrections log| Tier | Used for | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Original texts | What a text actually says | BORI critical edition of the Mahabharata; Gita Supersite; GRETIL |
| 2. Translations | Quotable English renderings | Murty Classical Library of India; university-press translations, always named |
| 3. Scholarly reference | Philosophy, history, debates | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism; peer-reviewed books |
| 4. Lived tradition | How people practise today | HIPL interviews, always labelled as one person's or community's view |
- Separate the layers. Original text, later retellings, regional traditions, historical evidence and modern interpretation are never mixed together.
- Never invent anything. No made-up quotations, verses, dialogue, dates or "scholars agree" claims.
- Name the version. Which text, edition, translation, tradition or region.
- Many traditions. More than one interpretation where they exist.
- Explore, don't prescribe. Modern connections are framed as questions; no claims that ancient texts "proved" modern science.
- Respect people. Caste, gender and other hard topics are handled honestly and without demeaning any community.
AI use. AI tools may help with research leads, transcription or first drafts, but a person checks every claim against the original source. We don't use AI images of sacred figures; illustrations are commissioned or properly licensed.
Who runs HIPL
Co-founder
Co-founder
Editor, Explorations
Producer, Dialogues & Interviews
Voices coordinator
Write to us: [CONTACT EMAIL] · Advisors and expert readers are listed on each entry they review.