India and the Swastika: Holding two histories at once (#519)

You notice it almost immediately in India.

On temple doors. Painted in red on the backs of trucks. Drawn in chalk beside shop entrances. Pressed into marigold garlands at weddings. Stamped onto new account books at Diwali.

The first time you see it, your breath catches.

Because to a Western eye - to anyone of our generation, raised on the history of the Second World War - the shape is shocking.

The swastika.

It feels out of place, unsettling, almost impossible.

And yet here it is everywhere.

Not whispered. Not hidden. But displayed openly, reverently, lovingly.

It forces you to slow down and ask:

What does this symbol really mean in India?

A symbol far older than the 20th century

Long before it was carried on red banners across Europe, the swastika was one of humanity’s oldest sacred marks.

The word itself comes from Sanskrit - svastika - meaning “well-being” or “good fortune,” literally “that which makes all well.”

It appears in ancient Indian texts and has been used across Eurasia for thousands of years as a sign of luck, life, and protection.

Archaeologists have found it:

• Carved into pottery at Troy,

• Woven into Neolithic European designs,

• Painted by Native American cultures,

• Engraved on temples in India, and

• Marked at Buddhist and Jain shrines.

Across cultures it represented the sun, continuity, prosperity, and the turning cycles of life.

In Hindu homes today, it still means exactly that.

Nothing more sinister than:

May this house be blessed.

Seeing it in India

Walking through Jaipur or Delhi, you begin to notice the quiet ordinariness of it.

A shopkeeper draws one in turmeric paste at dawn. A bride has one painted near the doorway before a wedding. A priest traces it in vermilion on a new car.

No one reacts. No one flinches.

To them, it is as benign as a cross on a church wall or a Star of David on a synagogue door.

The discomfort belongs entirely to me - the outsider carrying European history in my head.

For a moment, I feel the cultural dissonance almost physically.

My mind says: danger.

Their world says: blessing.

Both are true. Both are real. But they come from different centuries.

How it was stolen

The tragedy is not that India still uses the symbol.                                          

The tragedy is that it was ever stolen at all.

In the late 19th century, European archaeologists rediscovered the swastika in ancient sites and mistakenly linked it to imagined “Aryan” origins.

German nationalists adopted it as a racial emblem, and by 1920 the Nazi Party had transformed it into the tilted black symbol on a white circle and red flag.

From there the meaning was catastrophically rewritten.

It became a banner for:

• Racial supremacy,

• Antisemitism,

• Genocide, and

• Mechanized hatred.

Few symbols in history have been so thoroughly corrupted.

In the West, the swastika now evokes concentration camps, crematoria, and six million murdered Jews, alongside millions of other victims.

That association is permanent. It cannot, and should not, be erased. But it is only one chapter of a much longer story.

Two meanings in one shape

Standing outside a small temple in Rajasthan a few years ago, I watched an elderly woman draw a swastika carefully with rice flour.

Her hands trembled slightly. She paused, pressed her palms together, and bowed her head.

It was one of the gentlest gestures I’d seen all day. There was nothing political about it. Nothing ideological. Just hope. Health for her grandchildren. Safety for the family. A good year.

In that moment, the symbol had absolutely nothing to do with Europe or Hitler or war.

It belonged entirely to her.

And I realized something uncomfortable but important:

The world does not revolve around Western memory.

India’s history is older, deeper, and independent of ours. Their swastika was not born in Berlin. It was born thousands of years earlier.

Learning to hold both truths

Travel often asks us to hold two ideas at once.

The swastika is one of those difficult cases.

It is both:

• A sacred ancient sign of well-being, and

• One of the most horrific emblems of modern evil.

  
  

Neither meaning cancels the other. They coexist.

When I see it in India now, I still feel a flicker of unease, but it is softened by understanding.

Context matters. History matters. Meaning is not fixed forever. Symbols migrate. They are borrowed. They are abused. Sometimes they are reclaimed.

A quiet lesson

India teaches this lesson gently.

The symbol on the doorway is not an endorsement of hatred. It is a prayer.

And perhaps the deeper tragedy is not that India continues to use the swastika, but that one brutal regime managed to hijack a symbol of human well-being and turn it into the opposite.

If anything, seeing the swastika in India reminds me how fragile meaning can be. How easily something sacred can be twisted. And how important it is to understand before we judge.

Because sometimes what looks frightening at first glance is simply an old blessing, drawn carefully at sunrise, asking the world to be kind.

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