This orthodoxy has long been shaped by Marxist and secular-liberal frameworks, which treat religion, civilisational continuity and cultural symbolism with suspicion. It tends to see India not as a civilisational whole but as a fractured political entity patched together by modern secularism. Ironically, while it accuses others of whitewashing or politicising the past, it has long indulged in its own forms of selective erasure and ideological flattening.
For decades, school history textbooks taught students to approach India as a series of disconnected episodes – Harappan mystery, Vedic ritualism, Mauryan bureaucracy, Sultanate and Mughal court politics, colonial exploitation, and finally, the “idea of India” born in the crucible of the freedom struggle. Rarely did students encounter India as a civilisational project: a vast, diverse, yet spiritually resonant culture anchored in ethical reflection, philosophical inquiry and sacred geography. The civilisation if at all was too abstractly conjured vis pre colonial times.
The foundational insight of early Indian thinkers like Radha Kumud Mukherjee – and later echoed by Diana Eck and more recently in works of historian Shonaleeka Kaul is that India’s unity was not political but spiritual and symbolic. Sacred rivers, pilgrimage sites, epic narratives, and shared ritual practices created an inner cohesion across linguistic, regional, and sectarian lines. This was not a homogenising force, but a pluralistic frame.
Yet, modern historians, especially those influenced by Marxist materialism or postcolonial skepticism, have been wary of engaging this civilisational idiom. They prefer categories of economic exploitation, caste oppression, or dynastic power. These are important, but insufficient. A civilisation is not only built by rulers and classes, but by ethics, aesthetics, devotion, and longing.
More here: India’s past deserves more than apologia or amnesia
Know Thyself 