Dr Manoj Dash, Bhubaneswar, 4 September 2026
The obsession for idealisation of pre-modern Indian society as an egalitarian order and as a golden era corrupted only by foreign invasion doesn’t pass closer historical scrutiny. Indigenous literature, philosophical debates, inscriptions, and political chronicles reveal that the civilisation of our country was marked not only by intellectual achievement and cultural creativity, but also by hierarchy, injustice, exclusion, warfare, patriarchy, and resistance.
Colonial historians frequently portrayed pre-colonial India as backward, despotic, irrational, and politically fragmented. In response, early nationalist thinkers sought to restore collective self-respect by highlighting India’s philosophical, scientific, literary, and administrative achievements. That corrective was historically understandable, but such corrective narratives often get painted as an equally distorted “Golden Age” story – championed by the RSS, BJP and a host of other myth-manufacturing organisations.
Romantic accounts of our civilisation often attribute violence, economic decline, cultural disruption, and social regression almost entirely to external invaders. Turko-Persian conquests and European colonialism were undeniably transformative and frequently violent, but the claim that internal society was harmonious before their arrival creates a misleading binary: a virtuous civilisation on one side and foreign disruption on the other. This binary needs to be constantly debunked by rational individuals who truly care for the country without relying on myths and miracles.
Contradictions Within the Civilisational Record
Pre-modern Indian kingdoms themselves fought wars of expansion, extracted land revenue, suppressed revolts, competed for temples and trade routes, and subordinated conquered populations. External aggression and internal domination were not mutually exclusive realities.
A unified and glorified civilisational narrative has now become politically useful because it simplifies collective identity. Internal contradictions—caste oppression, gender inequality, regional imperialism, and conflicts between ruling groups and agrarian communities—make the past more difficult to mobilise as a source of unquestioned pride.
When biased political actors of the present era seek to construct a cohesive modern identity, inconvenient episodes get minimised, reinterpreted, or absorbed into myth. The result is not history as inquiry, but history as moral theatre: ancestors are cast as uniformly noble, while social failures are attributed to outsiders or later distortions.
Idealised history also satisfies a psychological need. In periods of rapid social change, economic insecurity, or cultural anxiety, the past can appear as a stable and morally complete refuge. A complex civilisation is transformed into a reassuring image of unity, order, and authenticity.
But nostalgia is selective by nature. It remembers the achievements of courts and scholars more readily than the burdens borne by peasants, women, labouring communities, and those placed outside the ritual order.
Caste was not merely a benign division of occupations. In many regions and periods, birth-based hierarchy was connected to restrictions on occupation, residence, education, ritual participation, marriage, and physical interaction. Untouchability and forms of ritual subordination were sustained through social practice and, in some contexts, legitimised by religious and legal literature.
Warfare and Internal Imperialism
Indian political history contains powerful empires and kingdoms, but political unity was often produced through conquest. Mauryan, Gupta, Chola, Pallava, and Maratha rulers, among others, pursued territorial expansion, extracted tribute, and subdued rival populations. The fact that a conqueror belonged to the same broad civilisation as the conquered does not make the violence less real.
Kalhana’s Rājataraṅgiṇī , composed in Kashmir between approximately 1148 and 1150 CE, is especially valuable because it presents kingship through a morally critical historical narrative rather than a simple catalogue of national triumphs. The work blends literary form with accounts of succession struggles, political intrigue, exploitation, and moral decay.
Celebrated philosophical traditions coexisted with restrictions on women’s education, property, marriage, sexuality, and public authority. The historical prevalence of practices varied across regions, communities, and periods, and no single description should be imposed uniformly on all of India. Nevertheless, child marriage, patriarchal inheritance, constraints on female learning, and practices associated with widowhood and sati formed part of the historical experience of many women.
Dissent as an Indigenous Tradition
A civilisation’s intellectual accomplishments cannot be used to conceal the denial of autonomy to large sections of its population. The appropriate question is not whether the past contained examples of learned or powerful women—it did—but whether social institutions enabled such freedom broadly and consistently.
The Lokāyata or Cārvāka tradition challenged the authority of the Vedas , rejected the necessity of priestly mediation, and questioned doctrines such as karma and ritual efficacy. Although much of its literature survives only through the accounts of opponents, its presence indicates that religious authority and sacrificial practice were contested within Indian intellectual life.
Early Buddhist texts challenged the idea that moral worth was determined by birth. In the Assalāyana Sutta , the Buddha questions claims of inherent Brahmin purity by pointing to the common biological processes of human life and by emphasising conduct rather than lineage. The Vajrasūcī , traditionally attributed to Aśvaghoṣa, similarly interrogates whether Brahmin status resides in the body, the soul, knowledge, or birth.
These arguments did not abolish caste across Indian society, but they demonstrate that caste hierarchy was contested from within the subcontinent’s own philosophical and religious traditions.
Basavanna and the Vachana tradition in twelfth-century Karnataka challenged ritual hierarchy, Sanskritic exclusivity, and social segregation. Kabir criticised both Hindu and Muslim formalism, exposing the arbitrariness of ritual purity and inherited religious authority. Ravidas, born into a leatherworking community, imagined Begumpura—a city without sorrow, oppressive taxation, caste hierarchy, or second-class citizenship.
Need for an Honest Civilizational Memory
The answer to romanticised history is not self-hatred, nor is it the wholesale dismissal of religious traditions, literature, philosophy, or cultural achievement. The alternative is a plural and evidence-based historical consciousness.
Civilisations become stronger, not weaker, when they can remember both achievement and injustice. A society that accepts only flattering memories becomes vulnerable to myth-making. A society that can examine its own past honestly acquires the moral capacity to reform the present.
The past is not a shrine to be guarded from uncomfortable questions; it is a landscape filled with achievements, wounds, arguments, and unfinished struggles. India’s civilizational inheritance does not consist solely of its sages, temples, empires, and sacred texts, but also of the dissenters who questioned authority, the communities that resisted exclusion, and the reformers who demanded dignity. Our collective responsibility is to keep this tradition alive and agile.
