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Reclaiming India’s Dharmic Sense of History: Evidence, Empathy, and Method
This essay offers a rigorous, empathetic roadmap to reclaim India’s Dharmic sense of history. It dismantles the colonial trope that Hindus lacked historical consciousness by surveying Itihasa, Puranas, caritras, inscriptions, and temple records across Ancient India and Medieval India. It explains why certain indigenous archives thinned during the medieval era and shows how to read…
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D.B. Parasnis: The tireless collector who transformed Maratha archives and Indian historiography
Dattatreya Balawant Parasnis stands out as a transformative force in Indian historiography, above all for rescuing and publishing primary sources at risk of loss. His acquisitions—from the Second Sikh War letters to Sir Frederick Currie, to Mughal and Deccani portraiture, to Marathi bakhar manuscripts—elevated the evidentiary standard of research on the Maratha Empire and beyond.…
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From Debate to Kinship: How Jadunath Sarkar and K.A. Nilakanta Sastri Shaped Indian Historiography
This essay reconstructs the formative encounter between Jadunath Sarkar and K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, situating it within the Modern Indian Renaissance and the wider debate over English versus vernacular mediums in historical pedagogy. It explains how Sarkar’s multilingual triangulation of Persian chronicles, Marathi bakhars, and regional records complemented Sastri’s epigraphic and philological reconstruction of South Indian…
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How Sita Ram Goel Reframed Indian Historiography: Shivaji, Nehru, and the Mughal Myth
Sita Ram Goel’s Shaktiputra Shivaji offers a concise yet rigorous meditation on Indian historiography, foregrounding Shivaji as an indigenous state-builder. Drawing inspiration from Dennis Kincaid’s The Grand Rebel, it rejects simplistic Western misconceptions that fixate on the Mughals as Britain’s chief adversaries. The analysis critiques overreliance on marital alliances to explain “indigeneity,” urging methodological consistency…
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Master the Politics of ‘Official’ History: A Complete Indic Guide to Transform Collective Memory
This essay examines how centralized, “official” history—whether colonial, Marxist, or nationalist—can erode India’s decentralized, living memory. It contrasts Western, top‑down historiography with Indic ethos, where society, not institutions, traditionally safeguarded memory across Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh traditions. Citing the 1857 War of Independence and the Azamgarh Proclamation, it shows how living memory enabled coordinated…
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Swami Vivekananda on the Ahistoricity of Hinduism
This insightful blog post explores Swami Vivekananda’s perspective on the universality of Vedanta as a religion, contrasting it with Christianity and other religions that revolve around historical founders. Swami Vivekananda emphasizes the ahistoricity of the Vedas and the eternal principles they embody, which allows Hinduism to remain unshaken even if the historicity of its prophets…