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Tag: Book

  • Bravehearts of Bharat by Vikram Sampath

    Indic Books — entry · Journal & E-Magazine — Book Review

    Ask a schoolchild to name India’s warriors and the list runs out quickly — not because the warriors did, but because the textbooks did. Vikram Sampath’s Bravehearts of Bharat: Vignettes from Indian History (Penguin, 2022) is a deliberate act of restoration: fifteen portraits of men and women who defended their lands and traditions, drawn from every corner of the map and every century of the second millennium.

    The range is the point. Lalitaditya Muktapida of Kashmir, whose empire the chronicles compare to the great conquerors and whom almost no one now names. Rani Abbakka Chowta of Ullal, who fought the Portuguese for decades. Lachit Borphukan, whose Ahom forces turned the Mughals back at Saraighat. Banda Singh Bahadur, Martanda Varma, Chand Bibi, Kanhoji Angre — sailors, queens, generals, ascetics-turned-soldiers. Sampath, a trained historian, keeps the apparatus honest: sources cited, legends flagged as legends, and the drama allowed to come from the events rather than the prose.

    Read as a set, the vignettes dismantle the laziest of our inherited storylines — that resistance was rare, regional, or futile. What they show instead is a continuous, geographically distributed instinct of defence that our civilizational memory kept better than our curriculum did.

    Who should read it: students meeting un-textbooked history for the first time; readers of our History & Civilization shelf — where the Heroes of Resistance sub-topic now has its founding book. Browse more titles on the Indic Books shelf.

    Credits: entry by Indic Warriors. Book: Vikram Sampath, Bravehearts of Bharat: Vignettes from Indian History (Penguin Random House India, 2022).

  • Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples by Meenakshi Jain

    Indic Books — entry · Journal & E-Magazine — Book Review

    Histories of temple destruction usually end at the rubble. Meenakshi Jain’s Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples (Aryan Books International, 2019) begins there — and follows what happened next: priests spiriting images away by night, murtis buried in fields or sunk in tanks and wells against a better day, communities keeping the memory of a hiding place alive for generations, and consecrations performed again when the danger passed.

    Jain works the way she always works: by accumulation of primary evidence — inscriptions, temple chronicles, colonial gazetteers, archaeological reports — arranged region by region until the pattern becomes undeniable. The ‘flight of deities’ emerges not as scattered anecdote but as a pan-Indian devotional practice: an organized, risk-laden discipline of preservation that the standard narratives of passive loss simply cannot accommodate.

    The book’s quiet argument is about agency. A tradition that hid its gods, carried them across rivers, and rebuilt around them — sometimes after centuries — was never merely a victim of its history. It was, all along, the keeper of its own continuity. For readers following today’s reconsecrations, the book supplies the long context in which they belong.

    Who should read it: anyone studying temple heritage seriously — alongside our Temple, Art & Heritage shelf and the Temple Architecture Yatra, where this history stands in stone. Browse more titles on the Indic Books shelf.

    Credits: entry by Indic Warriors. Book: Meenakshi Jain, Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples: Episodes from Indian History (Aryan Books International, 2019).

  • How I Became a Hindu by Sita Ram Goel

    Indic Books — entry · Journal & E-Magazine — Book Review

    Most conversion stories move toward a new faith; Sita Ram Goel’s moves toward clarity. How I Became a Hindu (Voice of India) is the autobiography of one of independent India’s most formidable polemical minds — and its power lies in how little it asks the reader to take on trust.

    Goel begins where much of his generation began: a brilliant student in 1940s Calcutta, persuaded that Marxism was simply what intelligence looked like. The book’s early chapters reconstruct that certainty from the inside — the moral seriousness of it, the intellectual glamour — which is precisely what makes the later unravelling credible. The turn comes not through mysticism but through evidence: the realities of communist practice, and the patient influence of his friend and lifelong collaborator Ram Swarup, who kept asking the questions the ideology could not survive.

    What Goel returns to is not a ritual identity but a civilizational one: dharma as a framework spacious enough to hold inquiry, plural enough to refuse totalitarian answers, and old enough to have seen every ‘new’ idea before. The closing chapters, where he weighs what Hindu society must relearn about defending itself intellectually, read as the founding notes of the publishing project — Voice of India — that would occupy the rest of his life.

    Who should read it: every student who suspects that the ideas they have inherited about India were someone else’s conclusions; readers of our Dharma & Philosophy shelf; and anyone tracing how the modern Indic intellectual resurgence began. Browse more titles on the Indic Books shelf.

    Credits: entry by Indic Warriors. Book: Sita Ram Goel, How I Became a Hindu (Voice of India; expanded edition 1993).

  • Review: The Beautiful Tree by Dharampal

    By Piyush Kukreti · Journal & E-Magazine — Book Review

    Some books argue; Dharampal’s The Beautiful Tree simply shows. Published in 1983, it is less a thesis than an act of retrieval: a collection of early British administrative surveys of indigenous Indian education — Madras Presidency, Bengal, Punjab, Bombay — reproduced at length and allowed to speak. What they say dismantles, in the administrators’ own handwriting, the belief that mass education arrived in India with the colonial state.

    The surveys Dharampal unearthed — above all the Madras Presidency returns of the 1820s and Adam’s reports on Bengal and Bihar — describe a dense web of village schools: one in nearly every sizeable village, teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, and often much more. The famous exchanges around Thomas Munro’s minute suggest school attendance proportions that compared respectably with England of the same decades. More uncomfortably for later assumptions, the rolls record substantial numbers of students from communities the colonial and post-colonial imagination has assumed were always excluded from letters.

    Three things make the book durable. First, its method: Dharampal was not a professional historian but a Gandhian archivist with monastic patience, and his refusal to paraphrase — the documents are reprinted, not summarized — makes the book almost impossible to dismiss. You are not asked to trust him; you are asked to read the East India Company’s own officers. Second, its title, which is Gandhi’s: speaking at Chatham House in 1931, Gandhi said the British had left India more illiterate than they found it, for they had dug up the beautiful tree of indigenous education and given nothing comparable in its place. The book is the footnote that speech never had. Third, its restraint. Dharampal does not romanticise the village school; he documents its curriculum, its fees, its social range, and lets the reader weigh what was lost when a fiscal order that had sustained it was dismantled.

    Read critically, the book still invites questions the serious student should keep open: survey coverage varied by presidency, definitions of “school” were elastic, and the comparison with England can be pushed too hard in both directions. But these are questions the book itself equips you to ask — which is exactly what a primary-source collection is for.

    For the parent or teacher reading it today, the takeaway is not nostalgia. It is a standard: education that was local, accountable to its community, and cheap enough to be universal was once an Indian norm. Whatever we build next in Indian education has to be measured against that memory, not against the assumption that the alternative to the present system was nothing.

    Who should read it: anyone teaching, funding, or rethinking Indian education; readers of our Education & Parenting shelf; and every student who has been told literacy came ashore with the colonizer.

    Credits: Review by Piyush Kukreti for Indic Warriors. Book: Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983; collected in Dharampal’s Collected Writings, Other India Press).