Prasenjit K. Basu’s “India Reborn: The Epic Story of a Civilisation’s Rebound from Two Centuries of Decline” is an important book with a clear purpose. It refuses to treat India’s rise as a recent miracle, or as a story that begins in 1947, or even in 1991. Basu is asking the primal question: how did a civilisation with long standing economic weight and intellectual influence suffer such a steep relative decline, and what does rebirth look like when it is measured in institutions and agency rather than in mood? The range is wide, yet the spine is firm. He moves from India’s historical economic scale into the mechanics of colonial conquest and extraction, into the layered struggle for freedom where he gives real weight to currents often distorted by historians or softened in public memory, and then into the Republic’s long policy drift before the reform turn and the current effort to rebuild delivery and opportunity at scale. The tone is confident and unsentimental, which is part of its appeal. Basu does not write to comfort and challenges us to rethink long held assumptions of who we are as a civilisational state claimant, how we got lost in between and how we may be finally getting there.
That long arc matters because the book is really intervening with its arguments and ideas in a contemporary contest: what kind of political entity is India? Read narrowly, India is a nation state, a modern constitutional polity, a republic, bounded by territory and defined by citizenship. Read more accurately, India is also a civilisational state, a perpetual thread of civilisational memory, Hindu religious and cultural grammar, intellectual, spiritual and syncretic traditions and social and commercial life that long predates and extends way beyond the modern map and repeatedly survived political rupture. Basu is interested in what happens when that continuity and endurance begins to express itself again as modern capability. And that is one of the key strengths of this compelling book.
The civilisational state idea has unfortunately been ideologically contentious. It is easily caricatured, and it can be mishandled by opposing sides, one denying any exceptionalism, greatness and glory of Indian civilisation and culture and the other asserting it to the exclusion of other influences and pluralities embraced by it over the ages. Used mindfully, it is an explanatory frame, inspirational and exhortatory, to reclaim India’s greatness of virasat in all its plenitude, its profundity and myriad dimensions. It tells you why continuity, antiquity, and shared civilisational memory is not mere memory but, when reignited, more recently in the last 11 years under PM Modi’s aastha—faith and indefatigable effort—vikas gets conjoined with and draws the self-confidence ballast of virasat. This virasat is of capability and genius, as cultural and philosophical as it is economic, technological and scientific, one that had often been suppressed by colonial and post-colonial narratives.
This can shape legitimacy more deeply than a single founding moment, and why a society’s instincts about unity in diversity, authority and responsibility often cannot be understood on a short timeline. It also forces a distinction that is often blurred in public debate: legacy as inheritance versus legacy as power. Basu puts it sharply in one line, contrasting communities that retain distant cultural residues with those that still control a living civilisational state: “these tenuous successors do not durably control civilisational states that can carry the rich legacy of their ancestors forward”.
That is the standard implied by the reborn. Civilisations can survive as nostalgia. Civilisational states survive as operating systems. They carry forward inherited depth into institutions, norms, and strategic choices, and they retain the capacity to renew without cultural amnesia. The concept is reinforced if it also organically allows its diversity to become its strength. Civilisations that endure for millennia do so through absorption, argument, accommodation, and synthesis. Any civilisational state argument that flattens plurality is historically illiterate and politically brittle and unwise. At the same time, Bharat’s mainstream Hindu civilisational core values, belief systems, philosophies and institutions have to be honoured and resuscitated and taken forward, not lost in submission to overlays of colonising cultures and values.
India qualifies as a civilisational state on three grounds that go beyond its subcontinental size, its largest population in the world and its oldest, biggest and most vibrant democracy that is pluralistic in several senses. Antiquity is the simplest. Continuity is the deeper proof. India has lived through repeated ruptures, invasions, partitions, and political reinvention, yet it retained recognisable threads across languages and literatures, sacred geographies, philosophical schools, and habits of debate, while other civilisations shrunk into museum lore as in Egypt. Continuity here is not stasis. It is persistence and resilience through change.
Consequence and influence in the region and globally is where the modern map becomes plainly inadequate. India’s civilisational reach historically travelled less by conquest and more by diffusion, through merchants and monks, scholars and sailors, craftsmen and courtly exchange. Southeast Asia is one visible layer, where epics, Sanskritic vocabularies, temple forms, and political ideas left durable residues that still surface in language, ritual, aesthetics, and architecture. Yet the sphere expands far wider. Across the Indian Ocean world, trade routes linked the subcontinent to the Gulf and the Red Sea, and onward to East Africa, carrying communities, words, tastes, and commercial cultures. Northwards and eastwards, Buddhism carried Indian philosophical concepts, monastic institutions, translation traditions, and artistic forms through Central Asia into China and beyond, creating civilisational bridges sustained by pilgrimage and learning rather than by armies. Ideas in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and logic also travelled across languages and regimes. This is civilisational influence in its most durable form: a web of transmission that outlives borders.
Read in this frame, from Virasat to Vikas becomes more than a slogan. Heritage is not decorative. It matters only when it is translated into capability, skill, talent, intellectual gravitas and cognitive genius in everything we do as a polity, economy, society, R&D and in forging ahead in the Tech 4.0 revolution. Competence is visible in the ordinary: predictable rules, usable services, lower leakage, and a citizen state interface that does not turn rights into supplication. This is where Basu’s argument, at its best, stays disciplined. A civilisational rebound is not only proven by cultural self-regard. It is proven by state capacity at population scale. That is also why the Modi era features in this story as more than politics. It’s a vision of rebirth of Bharatvarsha as a functioning civilisational state. The claim rightly is that India has tried to convert heritage into systems, and systems into dignity and opportunity.
On one side we have the rebuilding and revival of sacred spaces of worship long desecrated by invaders, of restoration of cultural monuments degraded by neglect and reclaiming of artefacts stolen by conquerors. These themselves generate economic activity and employment besides rekindling the sense of self of Indians everywhere. Complementing that is the financial inclusion and direct delivery architectures that reduce discretionary choke points and shift agency closer to citizens. Digital public infrastructure reduces friction between intent and outcome and makes scale governable. These are not romantic achievements. They are administrative ones. Yet administration is where a civilisational state either becomes modern, or remains only rhetorical.
Externally, the same translation is now being attempted as statecraft. Economic scale, including India’s rise near the top of global GDP rankings, matters less as a trophy and more as strategic space. It cushions shocks, widens choices, and changes bargaining power when supply chains, standards, finance, and technology are used as leverage. Soft power follows when capability is coupled with legible purpose. Yoga’s global institutionalisation, including its recognition through the United Nations, is one example of inheritance converted into modern diplomacy without stripping it of cultural texture. The G20 theme during India’s presidency—One Earth, One Family, One Future—placed a drawn from the civilisational ethic pronounced by the Upanishads into contemporary global consciousness at a time when multilateral cooperation and global public good, including on environmental and climate action and SDGs as on peace and security and humanitarian response, is plainly under strain if not abandoned. India’s Global South posture similarly seeks to convert global solidarity scale into coalition by offering usable platforms and partnerships, not only rhetoric.
The civilisational state frame does not remove India’s contradictions. It sharpens them. A civilisational state reborn has to not only be driven by a roaring, fastest growing economy, but prove itself in inclusion, fairness, and social cohesion, and participation and contribution of its citizenry because internal trust is the base layer of external power: Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishvaas, Sabka Prayas. And that has been the Modi era’s achievement. And Basu’s book is valuable because it pushes the reader toward that harder standard. Reborn, in this telling, is not a mood. It is a discipline. If Virasat is to become Vikas in a durable sense and further create a rich and dynamic Virasat for the 2047 destination and beyond, India’s rebound must be sustainable, institutional, inclusive and capable enough to carry the weight of its own civilisational claim into the future.
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Lakshmi Puri is a former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations
