A civilisation unsure of its past cannot remain sane in a world that weaponises narratives. The way forward is neither denial nor dogma but honest recognition.
Hindu revivalism, reform help recover civilisational confidence (Image: File)
One of the most persistent distortions in modern Indian intellectual life is the portrayal of Hindu revivalism as either reactionary or rebellious, a mirror image of modern revolutionary politics spearheaded by the Left that runs on resentment or exclusion. This framing is not accidental, but a result of a long colonial and postcolonial habit of reading India through borrowed categories, where recovery is mistaken for regression and remembrance is labelled revisionism. Hindu revivalism in the 19th and early-20th centuries was not a rebellion in the modern revolutionary sense. It was not about tearing down an order to replace it with ideological abstraction. Rather, it was about recognition, understanding, and realisation of a civilisation that had been systematically disconnected from its own intellectual and moral resources. It was a fruitful awakening, not a destructive estrangement.
To understand this, one must first abandon the lazy assumption that India’s modern consciousness began from scratch under colonial rule. That assumption itself is colonial. Because it presumes that India entered history only when it was recorded in European archives, and that everything before that was either a static tradition or religious superstition. This is how figures such as Adi Shankaracharya were gradually reduced to footnotes, acknowledged ritually, but erased intellectually, even after independence and Hindu reformers and modernizers were made to look negative.
We need to understand that Shankaracharya’s role was not merely theological. But in more ways than one, his interventions were civilisational. He systematised philosophical debate, reconnected dispersed intellectual traditions, and institutionalised knowledge through monastic networks that doubled as centres of learning, discipline, and social cohesion. The akharas, often caricatured today, were part of this civilisational architecture, spaces where ascetic restraint and worldly responsibility coexisted. That memory was not lost but was wilfully suppressed.
Colonial historiography is to be blamed here. It was followed obediently by Left intellectual traditions after Independence, as they treated Indian civilisation as a problem to be managed rather than a resource to be understood. India was presented as a society of fragments, caste, creed, superstition, awaiting salvation through Western modernity. Hindu revivalism was thus framed as a dangerous deviation, rather than a natural response to cultural disinheritance.
Yet, if we look at the 19th century, it tells us a different story. Dayanand Saraswati (February 12, 1824-October 30, 1883), was an important religious leader of his time. He is well known as the founder of Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement of the Vedic tradition. He championed truth, Vedic wisdom, and social upliftment. His ideals of equality will inspire generations to come.
This reformist energy did not remain confined to Bengal and travelled well across Bharat. As India’s political space widened, it travelled and adapted. Maharashtra and Punjab became crucial in translating cultural consciousness into social and political mobilisation. This is where the significance of the Lal-Bal-Pal trio becomes central, not as agitators for agitation’s sake, but as interpreters of revivalism in public life.
Bal Gangadhar Tilak understood that societies are not mobilised by abstract rights alone. His emphasis on Ganesh Utsav and Shivaji was not communal theatrics but part of the cultural pedagogy that India and Indians needed at the time. He was restoring historical continuity to a society that had long been trained to view its past as an embarrassment. Similarly, Bipin Chandra Pal carried Bengal’s revivalist ethos into nationalist discourse, insisting that self-respect was a prerequisite for freedom. Lala Lajpat Rai, drawing from Punjab’s reformist yet assertive traditions, articulated Hindu unity not as exclusion but as coherence in an increasingly competitive political environment. Together, Lal-Bal-Pal represent a phase where Hindu revivalism matured into civic confidence.
This was not hatred-driven politics. It was a refusal to be culturally erased. It was a response to a colonial system that actively fragmented society while presenting itself as neutral.
As political representation hardened under colonial rule, reformist consciousness inevitably sought organisational expression.
This is where later figures come into view. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Syama Prasad Mukherjee did not invent Hindu consciousness, but they inherited a long civilisational debate and gave it sharper political articulation. Their interventions must be read as part of a continuum. What Left historiography has consistently done is to collapse this entire civilisational arc into its most politically inconvenient endpoints, brushing aside the intellectual labour that preceded it. The result is an India presented as if it had suddenly woken up, first to colonialism, then to independence, without memory, without continuity, without inheritance.
This is why today, even the act of remembering civilisational efforts of the 20th century is suddenly labelled as chauvinism. To speak of Hindu revivalism is assumed to be aggressive. Recalling akharas, spiritual networks, or cultural symbols is treated as an ideological provocation. The deeper question that arises from such reflection is why a civilisation feels the need to remember at all. It is a question that is rarely asked despite the enraged debates on this subject.
We often find ourselves falling prey to this mindset because colonial categories have trained us to distrust ourselves. Postcolonial intellectual loyalty ensured that distrust continued in the name of progress. Over time, criticism, which has always been integral to Indian culture, was replaced by cynicism, and reform was treated as a mere formality. But such errors have consequences. In a fast-paced world of algorithm-driven outrage, ideological warfare, and relentless misinformation, a society without an internal compass becomes easy prey.
The best answer, if not the only answer, to technological disruption and narrative warfare is civilisational clarity. India already possesses this clarity in its inherited values, pluralism rooted in continuity, criticism anchored in belonging, and reform without rupture. The tragedy is not that these values are contested, because, as we know, contestation is healthy when employed prudently and responsibly. Instead, the tragedy remains that they are often caricatured, antagonised, or dismissed in service of ideological loyalties that have little to do with India’s lived reality.
If India is serious about Amrit Kaal or the idea of an Indian century, it cannot afford this intellectual schizophrenia, wherein it keeps on celebrating confidence economically while apologising culturally. A civilisation unsure of its past cannot remain sane in a world that weaponises narratives. The way forward is neither denial nor dogma but honest recognition. Hindu revivalism was not hatred dressed as history. It was a civilisation reminding itself of who it was, so that it could decide, freely, who it wished to become. Until we accept that, we will continue to mistake memory for menace and confidence for chauvinism. And that confusion serves only those who benefit from India forgetting itself. Because let’s face it, such confusion or hesitation of our past and our civilisation does not serve Bharat or any Bharatiya.
Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice Chancellor of JNU.
