• What was the version of Indian History for 75 years? We must see our civilization as a sleeping giant reawakening to its millennia-old journey of collective growth and prosperity. It is this spirit that was rekindled by Swami Vivekananda.

We all recognize that the essential frameworks of contemporary Indian histories were laid down by the colonizers, with their priorities, biases and ways of constructing what has happened in India over the centuries.

In the past 75 years, decolonization or deconstructing these sensemaking frameworks has been an ongoing project of developing Indian history.

Central to the decolonization project has been the question of what it means to write a history of a people. Is it a history related to battles and kings? Is it the evolution of a civilization? Is it the changing models of collective identity and self-awareness?

Answering this question is deeply connected to our vision of ourselves.

The history of the Indian people, as written post-independence, was built around the construct of India as a recently “free” country – hence the emphasis on freedom struggles, and an undue emphasis on the conquerors of this subcontinent in the immediate 500-600 years. 

As we all know, some of these conquerors stayed on as rulers, who imposed new cultural and religious elements on the population. The others, particularly the British, came not only to extract and pillage, but also to make the existing people reimagine themselves through the lens of the colonizer.

Therefore, Indian history of the past 75 years has been presented as the story of a defeated people who were “granted” freedom, and who needed to find worth again. 

However, 75 years on, India has changed.

Our emerging vision of ourselves is that of an unbroken, continuous civilization of several thousand years, which has seen both glorious and bad periods.

This vision implies a new sensemaking of Indian history.  In this new forward-looking vision, our conception of history must go beyond battles and kings, and also go beyond a collective journey of uncovering past wounds and past victories.

Rather we must see our civilization as a sleeping giant reawakening to its millennia-old journey of collective growth and prosperity.  

It is this spirit that was rekindled by Swami Vivekananda in one of his first addresses to his fellow Indians, after his triumphant return from the West in 1897.

“The longest night seems to be passing away, the sorest trouble seems to be coming to an end at last, the seeming corpse appears to be awaking and a voice is coming to us — away back where history and even tradition fails to peep into the gloom of the past, coming down from there, reflected as it were from peak to peak of the infinite Himalaya of knowledge, and of love, and of work, India, this motherland of ours — a voice is coming unto us, gentle, firm, and yet unmistakable in its utterances, and is gaining volume as days pass by, and behold, the sleeper is awakening! 

Like a breeze from the Himalayas, it is bringing life into the almost dead bones and muscles, the lethargy is passing away, and only the blind cannot see, or the perverted will not see, that she is awakening, this motherland of ours, from her deep long sleep.

None can resist her anymore; never is she going to sleep anymore; no outward powers can hold her back any more; for the infinite giant is rising to her feet.” CW3.145.3

It is this spirit that must be echoed by every Indian if we want to create a Viksit Bharat in the next 25 years.

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Author  Srinivas is the Founder-CEO of Illumine and has been working on integrating Indian philosophical thought (notably Swami Vivekananda’s philosophy of Practical Vedanta) with contemporary knowledge and institutional practices.

He is also an innovator who has developed new models for large-scale change such as Large-Scale Knowledge Interventions (LSIs), and Enablement Dialogue Models (EDMs). His work at Illumine has impacted over 5 million people thus far, across thousands of schools, colleges, government organizations, some of India’s largest corporates and communities. 

He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from Vivekananda University (RKMVERI) and the Vivekananda Award from the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture. His latest book, Awakening the Nation, helps the modern reader rediscover Swami Vivekananda’s nation-building ideas.

Copyright Srinivas Venkatram