This is going to be an opinionated history of India/Bharat. Basically Indian history has been so much clouded by single lens; vedic lense that people have forgotten what actually India/Bharat is, what  it means. and where it should go. Let's look at other meanings of Bharat meant, which spread light continuously or which bears the weight. Not someone's child or some king name. Those were very later interpretations by vedic schools to connect dots with their mythologies to give consistent history of India in vedic ways or puranic ways. In this article, I will try to make you ponder other ways of looking at India.

Most people will feel uncomfortable or even insecure that why not vedic India? Are you trying to take away our identity? It is injustice. But honestly, calling ancient India a vedic country, is a much bigger injustice. Ancient India had already flourished with lots of philosophical schools even before vedic philosophies. In this time, there was a magadh area which was more of a shramanic land and northern India was of vedic lands. Although Vedic rituals were elitist, but still northern India had more of it, it was more influential there. 

geographically and culturally, early India was divided:

• The northwestern and Gangetic plains had stronger Vedic ritual presence, particularly among elites. Vedic rituals were elitist. After/During the fall of shramanic movements and during bhaktikal, these philosophies absorbed many elements from shramanic philosophies to become what is known to be Hinduism. 

• Magadha and eastern India were predominantly Shramanic, skeptical of ritual sacrifice, open to renunciation, debate, and ethical inquiry.

• Southern India was largely indigenous and non-Vedic, shaped by Dravidian cultures, local deities, and ethical–poetic traditions rather than ritual sacrifice or priestly authority.

• It later absorbed Shramanic ideas and selective Brahmanical elements, producing a flexible synthesis (Jain/Buddhist influence and Bhakti) 

What is known to be the shramanic movement which can also be seen as the fruitful result of janapadas uniting into mahajanpadas, giving stable environments for philosophical and theological developments. It gave birth to philosophies like Buddhism, Jainism, Ajivikas and their associated schools. 

This period coincided with:

• The Second Urbanization of India

• The consolidation of Janapadas into Mahajanapadas

• The rise of large, stable polities capable of supporting universities, libraries, hospitals, and debate traditions

The Shramanic worldview transformed Indian civilization in several decisive ways:

• Universalism: Membership was not determined by birth or ritual purity.

• Social Mobility: Ethical conduct and knowledge, not caste, determined status.

• Scientific Temper: Emphasis on logic (hetuvidya), debate, empiricism, and inquiry.

• Cosmopolitanism: Indian ideas flowed to Central Asia, China, Southeast Asia, and beyond.

The results of these movements in terms of institutions were Taxila, Nalanda, Vikramashila, and Odantapuri. These were not merely religious centers but were more than that. They were multi-disciplinary universities. Gupta period, often remembered selectively for “Hindu revival,” was in fact deeply Shramanic in its intellectual orientation.

This was India’s real Golden Age.

The fall of the Gupta Empire around 550 CE marked a turning point in Indian history, if we look from hindsight. It was not immediate collapse but slow internal decay of golden civilization into ritualistic, caste ridden society, losing memories of its own past. It can be termed as the dark ages of India, if we try to put parallels with European history. 

India’s civilization decline started to began centuries before the invasions of 1001 CE. Military defeats was the final blow to a structure that was already hollowed out by intellectual stagnation, social rigidity and strategic blindness. 

The collapse of Buddhism and Jainism as mass institutions created a Shramanic void, one that the emergence of Brahmanical-Puranic order failed to fill.

The decline of Shramanic traditions also marked a shift in intellectual priorities.

• Then: Logic, debate, epistemology, medicine, astronomy

• Now: Ritual correctness, textual authority, hereditary knowledge

Philosophical dominance shifted toward Mimamsa concerned with ritual performance rather than ethics or inquiry. Although some schools of vedic philosophies were leading in logic, they all suffered from putting vedas as absolute authority. 

By the 11th century, the Persian scholar Al-Biruni observed that Indian elites had become insular, arrogant, and intellectually stagnant believing no knowledge existed beyond their own traditions. He explicitly blamed the priestly class for hoarding learning and misleading the masses with superstition.

Shramanic traditions had provided the only large-scale counterweight to caste hierarchy. Their collapse led to:

• Hardening of jati identities

• Fragmentation into clan-based politics (Rajputization)

• Shrinking pools of administrators and soldiers

• Disarmed, alienated masses with no stake in civilizational defense

India lost not just unity in such a way, which still bothers present day India.

Strategic Blindness (Absence of Shatrubodh)

While the Arab world eagerly translated Greek, Roman, Persian, and Sanskrit texts to build a new scientific-military synthesis, India turned inward.

The curiosity of Nalanda was replaced by ritual self-satisfaction. New war technologies, political ideologies, and theological movements were dismissed as irrelevant mleccha concerns, until they arrived at the gates.

As institutions collapsed, history was replaced with mythology. Complex civilizational processes were reduced to divine cycles and moral allegories. This made introspection impossible and reform heretical. 

India did not remember its past, it sanctified it.

The arrival of Islam in India must be understood not merely as invasion, but as a civilizational encounter marked by deep asymmetry. Islam arrived with a coherent and surprisingly new worldview-universalist theology, codified law, urban institutions, and a strong tradition of learning that eagerly absorbed Greek, Persian, and Indian knowledge. India, by contrast, encountered this force in a post-Shramanic phase-politically fragmented, intellectually inward, and socially rigid. Early conversions in frontier regions such as Gandhara and Bengal were not simply the result of coercion, but of civilizational appeal. Islam offered dignity, community, and mobility to populations excluded by caste-bound society. This was not the triumph of Islam alone, but the failure of a civilization that had lost its inclusive and ethical core. 

Gandhara was historically a Shramanic and cosmopolitan frontier along with many other major mainland India urbanized places, Gandhara was the key linking India to Central Asia. When Buddhist monasteries declined, due to Hunnic invasions and internal decay, the Brahmanical order did not replace them with an equally inclusive, universalizing framework.

Rigid purity laws and exclusionary practices labeled frontier populations as mleccha. These groups were never reintegrated. When Islam arrived, offering equality, community, and coherence, the region converted not merely by force, but by civilizational appeal.

A similar process unfolded in Bengal. Under the Buddhist Palas, the region thrived. After their fall, the conservative Sena dynasty retreated from frontier engagement.

As historian Richard Eaton notes, Islam spread in Bengal through agrarian expansion. Sufis cleared forests, issued land grants, and absorbed tribal populations. The Brahmanical order, constrained by caste notions of impurity, failed to do so.

This was not a loss to Islam; it was a failure of post-Shramanic Indian civilization.

British colonization was not the beginning of India’s decline, but its most systematic exploitation. The British did not conquer a unified or intellectually vibrant civilization; they took control of a society already fragmented, institutionally weakened, and stripped of its universal ethical core. This made long-term foreign rule not only possible, but efficient.

Colonial governance was rational, bureaucratic, and extractive. Railways, courts, and revenue systems were built not to regenerate Indian society, but to administer and drain it. Education was introduced selectively to produce clerks, not thinkers; intermediaries, not citizens.

British scholarship rediscovered India’s past, but only as a relic. Living traditions were classified, frozen, and compartmentalized. Caste hardened further under colonial enumeration; religion became identity rather than inquiry. India learned to see itself through colonial categories ancient, mystical, and static.

Colonial rule did not destroy India’s civilization; it completed its disempowerment. By the time independence arrived, India inherited institutions of governance, but not institutions of thought.

The 19th-20th century is often called India’s renaissance. In truth, it was a mini-renaissance, limited to urban elites. Scientific rationality, constitutionalism, and social reform did not fully penetrate the masses. Also the main focus remained, connecting present day India, to vedic and puranic history. Some social reformers tried to put new looks on the past, but it was all being seen from tinted glass. 

Independence inherited symbols, not civilizational clarity.

Modern India always seems restless, not because it's poor or defeated or incapable. But because it senses a profound loss, it cannot name. There is an uneasiness that runs beneath economic growth and cultural spectacle. Something essential is missing. That something is nothing but, Its true identity, the civilizational direction. 

On one side lies, the blind revivalism, a very desperate attempt to rebirth a mythologized past, a history flattened into scriptures, complexity in slogans. Instead of fact, symbols are worshipped in place of understanding. This past is not studied,questioned or even  remembered, but sanctified. And it shows the hollowness of the approach, when it distills into society as misleading confidence in myths etc, not what India truly stands for. 

It is becoming increasingly apparent that we all miss something about the past, a better way to look at it. Not mythologies, or resentment but a more universal way which can not only improve the ways we look at the past, but also the way we look at the present and future. 

India’s future is not in returning to a mythologized Vedic past, nor in rejecting tradition altogether. It lies in rediscovering its Shramanic spirit

• Rational inquiry

• Ethical universalism

• Social mobility

• Scientific temper

• Civilizational confidence without insularity

A true Indian renaissance will occur when India stops asking who ruled us and starts asking how we once thought and lived. I believe we have already entered that phase in 21st century. India will discover its true essence and will make unprecedented progress. 

Not everything that shines is gold.
Sometimes, it is light itself.

Thank you.

This is going to be an opinionated history of India/Bharat. Basically Indian history has been so much clouded by single lens; vedic lense that people have forgotten what actually India/Bharat is, what  it means. and where it should go. Let's look at other meanings of Bharat meant, which spread light continuously or which bears the weight. Not someone's child or some king name. Those were very later interpretations by vedic schools to connect dots with their mythologies to give consistent history of India in vedic ways or puranic ways. In this article, I will try to make you ponder other ways of looking at India.

Most people will feel uncomfortable or even insecure that why not vedic India? Are you trying to take away our identity? It is injustice. But honestly, calling ancient India a vedic country, is a much bigger injustice. Ancient India had already flourished with lots of philosophical schools even before vedic philosophies. In this time, there was a magadh area which was more of a shramanic land and northern India was of vedic lands. Although Vedic rituals were elitist, but still northern India had more of it, it was more influential there. 

geographically and culturally, early India was divided:

• The northwestern and Gangetic plains had stronger Vedic ritual presence, particularly among elites. Vedic rituals were elitist. After/During the fall of shramanic movements and during bhaktikal, these philosophies absorbed many elements from shramanic philosophies to become what is known to be Hinduism. 

• Magadha and eastern India were predominantly Shramanic, skeptical of ritual sacrifice, open to renunciation, debate, and ethical inquiry.

• Southern India was largely indigenous and non-Vedic, shaped by Dravidian cultures, local deities, and ethical–poetic traditions rather than ritual sacrifice or priestly authority.

• It later absorbed Shramanic ideas and selective Brahmanical elements, producing a flexible synthesis (Jain/Buddhist influence and Bhakti) 

What is known to be the shramanic movement which can also be seen as the fruitful result of janapadas uniting into mahajanpadas, giving stable environments for philosophical and theological developments. It gave birth to philosophies like Buddhism, Jainism, Ajivikas and their associated schools. 

This period coincided with:

• The Second Urbanization of India

• The consolidation of Janapadas into Mahajanapadas

• The rise of large, stable polities capable of supporting universities, libraries, hospitals, and debate traditions

The Shramanic worldview transformed Indian civilization in several decisive ways:

• Universalism: Membership was not determined by birth or ritual purity.

• Social Mobility: Ethical conduct and knowledge, not caste, determined status.

• Scientific Temper: Emphasis on logic (hetuvidya), debate, empiricism, and inquiry.

• Cosmopolitanism: Indian ideas flowed to Central Asia, China, Southeast Asia, and beyond.

The results of these movements in terms of institutions were Taxila, Nalanda, Vikramashila, and Odantapuri. These were not merely religious centers but were more than that. They were multi-disciplinary universities. Gupta period, often remembered selectively for “Hindu revival,” was in fact deeply Shramanic in its intellectual orientation.

This was India’s real Golden Age.

The fall of the Gupta Empire around 550 CE marked a turning point in Indian history, if we look from hindsight. It was not immediate collapse but slow internal decay of golden civilization into ritualistic, caste ridden society, losing memories of its own past. It can be termed as the dark ages of India, if we try to put parallels with European history. 

India’s civilization decline started to began centuries before the invasions of 1001 CE. Military defeats was the final blow to a structure that was already hollowed out by intellectual stagnation, social rigidity and strategic blindness. 

The collapse of Buddhism and Jainism as mass institutions created a Shramanic void, one that the emergence of Brahmanical-Puranic order failed to fill.

The decline of Shramanic traditions also marked a shift in intellectual priorities.

• Then: Logic, debate, epistemology, medicine, astronomy

• Now: Ritual correctness, textual authority, hereditary knowledge

Philosophical dominance shifted toward Mimamsa concerned with ritual performance rather than ethics or inquiry. Although some schools of vedic philosophies were leading in logic, they all suffered from putting vedas as absolute authority. 

By the 11th century, the Persian scholar Al-Biruni observed that Indian elites had become insular, arrogant, and intellectually stagnant believing no knowledge existed beyond their own traditions. He explicitly blamed the priestly class for hoarding learning and misleading the masses with superstition.

Shramanic traditions had provided the only large-scale counterweight to caste hierarchy. Their collapse led to:

• Hardening of jati identities

• Fragmentation into clan-based politics (Rajputization)

• Shrinking pools of administrators and soldiers

• Disarmed, alienated masses with no stake in civilizational defense

India lost not just unity in such a way, which still bothers present day India.

Strategic Blindness (Absence of Shatrubodh)

While the Arab world eagerly translated Greek, Roman, Persian, and Sanskrit texts to build a new scientific-military synthesis, India turned inward.

The curiosity of Nalanda was replaced by ritual self-satisfaction. New war technologies, political ideologies, and theological movements were dismissed as irrelevant mleccha concerns, until they arrived at the gates.

As institutions collapsed, history was replaced with mythology. Complex civilizational processes were reduced to divine cycles and moral allegories. This made introspection impossible and reform heretical. 

India did not remember its past, it sanctified it.

The arrival of Islam in India must be understood not merely as invasion, but as a civilizational encounter marked by deep asymmetry. Islam arrived with a coherent and surprisingly new worldview-universalist theology, codified law, urban institutions, and a strong tradition of learning that eagerly absorbed Greek, Persian, and Indian knowledge. India, by contrast, encountered this force in a post-Shramanic phase-politically fragmented, intellectually inward, and socially rigid. Early conversions in frontier regions such as Gandhara and Bengal were not simply the result of coercion, but of civilizational appeal. Islam offered dignity, community, and mobility to populations excluded by caste-bound society. This was not the triumph of Islam alone, but the failure of a civilization that had lost its inclusive and ethical core. 

Gandhara was historically a Shramanic and cosmopolitan frontier along with many other major mainland India urbanized places, Gandhara was the key linking India to Central Asia. When Buddhist monasteries declined, due to Hunnic invasions and internal decay, the Brahmanical order did not replace them with an equally inclusive, universalizing framework.

Rigid purity laws and exclusionary practices labeled frontier populations as mleccha. These groups were never reintegrated. When Islam arrived, offering equality, community, and coherence, the region converted not merely by force, but by civilizational appeal.

A similar process unfolded in Bengal. Under the Buddhist Palas, the region thrived. After their fall, the conservative Sena dynasty retreated from frontier engagement.

As historian Richard Eaton notes, Islam spread in Bengal through agrarian expansion. Sufis cleared forests, issued land grants, and absorbed tribal populations. The Brahmanical order, constrained by caste notions of impurity, failed to do so.

This was not a loss to Islam; it was a failure of post-Shramanic Indian civilization.

British colonization was not the beginning of India’s decline, but its most systematic exploitation. The British did not conquer a unified or intellectually vibrant civilization; they took control of a society already fragmented, institutionally weakened, and stripped of its universal ethical core. This made long-term foreign rule not only possible, but efficient.

Colonial governance was rational, bureaucratic, and extractive. Railways, courts, and revenue systems were built not to regenerate Indian society, but to administer and drain it. Education was introduced selectively to produce clerks, not thinkers; intermediaries, not citizens.

British scholarship rediscovered India’s past, but only as a relic. Living traditions were classified, frozen, and compartmentalized. Caste hardened further under colonial enumeration; religion became identity rather than inquiry. India learned to see itself through colonial categories ancient, mystical, and static.

Colonial rule did not destroy India’s civilization; it completed its disempowerment. By the time independence arrived, India inherited institutions of governance, but not institutions of thought.

The 19th-20th century is often called India’s renaissance. In truth, it was a mini-renaissance, limited to urban elites. Scientific rationality, constitutionalism, and social reform did not fully penetrate the masses. Also the main focus remained, connecting present day India, to vedic and puranic history. Some social reformers tried to put new looks on the past, but it was all being seen from tinted glass. 

Independence inherited symbols, not civilizational clarity.

Modern India always seems restless, not because it's poor or defeated or incapable. But because it senses a profound loss, it cannot name. There is an uneasiness that runs beneath economic growth and cultural spectacle. Something essential is missing. That something is nothing but, Its true identity, the civilizational direction. 

On one side lies, the blind revivalism, a very desperate attempt to rebirth a mythologized past, a history flattened into scriptures, complexity in slogans. Instead of fact, symbols are worshipped in place of understanding. This past is not studied,questioned or even  remembered, but sanctified. And it shows the hollowness of the approach, when it distills into society as misleading confidence in myths etc, not what India truly stands for. 

It is becoming increasingly apparent that we all miss something about the past, a better way to look at it. Not mythologies, or resentment but a more universal way which can not only improve the ways we look at the past, but also the way we look at the present and future. 

India’s future is not in returning to a mythologized Vedic past, nor in rejecting tradition altogether. It lies in rediscovering its Shramanic spirit

• Rational inquiry

• Ethical universalism

• Social mobility

• Scientific temper

• Civilizational confidence without insularity

A true Indian renaissance will occur when India stops asking who ruled us and starts asking how we once thought and lived. I believe we have already entered that phase in 21st century. India will discover its true essence and will make unprecedented progress. 

Not everything that shines is gold.
Sometimes, it is light itself.

Thank you.