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Uprooting the Beautiful Tree: Dharampal’s Rediscovery of India’s Indigenous Education System
In the landscape of Indian historiography, few interventions have been as intellectually disruptive as Dharampal’s The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. First published in 1983, this landmark volume mounts a compelling challenge to entrenched colonial narratives that portrayed precolonial India as a civilizational void, bereft of formal education and awaiting the salvific arrival of British modernity. Drawing on archival records and administrative surveys commissioned by the British East India Company, Dharampal meticulously reconstructs an educational ecosystem that was at once decentralized, inclusive, and pedagogically rich. The source materials for Dharampal’s research include extensive data from early nineteenth-century surveys conducted in the Madras, Bombay, and Bengal Presidencies.…
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A Civilizational Manifesto: Reading Amritasya Putrah by Kanchan Banerjee
In an era marked by cultural amnesia and spiritual disorientation, Amritasya Putrah by Kanchan Banerjee arrives not merely as a book, but as a civilizational invocation, a reminder that India is not merely a geopolitical construct but a living, breathing samskriti, whose soul has been nourished for millennia by the chants of the Vedas, the wisdom of the Upanishads, and the tapasya of countless rishis. The title, drawn from the Upanishadic mahāvākya, “Shrinwantu vishwe amritasya putrah” (“Listen, O Children of Immortality”), is not a poetic flourish, but a call to reawaken the sacred identity that lies dormant beneath centuries of conquest, colonization, and confusion. Banerjee does not write as a…
𝐈𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐜 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐘𝐨𝐮 📚
