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.…