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It is easy to pick holes in the nationalist representation of Indian civilization. This chapter looks at some of its problems and infirmities. It refutes the assumption of the continuity — in terms of location in a territorially defined political unit over a long period — in Indian civilization. The chapter goes on to evaluate works of modern Indian historiographers.

This chapter begins by providing a background to the colonial/Orientalist narratives that framed the discourses of ‘talking back’. James Mill’s History of British India and his adverse evaluation of Indian civilization are examined in detail. The chapter then moves on to responses of Mills version of Indian history from Bankimchandra Chatterjee, a litterateur, and R.G. Bhandarkar, one of the first professional Indian historians.

This chapter explores the concept of the so-called racial theory of Indian civilization. It explains that the abrupt decoupling of race and language was a reaction against the Aryan idea, particularly against the assertion that Indians were kin to Europeans, and that it attacked the authority of the comparative philologists and Sanskritists. The deepening time of race formation acted to solidify the idea of race as an entity independent of language. In addition, the acceptance of the new Darwinian reading of the history of biological forms invalidated claims that India's ancient literature was a testament of the primitive state.

Indian civilization is deep-rooted and far-reaching. There were four encounters that have been seminal in Indian civilization. Each of these four civilizational encounters has deeply influenced the society, families, and individual beings and are living parts of consciousness and ways of living. The fifth civilizational encounter, encompassing all aspects of our living is the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Revolution. Based on connectivity, ICT is radically transforming production and consumption pattern; access to information; governance; and politics. As warned by Mahatma Gandhi, it is also necessary to be aware of the evils associated with machines. There are two divergent views about Mahatma Gandhi's attitude towards ‘machines’ and ‘modernization’. The comments of Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru and Ernest Fritz Schumacher are chosen for further discussion.

This introductory chapter explains the theme of this book, which is about the Indo-European or Aryan concept. This concept has certain formal properties of its own that have been more or less stable from its inception in the eighteenth century to the present. The chapter explores the racial theory of Indian civilization, the British ethnologies of India in the period of empire, and the creation of anthropology as a specialized science. It also traces the usage of the Sanskrit word arya and describes those who are considered Aryans.

This chapter presents additional discussion on the issue of the Aryan idea and the racial theory of the Indian civilization, providing commentaries on the social construction of race, the value of the accomplishments of the British Sanskritists, and the impact of new Orientalism on India. It concludes that the political consequences of the Aryan or Indo-European idea do not reside within the idea itself but vary with circumstance, and are the creatures of historical conjuncture and human purpose.

This chapter talks about the local narrators’ replacement of the Indian peoples through crafting a historical account invalidating prior Indian history as a dead-end civilization, and replacing it with a New England history of property agreements and fair relations that authorized their claims to the land. This message of replacement was also evidenced in other settings such as historical commemorations, relics and ruins, place-names, and the land itself. According to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, this kind of memorialization contributes to the creating, altering, and sanctioning of the public meanings attributed to historical events. Through these inaccurate perpetuations, local accounts demolished the complex history of Indian and English relations, and established the idea of rightful English replacement of Indian peoples.

This chapter focuses on vicissitudes of the metaphor of journey. It treats them not as an experience that is uniquely Indian, but as an artefact of Europe's age of arrogance in the tropics and as a register of the changing mythography of South Asian creativity during the last hundred years. It is argued that, during the period, certain core concerns and anxieties of Indian civilization have come to be reflected in the journey from the village to the city, and from the city to the village. Travel through space and time, the known and the unknown and, ultimately, the self and the not-self, get subsumed under these two humble forms of journey. It is shown that even the great Partition violence in north India, which killed millions during 1946–8, has become intertwined with the idea of the journey between the village and the city.

Between 1807 and 1812 the factory system reached institutional maturity, with a dozen posts serving Indian communities from the southern Appalachians to the Missouri Valley. These trading houses continued to serve the local agendas of Native American chiefs and hunters, as well as several different federal imperatives: diplomacy, land-acquisition, and the Indian “civilization” program. Some generated considerable business and revenue through sales of high-demand items like lead and small furs. Some provided acculturating Indians like the Wyandots with agricultural hardware and sophisticated consumer goods, encouraging their “civilization.” Some benefited only well-connected chiefs or private traders to whom the factors extended credit. One (Tellico) used factory debts and bribes to secure land cessions, but at the cost of a political revolution among the Cherokees. The trading houses became centers of dialogue between American national policies and local Indian socio-political aspirations, the latter of which, more often than not, prevailed.

This chapter provides a detailed description of the Sikh homeland, Punjab. The beginning of the chapter presents a geographical description of the area, including its land forms and boundaries. The climate and landscape of the Punjab is examined, along with the various activities done during the different seasons. A brief description of the settlements and flora and fauna in the area is provided. It also explains of the origin of the name ‘Punjab’, and a discussion of the ancient Indian civilization. Indologists believe that the Indian civilization is one of the oldest in the world, and that the very centre of this civilization was in Punjab. It then looks at the Punjabis and the birth of Punjabi nationalism.

Christophe Jaffrelot’s chapter highlights the polyvocal exchanges between Arabia and South Asia contributing to the making of the Indian Muslim Civilization. Tracing a historical path starting from the 1857-59 mutiny in colonial India, the chapter draws out the effects of the fall of the Mughal empire and the repression of the Mutiny on the reinforcement of ties between Arabian centers of Islam and Indian Muslims. It insists upon the mutuality of influences between the two in the flourishing of the Muslim cosmopolis. The chapter goes on to present the visions of a new Islamic Republic harbored by the promoters of Pakistan and the failed effort to build a trend-setting model of an Islamic State for the Muslim world. The historical progression of the chapter ultimately moves to examine the Arabization of Islam in Pakistan under President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq through his Islamization Policy and the rapprochement with the Gulf monarchies following the Afghan jihad explaining thus, the ‘gulfization’ of South Asian Islam.

In this essay, Badrinath points out the two different frameworks of perceiving man and the world: one is that of the modern Western political thought and the philosophy of law; and the other is that of dharma and its method that characterizes the journey of Indian civilization. What is at the very heart of human diversities, and therefore of human freedom, is the question of truth, which is perceived by different people in different ways. Anekanta-vada, Badrinath says, demonstrates how all human perceptions are only partially true, that is, they are true only conditionally.