“From Virasat to Vikas: The two sides of India’s civilisational rebound”, The Sunday Guardian, January 25, 2026
“Prasenjit K. Basu’s “India Reborn: The Epic Story of a Civilisation’s Rebound from Two Centuries of Decline” is an important book with a clear purpose. It refuses to treat India’s rise as a recent miracle, or as a story that begins in 1947, or even in 1991. Basu is asking the primal question: how did a civilisation with long standing economic weight and intellectual influence suffer such a steep relative decline, and what does rebirth look like when it is measured in institutions and agency rather than in mood? The range is wide, yet the spine is firm. He moves from India’s historical economic scale into the mechanics of colonial conquest and extraction, into the layered struggle for freedom where he gives real weight to currents often distorted by historians or softened in public memory, and then into the Republic’s long policy drift before the reform turn and the current effort to rebuild delivery and opportunity at scale. The tone is confident and unsentimental, which is part of its appeal. Basu does not write to comfort and challenges us to rethink long held assumptions of who we are as a civilisational state claimant, how we got lost in between and how we may be finally getting there.
That long arc matters because the book is really intervening with its arguments and ideas in a contemporary contest: what kind of political entity is India? Read narrowly, India is a nation state, a modern constitutional polity, a republic, bounded by territory and defined by citizenship. Read more accurately, India is also a civilisational state, a perpetual thread of civilisational memory, Hindu religious and cultural grammar, intellectual, spiritual and syncretic traditions and social and commercial life that long predates and extends way beyond the modern map and repeatedly survived political rupture. Basu is interested in what happens when that continuity and endurance begins to express itself again as modern capability. And that is one of the key strengths of this compelling book.
The civilisational state idea has unfortunately been ideologically contentious. It is easily caricatured, and it can be mishandled by opposing sides, one denying any exceptionalism, greatness and glory of Indian civilisation and culture and the other asserting it to the exclusion of other influences and pluralities embraced by it over the ages. Used mindfully, it is an explanatory frame, inspirational and exhortatory, to reclaim India’s greatness of virasat in all its plenitude, its profundity and myriad dimensions. It tells you why continuity, antiquity, and shared civilisational memory is not mere memory but, when reignited, more recently in the last 11 years under PM Modi’s aastha—faith and indefatigable effort—vikas gets conjoined with and draws the self-confidence ballast of virasat. This virasat is of capability and genius, as cultural and philosophical as it is economic, technological and scientific, one that had often been suppressed by colonial and post-colonial narratives……”
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