Western countries are experts in branding themselves. Look at the UK, for instance. It’s even managed to brand its colonial past and sell it back to the former colonies in the form of the English language and various other hangovers of the colonial civilization. Many students from developing countries apply for the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. How many of them have any idea about Cecil Rhodes (after whom the Rhodes scholarship is named) being a brutal colonizer whose statue still “graces” the campus of Oxford University?
Colonialism aside, European countries have done impeccable branding of their cultural and civilizational ethos. In the UK, you would find a well-functioning museum even in the tiniest of villages. In a country that’s tiny compared to the size of Bharat, there exist numerous museums celebrating the legacy of well-known British writers. The former childhood home of famous British poet Ted Hughes is impeccably maintained as a cottage and there is a whole website dedicated to it.
The point I am trying to make is, as a country with a glorious civilizational heritage, we have somehow failed to brand our ancient culture the way we should have. The entire cultural and civilizational legacy of Bharat, as the world knows it, is vastly limited to monuments built during the Mughal period and the various museums and art galleries built by Nehruvian Bharat under the influence of British colonial legacy.
Thus, what is missing is a Bharatiya perception of Bharat, that there indeed existed a civilizationally rich Bharat before the Mughals and the British, and we don’t owe all our artistic and cultural heritage to the Mughal invaders and the British colonizers.
Modi government has already started the process of cultural re-branding of Bharat. With the construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya and the revamping of the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, the government has taken massive steps to boost temple tourism. The results are there for all to see. A decade back, foreigners, even Bharatiyas associated Bharatiya heritage with Taj Mahal, Humayun’s Tomb, etc. Apart from the Akshardham Temple complex and Birla Mandir, our great temples were completely absent from the mainstream tourism circuit. But now, one has to just look at the social media feed of millions visiting Bharatiya temples to confirm the growing demand for temple tourism in the country.
Here are a few suggestions to the government for further branding of Bharat’s civilizational and cultural heritage:
- Online temple directory
The government should come up with a dedicated temple tourism website that gives users handy information on all ancient Hindu temples.
We have so many ancient temples located in every corner of Bharat but nobody knows about these. These temples are not well-maintained so there is hardly any online information about them.
The government should commission a relevant team to research all ancient temples of Bharat and create an effective database. The temple tourism website should be a one-stop destination for all prospective pilgrims and tourists both from Bharat and abroad.
It should incorporate state-of-the-art AI tools to suggest to users an entire temple tourism itinerary based on their b schedule and the area of Bharat they plan to visit. It should also have provisions for linking users to all relevant hotels, guest houses, and homestays in the geographical region they are planning to visit.
- Identification and revamping of ancient temples
Numerous ancient temples in Bharat are in ruins due to consistent neglect. There are others which have great Vedic significance, but nobody knows about their existence.
The government needs to commission a dedicated team to collect information on all ancient temples throughout Bharat and accordingly commission their renovation in collaboration with the concerned departments.
The Yogi Adityanath government of Uttar Pradesh has already taken many steps to revamp lesser-known temples in UP. For example, a temple in Bareilly cantonment with links to Mahabharata is being restored by the UP government. The Yogi Adityanath government has identified 10 temples for restoration by the UP-State Tourism Development Corporation. Other states should come up with similar initiatives.
- Set up Museums in small cities and towns
Our museum infrastructure is essentially macro. We have many state-of-the-art museums set up post-independence at a national level. But we lack the micro-museum infrastructure representing local culture.
The government needs to encourage projects to set up museums in small towns and cities of Bharat highlighting the local culture and civilizational legacy of these places.
Bharat has already taken certain initiatives in this regard. The Mahabharata-themed Jyotisar Anubhav Kendra (Experience Center ) in Kurukshetra was inaugurated by PM Modi in February 2024. The development of the museum is ongoing and it’s the first-of-its-kind digital museum recreating the Mahabharata era.
More such museums and art galleries focusing on Bharat’s civilizational heritage need to be encouraged. Most importantly, we need to develop these in small towns and cities so that branding of Hindu culture and civilization generates large-scale local employment, thus boosting the local economy and controlling the large-scale migration to metropolitan cities of Bharat.
- Set up cultural centers with spotlight on ancient Hindu civilizational heritage
I have raised this point in many of my write-ups that the cultural spaces of Bharat have been hijacked by the leftists.
Thus, the youth, especially in big cities, have no public spaces to go to where they wouldn’t be brainwashed into subscribing to all sorts of anti-Bharat gibberish.
Thus, the government needs to create new cultural centers in metropolitan cities that promote a dialogue on Bharatiya culture and civilization. The discussions, debates,various events, etc. at these centers should focus exclusively on the vast corpus of knowledge and literature of ancient Bharat, thus connecting youth with our ancient civilizational heritage and branding our culture in the process.
- Encourage heritage tours of the holy cities of Bharat
Bharatiya capital Delhi is full of heritage tours and guided walks of Mughal monuments. It’s an entire industry, so much so that many people have created their livelihood around it!
The government should develop a similar ecosystem of guided tours and walks in holy cities of Bharat like Kashi, Mathura, Ayodhya, Prayagraj, Madurai, etc. Currently, we lack the sophisticated ecosystem of such guided walks and tours by experts and enthusiasts of ancient history when it comes to the Hindu heritage of Bharat.
Thus, it’s high time we develop this ecosystem and rope in various experts and Hindu heritage enthusiasts to conduct these kinds of walks in different holy cities of Bharat.
- Create cultural ambassadors
Many international organizations have the concept of citizen ambassadors under which professionals in different fields visit each other’s countries through an exchange program to foster intercultural understanding.
Bharat with its rich repository of civilizational cultural heritage and an enormous youth population should create its fleet of citizen cultural ambassadors.
This can be an ambitious initiative under which the government should collaborate with various universities to create ambassadors of culture. These citizen cultural ambassadors could be chosen from a pool of humanities and social sciences researchers based on the nuanced and positive understanding of Bharat’s ancient culture and civilizational heritage their research and scholarship are bringing to the field.
If the government manages to create a program of citizen cultural ambassadors at multiple levels, it will inspire the youth to take more pride in their own culture and heritage and also enable experts on Bharatiya culture and civilization to get a unique platform to showcase their talent and expertise.
- Promote Sanskrit language
If we must brand our civilizational legacy and culture, the government must promote the study of the Sanskrit language.
Decades of leftist propaganda has marginalized the Sanskrit language; as a result, 90 percent of the researchers and academicians translating ancient Sanskrit texts into English are foreigners. While the Sanskrit language is taught in many prestigious international universities, its position is deteriorating back home.
The government needs to change this by incentivizing schools and colleges to introduce different kinds of Sanskrit study programs for students at all levels.
The government should consider setting up a full-fledged modern institute for the study and promotion of the Sanskrit language and literature, on the lines of various foreign language centers like the Max Mueller Bhavan of Germany and Instituto Cervantes of Spain.
When Bharatiyas can flock to these European centers to learn European languages, why can’t we create a sophisticated modern ecosystem for the promotion of the Sanskrit language?
We cannot truly appreciate our ancient history and civilization until we begin to learn the Sanskrit language. Right now, we have so many distorted English translations of Vedas, Puranas, and many other Hindu epics, and ancient texts of Hindu Dharma. We have limited options because we have a very limited pool of Sanskrit-to-English or Sanskrit-to-Hindi translators within Bharat.
Thus, the government should set up a modern institute for the study and promotion of Sanskrit that will offer Certificate programs and diploma programs in the Sanskrit language.
