The Prologue Problem
When people discuss India’s pre-independence intellectual history, they almost always read it backwards — as a prologue to something that came after.
BJP supporters read it as the prologue to Hindu nationalism. Congress supporters read it as the prologue to Nehruvian secularism. Marxists read it as the prologue to anti-colonial class struggle.
Each of these readings selects the evidence that fits and ignores the rest.
What Indian intellectual life actually was in the 19th century was incomparably more interesting than any of these retrospective narratives.
The Reform Traditions
The first major intellectual movements of colonial India were reform movements — efforts by Indian thinkers to engage critically with their own traditions in the context of colonial encounter.
Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) — arguably the first modern Indian public intellectual — simultaneously defended Sanskrit and Vedantic philosophy against European dismissal, while arguing within Hindu tradition for the abolition of sati and child marriage. He was not a Westerniser who rejected India. He was an Indian who read Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and English and used all of them against each other.
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–1886) and his disciple Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) developed a different response — a vigorous assertion that Hindu philosophy, properly understood, was not only compatible with modern rationalism but superior to the materialist West in its understanding of consciousness.
Vivekananda at Chicago in 1893 was not defensive. He was intellectually aggressive. He argued that Advaita Vedanta provided a philosophy of universal consciousness that both Western science and Western religion needed.
This is not a prologue to any contemporary political position. It is its own thing.
The Rationalist Tradition
Simultaneously, figures like Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890) and later B.R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) were mounting a rigorous critique of Brahminical orthodoxy from within the Indian tradition.
Phule’s critique of the Vedic canon was not based on European Orientalism. It was based on his reading of Indian history and his observation of caste oppression. Ambedkar’s intellectual formation combined this tradition with modern constitutional theory, Buddhist philosophy, and Western social science.
Ambedkar is simultaneously the most rigorous critic of aspects of Hindu tradition and one of the architects of the Indian constitutional framework. Anyone who tries to use him as a simple weapon in current political arguments is using an intellectual Swiss army knife as a hammer.
The Multiple Nationalisms
By the early 20th century, Indian nationalism was multiple, not singular:
- Tilak’s nationalism — rooted in Maharashtrian Brahmin tradition, using the Gita as a text of political action
- Gandhi’s nationalism — syncretic, drawing on Jainism, Ruskin, Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount
- Tagore’s nationalism — deeply suspicious of organised nationalism of any kind, committed to universal humanist culture
- The Revolutionaries — Bhagat Singh (a declared atheist and Marxist), Chandrashekhar Azad, Lala Hardayal
- Savarkar’s nationalism — explicitly secular in the sense of Hindu identity being cultural rather than theological, explicitly hostile to Islamic political claims
These traditions did not share a common ideology. They disagreed sharply about religion, caste, the role of violence, the nature of the nation, and the relationship with the West.
Why This Matters
The retroactive ideologisation of Indian history creates two problems:
First, it produces bad history. It misrepresents the actual complexity of Indian intellectual life before independence.
Second, it produces bad politics. It allows both left and right to claim “the real India” as their franchise, when the actual historical record shows that “the real India” has always been an argument, not a consensus.
India has always been a debate. The attempt to close that debate — from any direction — is the historical anomaly, not the tradition.
This article draws on established historical scholarship across the political spectrum.