An Anthology of Discourses on Bharat: Essays in the Honour of Prof. Kuldip Chand Agnihotri

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To look at Bharat from Western, Marxist or Greeco-Roman lenses is fraught with the risk of distortions, And these distortions have been imposed upon us. An Anthology of Discourses on Bharat: Essays in the Honour of Pof Kuldip Chand Agnihotri is a collection of essays elaborating on the unique aspects of Bharatiya history, culture and polity including Bharatiya Dharma and its religions, ancient language Sanskrit and the present geopolitics based on things Bharatiya that have shaped Bharat-which is often to be denied by those who adopt a completely alien lens to know it.

The essays ranging from a wide array of topics like the concept of nationalism in Bharat; the influence of Dharma in the Bharatiya national movement; how the pursuit of ethical acquisition of wealth (artha) was welcome in ancient Bharat; Sanskritic traditions in Punjab; to Bharat’s current foreign policy; geopolitics and China; to Buddhism’s influence in Bharat; and much more. The essays are meant to decolonize the marketplace full of narratives inimical to Bharat.

These essays are dedicated to Prof Agnihotri, an academician, an author and nationalist thinker who has vociferously emphasised on the inclusion of national and indigenous thoughts to be made a part of institutional knowledge system. Apart from his contribution to academia, he has worked extensively on the issues of separatism in Kashmir, Punjab and North-East. He also strives to revive the ancient nomenclatures for Bharat; for instance, Jambudvipa, Sapt-Sindhu, Dashguru Parampara.

Born in 1951 at a place called Mukandpur in district Nawanshahar, Punjab, Prof Kuldip Chand Agnihotri has been associated with teaching and learning for nearly half a century. After preliminary school education from his native place, he completed his B.Sc from the Sikh National College, Banga, Punjab and his Masters from Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jalandhar. He obtained his PhD from the Panjab University, Chandigarh. Prof Agnihotri detoured into several allied streams of learning and qualified the examination of Adi Granth Acharya from Panjab University besides receiving Honours degree in Punjabi language from Punjabi University, Patiala.

His illustrious academic career began with teaching assignments at several colleges in Punjab and Himachal Pradesh viz. Guru Nanak Khalsa College-Sultanpur Lodhi and he also remained the Principal of Baba Balak Nath Government Post Graduate College Chakmoh, Himachal Pradesh. In the higher academic echelons, Prof Agnihotri held several academic and administrative responsibilities. Prominent among these were: Chairman, Dr B.R. Ambedkar Chair, Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh; Vice-Chairman of Punjab School Education Board, Mohali, Punjab; Director, Himachal Pradesh University Regional Centre, Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh and finally graced the position of Vice-Chancellor, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamshala.

Prof Agnihotri, a polymath of sorts, is a nationalist thinker with original ideas and solutions for the problems afflicting the nation and society. During his long public life, he has remained a true seeker of knowledge and has disseminated his wisdom through his teachings, writings and lectures. Besides serving in academia, Prof Agnihotri has dedicated himself towards diverse national and social issues ranging from combating separatist tendencies (in Kashmir, Punjab and North-East Bharat), social fragmentations (Dalit issues and thoughts on Ambedkar); offering fresh narratives and countering false narratives (narratives on national movement for freedom); new insights on foreign policy issues (Bharat-China-Tibet issue); and presenting things in right perspective from national viewpoint. A strong believer of the idea of cultural nationalism and putting Bharat first, he vociferously emphasised that the national and indigenous thoughts must be made a part institutional knowledge system. One of the most inspiring initiatives of his exceptional thinking regarding the collaboration of native knowledge traditions with academia has been the launch of Hindu Studies program in the select universities of the country.

Apart from dedicating himself to the academics, Prof Agnihotri has travelled far and wide to different countries on official and academic assignments including the religious strife torn Iran of late 1970s. Among other objectives, one of the major purposes of his visits abroad has been to study the footprints of Bharat's culture and religions on the foreign soils and the revival of lost cross cultural and civilizational links. He has endeavoured to revive the lost nomenclatures in academics and in common parlances; for instance, Jambudvipa for subcontinental Bharat and beyond, Sapt-Sindhu for the whole of northwest Bharat and Dashguru parampara for the Sikh gurus in Punjab. As a true practitioner of the philosophy of Nishkama Karma, Prof Agnihotri has practically contributed towards the varied social and national causes by way of serving in national news agencies and newspapers like Hindusthan Samachar and Jansatta; holding responsibilities in the national political party, Bharatiya Jana Sangh; its student body, Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad; patronising an Indo-Tibetan think tank, Bharat-Tibet Sahyog Manch; harmonization work among the Sikh community. Rashtriya Sikh Sangat; presenting the national narratives on the Kashmir issue and countering the anti-Bharat tirade, Jammu Kashmir Study Centre; and promoting research on pertinent and contentious socio-cultural issues, the Centre for Social and Cultural Studies. In 1975, during the national emergency, Prof Agnihotri faced imprisonment while fighting the dictatorial regime of the day for the restoration of democratic values.

The idea behind coming with an edited volume had its genesis The nearly two and a half years ago when the dynamism of our lives came to a sudden halt during the first lockdown' in the heydays of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was a casual discussion among the friends and colleagues of the department of history in one summer afternoon of 2020 that led to the initiation of this thought. The idea was to engage young and promising scholars from good universities of Bharat and probably abroad, who would share ideological and academic commonalities vis-à-vis the Bharatiya (Indic) way of looking at Bharat. The fair point was to rope in scholars who could write on Bharat, viewed through the Bharatiya lens, without succumbing to the narratives peddled in the name of scientific writing based on Western paradigms. It was not too much to ask from our end, since, for long, we have been taught that the Bharatiya way of looking at things is unscientific, irrational and illogical, and which can only lead to myth-making. Much of the scholarly works on varied facets of Bharat, especially on its history, politics and culture, since independence, ran through such illusory notionalities. This was the way of carefully carved deceptive approaches of altering the realities by using the lens meant for viewing something different. This book stands to vindicate that it is not India, which is Bharat, but it is Bharat that has been made India, willy-nilly. It is an official name but a deception nonetheless.

Bharatvarsha is the last extant among the civilisational nations that have bitten the dust either under the assault of marauding hordes of the Abrahamic West or under the influence of perfunctory ideologies like communism. Bharatvarsha survived multiple assaults. The assaults, however, severed its geography, making it a subcontinent from almost a continent and from a subcontinent to a country. Nevertheless, it could not throttle its spirit, which emanated from the glory of its dharma and dharmic value system. This very dharma assigned with varying adjectives like Vedic dharma, Hindu dharma, or Sanatana dharma remained the life force behind this cultural endurance. As Darwin would have wanted it, the fittest culture survived and thrived several millennia. It provided strength to our freedom movement, to our post-independent polity, foreign policies, diplomacies, to our economic pursuits, to our environmental concerns, and above everything, to us.

It is in this spirit of reading Bharat, ie, India right, the present work is diligently designed. The book is thematically proportioned into three sections, each dealing with the substantial themes of history, politics and culture. Each section comprises five thematic essays, which address the section-specific theme within the broad templates of historical, cultural and political processes. The collection of essays delves into the phenomena, which have been unleashed, and are unleashing, in Bharat in a prospective and retrospective manner. The volume, therefore, is neither meant nor expected to be a fundamental work but is a conglomeration of writings that deals with the fundamentals of what makes it to be Bharat and Bharatiya. For instance, Bharat as a nation in making, vehemently espoused by Surendranath Banerjee, a patriot and a Congressman in 1925, was deeply oblivious of the deep-rooted civilisational ethos of this nation. It was probably under the overarching system of coloniality that overwhelmed the collective psyche of the learned men and women of his generation, and even later, that such discourses refuse to die down.

have just celebrated the 'Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav' to commemorate seventy-five years of freedom from colonial rule. The British were in India for less than 200 years, which as we know is only a fraction of the time in the historical canvas of this ancient land.

It needs no emphasis to state that India has evolved as a civilizational nation and is not the result of the political redrawing of maps and paper treaties, or of wars and military gains. This explains why in spite of our differences in food, language, dialects, dress, religion and cultural practices among other things there is an unseen but innate and deep bounding among all those that we term as Indian. Sri Aurobindo had highlighted this unique evolutionary process indeed the uniqueness of Bharat when he observed: "India shut into a separate existence by the Himalayas and the ocean has always been the home of a peculiar people.... with its own distinct civilization, way of life, way of the spirit, a separate culture, arts, building of society..."

A careful and dispassionate review of post-colonial academic development and growth makes it easy to note that even though British rule had ended, its influence left behind was deep and all present. The result is that the historical mainstream narratives that have dominated academic discourses in the post-independence decades have retained colonial influences and in doing so have commonly oversight the need to undo the damage done by the colonial approach to understanding Bharat.

There is always a certain degree of anachronism in the processes Tassociated with the social sciences. History, contemporaneity and the things in between can be theoretically understood as the coming together of different dimensions in the same historical present. The factuality and the notions that emanate from such points of departure encompass the themes pertinent to obtaining the holistic idea of social, political and cultural life. There have been pluralisms, cultural specificities of the places that shape the collective national sensibilities about what is old and what is new, about what is fortuitous and what is deterministic, and about what has been and what has been made to be. Therefore, there is discursiveness when the past is interpreted as separate, but very distinctly connected to the present. Consequently, one can discern the presence of the past through common historical traditions. To realise the dimensions. of history, politics and culture in both the intuitive and counter- intuitive sense, it is pertinent to ideate about and question the prevalent notionalities in the field of scholarship on Bharat.

The history, culture and polity of Bharat as we come across and study today, owe mostly to the scholarship emanated either from the Western academia grounded in understanding a civilisation in Orientalist or Marxist paradigms or on the basis of knowledge systems deeply embedded in the Greco-Roman civilisational approaches. For a long tenure of two centuries under the colonial hegemony, Bharat has been generally understood as India beyond Indus, being a conglomerate of nations and sub-nations with no cardinal unity, much less a synergy imperative to drive a nation. As the colonial scholars began to delve deeper into the wonders of India with the aid of exploratory studies on the antiquity of the land and its people, systems of knowledge, polities that governed the enormous landmass, and the cultural efflorescence that spurted at different. times under its emperors, they gradually discovered Bharat for themselves and rest of the world. However, in spite of providing unequivocal recognition, if not appreciation of this ancient land, the Bharat watchers problematised their whole understanding with confirmation bias', albeit with minor exceptions here and there.

The anti-colonial movement took liberal cues from religion, cultural symbols, metaphors, imageries and from texts. The classical texts with Sanskrit as a language of liturgical and textual import were weaponised for resistance against the colonial dispensation. Both, culture and language(s) militated against the coloniality saturated with hegemonising Western worldview.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages