“Long years of subjugation have buried our collective memory beneath layers of debris. Even when it resurfaces, it does so faintly.”
With those words, senior bureaucrat Shashi Ranjan Kumar opened the launch event for his book, The Decline of Hindu Civilisation, turning what might have been a routine literary event into a sustained examination of how India lost not only political power, but also intellectual continuity.
Kumar, a 1992-batch IAS officer of the Tripura cadre and currently Secretary of the Union Public Service Commission, framed civilisational decline not as an absence of achievement, but as a process of accumulated amnesia. India, he argued, continues to celebrate fragments of its past without understanding the intellectual systems that once sustained them.
He illustrated this through mathematics, beginning with zero.
“Zero appears in many ancient cultures,” Kumar said. “But in most of them it is only a placeholder. It is only in India that zero becomes a genuine number, capable of arithmetic operations.”
By the seventh century, Kumar noted, Brahmagupta had laid down formal rules for calculations involving zero. In the twelfth century, Bhaskara II went further, associating division by zero with the idea of infinity. These abstractions, he argued, were far ahead of their time.
“Negative numbers are even harder to imagine,” he added. “Yet Indian mathematicians accepted them and integrated them systematically, while Europe struggled even to accept zero.”
He pointed out that Florence banned the use of zero in public accounting in 1299, fearing it would enable fraud—long after Indian mathematicians had normalised it.
To explain deeper divergences between civilisations, Kumar contrasted Euclid and Panini. Euclid’s Elements, he said, shaped a Western tradition grounded in axioms, definitions and deductive proof. Panini’s Astadhyayi, by contrast, represented algorithmic thinking of extraordinary precision.
“The emphasis is on method rather than metaphysics,” Kumar said. “On procedures, not assertions.”
This distinction shaped astronomy as well. Greek astronomers sought physical models of the cosmos and justified them philosophically. Indian astronomers, by contrast, focused on computation.
“They were less interested in what the universe looked like,” Kumar said, “and more interested in accurately calculating planetary positions.”
He anchored these abstractions in historical episodes.
Kumar recalled that in 1140 CE, a literary gathering in Kashmir brought together 32 scholars—philosophers, poets, grammarians, aestheticians and architects—to celebrate the completion of a Sanskrit epic.
“This was not a local salon,” he said. “Scholars travelled long distances. It shows the scale of the intellectual ecosystem that once existed.”
A decade later, Bhaskara II’s Siddhanta Siromani blended algebra with poetry, posing mathematical problems through romantic imagery.
“No one found this inappropriate,” Kumar noted. “That confidence tells us something about the culture.”
That ecosystem, he argued, collapsed rapidly after the late twelfth century. The defeat at Tarain in 1192 opened the Gangetic plains to conquest. Nalanda was destroyed. Scholarly networks disintegrated.
“The destruction was not just material,” Kumar said. “It was institutional and epistemic. India entered a long arc of intellectual contraction.”
By the time European colonialism arrived, India had already been weakened by centuries of earlier disruption. Kumar also pointed to a paradox in military history.
“Deception lies at the heart of the Arthasastra,” he said. “Yet historically, India rarely used deception systematically in warfare.”
Equally damaging, he argued, was India’s lack of curiosity about the outside world.
“We sent merchants and monks abroad,” Kumar said. “But we produced no sustained accounts of foreign societies. We were generous givers of ideas, but reluctant borrowers.”
The second set of responses came from Swapan Dasgupta, author and former Rajya Sabha MP, and Amish Tripathi, who placed Kumar’s argument in a broader civilisational frame.
Dasgupta argued that questions of decline and sovereignty had preoccupied Indian thinkers from the nineteenth century until Independence, but were abruptly sidelined thereafter.
“A certain idea of modernity encouraged disengagement from the past,” he said. “The term ‘Hindu civilisation’ itself became suspect in polite discourse.”
He pointed to the collapse of Sanskrit as a living discipline and the narrowing of academic history as evidence of institutional neglect. Kumar’s book, Dasgupta said, mattered because it restored legitimate questions to public debate, even if it did not settle them.
Tripathi approached the issue from a different angle, arguing that the last thousand years should not be read simply as a sequence of defeats.
“Many ancient cultures faced the same invaders,” he said. “Most did not survive. Hindu civilisation did.”
The story, Tripathi argued, was one of prolonged resistance, sustained by cultural flexibility rather than doctrinal rigidity. He warned against treating Hindu civilisation as a single, exclusive tradition.
“That idea is modern,” he said. “Historically, Hindu society functioned through multiple, sometimes contradictory, streams.”
He cited the Ranakpur Jain temple, where a fierce Shaivite guardian deity stands at the entrance to a shrine dedicated to non-violence.
“Pacifism inside, force at the gate,” Tripathi said. “That complementarity was a strength.”
The final intervention came from Gautam Sen, Director of the Dharmic Ideas and Policy Foundation, who adopted a sharper tone. Sen warned that India was losing a global “narrative war” over its past.
He argued that civilisational scholarship rooted in India remained underfunded and institutionally weak compared to well-resourced international academic networks. Kumar’s book, he said, was valuable precisely because it was accessible to non-specialist readers.
Despite differences in emphasis, all four speakers converged on a shared concern: that India’s decline was not the result of intellectual poverty, but of broken transmission.
Recovering that inheritance, they argued, requires neither grievance nor nostalgia, but a renewed willingness to examine the past without fear.