Chapter 233: Project Taxila
September–December 1976Lucknow; New Delhi; Madras; and the specific rooms where India's future was being argued about by people who understood what was at stake
(shoutout to our brother Souvik_Kundu_6615 who gave me inspiration for this chapter ,idk this is accurate with his vision as i have forced some nationalist ideology in chapter but i had used this chapter as Renaissance of indian nationalism ,but i am sure he will love this chapter ,also to other brothers and sister pls comment on chapter whnever yo want ,your perpective give me very big ideas)
The document that started it was not a policy brief.
It was a history textbook.
Specifically, the standard Class X history textbook used in Uttar Pradesh government schools, which Karan had requested in August and which arrived on his desk on the third of September, 1976, in the same brown wrapping that textbooks had been delivered to Indian schoolchildren for the previous thirty years. He had not read it as a student — his schooling had been private, conducted in the colonial idiom that private schools maintained long after the colonial power had departed. He read it now, in his office at the Chief Minister's residence in Lucknow, with the careful attention he brought to documents that he suspected would tell him something he needed to know.
He read all four hundred and twelve pages over two evenings.
He set it down on the second evening and sat for a very long time without moving.
The book was not badly written. That was almost the problem. It was written with competence and a certain well-intentioned earnestness, and it described Indian history with the quiet structural confidence of a tradition that had been laying down its categories for two centuries and no longer needed to announce them because they had become the only available vocabulary. The Indus Valley Civilization: impressive but mysterious, ultimately undeciphered. The Vedic period: religious, ritualistic. The Maurya Empire: Ashoka, conversion to Buddhism, rock edicts. The Gupta Period: classical, golden, notable for mathematics and literature. Then: fragmentation, regional kingdoms, the arrival of Islam, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, colonialism — British colonialism, three hundred pages of it, described with a thoroughness and a sophistication that the preceding three thousand years of Indian history did not receive.
It was not that the book lied.
It was that it had absorbed, so thoroughly that the absorption was invisible, the framework within which British historians had organized Indian history for their own administrative and ideological purposes. India before colonialism was essentially pre-history in this telling — a long prelude of religious and dynastic activity that had no continuous thread of development, no accumulating intellectual tradition, no economic history worth describing in detail, no political philosophy that could be compared with Greek or Roman or European traditions. India became historically legible, in this textbook's implicit argument, at the moment when it became legible to Europe.
Chanakya was mentioned in three sentences. The Arthashastra — one of the most sophisticated works of political economy produced in any civilization before the fifteenth century — did not appear. The Tamil Sangam literature, produced over five centuries of extraordinary poetic and intellectual activity, received a paragraph. Aryabhata's mathematics, which had calculated the earth's rotation with accuracy that European science would not match for another thousand years, appeared in a box labeled "Did You Know?" on page 178. The concept of zero, which had changed the architecture of all subsequent human thought. The metallurgy of the Wootz steel tradition, which had produced blades that European swordsmiths could not replicate for a thousand years. The trade networks that had made India the largest economy in the world through most of recorded history. The philosophical schools — Nyaya, Vaisheshika, the Buddhist philosophical traditions of formal logic — that had developed systems of rigorous argumentation as sophisticated as anything Greece had produced.
All of it: absent. Or compressed into boxes. Or mentioned as color rather than as substance.
The Permanent Settlement of 1793, by contrast, received fourteen pages. The Indian Civil Service examination system received nine pages. The Indian Councils Acts received seven pages. The Rowlatt Act received four pages. The British administrative architecture of India was described with the kind of institutional specificity and analytical depth that the preceding three millennia of Indian political development had not been accorded.
He put the book away and sat at the window.
He thought about twelve million children — twelve million in UP alone, this academic year — reading this book. Learning to understand themselves through this framework. Absorbing the implicit conclusion that India was a civilization that had received history rather than made it. That the active intelligence of human civilization resided elsewhere and India's contribution was to be a setting for other people's stories.
He thought about what that did to a mind across twelve years of formal schooling. What kind of adult emerged from that process — educated, in many cases genuinely capable, but educated within a framework that positioned India as a subject of history rather than its agent. A framework that made the Indian child feel, at the deepest level, that the real centers of intelligence and creation and energy were elsewhere. In London. In New York. In Moscow.
He thought about something he had understood for a long time but had not yet articulated in its full political significance.
The world in 1976 was organized around two competing ideological systems.
The Soviet Union offered communism: the collective ownership of production, the primacy of class solidarity, the historical inevitability of the workers' triumph over capital. It had a theory of history. It had a theory of economics. It had a theory of the human being and what the human being was for. It had a complete intellectual architecture that answered every question a young person might ask about how the world worked and why it was arranged as it was and what the correct direction of travel was. Karl Marx had given it the architecture. Lenin had given it the state. The Soviet academy had spent sixty years elaborating it into every domain of human knowledge.
The United States offered capitalism: the free market, the sovereignty of the individual, the self-correcting mechanism of competition, the political system of representative democracy as the natural expression of the free individual's political nature. It had a theory of history — the arc of the moral universe bending toward liberal democracy. It had a theory of economics — the efficient allocation of resources through price mechanisms. It had a theory of the human being — the rational actor maximizing utility. It had a complete intellectual architecture, elaborated by generations of economists and political philosophers and cultural producers, that answered every question about how the world worked and what the correct direction of travel was.
Both systems were exported. Both systems were backed by universities and publishing houses and research institutions and foreign policy and, when necessary, armies. Both systems were genuinely believed in by the people who held them. Both systems had serious intellectual traditions and serious intellectual errors. Both systems had produced extraordinary achievements and extraordinary atrocities.
And both systems, when applied to India, produced the same fundamental error.
Both systems treated India as a case study in their own theory rather than as a civilization with its own theory.
The Marxist applied to India found Indian history to be a story of class struggle and mode of production transition — feudalism, colonialism, the incomplete bourgeois revolution, the potential for socialist transformation. The Indian past was a stage in the universal drama that Marx had written.
The liberal applied to India found Indian history to be a story of incomplete modernization — tribal customs giving way to rational institutions, the replacement of hierarchy with individual rights, the gradual triumph of the principles that Locke had articulated and the American founders had implemented. The Indian past was a deficient version of the path that England had correctly walked.
Neither framework asked what India itself had to say about how civilizations were organized and what they were for. Neither framework found it necessary to understand Sanskrit or Tamil or the Arthashastra or the Upanishads or the Buddhist philosophical tradition on their own terms rather than through the mediating lens of Western scholarship. Neither framework was capable of recognizing that India had produced, across three thousand years, a series of answers to the questions that both Marxism and liberalism were asking — and that those answers were in several respects more sophisticated than the answers that either tradition had arrived at.
Karan had been thinking about this for years. Since before he was the Chief Minister. Since before the LED paper. Since before the S-27.
He had known, since the beginning, that the INP needed an ideology.
Not a programme. The five-sector plan was a programme. Not a policy. The agricultural credit reform was a policy. Not even a philosophy of governance, exactly, though it had one. What it needed was what Marxism had and what liberalism had and what India had never successfully articulated for itself in a modern form: a complete intellectual system that answered the deepest questions about what civilization was, what economics was for, what the relationship between the individual and the community should be, what the correct direction of history was, and why India's specific answer to these questions was not only valid but was, in certain crucial respects, correct in ways that both the Soviet and the American answer were not.
The ideology that the INP needed was not available off the shelf. It had to be built. Built from the primary sources of Indian civilization. Built by scholars who understood those sources with the rigor that any serious intellectual tradition demanded. Built into a form that could compete, institutionally and intellectually, with the organized traditions that the two superpowers had been building for a century.
The Taxila institution was where that ideology would be built.
Not designed by Karan. Not imposed from above. Built by the best minds India could assemble, working from Indian primary sources, accountable to evidence, open to argument — but oriented by the specific question that neither Marxism nor liberalism asked: What does India itself say?
He called Meera at nine-fifteen.
"I need a meeting," he said. "Not the usual kind. Twelve to fifteen people. Historians. Economists. Philosophers. People who have spent their lives thinking about what India has been. And one or two who have thought about what India should be."
"When?" Meera asked.
"September twelfth," he said. "Two days. Residential. Lucknow."
"I'll arrange it," she said.
He spent the next week reading. Not the textbook again — he had read it once and that was sufficient. The sources it had omitted.
He read Chanakya's Arthashastra in the translation by L.N. Rangarajan. He had read it before, in the other life, from a different vantage point and with different questions. He read it now with the question that he had not been asking then: what theory of the state does this text contain, and how does that theory compare with the theories that Marxism and liberalism had produced? The answer, which had been available to any careful reader for two thousand years, was that the Arthashastra contained a theory of the state that was neither communist nor liberal — it was a theory of the state as a developmental instrument, oriented toward matsya nyaya — the law of the fish, the condition where the large devour the small — as the problem that the state existed to prevent, and toward dharmic social order as the condition the state existed to maintain. Not through ideological uniformity. Not through the suppression of individual interest. Through the specific, institutional, evidence-based administration of a society complex enough to require administration.
He read the Upanishads — not all of them, but enough to understand the core argument: that the self (atman) and the ultimate reality (Brahman) were identical, that the individual consciousness and the cosmic consciousness were not separate things in conflict but expressions of the same fundamental reality. This was not a religious claim in the sense that made it irrelevant to politics. It was a philosophical claim about the relationship between individual and collective that was different from both the Marxist claim (the individual is determined by class position and economic forces) and the liberal claim (the individual is the sovereign unit from which all social arrangements derive). The Indian claim was that the individual and the collective were not in fundamental opposition — they were aspects of the same reality, related not by conflict or by contract but by inherent connection.
He read the Buddhist philosophical texts — specifically the Milindapanha and the Nagarjunian Middle Way — not as religion but as philosophy, as a sustained argument about the nature of causation, the nature of the self, and the ethics of action in a world where all things were interdependent. What he found there was the most sophisticated available response to the specific question that both Marxism and liberalism struggled with: if the self is not the fundamental unit of value (as Marxism argued) and if the collective is not the fundamental unit of value (as an extreme reading of Marxism also argued), then what is the basis for ethical action? The Buddhist answer — dependent origination, the mutual constitution of all things, ethics grounded in the recognition of interdependence rather than in either individual interest or class solidarity — was not a religious answer. It was a philosophical answer of considerable depth.
He read Basava's Vachanas — the twelfth-century Kannada poet-philosopher's attacks on caste, on the corruption of religious institutions, on the substitution of ritual for genuine ethical commitment. He read Kabir. He read the Bhakti poets whose work had, across five centuries, maintained a tradition of social criticism and spiritual egalitarianism that was independent of both the Brahminical hierarchy and the Islamic framework that had surrounded it. These were not marginal figures. They were central figures in a tradition of Indian democratic thought that predated both the French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence.
He read Bal Gangadhar Tilak's reconstruction of the Bhagavad Gita as a call to action — not to the passive acceptance of fate but to engaged, consequence-disregarding duty. He read Sri Aurobindo's political writings, not his metaphysics, to find in them the most articulate attempt at a modern synthesis of Indian civilization's political implications. He read Vivekananda's speeches — not the religious Vivekananda but the cultural nationalist Vivekananda, the man who had stood at Chicago in 1893 and said, with the specific confidence of someone who understood what he was carrying, that the tradition he represented was not less than the traditions surrounding him.
He read all of this in a week. Not for the first time — he had read much of it before, in the other life, from a different position. He read it now with the question that the textbook had made urgent: how do I articulate, in modern political form, the ideology that this tradition makes possible?
By the end of the week, he had the answer in outline.
Indian nationalism — genuine Indian nationalism, not the narrow religious nationalism that the right offered and not the liberal nationalism that the Congress had practised and not the socialist nationalism that various left parties had attempted — was a third position. It was not a compromise between the Soviet and American positions. It was a different starting point that generated different conclusions.
It started from the proposition that India was not a nation in the Western sense — a people defined by shared language, ethnicity, or religion — but a civilization, the specific form of social organization that had maintained continuous intellectual, cultural, and spiritual development for three thousand years across an enormous geographic and demographic diversity. The civilization had absorbed waves of migrants and conquerors. It had metabolized Buddhism and Islam and Christianity without being destroyed by any of them. It had produced, within its own internal development, a diversity of philosophical and political traditions that no single ideology could capture.
From this starting point, the implications were specific.
The correct unit of analysis for understanding India was not the individual (the liberal starting point) or the class (the Marxist starting point) but the civilization — the accumulated inheritance of three thousand years of intellectual, spiritual, and material development that constituted what India was. Politics in India was not about arranging individuals optimally or liberating classes from exploitation. It was about making the civilization work — about giving the civilization's accumulated inheritance productive expression in the modern world.
The correct relationship between individual and state was neither the liberal relationship (the state as servant of individual rights) nor the Marxist relationship (the individual as expression of social forces) but the dharmic relationship: the individual as part of a civilization that made the individual possible, with corresponding obligations of participation and contribution, and the state as the instrument through which the civilization maintained the conditions for its own flourishing.
The correct framework for economics was neither the free market (which maximized individual wealth at the cost of collective obligation) nor the command economy (which maximized collective output at the cost of individual initiative) but the developmental state: the state as the active manager of the conditions that allowed both individual initiative and collective flourishing to operate simultaneously. Not because markets were wrong — markets were the most efficient mechanism for allocating most resources most of the time — but because markets, left entirely to themselves, maximized short-term individual returns at the expense of long-term civilizational investment. The state's role was to make that investment when the market would not.
The correct framework for foreign policy was neither alignment with the Americans (which made India a client state in the Cold War) nor alignment with the Soviets (which made India a different client state) but the specific assertion of Indian civilizational interest as a legitimate category in world affairs — the interest of a civilization that had its own history, its own values, its own understanding of human development, and its own contribution to make to the organization of a world that was currently being organized around frameworks that India had not chosen and did not fully endorse.
This was the ideology.
It was not a complete ideology. It had gaps. It had tensions — particularly between the dharmic framework and the democratic framework, between the civilizational argument and the pluralist reality of a country with a hundred languages and a dozen major religious traditions. Those tensions were not problems to be eliminated but productive tensions to be maintained, because an ideology that had eliminated all its tensions had stopped being able to think.
The ideology needed an institutional home. An institution capable of elaborating it, testing it, transmitting it, and defending it against both the Soviet and the American critiques — which would come, because both superpowers would correctly identify a serious Indian nationalism as a threat to their preferred organization of the world.
That institution was Taxila.
The twelve people who came to Lucknow on the twelfth of September arrived with varying degrees of curiosity and varying degrees of skepticism.
Professor Irfan Habib had come from Aligarh. He was fifty-two, a historian of the Mughal economy, a Marxist — which Karan had noted and had decided was not an impediment, because what mattered was the rigor of his methodology and his commitment to primary source research, and on both counts Habib was among the finest scholars India had produced.
Professor K.N. Chaudhuri had come from Delhi. He had spent his career at SOAS in London and had written the definitive study of the Indian Ocean trading economy before European dominance — a book that demolished the claim that Asia had been passive and undeveloped before European contact, demonstrating from Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Arabic sources that India had maintained a sophisticated, self-sustaining economic system for centuries before Vasco da Gama arrived.
Dr. Romesh Kumar had come from Bombay — an economist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences who had spent a decade studying the Indian informal economy and who had concluded that neither neoclassical nor Marxist economics adequately described how the Indian economy worked.
Professor Madhavan Nair had come from Madras — a classicist who had spent forty years with Tamil Sangam literature, producing translations that scholars praised and that no national publisher had been willing to carry to a general audience.
Dr. Uma Chakravarti had come from Delhi — a historian of ancient Indian social history, specifically the position of women in early Buddhist and Brahminical society, rigorous in method and personally skeptical of powerful people claiming interest in Indian civilization.
Professor Bipin Chandra had come from JNU — a historian of Indian nationalism whose work on the ideology of the nationalist movement was foundational and whose analysis of how colonial economic policy had systematically deindustrialized India was among the most cited work in the field.
Dr. Venkataraman Subramaniam had come from Hyderabad — a philosopher who spent his career arguing, against considerable institutional resistance, that India had produced philosophical traditions of analytic rigor — particularly the Nyaya school's logic and epistemology — that European philosophy had not engaged with because European philosophy had not found a way to access them without the mediation of orientalist scholarship.
Colonel Ajit Singh Dhillon had come from Delhi — recently retired from military intelligence, author of a classified Defence Ministry paper on strategic studies education in India that was the most cogent argument for why India needed an independent strategic studies institution that anyone had written and that had been read by almost no one.
Dr. Prabhat Patnaik had come from Cambridge where he was visiting. He was thirty-five, an economist working on the specific mechanisms by which colonial economies were structured to extract surplus rather than accumulate it. His politics were to the left of Karan's. His methodology was rigorous enough that the politics were separable.
Professor Lotika Varadarajan had come from Pune — a historian of Indian maritime trade and shipbuilding who had spent decades demonstrating that India had maintained a sophisticated maritime economy across the Indian Ocean for two thousand years before the European arrival. Her books were praised by specialists and assigned in not one Indian school.
Dr. Sarvepalli Gopal was the most distinguished figure in the room. He was sixty-one, the official biographer of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man whose intellectual standing was such that his presence at any gathering constituted a form of endorsement.
Dharamvir Bharati was fifty-one, the editor of Dharmayug, India's most important Hindi literary magazine, a novelist and poet of genuine distinction who inhabited the space between the Sanskrit classical tradition and the contemporary Hindi vernacular that very few writers could inhabit.
These were the twelve people around the table on the morning of September twelfth.
Karan had placed copies of the Class X history textbook at each seat.
He gave them twenty minutes to look at it. The room was quiet with the particular quality of silence that descends on scholars when they are confronted with something that confirms a concern they have had for years but have not fully articulated.
Madhavan Nair was the first to speak. "The Sangam literature. One paragraph."
"The Arthashastra," Subramaniam said. "Three sentences."
"The Nyaya school," Subramaniam continued. "Not mentioned. Not once. The most rigorous system of formal logic produced in the ancient world outside of Aristotle. Not mentioned."
"That's because the framework doesn't have a category for Indian logic," Bipin Chandra said. He was reading the table of contents. "The curriculum assumes that rigorous formal thought begins in Greece and is transmitted through Rome and Europe. Indian texts that contain rigorous formal thought are therefore categorized as religion. The Nyaya Sutras are in the philosophy section, meaning they are understood as spiritual practice, not as logic."
Karan had been listening without speaking. Now he spoke.
"I want to describe what I believe this textbook represents," he said. "Not as a critique of the people who wrote it. As a description of the problem."
The room looked at him.
He said: "The world in 1976 is organized around two competing ideological systems. The Soviet Union offers Marxism. The United States offers liberalism. Both of these systems have something that India currently lacks."
He paused.
"They have an articulated, institutional, self-reproducing intellectual tradition that answers the deepest questions about human society. What is the individual? What is the collective? What is the state for? What direction is history moving? Why is our system better than theirs? These questions have answers in Marxist theory. They have answers in liberal theory. They have university departments, research institutes, journals, fellowships, publishing houses, and foreign policy apparatuses devoted to elaborating and defending those answers."
He said: "India has been independent for twenty-nine years. In twenty-nine years, we have not built an equivalent institution. We have built universities. We have produced individual scholars of great distinction. We have adopted planning frameworks from Soviet experience and democratic frameworks from British experience. But we have not asked the prior question — what does India itself say? What is the Indian answer to the questions that Marxism and liberalism are both answering? What is the specific intellectual contribution that three thousand years of Indian civilization has made to the questions of how human societies should be organized?"
He looked at the room.
"That textbook," he said, pointing to it, "represents the failure to ask that question. It is a textbook that tells twelve million UP children what British scholarship concluded about India, filtered through the frameworks that Indian academics inherited from British scholarship. It does not tell them what Indian civilization itself concluded about the questions that matter — how to organize a state, how to manage an economy, how to think about the relationship between individual and community, how to maintain social order across extraordinary diversity. Those answers exist. They are in the primary sources. They have never been systematically assembled into a modern form capable of competing with the intellectual systems that the two superpowers are projecting."
He said: "That is what Project Taxila is. It is India's intellectual sovereignty."
The room was very quiet.
Bipin Chandra spoke first. He was a man who had spent his career studying Indian nationalism, and he recognized immediately what was being proposed, and he recognized its significance.
He said: "You are proposing to build the intellectual infrastructure for a third ideology."
"Yes," Karan said.
"An Indian ideology," Chandra said. Not a question.
"Not Indian in the sense of Hindu," Karan said immediately. "Not Indian in the sense of excluding the Islamic contribution or the Buddhist contribution or the Jain contribution or the contributions of every regional tradition. Indian in the sense of the civilization — the entire, inclusive, three-thousand-year tradition of human development that has occurred on this subcontinent and that constitutes a coherent intellectual inheritance regardless of its internal diversity."
"The specific claim," Subramaniam said. He was the philosopher in the room and the philosopher's instinct was to find the specific claim. "The claim is that Indian civilization has produced answers to the foundational questions of political philosophy that are different from both Marxist answers and liberal answers. And that those answers are valid — not merely culturally interesting, but actually correct in ways that matter for how India should organize itself and what India should say to the world."
"Yes," Karan said.
"State the strongest version of the claim," Subramaniam said. "The version that can be criticized. Don't give me the qualified version."
Karan said: "The liberal claim is that the individual is the fundamental unit of political value and that the state derives its legitimacy from the consent of individuals. The Marxist claim is that material conditions determine consciousness and that class is the fundamental category of political analysis. The Indian claim — the claim that emerges from the Arthashastra, from the Upanishads, from the Buddhist philosophical tradition, from the Bhakti movement, from the long history of the Indian state as a developmental rather than a contractual institution — is that the civilization is the fundamental unit of political value, that the individual and the collective are aspects of the same reality rather than antagonists, that the state's legitimacy derives from its service to the civilization's flourishing rather than from individual consent or class interest, and that the correct orientation of economics is toward long-term civilizational development rather than short-term individual utility or short-term collective production."
A long silence.
Habib said: "That claim is in direct tension with the liberal democratic framework that India has adopted constitutionally."
"Not in direct tension," Karan said. "Liberal democracy is an institutional arrangement for managing political competition. The Indian claim is a philosophical statement about what political competition is for. You can have liberal democratic institutions — elections, individual rights, separation of powers — while also having a civilizational theory of the state's purpose. In fact, India's specific form of liberal democracy may require a civilizational theory to function, because the pure liberal theory — individuals contracting to form a state — doesn't actually describe how India works or how it has ever worked."
Patnaik said: "The developmental state claim. You said the state's role is as the manager of conditions for civilizational flourishing. This is not far from the Nehruvian socialist state model."
"It's different in one crucial way," Karan said. "The Nehruvian model adopted the state's role as economic producer — the state would produce the steel, the chemicals, the power, the infrastructure. The Indian civilizational model says the state's role is to create conditions, not to be the producer itself. The state ensures that individuals and communities have the resources, the education, the security, and the institutional framework to be productive. What the individuals and communities then produce — that's theirs. Not the state's."
"That's closer to the liberal model than the socialist model," Romesh Kumar said.
"No," Karan said. "It's different from both. The liberal model leaves the conditions themselves to the market. If education is expensive, the market produces private education that the wealthy can buy. If healthcare is expensive, the market produces private healthcare. If infrastructure is expensive, the market underproduces it because the returns are too long-term. The Indian model says the state is responsible for the conditions because conditions are a civilizational investment that no individual can rationally make at the required scale." He paused. "The distinction is: the liberal state is the referee. The Marxist state is the player. The Indian state is the groundskeeper — responsible for the conditions without which play is impossible, but not playing itself."
"Who decides what the conditions are?" Uma Chakravarti asked.
"That is the constitutional question," Karan said. "And the answer is: the people, through democratic institutions. The Indian claim is not that there is a philosopher-king who knows what the civilization needs. The Indian claim is that the civilization knows what it needs, and that the state's job is to listen carefully and respond effectively. The democratic mechanism is the listening. The developmental mechanism is the response."
Gopal had been watching Karan throughout this exchange with the specific attention of a man who had spent his career studying the intellectual history of Indian nationalism and who was now watching something he had never expected to watch: a practicing politician articulating the intellectual foundations of a coherent, primary-source-based Indian nationalist philosophy.
He said, quietly: "Chanakya."
Karan looked at him.
"You're not inventing this," Gopal said. "Chanakya already said it. The Arthashastra is the most complete statement of the developmental state theory in the ancient world. The Rajadharma — the duties of the king — are not about the king's power. They are about the conditions the king is obligated to maintain. The granaries. The irrigation systems. The roads. The administration of justice. The protection of trade. The Arthashastra is two thousand years old and it is the intellectual foundation of what you are calling the Indian model."
"Yes," Karan said. "Chanakya said it. The Arthashastra is the foundational text of Indian political economy. It is not taught in Indian schools. The Class X textbook has three sentences on Chanakya. The intellectual tradition that Chanakya represents — the tradition of the state as the developmental manager of civilizational conditions — has been submerged under two centuries of frameworks that began from different premises. Taxila exists to recover that tradition and to demonstrate its contemporary relevance."
The morning session lasted four hours. By the end of it, the twelve people had stopped performing their initial roles and had begun doing the thing that scholars do when they encounter a problem that is genuinely important: arguing about it seriously.
Habib and Chandra argued sharply about whether the civilizational framework was compatible with the Marxist analysis of class. Habib's position was that a civilization was not above class — that the Arthashastra's state was a state that served the interests of the Brahmin-Kshatriya ruling class and should not be romanticized as a neutral developmental instrument. Karan's response was that this critique applied equally to liberal democracy — the liberal state was also not neutral, it served the interests of the property-owning class — and that the question was not whether the Arthashastra state was perfect but whether the Arthashastra framework was more useful for understanding what the Indian state should be than either the liberal or Marxist framework.
"The test," Karan said, "is not whether the Arthashastra was implemented perfectly in ancient India. The test is whether the principles it articulates — the state as the maintainer of conditions for civilizational flourishing — generate better policy than the principles that either the liberal or the Marxist framework generates when applied to contemporary India."
Subramaniam had been making notes through the morning, and he now produced a challenge that was more philosophically fundamental than anything that had been said.
He said: "The problem with the civilizational framework is the problem of all frameworks that appeal to a collective identity — it tends to suppress the internal diversity of that identity. India is not one civilization. India is a conversation between many civilizations — the Tamil civilizational tradition, the Bengali civilizational tradition, the Punjabi tradition, the Rajasthani tradition, the Kerala tradition. When you say 'the Indian civilization's answer,' you are making a claim about a unity that may not exist in the form you are describing."
This was the hardest objection. Karan had been thinking about it for weeks.
He said: "The unity is not the unity of a single tradition. It is the unity of a conversation. What makes India a civilization rather than a collection of civilizations is not that all its parts say the same thing but that they have been in conversation with each other for three thousand years, that they have responded to each other, borrowed from each other, argued with each other, and that through this sustained conversation they have produced a shared intellectual inheritance that is recognizably Indian even though it contains Shaiva and Vaishnava and Buddhist and Jain and Sufi and secular elements simultaneously." He paused. "The analogy is not a nation-state but a family. A family is unified not because all its members are the same but because they have a shared history and a shared conversation that produces a shared inheritance. The Indian civilization is a family of civilizational traditions, and the Indian ideology I am describing is not the ideology of any single member of that family but the ideology that emerges from the family's conversation taken as a whole."
Madhavan Nair, who had been quiet through most of the morning, spoke now from a position of obvious emotional engagement. He said: "The Tamil Sangam literature. The Thirukkural. Thiruvalluvar wrote, two thousand years ago, a text on ethics and governance and the nature of love that is as sophisticated as anything in the world's philosophical literature. It has been translated into German and Russian and French and English. It is studied in universities outside India. It is not in this textbook. It is not in any Indian curriculum. The intellectual content of the Tamil civilizational tradition — which is part of the Indian conversation you are describing — has been systematically excluded from the national self-understanding by a curriculum framework that was never designed to include it."
"Yes," Karan said. "That is part of what Taxila corrects. Not by adding the Thirukkural as a box on a page. By building the institutional infrastructure that takes the Thirukkural seriously as philosophy — translates it into Hindi, publishes it in affordable editions, trains scholars who can teach it, connects it to the contemporary questions it speaks to."
Nair was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: "I have spent forty years working on texts that nobody reads. I have sometimes wondered whether the work had any point."
"It had every point," Karan said. "The work existed and it was correct and it was waiting for an institution capable of distributing it. That institution is what we are building."
During the lunch break, Karan found himself in conversation with Dharamvir Bharati.
Bharati was, of all the people in the room, the one whose work most directly inhabited the question that Taxila was trying to answer. He had spent his career in the space between classical and contemporary, between Sanskrit and Hindi, between the civilizational inheritance and the modern world. His novel Gunaho ka Devta had reached millions of Hindi readers. His poetry engaged the Bhakti tradition without being captured by it. He understood, from the inside, what it felt like to be doing serious intellectual work in Indian languages within an institutional environment that did not take that work seriously.
He said, over the food: "The Hindi intellectual tradition. You understand what has happened to it."
"Tell me what has happened to it," Karan said. He wanted to hear Bharati say it, because Bharati's formulation would be more precise than his own.
"The English-language institutions produce scholarship that the Hindi world cannot access," Bharati said. "The Hindi literary world produces work that the English-language institutions do not acknowledge. The two traditions operate in parallel and strengthen each other not at all. The result is that neither is as strong as it should be. The English-language tradition lacks the connection to the living intellectual and spiritual culture that the Hindi literary tradition maintains. The Hindi tradition lacks the institutional resources and the international recognition that the English-language tradition has. Both are impoverished by the separation."
"Taxila Press bridges that," Karan said.
"If it is done correctly," Bharati said. He was not an easy man to satisfy, which was why Karan wanted him. "The bridge has to go both ways. Hindi translations of the scholarship that the English-language tradition produces. English translations of the Hindi literary and intellectual work that the English-language tradition ignores. Not as a concession. As a recognition that they are both expressions of the same civilizational inheritance and that the inheritance is incomplete if either is missing."
"Yes," Karan said. "That is exactly what the Taxila Press is for."
"The popular publications," Bharati said. "The Civilization Series. You described it as volumes on Indian civilization that are written for the general reader. Not for scholars. For the family that has a literate adult and wants to understand what their civilization has produced."
"Yes."
"The tone matters," Bharati said. "The tone of these publications cannot be the tone of an institution congratulating India on itself. That tone produces defensiveness and nationalistic pride, and neither of those is the same as genuine understanding. The tone has to be the tone of a civilization that is confident enough in its actual achievements that it does not need to claim false ones. The Aryabhata volume should tell the reader, with appropriate rigor, what Aryabhata actually contributed to mathematics, why it matters, and why the claim that India contributed the zero is not a nationalist myth but a historical fact with specific documentary support."
"Yes," Karan said.
"And also where Aryabhata was wrong," Bharati said. "A tradition that claims its thinkers were never wrong is a tradition that doesn't trust itself. The test of intellectual confidence is the ability to acknowledge error while maintaining pride in achievement."
"That is exactly the principle," Karan said. "The Taxila scholarship acknowledges the civilizational failures as well as the achievements. The caste system is a civilizational failure. The exclusion of women from formal intellectual life is a civilizational failure. The internal fragmentation that allowed colonization to occur is a civilizational failure. These are not things that a confident nationalism should hide. They are things that a confident nationalism should examine honestly, understand structurally, and learn from — because the ideology is not about India being perfect. It is about India being worth the serious intellectual attention that any great civilization deserves."
Bharati looked at him for a moment. He was a man who had been producing serious intellectual work in an environment that did not take that work seriously, for thirty years. Something in his expression communicated that he understood precisely what was being proposed and found it genuinely significant.
He said: "I will edit the popular publications."
"I was hoping you would say that," Karan said.
The afternoon session produced the ideological framework document.
Not a final document — a working document, marked as such, that would be refined over months of subsequent debate. But a document that named the thing.
Its title was: Toward an Indian Political Philosophy: The Foundations of Indian Nationalism.
It had seven propositions.
The first proposition was the civilizational proposition: India is not a nation in the modern Western sense — a people defined by shared language, ethnicity, or religion. India is a civilization: the specific form of continuous human development that has maintained intellectual, cultural, spiritual, and material life across an enormous geographic and demographic diversity for three thousand years. The appropriate framework for understanding India is not the nation-state framework but the civilization framework.
Habib had objected that this proposition was too abstract to have policy implications. Karan had responded that every political philosophy began with a statement about the fundamental unit of analysis. Marxism began with class. Liberalism began with the individual. The Indian philosophy began with the civilization. The policy implications followed from the fundamental unit.
The second proposition was the dharmic proposition: the Indian tradition's concept of dharma — not as religious duty but as the appropriate organization of human activity in relation to cosmic and social order — provided an alternative to both the liberal concept of rights (individual claims against the collective) and the Marxist concept of historical progress (the collective's movement through necessary stages). Dharma was relational and contextual: the appropriate action depended on one's position in the social web and on the consequences for the web as a whole.
Subramaniam had expanded this proposition for twenty minutes, tracing its philosophical development through the Upanishads, the Buddhist middle way, and the Bhakti tradition's democratization of the dharmic concept. Uma Chakravarti had pushed back on the gendered implications — dharmic thought had historically assigned different dharma to men and women in ways that were oppressive. The resulting formulation was careful: the dharmic framework provided the relational orientation, but the specific content of dharma was historically conditioned and required continuous democratic revision rather than appeal to ancient authority.
The third proposition was the developmental state proposition: the Indian civilizational tradition consistently understood the state as the active manager of conditions for civilizational flourishing — not as the producer of economic output and not as the mere referee between individual interests. The Arthashastra was the foundational text. The Mauryan state, the Chola administrative system, the Vijayanagara empire's commercial policies — all demonstrated in practice the theory that the state's responsibility was to maintain infrastructure, ensure justice, protect trade, and manage the long-term conditions that no individual could manage alone.
Bipin Chandra had connected this to the colonial argument: one of the specific injuries of colonialism was the replacement of the developmental state model with the extractive state model. The colonial state had not been a developmental state — it had been a mechanism for extracting surplus from India and transferring it to Britain. The post-colonial state had, in many ways, inherited the extractive architecture without fully replacing it with the developmental architecture. Taxila's School of Governance would systematically study what the developmental state required and what specific institutional reforms the colonial inheritance required.
The fourth proposition was the civilizational economy proposition: the Indian approach to economics was neither socialist nor liberal but civilizational — the economy existed to serve civilizational development, not to maximize individual utility or collective output as abstract ends. This meant that the market was the correct instrument for most resource allocation but that the state had an obligation to correct market failures that threatened civilizational investment — in education, in research, in culture, in long-term infrastructure. The distinction was not about ownership but about orientation: what is the economy for?
Romesh Kumar had spent thirty minutes on this proposition, connecting it to his own work on the Indian informal economy and arguing that the informal economy was not a failure to modernize but an expression of a different economic rationality — one that prioritized community stability and mutual obligation over individual profit maximization. The civilizational economy proposition provided the theoretical framework within which the informal economy could be understood as economically rational rather than economically deficient.
Patnaik had challenged this — the informal economy was also an economy of exploitation, of workers who were paid less than their value because they had no institutional protection. The response to this was that the civilizational economy proposition did not romanticize existing practices. It provided a framework within which those practices could be analyzed and reformed. The informal economy was economically rational in its social organization and economically unjust in its distribution of rewards. Both of these things were true simultaneously.
The fifth proposition was the pluralist unity proposition: the Indian civilization's specific achievement was the maintenance of extraordinary diversity within a recognizable unity. Not through the suppression of diversity — the various regional, linguistic, and religious traditions were not forced into uniformity. Through the sustained conversation between diverse traditions that produced a shared intellectual inheritance while maintaining specific identities. The Indian nationalism that Taxila elaborated was therefore not a nationalism that required cultural uniformity. It was a nationalism that celebrated diversity as the specific form of strength that civilizations, as opposed to nation-states, could achieve.
Madhavan Nair had been waiting for this proposition. He had spoken with the specific directness of a man who had spent forty years watching the Tamil civilizational tradition being treated as regional rather than national.
He said: "The Tamil tradition is not peripheral to the Indian civilization. The Sangam literature is older than most of what is considered classical Indian literature. The Tamil philosophical tradition — Shaiva Siddhanta, the Alvars' Bhakti poetry — is a core expression of the Indian civilizational conversation, not a regional variant of it. If the Taxila institution takes this proposition seriously, it takes Tamil seriously not as a regional language of a regional tradition but as one of the languages of the Indian civilizational inheritance, with the same claim on the national intellectual imagination as Sanskrit."
"Yes," Karan said. "That is precisely what taking this proposition seriously means. The Encyclopedia of Bharat has Tamil literature as a primary category, not as a regional section. The School of Languages and Translation has Tamil as a first-tier language alongside Sanskrit and Hindi. The National Fellowship program recruits from Tamil Nadu's scholars with the same priority as from the Sanskrit universities of the north."
Nair was quiet for a moment. Something shifted in his expression — the specific shift of a man who has been expecting disappointment and has not received it.
The sixth proposition was the international proposition: India's appropriate international stance was not alignment with either superpower but the assertion of Indian civilizational interests as a legitimate category in world affairs. This meant more than non-alignment as a foreign policy position. It meant the active articulation of what the Indian civilization had to contribute to the organization of world order — specifically, the framework of mutual obligation across diversity, the developmental state model as an alternative to both state socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, and the civilization's specific traditions of conflict resolution through dialogue rather than confrontation.
Dhillon had been waiting for this proposition. He said: "The strategic implication is significant. If India asserts civilizational interests rather than merely national interests, it has a basis for leadership in Asia and Africa that transcends Cold War alignment. The countries of Asia and Africa are not naturally at home in either the American or Soviet framework. A coherent Indian framework that addresses their actual conditions — poverty, colonial inheritance, developmental needs, cultural diversity — is potentially more compelling to them than either available alternative."
"Yes," Karan said. "The School of Strategic Studies has two functions. The first is the standard function of a strategic studies institution — rigorous analysis of India's security environment and strategic options. The second is unique: the elaboration of an Indian theory of international relations, based on the civilizational principles, that provides a framework for Indian foreign policy that is not merely non-alignment but is positively articulated. India has specific things to say about how the world should be organized. Those things have not been said in a form that can compete intellectually with the American theory of international relations or the Soviet theory. Taxila changes that."
The seventh and final proposition was the generational proposition: the ideology of Indian nationalism, as Taxila elaborated it, was not addressed to the present generation alone. It was addressed to the fifty-year arc of Indian development. The choices that India made in the next thirty years — about education, about institutional development, about the relationship between economy and civilization, about the assertion of Indian interests in world affairs — would determine what India was in 2030. Taxila was a thirty-year institution. Its first twenty years were preparation. Its second twenty years were elaboration. Its third twenty years were transmission to a generation of Indians who would be equipped, for the first time in two centuries, to understand their civilization on its own terms.
Dharamvir Bharati had said, at the end of the session: "You are describing the intellectual project of Indian independence. Not political independence — that happened in 1947. Intellectual independence. The completion of the independence movement by the recovery of the Indian mind from the intellectual colonization that continued after the political colonization ended."
"Yes," Karan said. "That is exactly what this is."
The founding statement of the National Academy of Civilizational and Policy Studies — Taxila — was drafted in a three-hour session on the second day, with Sarvepalli Gopal holding the pen.
The founding motto was: Jnana, Dharma, Rashtra. Knowledge, Duty, Nation.
The founding statement's first paragraph read: The National Academy of Civilizational and Policy Studies is established on the conviction that India is a civilization whose intellectual inheritance constitutes one of the greatest achievements of the human mind, and that the recovery, elaboration, and contemporary application of that inheritance is both an intellectual obligation and a national necessity. The Academy's scholarship begins from Indian primary sources. It answers to Indian questions. It is accountable to Indian intellectual standards that are equivalent to the highest international standards while being independent of frameworks that were developed without Indian civilization's participation.
The second paragraph read: The Academy is not an ideological institution in the sense of an institution committed to a predetermined set of conclusions. It is an ideological institution in the deeper sense: it proceeds from the conviction that the questions — what is the state for? what is the economy for? what is the civilization for? — have Indian answers that have not yet been systematically elaborated in modern form, and that the elaboration of those answers is the central intellectual task of this generation.
Habib had objected to the phrase "the central intellectual task of this generation," calling it grandiose. The final version read "one of the central intellectual tasks of this generation," which Habib found marginally more acceptable and Bharati found slightly weaker than the original. Both accepted the compromise.
The third paragraph was the one that Karan had insisted on and that the room had argued about longest: The ideology that the Academy elaborates is neither conservative nor progressive in the Western sense. It does not begin from a pre-existing political alignment. It begins from Indian primary sources — the Arthashastra's developmental state theory, the Upanishadic account of the individual's relationship to the whole, the Buddhist philosophical tradition's analysis of interdependence and ethics, the Bhakti tradition's democratic assertion of spiritual equality, the Tamil Sangam's account of the moral life, and the full range of Indian intellectual achievement across three thousand years and every regional tradition — and it builds contemporary conclusions from those sources through the method of rigorous scholarship rather than political predetermination.
The room had approved this paragraph.
The founding scholars had then signed the document. Twelve signatures.
The National Academy of Civilizational and Policy Studies was formally announced on the first of October, 1976, through a press release from the Chief Minister's office.
The reaction was not what Karan had expected, which was larger and more immediately significant than he had anticipated.
Priya Verma had been waiting.
Her piece in Drishti was titled The Third Way: How Karan Shergill Is Building India's Answer to Marx and Mill and it was the most widely read piece she had written in ten years of publishing the journal.
She wrote: The twentieth century's great political project has been the competition between two intellectual systems — communism and liberal capitalism — each of which claimed to have discovered the correct theory of human organization. The competition has produced an enormous intellectual literature, a catastrophic set of wars, and a world that is organized around a binary that approximately three billion people, living in Asia and Africa and Latin America, did not choose and do not fully endorse.
She wrote: India has, since independence, attempted to occupy a position between the two — non-alignment in foreign policy, a mixed economy domestically, a democratic system that borrowed from the British model while attempting to address Indian conditions. This position has been described, by both sides, as a failure to choose. What it has actually been is an insufficient articulation. The position was correct. The philosophy behind it was underdeveloped.
She wrote: Project Taxila is the attempt to develop the philosophy. To take the specific position that India occupies — between the two superpowers, grounded in a civilizational inheritance that neither superpower has engaged with seriously — and give it the intellectual architecture that makes it a genuine alternative rather than a mere refusal to align.
She wrote: If the institution succeeds — and it has the endowment, the scholars, and the political protection to have a serious chance of succeeding — it will produce, across thirty years, the intellectual infrastructure for an Indian nationalism that is not the narrow nationalism of religion or language or ethnicity but the expansive nationalism of a civilization that knows what it has produced and knows what it has to contribute.
She wrote: The world has two complete ideological systems. It is about to have three.
The English language press responded with respectful skepticism. The Economic and Political Weekly ran a critical piece questioning the national interest framing. Three of the founding scholars responded with a joint piece that was the sharpest institutional advocacy that had appeared in the EPW in years.
The Hindi press was more enthusiastic. Bharati's piece in Dharmayug reached two million readers.
The student response was the most significant: within three weeks, the Taxila fellowship program had received fourteen hundred applications from history students, economics students, political science students, philosophy students, linguistics students from universities across India — from people who had been doing the work the institution described as its purpose, in conditions of institutional inadequacy, and who recognized in the Taxila announcement something they had been waiting for without knowing they were waiting for it.
In the third week of October, Karan received a letter from a twenty-two-year-old student at Banaras Hindu University.
The student's name was Sanjay Dwivedi. He was studying ancient history. The letter was three pages, handwritten, in Hindi, and it described in careful detail what it felt like to study Gupta period history in a department that had no access to the primary Sanskrit sources, whose curriculum consisted entirely of secondary scholarship in English that had been produced by British and German scholars whose framework he could see was inadequate but which he had no alternative framework to replace it with.
He wrote: I have known for three years that there was something wrong with the way I was being taught to understand my own civilization. I did not know how to describe what was wrong. I did not know what the correct alternative was. I have read the Taxila founding statement three times. It is the first time that someone has described, in precise language, what I have been feeling and what the correct response to it is. I am writing because I want to study at Taxila. I am writing also because I want to say that what you are building is the thing that should have been built thirty years ago.
Karan read the letter.
He thought about what the ideology was.
Not what he had articulated to the founding scholars. Not the seven propositions. The thing underneath the seven propositions, the thing that had generated them, the thing that was the reason the institution was worth building.
The reason was this: a civilization that could not articulate its own intellectual inheritance in modern form was a civilization that was losing the capacity to understand itself. Losing that capacity, it lost the ability to make the choices that its survival required. A civilization that understood itself only through the frameworks of other civilizations would make choices that served those other civilizations' interests rather than its own. Not through malice or conspiracy but through the simple mechanism of thinking with borrowed tools.
The tools built by British scholarship had been borrowed. The tools built by Marxist scholarship had been borrowed. Both sets of tools were valuable — the British contributions to Indian historiography were real contributions, and the Marxist contributions to the understanding of Indian economic history were real contributions. But borrowed tools had the bias of their builders. They asked the questions the builders had wanted answered. They generated insights in the directions the builders had been looking.
India needed its own tools. Tools built from Indian primary sources, by Indian scholars, asking Indian questions, generating insights in Indian directions.
That was Taxila.
He set the letter down.
He thought about what he was building.
Not just the institution. The ideology it would produce. The ideology that would give the INP what every successful political movement required: a theory of the world that was coherent and articulable and true, that answered the deepest questions, that gave people a framework within which to understand their own lives and their own civilization, that competed with Marxism and with liberalism not by dismissing them but by starting from a deeper and older starting point.
He thought about how long it would take.
Thirty years, probably. For the ideology to be fully elaborated. For the scholarship to be comprehensive. For the first generation of Taxila fellows to move through the civil service and the judiciary and the press and the academy and carry the intellectual formation into every institution they entered.
He was thirty years old.
Thirty years from now, he would be sixty.
He thought: if the ideology is correct, and if the institution is well built, and if the first generation of fellows has the quality that the fourteen hundred letters suggest is available, the ideology will outlast any individual political project. It will outlast him. It will outlast the INP. It will be the intellectual inheritance of India in 2030, the way Marxism was the intellectual inheritance of the Soviet Union in 1950 — not because a single person had created it, but because an institution had systematically elaborated it across decades until it became the vocabulary within which educated Indians understood their civilization.
That was the ambition.
He pulled out a fresh sheet of paper.
He began writing a response to the student from BHU.
The letter said: The institution will accept its first fellows in eighteen months. The standard for selection is the quality of the intellectual work and nothing else. The conditions you describe — studying a civilization you cannot fully access through borrowed frameworks — are the conditions that Taxila exists to change. Your letter demonstrates exactly the kind of mind the institution needs: a mind that knows something is wrong without yet having the tools to say what is right. Come when the doors open. Bring your questions. We will work on the tools together.
He signed it.
He put it in the envelope.
He looked at the window, at the Lucknow evening, at the city that had given him the Chief Minister's office and that had twelve million children reading a textbook that did not tell them what their civilization had produced.
He thought: we are building the thing that should have been built thirty years ago.
The work had begun.
There was still much to do.
There always was.
The Taxila campus was selected in November: forty-two acres on the outskirts of Lucknow. Charles Correa came to look at it in the November light.
Correa walked the land for three days and talked with Karan about what buildings were for.
He said: "The library is the center."
"The library and the garden," Karan said. "In the Indian tradition, the garden was part of the pedagogy. The tree was part of the teaching. Nalanda's excavations show a designed landscape. I want that logic here — not as revival, as a contemporary interpretation of a spatial principle that is Indian and that works."
Correa made notes.
"Native trees only," Karan said. "The same principle as the Green Belt Mission. In fifty years, the campus should look like it grew from the specific ecology of this part of the Gangetic plain. The buildings emerging from a forest."
"The seven schools," Correa said. "How should they relate?"
"They should overlap," Karan said. "Not so that they have no individual identity. But the spaces between the schools are as important as the spaces within them. The School of Economics and the School of Society should be close enough that their scholars encounter each other in passing. The School of Languages and Translation should be at the center, because all the other schools depend on the language capacity it produces. And the School of Future Studies should be at the eastern edge — facing the sunrise. Always building toward something that doesn't yet exist."
Correa looked at him for a long moment. In thirty years of designing institutions, he had rarely been given a brief of this intelligence.
"The ideology shapes the architecture," Correa said.
"Yes," Karan said. "The ideology says that the relationship between individual scholarship and collective knowledge is as important as either one separately. The architecture should make that relationship visible. The scholar walking from her office to the library should pass through the collective space. The seminar should be visible from the garden. The library should be at the center of everything because knowledge is the foundation of everything."
Correa built it.
The founding endowment was constituted legally in December 1976: two hundred and fifty crore rupees, irrevocable, in a trust administered by the Taxila academic board.
The central government's contribution of seventy-five crore had been approved by cabinet in December, following a conversation between Karan and the Finance Minister that was, in its functional content, this: Karan had described the institution, the Finance Minister had described the political complications of funding an institution that the government could not control, and Karan had said that the complications were the point.
"An institution the government can control," Karan had said, "is an institution that serves the government's short-term interests. An institution the government cannot control is an institution that serves India's long-term interests. I am asking the government to invest in its own long-term interests."
The cabinet approved.
In December, Madhavan Nair wrote Karan a letter from Madras.
He had begun the full translation of the Purananuru. All four hundred poems. Into Hindi and English simultaneously.
The letter ended: I am sixty-four years old. I have perhaps twenty years of productive scholarship remaining. I had concluded that I would not live to see the Sangam literature reach the audience it deserves. I was incorrect. I find this a cause for some happiness.
Karan read the letter twice.
He sat with the specific quality of stillness that he maintained when something had happened that was correct. Not triumphant — the institution was not yet built, the fellows had not yet been selected, the ideology had not yet been elaborated in its full form, the Encyclopedia of Bharat had not yet been started, the Arthashastra had not yet been placed beside the Communist Manifesto and the Wealth of Nations as the third great document of political economy available to a thinking person.
But the direction was set.
The intellectual independence of India had begun.
Not in 1947, when the flag was raised.
In 1976, when twelve scholars sat around a table in Lucknow and agreed that the civilization could speak for itself.
He picked up the next file.
There was work to do.
There always was.
End of Chapter 233