From the past 104 years, on 1st August, Vaadasabha, which is the official debating union of S. P. College, has been organizing Lokmanya Tilak Punyatithi programme in the remembrance of Lokmanya Tilak. This year Vaadasabha had the honour of hosting Hon. Sanjeev Sanyal, who is a celebrated economist, historian, and thinker. His address was a powerful blend of history, geopolitics, and civilizational introspection, focused on a theme both ancient and urgent: the origins of our national identity as Bharat.
In a world where national identities are often defined by colonial timelines, India, or more accurately, Bharat stands out as an ancient civilization whose continuity predates modern statehood by millennia.
Yet ironically, even in 2025, it becomes necessary to reassert this civilizational truth. As Hon. Sanjeev Sanyal pointed out in his lecture and presentation, the colonial attempt to erase the idea of India wasn’t some historical misstep, it was a deliberate strategy of domination. Calling India “no more a nation than the equator” wasn’t just Churchill’s rhetoric but civilizational gaslighting.
The roots of Bharat go far deeper than modern maps or Mughal chronicles. The term Bharata first appears in the Rigveda, tied to a small tribe — the Bharata-Trutsu, who lived along the once-mighty Saraswati River, lauded as Sindhu-mata, the mother of rivers. This river, dismissed for years as mythical, is now visible through satellite imagery and archaeological evidence, flowing from the Himalayas to the Rann of Kutch, supporting a flourishing Saraswati-Harappan civilization that collapsed not by war, but by climate.
But here's the kicker: India didn’t become a civilization despite its diversity, it became one because it assimilated it. The Battle of Ten Kings, often treated as a mere military episode, laid the foundation of something deeper. After victory, King Sudasa didn't impose, he assimilated. The Vedas emerged not as sectarian texts, but as a Samhita — a compilation of shared wisdom across tribes. This principle ‘unity without uniformity’ became the operating system of Indic civilization.
The Rigveda even ends with a civilizational compact: “Common be your assembly, common your thought.” This idea would echo for centuries, from the scattered Shakti Peethas to Shankaracharya’s pan-India yatras, from Tolkappiyam (the oldest Tamil grammar) rooted in Vedic wisdom to the sacred geography described in the Puranas — rivers, mountain ranges, and even people like the Kiratas and Yavanas are mapped into a cohesive whole.
Even when colonial powers tried to fracture this identity, the internal memory of Jambudwipa (the sacred land of the rose apple) held, from Kashmir’s sages to Kerala’s Mahabali. And nothing symbolizes this better than the Ashoka Chakra on our national flag. It is not merely a wheel, it is the ancient emblem of the Chakravartin — the universal sovereign. King Sudasa once wielded this very symbol, not to dominate, but to unify. Today, it stands not for empire, but for democratic dharma, the wheel that turns not by force, but by consensus.
This blog isn’t a nostalgic ode. It’s a civilizational reminder, that in the face of fractured narratives, we must remember we are not fragments. We are the fire. We shall speak together, let our minds be one, Samgacchadhvam samvadadhvam.
-Aditya Phad
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