Knowledge & Mind
"Civilisational amnesia" as the deepest break of all — and recovering the farmer's and the woman's vidyā as real knowledge, not folklore.
For Dharampal the gravest injury was not to any single institution but to memory itself. By about 1820, he argues in Bharat ka Swadharm, an important part of India's elite had become "intellectually and emotionally detached from its own society" and had adopted parakiyata — foreignness. This class inherited the coloniser's picture of a degraded India and passed it on as history. The result he names is amnesia: "in the last one-and-a-half to two centuries such an excess of amnesia came over us… This is the terrible form of amnesia."
He puts the stakes in terms of authority, not nostalgia: "A statement or a thought stripped of memory becomes… stripped of authority; its real force does not remain." A people cut off from the memory of its own civilisation loses the ground on which any of its resolve or creation can stand.
What Dharampal names parakiyata in the language of the study, Rajiv Dixit put in the language of the kitchen table. Foreignisation, he argued, is not an event but a process you are not meant to notice — "when a process is applied to you without your noticing… that is the easiest way to make a slave." His conclusion is the sharpest single image in the corpus:
"Growing up carrying sanskars of this kind, we are neither Indian, nor European, nor American, nor Hindustani. We have been left a khichdi — hanging, like Trishanku, between two worlds."— Rajiv Dixit, lecture transcription (his interpretive argument, quoted as oratory — not an archival claim)
And he refused the easy half-way: either commit fully to becoming Europe or America and accept the consequences, he told audiences, or recover the foundations — but stop pretending the suspended state is progress. That framing — choose deliberately, count the consequences — is this page's question in his voice.
The record he sets against the amnesia is, again, the coloniser's own surveys — showing that real knowledge was distributed far more widely than the elite believed. In the 485 villages of one Bengal count, alongside the teachers there were 123 general practitioners, 205 village doctors, 60,297 midwives and 21 smallpox inoculators — medicine and learning woven through ordinary village life, not confined to a lettered caste. Documented
From this Dharampal builds two arguments. The first is a contrast of foundations: he reads Indian and European civilisation as resting on different "chief bases," seven on each side — the Indian tradition organised around Satya, Ṛta and Sanatana Dharma, infinity and manifold paths, viveka (innate discernment) and svadharma; the European around a single truth-messenger, matter, trained rationality and a "metaphysics" that, he argues, "gave birth to a specific high-low ranked society-method." This is his interpretive framework, offered for debate, not an archival finding.
The second is that the everyday knowledge of the "vast society" is genuine vidyā. The Indian peasant's reading of soil, season, seed, wind and cattle, and the household woman's knowledge of food, health, home-medicine and lokachar, are — in his words — "all forms of learning." He notes that the dharma-texts themselves hold "the home-knowing woman" the final authority on family custom, and the ordinary man of a region the final authority on its folk-custom.
The prescription is to re-establish the knowledge-centres and honour these vidyās as real knowledge — gathering, editing and studying the farmer's and the woman's learning with the same seriousness spent on Western instruments, and keeping the resources for it under local control, since "by centralised control these learnings are destroyed." He closes the diagnosis of a society split between a two-lakh-family "officer class" and twelve-to-fifteen crore families by asking that the gap be closed through knowledge, not decree.
He is emphatic that this cannot be legislated from above: "this politics cannot be done by any one central cadre or group." The future model "will be by the wider Indian intellect," and "whatever is made in the beginning will have deficiencies… then, by experience and thought, it will keep changing. But the model will be of the tradition. There is no other road." An open problem, self-consciously left open.
- The Indian Knowledge Systems division of AICTE, established under NEP 2020, institutionalises "end the amnesia" as curriculum policy — with The Beautiful Tree among its founding citations. Documented — the counter-view: scholars debate whether this recovers documented knowledge or curates a selective past.
- The "Panch Pran" framing (2022) — "freedom from colonial mindset," "pride in heritage" — compresses this book's opening argument into governance slogans. Documented as policy language; its substance is exactly what remains contested.
Sources
- Dharampal, Bharat ka Swadharm (1993), ch. 1 & ch. 4 — overview: The Book; full text: Bharat ka Swadharm — Full English Translation (Lecture One; "The Future, and the Search for the Right Path").
- Village knowledge-economy figures from the Bengal survey data reprinted in The Beautiful Tree (1983) — full PDF.
- Present-day: NEP 2020 / AICTE IKS Division; "Panch Pran" (2022). See Evidence & Claims.