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DHARAMPAL • COLLECTED WRITINGS Volume V
A radical change in the common perception of our pre-colonial history will enable us to recover our spirit and renew Indian civilisation.
In this set of five landmark essays - made available for the first time in one single volume - Dharampal provides the philosophical background of his lifelong quest to rediscover the indigenous social, political, educational and economic systems which served the people of this country till these were suppressed and supplanted by the imported institutions associated with the bourgeois civil society of England.
Though these imported structures may today serve India's ruling elite well, they are designed to exclude the participation and understanding of the great mass of the population - which continues to remain loyal to the older, civilisational worldview and tradition profoundly described in the essay, Bharatiya Chitta Manas and Kala. The result is a society working at cross purposes and a political system forever preempted from tapping the creative energies and involvement of its people.
We always gain by studying our past, writes Dharampal. We lose when we denigrate it, without study. After several decades of English education, we appear to be firmly convinced that everything indigenous is inferior, and that real knowledge and wisdom can come only from the West. No one can conceiv ably assist a society grounded in such fatal assumptions.
Essays on Tradition, Recovery and Freedom is the fifth in the series of five volumes of the Collected Writings of Dharampal brought out in a special edition by Other India Press and SIDH.
In this set of five landmark essays - made available for the first time in one single volume - Dharampal provides the philosophical background of his lifelong quest to rediscover the indigenous social, political, educational and economic systems which served the people of this country till these were suppressed and supplanted by the imported institutions associated with the bourgeois civil society of England.
Though these imported structures may today serve India's ruling elite well, they are designed to exclude the participation and understanding of the great mass of the population - which continues to remain loyal to the older, civilisational worldview and tradition profoundly described in the essay, Bharatiya Chitta Manas and Kala. The result is a society working at cross purposes and a political system forever preempted from tapping the creative energies and involvement of its people.
We always gain by studying our past, writes Dharampal. We lose when we denigrate it, without study. After several decades of English education, we appear to be firmly convinced that everything indigenous is inferior, and that real knowledge and wisdom can come only from the West. No one can conceiv ably assist a society grounded in such fatal assumptions.
Essays on Tradition, Recovery and Freedom is the fifth in the series of five volumes of the Collected Writings of Dharampal brought out in a special edition by Other India Press and SIDH.
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First published January 1, 2000
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About the author
Dharampal
21 books90 followersDharampal was born in 1922 at Kandhala in the Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh. He has been associated in various ways with the regeneration of India’s diverse populations and the restoration of their decentralized social, political and economic organization centered on local communities.
After being active in the Quit India Movement (1942-43), he worked for some years with Mirabehn, an associate of Mahatma Gandhi, and in the 1950s founded a cooperative village near Rishikesh. Before that, at the time of Partition, in 1947-48, he was put in charge of the Congress Socialist Party centre for the rehabilitation of refugees coming from Pakistan, and came in close contact with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, as well as with numerous younger friends, such as L.C. Jain, in Delhi. He was also a founding member of the Indian Cooperative Union in 1948.
From 1958 until 1964 he was General Secretary of the Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development (AVARD) and subsequently Director, Study and Research of the All India Panchayat Parishad, until 1965. He was closely associated with Sri Jaiprakash Narayan, who deeply appreciated his research and writings.
From 1966 Dharampal devoted himself, for almost two decades, to an exploration of Indian archives spread over the British Isles. His published works of this period include: Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary Indian Accounts (1971), Civil Disobedience and the Indian Tradition (1971) and The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983). He also authored Panchayat Raj as the Basis of Indian Polity: An Exploration into the Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly (1962) and The Madras Panchayat System: A General Assessment (1973). Recently several collections of his essays have been compiled and published by several of his younger associates. A complete listing of his published works is compiled below. The total picture of pre-colonized India that emerges from the pioneering historical research of Dharampal, though quite impressive, is yet to have a more widespread impact on India’s historiography. In the 1980s, his guidance served as inspiration for a group of scientists called the People’s Patriot Science and Technology (PPST) with their headquarters in Chennai.
Dharampal served as a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research for two terms in the early 1990s and again for a term recently. He was also the Chairman of the Commission on the Protection of the Cow set up by the Government of India in 2001. From the mid 1980s Dharampal was closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi’s Sevagram Ashram, Wardha (Maharashtra) which he considered his main abode until he passed away there on 24th October 2006. He is survived by his brothers, Yogendra Pal and Yash Pal, his sister, Sushila, and his children, Pradeep, Gita and Anjali. His elder daughter, Gita Dharampal-Frick is a professor of history at the South Asian Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany.
After being active in the Quit India Movement (1942-43), he worked for some years with Mirabehn, an associate of Mahatma Gandhi, and in the 1950s founded a cooperative village near Rishikesh. Before that, at the time of Partition, in 1947-48, he was put in charge of the Congress Socialist Party centre for the rehabilitation of refugees coming from Pakistan, and came in close contact with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, as well as with numerous younger friends, such as L.C. Jain, in Delhi. He was also a founding member of the Indian Cooperative Union in 1948.
From 1958 until 1964 he was General Secretary of the Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development (AVARD) and subsequently Director, Study and Research of the All India Panchayat Parishad, until 1965. He was closely associated with Sri Jaiprakash Narayan, who deeply appreciated his research and writings.
From 1966 Dharampal devoted himself, for almost two decades, to an exploration of Indian archives spread over the British Isles. His published works of this period include: Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary Indian Accounts (1971), Civil Disobedience and the Indian Tradition (1971) and The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983). He also authored Panchayat Raj as the Basis of Indian Polity: An Exploration into the Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly (1962) and The Madras Panchayat System: A General Assessment (1973). Recently several collections of his essays have been compiled and published by several of his younger associates. A complete listing of his published works is compiled below. The total picture of pre-colonized India that emerges from the pioneering historical research of Dharampal, though quite impressive, is yet to have a more widespread impact on India’s historiography. In the 1980s, his guidance served as inspiration for a group of scientists called the People’s Patriot Science and Technology (PPST) with their headquarters in Chennai.
Dharampal served as a member of the Indian Council of Historical Research for two terms in the early 1990s and again for a term recently. He was also the Chairman of the Commission on the Protection of the Cow set up by the Government of India in 2001. From the mid 1980s Dharampal was closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi’s Sevagram Ashram, Wardha (Maharashtra) which he considered his main abode until he passed away there on 24th October 2006. He is survived by his brothers, Yogendra Pal and Yash Pal, his sister, Sushila, and his children, Pradeep, Gita and Anjali. His elder daughter, Gita Dharampal-Frick is a professor of history at the South Asian Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany.
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