Dharampal
The historian who went back to British colonial archives and proved that India had thriving educational and industrial systems before colonization destroyed them - his work is the empirical foundation for any serious claim about what India actually lost.
Shri Dharampal, inspired with this vision of Gandhi, created a vast body of literature which analyzed how India’s education used to be before the British messed it up. It built upon the Gandhian ideas of education and has contributed greatly to India’s public discourse. Gandhi was a great critique of the British and their institutions. Particularly in education he had remarked that how India had a vibrant education system and how the British uprooted and supplanted it with a system which has been eroding Indian’s Knowledge Tradition ever since.
Select Works
- Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century (1971) – Archival study of pre-colonial technical knowledge.
- Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition (1971) – Historical analysis of nonviolent resistance.
- The Beautiful Tree (1983) – Groundbreaking study of indigenous Indian education before British rule.
- Panchayat Raj: The Indigenous Polity of India (1990s) – Research on traditional local governance.
- Collected Writings (5 vols., 2000) – Comprehensive edition of Dharampal’s historical research.
