Shonaleeka Kaul, Bharata Before the British and Other Essays: Towards a New Indology. Delhi: Vitasta Publishing, 2024.
Shonaleeka Kaul has long established herself as one of the most original voices in the historical study of early India. From her pioneering work on Sanskrit kāvya as a window into urban cultures, to her reinterpretation of Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇī as a historical text rather than a literary oddity, she has consistently expanded the boundaries of historical imagination. Her new book, Bharata Before the British and Other Essays: Towards a New Indology, gathers seventeen essays that display at once the fruits of decades of scholarship and the intellectual courage to chart new directions for Indian historiography. Most of these essays stand independently in their insight and execution, yet together they converge seamlessly toward the book’s larger intellectual and thematic vision.
As the title suggests, Kaul is centrally preoccupied with the question of “Bharata” as a civilizational, cultural, and historical category prior to colonial mediation. That the Constitution of India identifies the country as “India, that is, Bharat” provides a fitting preface to the book’s intellectual project: reclaiming the terms of selfhood, knowledge, and belonging that colonial and neo-colonial historiography have obscured. The author reminds us: “Bharata Before the British, is not only for alliterative effect but a nod to the reclamation of selfhood that our Independence from British rule in 1947 symbolized …” (vii). Thus, decolonization, in Kaul’s hands, is not a rhetorical flourish or ideological weapon but a methodological commitment. Her essays insist that early Indian texts and traditions be interpreted within their own cultural logic, without either uncritical glorification or condescending dismissal.
The collection addresses a broad spectrum of questions vital to Indian Knowledge Systems. How far back does the idea of India extend? Was Kashmir an isolated cultural entity or deeply enmeshed within the subcontinent? Did ancient Indians write history, and if so, in what idioms? How was time conceptualized – only as linear chronology, or through multiple temporalities that stretched from the human to the cosmic? Could architecture itself serve as a philosophical statement, even an instrument of liberation (mokṣa)? What were the contours of kāma culture in early India, and how did literary traditions register not only human but also animal voices? These questions, while diverse, converge in Kaul’s commitment to recovering emic categories of thought and practice that underpin Indian knowledge traditions.
Methodologically, the book distinguishes itself through its insistence on primary sources – literary, epigraphic, archaeological, numismatic, and art historical. Unlike many historical interventions that merely reframe prevailing secondary debates, Kaul grounds her claims in close textual and material analysis. In doing so, she dismantles enduring misconceptions: that India was an imagined construct of colonial rule, that Kashmir’s cultural history is a blank before the modern geopolitical crisis, or that myth is by definition the antithesis of history. In one of the book’s most compelling arguments, she demonstrates how itihāsa, purāṇa, and kāvya encode modes of historical consciousness that challenge the reductive binaries imposed by colonial epistemology.
The volume is particularly strong in rethinking the cultural geography of India. The opening chapter, “Bharata Before the British,” marshals a formidable array of evidence – from the Mahābhārata, Viṣṇu Purāṇa, and Bṛhat Saṃhitā to Megasthenes, Xuanzang, Al-Bīrūnī, Abūʾl-Fazl, and beyond – to show that the idea of India as a shared civilisational space long predates colonial cartography. Far from a retrospective invention of modern nationalism, this “unified sphere of cultural circulation” exhibited deep pluralism and remarkable continuity across centuries. Maps, inscriptions, and literary testimonies converge here to present a vision of Bharatavarṣa that is both historically grounded and conceptually expansive.
Equally significant are the four essays on Kashmir, which reprise and extend Kaul’s The Making of Early Kashmir (2018). Against the prevailing neglect of Kashmir’s longue durée, Kaul demonstrates the region’s embeddedness in wider networks of polity, economy, and culture: from Aśoka’s founding of Srinagar, to the circulation of Kannada coinage in medieval Kashmir, to Kashmiri officials holding land in Chidambaram and Kalahasti. These “connected histories” reposition Kashmir at the heart of Indian civilisation rather than at its margins, offering a necessary counterweight to contemporary reductions of the region to geopolitics alone.
Other essays offer equally provocative interventions. “Indic Visions of History” revisits the colonial indictment of Sanskrit literature as ahistorical, exemplified in H.H. Wilson’s remark that the Rājataraṅgiṇī was the sole historical work in Sanskrit. Kaul deftly shows how such judgments not only misconstrued literary genres but also erased alternative historical sensibilities that encompassed myth, genealogy, and cosmology. Her essay on “Kāma Culture” retrieves a vibrant discourse of pleasure and eros in Sanskrit texts, complicating assumptions of social conservatism in early India. Another piece on the Hitopadeśa advances a novel reading of animal fables as “animal histories,” recognizing the individuality of non-human lives within the broader web of existence.
One of the book’s most refreshing features is its prose. Unlike the ponderous opacity that often characterizes academic history, Kaul writes with lucidity, elegance, and accessibility. The essays, many of which originated as columns or public lectures, retain their readability without sacrificing scholarly rigour. Photographs, illustrations, and even a map of the Mahābhārata’s ethnographic geography enrich the text and situate it within a mode of public history that speaks across audiences. In this respect, Kaul exemplifies a rare balance: she is a scholar’s scholar, but also a public historian unafraid to converse with lay readers.
The final two essays turn reflexive. Historians in India, especially those who write in English, rarely write about themselves, and Kaul’s openness about her intellectual journey is therefore both unusual and valuable. She reflects on the shaping of her interests, the negotiations with institutional and ideological constraints, and the role of language and politics in scholarly life. Her caution against “the warring twin camps of Left and Right politics” is timely, as is her insistence that “language is a skill, not a liability.” Such candour not only humanises the historian but also models a practice of academic integrity amid polarised intellectual climates.
For the Indian Knowledge Systems, the significance of this book is twofold. First, it restores Indic categories of knowledge – rāṣṭra, itihāsa, puraṇa, kāvya, kāma, and more – to their rightful place as tools for historical thinking rather than curiosities to be explained away by alien frameworks. Second, it demonstrates how such categories can be mobilised for contemporary debates: about nationalism, regional identity, decolonisation, and the very purpose of history. Kaul thus exemplifies an approach that is neither uncritical revivalism nor wholesale rejection but a disciplined engagement with indigenous epistemologies.
Kaul appears to be more interested in devising methods to rigorously represent Indic texts and traditions in their culture-sensitive logic than in deferring to anachronistic and inappropriate interpretations of the present day. As she puts it: “[This book] challenges in particular the hold on the profession of history of colonial and neo-imperial approaches, on the one hand, and political ideologies, on the other. These have taken us considerably away from developing a robust emic understanding of ourselves – our nation, our thoughts, our practices, and patterns of belief and behaviour. The diverse essays in this book … attempt to reclaim such an understanding in ways that do justice to our historical sources on their terms rather than compromise them in the service of extra-academic imperatives.” (viii–ix) In doing so, Kaul convincingly demonstrates the historical rootedness of the idea of India and its self-reflexivity. The impulse to “decolonize” history or any form of knowledge is valuable only insofar as it sustains openness to plural methodologies, intertextual readings, and comparative insights. Future research, therefore, might focus less on oppositional binaries – colonial versus native, Western versus Indic – and more on evolving integrative models that foreground shared intellectual inheritances.
That said, the book also raises challenges. At times, the sheer density of evidence – inscriptions, texts, testimonies – can overwhelm the reader. Specialists will find this richness rewarding, but non-specialists may struggle to follow the argumentative arc across multiple registers. Nonetheless, these caveats do not detract from the achievement of Bharata Before the British and Other Essays. The book is a significant contribution in rethinking both India and Indology, situated at the crossroads of rigorous scholarship and the urgent need for decolonised knowledge. It will be indispensable for historians, Sanskritists, and scholars of Indian Knowledge Systems, while also serving as a model of how to write for wider publics without compromising on academic depth.
In sum, Kaul’s collection is not only a reminder of the vitality of early Indian knowledge traditions but also a call to historians to recover their complexity on their own terms. It is revisionist history in the best sense: bold, meticulous, and deeply engaged with the sources. For students and scholars of Indian Knowledge Systems, this is a book that both inspires and instructs – an invitation to think historically with the categories of our own past.
