Rejoinder: Manu Pillai treats civilisational coherence with deep suspicion

In the recent Scroll Adda podcast, public historian Manu S Pillai offered a framing of premodern India: a fragmented cultural space marked by plural power centres, elite accommodations, and loosely connected traditions.

Hinduism, in this account, was not a unified civilisational matrix but an evolving continuum – shaped as much by folk and regional traditions as by Brahmanical orthodoxy. Pillai argues that contemporary efforts to view India’s past through a civilisational or dharmic lens are retrofitted, often ideologically motivated, and historically unsound.

While at one level the complexity is perhaps true, Pillai’s reading reflects and continues a historiographical tendency that treats civilisational coherence with deep suspicion. The implication is that any attempt to connect India’s disparate political and social entities into a broader historical imagination reflects presentist distortion.

Limits of fragmentation

Yet, this refusal to ascribe coherence can also obscure moral and institutional continuities that did, in fact, persist. Precolonial India – despite its fragmented polities – was not devoid of civilisational logic. The endurance of institutions like temple trusts, village assemblies, local jurisprudence and pedagogical traditions points to an underlying moral-political grammar.

These were neither random nor merely symbolic. They drew on dharma as a normative concept: not in a narrow theological sense, but as an ethical and social grammar...

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