Volume 5: About the Book

In this set of five landmark essays—made available for the first time in one single volume—Dharampal provides the 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 rulling elite well, they are designed to exclude the participation – which contains to remain loyal to the older, civilization worldview and tradition profoundly described in the essay, Bhartiya Chitta Manas and Kala. The result is a working at cross purpose 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 real knowledge and wisdom can come only from the West. No one can conceivably 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.