How India’s Civilization Was Relegated From ‘History’ To ‘Fairy Tale’

Was India ever truly a ‘civilizational superpower’ — and if so, why has much of that greatness been framed as “mythology” rather than accepted history?

Did colonial power shape not just the ‘political map’ of India, but the ‘cognitive map’ of Indians themselves — infecting self-worth, identity, and historical memory?

Was the relegation of India’s civilizational achievements to the realm of “myth” an accident of time, or a calculated ideological strategy?

These questions cut to the core of how modern India understands its past and imagines its future.

The Greatness That Was

For more than three millennia — stretching from the Indus Valley civilization to the Mauryan and Gupta empires, through the deep intellectual currents of Vedanta, Sankhya, and Nyaya philosophies, to the mathematical precision of Aryabhata’s zero, Bhaskara’s calculus precursors, and the classical Indian sculptural and architectural corpus — India was not merely a collection of regional kingdoms but a sustained civilisational unit with global reach. Its intellectual, artistic, and scientific contributions shaped Eurasian thought for centuries.

Yet in many mainstream textbooks, curricula, and academic discourses, this profundity is often compartmentalized, fragmented, or treated as incidental to “real history.” Why?

How ‘History’ Became ‘Myth’

The narrative shift did not occur organically. British colonial scholarship, administrators, and early Orientalists often framed India as:

• a land of superstition and backwardness that needed Western rationality,
• a land of fragmented principalities without organic unity, and
• a civilization that “began” properly with British rule, rather than millennia earlier.

This framing was not harmless. It served imperial goals: justify the colonial mission, neutralize resistance to rule, and construct the colonized as unfit for self-government. Indeed, leading British academics of the 19th and early 20th centuries dismissed indigenous civilizational narratives as “mythology,” while canonizing their own imperial epics as history. 

Even today, influential strands of historical discourse — both in the West and in parts of India — still view ancient Indian achievements as colorful legends rather than evidence of systematic intellectual endeavor.

Was It Intentional?

Here the question becomes conspiratorial, and historians are rightfully cautious about using the term “conspiracy” loosely. Yet there is intentionality in the colonial narrative construction:

• Narrative Control as Power:
  By portraying India’s past as chaotic and its societies as intrinsically disunified, British colonial ideology justified empire on the basis of “civilizing mission” and “bringing order.” This narrative overrode indigenous voices, sources, and epistemologies. 
   
• Economic Exploitation & Devaluation of Local Systems:
  The structural extraction of wealth — criticized by modern economists and historians — did not just impoverish India materially. It weakened traditional institutions and intellectual ecosystems, making it easier for British legal, educational, and cultural frameworks to supplant them. The narrative that India needed modernity came with material instruments of power. 
   
• Erasure of Indigenous Knowledge:
  In framing Sanskrit cosmology or local scientific achievements as religious or folk lore rather than legitimate intellectual systems, colonial education policies deprioritized India’s civilizational archive. This was not an accident; it reflected a strategy where knowledge hierarchies became political hierarchies.

So yes, even if there was no single, centralized blueprint titled “How to damage Indian self-worth”, the cumulative practice of dismissing indigenous achievements had the same functional effect.

Mythology Isn’t Always Fiction — Just Misplaced

The myth vs. history dichotomy has been weaponized. Consider:

• Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi:
  Her life has become legend. Oral histories and folk traditions elevated her to a symbol of feminine courage — yet many academic histories once treated her story as anecdotal rather than as part of a coherent resistance narrative. 
   
• The Civilization’s Age & Continuity:
  India’s longstanding civilizational self-understanding — often expressed through epics like the Mahabharata or Ramayana — was dismissed by colonial scholars as poetic imagination, not continuity of identity. Meanwhile Western histories of their own past routinely treat medieval European monarchies, Renaissance scholars, and Enlightenment thinkers as foundational history, despite belonging to distinct epochs.

This selective calibration — ‘history’ for one, ‘mythology’ for another — functionally made India’s greatness a ‘footnote,’ while magnifying the colonial narrative as ‘the main text.’

The Echoes Today

Post-independence India still grapples with these inherited narratives. Debates rage over curricula, national identity, and what counts as factual history versus mythology. Some of this struggle is healthy: democracies ought to debate their past. But if the default starting point assumes India was civilizationally inferior until colonial intervention, we have already lost the argument before it begins.

Leaders and thinkers — from Gandhi in Hind Swaraj to present day commentators — have contested this narrative, insisting that the idea of pre-colonial disunity was itself a colonial fabrication. 

What This Means for ‘Indian Self-Worth’

When greatness is dismissed as myth, the psychological consequences are profound:

• Cognitive marginalization of indigenous accomplishments.
• Dependence on Western epistemic validation to legitimize local ideas.
• Fragmented historical consciousness, which weakens collective self-esteem. 

This is not merely historical trivia; it shapes how nations see themselves, how citizens believe in their own potential, and how future trajectories are imagined.

Final Thoughts: Is India’s Greatness a ‘Mythology’?

Not in the substantive, civilizational sense. India’s rich historical contributions are real, documentable, and transformative. What we must scrutinize is why the dominant narrative shifted these contributions into the margins of myth rather than the core of history.

Was this shift incidental or engineered?

It emerged from the mechanics of colonial power — a combination of ideology, institutional control, and cultural authority. While not a whispered conspiracy, it was a deliberate intellectual project with enduring effects.

Reclaiming India’s narrative is not about glorification; it is about reclaiming epistemic agency. It demands asking not just ‘what happened’ in India’s past, but ‘who wrote what is accepted as history, and why.’ Only then can India’s story step out of the shadows of “myth” and stand tall in the light of historical legitimacy.