Nations of the world have long been defined and understood within the dominant framework of borders, constitutions, and flags, and though this identification of a nation with modern symbols has become imperative in the current world order, it seems rather inadequate for explaining India’s position on the world stage. A country rising through the ranks of the international order, India is not simply a developing country, it is a civilization reawakening to itself, and this distinction matters enormously in contemporary global politics.
Conceptually, a “civilizational state” can be defined as a political entity whose identity and legitimacy transcend the modern nation-state template—a state which embodies a deep, continuous cultural and philosophical heritage. Scholars—including Martin Jacques and Lucian Pye—have, in the past, applied this conceptual understanding to China, arguing persuasively that China’s five-thousand-year-old civilization is categorically different from the United States, France, and Germany. Western scholarship, however, has largely resisted applying the same lens to India, often dismissing Indian civilizational unity as a colonial construct, or treating Sanatana Dharma—the timeless, eternal path which anchors Indic civilization—as too amorphous to support a coherent civilizational identity.
This resistance by Western academia to recognize India as a civilizational entity is worth interrogating, and when interrogated, all normative theories seem to fall apart.
Bhāratavarṣa: An Ancient Self-Understanding
India existed as a coherent civilizational space—Bhāratavarṣa—long before the British drew lines on a map. Bhāratavarṣa was not defined by bureaucratic frontiers but by a sacred geography, network of pilgrimage sites, shared philosophical traditions, and a religio-ethical framework that endured centuries of invasion, disruption, and foreign rule. Ancient Indian texts—from the Vedas to the Puranas—delineate India’s geography not merely in political terms but from a spiritual and cosmological perspective. In the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, Bhāratavarṣa is described as the land north of the ocean and south of the Himalayas—the land of the descendants of Bharata, the legendary Chakravarti emperor. In the hymns of the Rigveda, rivers like the Ganga and Saraswati were consecrated not as administrative boundaries but as sacred entities binding a people to a place. This was not just a geographical formulation, but a civilizational consciousness, and this consciousness has survived for centuries. Upaniṣadic wisdom did not replace Vedic ritualism, it only deepened it. Furthermore, Śramaṇa traditions—Buddhism and Jainism—critiqued Vedic orthodoxy but remained within the civilizational matrix, sharing core philosophical beliefs such as Karma, Mokṣa, and ethical living. The period between the sixth to sixteenth centuries was marked by the onset of the Bhakti tradition, characterized by the efflorescence of spiritual movements spanning the length and breadth of Bhāratavarṣa. However, instead of breaking from the past or fracturing the existing order—as has been argued by several scholars—the progenitors of these movements only expanded existing philosophical traditions through devotion and vernacularization. The intellectual history of Bhāratavarṣa is, therefore, one of cumulative layering, not rupture, signifying a unique pattern vis-à-vis internal coherence and longevity.
This robust endurance is also evident in India’s political institutions. The Vedic assemblies— sabhā (council of elders and nobles) and samiti (larger assembly of common people)—were proto-democratic bodies that maintained checks on royal authority millennia before the Magna Carta. Similarly, Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra— a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, economic policy, politics, and military strategy—codified a sophisticated model of governance in ancient times. Village councils, or panchayats, persisted through Islamic and British rule alike, and survive today as constitutionally recognized units of local governance. Post-independence political entities—Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha—are not simply borrowings from Westminster—they carry the institutional memory of Vedic deliberative practice. This continuance of institutions and the existence of a potent civilizational memory cannot be dismissed as myth-making or retroactive nationalism, and no matter how vociferously colonial and Marxist historians deny it, India’s civilizational coherence cannot be undermined or ignored.
India’s “Civilizational Reset”: 2014 and Beyond
A significant change took place in India’s self-presentation after 2014. The NDA government led by Narendra Modi as prime minister did not merely pursue nationalism—rooted in India’s civilizational ethos—as a domestic political strategy, it articulated—consistently and at the highest levels of statecraft—a vision of India as a civilization reclaiming interrupted continuity. Three interconnected ideas crystallize this shift: first, the idea of India being a civilizational state; second, Aatmanirbhar Bharat (Self-Reliant India); and third, Amrit Kaal (Age of Nectar). Post-2014, India is no longer envisioned—at least not by the current political dispensation—as a post-1947 constitutional entity, rather it is celebrated as a polity whose moral authority and global role are derived from its rich and glorious ancient heritage. Furthermore, the conception of Aatmanirbhar Bharat rests on the proposition that economic sovereignty is not merely a development strategy, rather it is a prerequisite for civilizational assertion. Amrit Kaal—a twenty-five-year horizon connecting present policy to the centenary of independence in 2047—further compounds the framing of contemporary decisions as chapters in a civilizational story and not merely a growth story based on western notions of realism.
The symbolic and institutional dimensions of this reset are extensive. The renaming of legal codes, for instance, inherited from British administration—the Indian Penal Code, the Indian Evidence Act, the Code of Criminal Procedure—symbolises an alignment with Indian civilizational ethics. Moreover, new parliamentary architecture has incorporated civilizational motifs. The Sengol—a Chola-era sceptre symbolizing the transfer of righteous power—was installed in the new parliament building. Similarly, the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya—inaugurated in January 2024—was not simply a religious construction but the restoration of a civilizational wound and the reclamation of a religious space associated with one of the most powerful symbols of India’s civilizational story, Bhagwan Shri Ram.
Pilgrimage infrastructure—from the Kashi Vishwanath Corridor to the Kedarnath-Badrinath routes—has been reimagined as both sacred space and civilizational heritage. Furthermore, welfare schemes are framed in the vocabulary of Dharma (righteous duty), Seva (selfless service), and Sarvodaya (universal upliftment), linking the welfare state to civilizational ethics rather than technocratic governance. India’s civilizational reset is also epitomized by the National Education Policy 2020—a policy that integrates Indian Knowledge Systems into curricula at all levels, promoting classical languages and the learning of ancient Indian systems, thereby, explicitly attempting to undo Eurocentric distortion in the teaching of Indian history. Critics may call this political messaging dressed in civilizational rhetoric, but the consistency and depth of the civilizational framing across domains—legal, diplomatic, architectural, and educational—suggests something more substantive: a comprehensive attempt to reposition India’s self-understanding from its colonial-nationalist origins to an age-old civilizational heritage.
Navigating Global Politics: India’s Role in Constructing a Different World Power
The civilizational dimension of India’s identity has direct implications for how it navigates global politics, and for the kind of world order it is helping to construct. India’s foreign policy—from 2014 onwards—is rooted not in ideological blocs of the Cold War era, or in simple great-power competition, but in Kautilyan multi-alignment, entrenched in the notion that states must form overlapping, pragmatic partnerships in order to maximize strategic interests. The ancient Mandala Theory of interstate geometry—posited by Kautilya in the Arthaśāstra—in which relationships are determined by power and position rather than ideology or permanent alliance—is typified in New Delhi’s contemporary global posture. India’s simultaneous membership of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD)—a strategic partnership between India, the United States, Japan, and Australia—and BRICS—an intergovernmental organization comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia—demonstrates India’s rightful place as a key strategic partner on the world stage. Besides, India’s strategic partnership with the US—primarily focused on trade—as well as its strategic ties with Russia—including the purchase and joint manufacturing of defence equipment—makes India a voice of the Global South that sits at the G20 table as a leader. This is not an incoherent or a disjointed foreign policy, it is civilizational pragmatism—a foreign policy rooted in strategic autonomy rather than subordination to any single global framework.
At the 2023 G20 summit, hosted by New Delhi, the civilizational motto of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam—“One Earth, One Family, One Future”, drawn from the Maha Upaniṣad— was placed at the centre of India’s global governance agenda. This was much more than mere branding; it was a claim that India’s civilizational heritage—grounded in pluralism, non-coercion, and the recognition of multiple civilizational centres—offers a genuine normative alternative to Western liberal universalism.
Furthermore, India’s soft power—Yoga (now an international observance backed by 175 UN co-sponsors), Ayurveda, Bollywood, and a 35-million-strong diaspora—amplifies this civilizational message in ways that no hard power instrument can replicate, and unlike China’s civilizational assertiveness—which many nations find threatening—India’s civilizational offer is non-hegemonic. India presents its heritage as a contribution to global pluralism, not as a replacement for existing frameworks.
The security dimension has sharpened too. Surgical strikes in Pakistan following the 2016 Uri attack, the Balakot airstrikes in 2019, and Operation Sindoor in May 2025 following the Pahalgam massacre mark a decisive shift from strategic restraint to proactive deterrence. On the China front, the post-Galwan posture recognizes Beijing as a long-term strategic competitor, not simply an economic partner, with accelerated military infrastructure along the Line of Actual Control and deepened Indo-Pacific partnerships to match.
Why This Civilizational Reset Matters
The rise of India as a civilizational state is not merely an interesting case study in comparative politics. It poses a fundamental challenge to the dominant assumptions of the international order. While the Westphalian system is premised on the nation-state as the basic unit—a construct that owes its design to specific European historical circumstances—civilizational states like India do not fit cleanly into this mould. Civilizational states claim a deeper form of legitimacy, a longer timescale of identity, and a different relationship between cultural heritage and political authority. When India demands reform of the UN Security Council, promotes South-South cooperation through the Global South framework, or offers the Aadhaar model as a digital public good to developing nations, it is not merely seeking a bigger seat at an existing table, it is contesting the design of the table itself.
The question, therefore, for the twenty-first century is not whether India will “rise” in the conventional sense of GDP and military capability—on those metrics, the trajectory is reasonably clear. The more interesting question is whether the world is prepared to take seriously the idea of a civilization that has been continuously generating knowledge, statecraft, and ethics, for over three thousand years and has immense potential to contribute to global governance beyond its economic weight. India is betting that the answer is “yes”, and it is making that bet with increasing confidence—not as a challenger demanding entry into a Western-designed order, but as a civilization returning, on its own terms, to the world stage it never truly left.
