India, April 3 -- "This prosperity did not happen as a one-off. There had to be a philosophical principle behind it." Those words, spoken without theatre or flourish at Gulmohar Hall of the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on Thursday, landed with the quiet weight of a provocation.

Behind them sits a question that former IMF economist Sriram Balasubramanian has spent nearly a decade trying to answer seriously: if India dominated global GDP for 17 unbroken centuries, what exactly was the architecture that held it up? And why has no one in mainstream economics bothered to find out?

The occasion was the inaugural session of Bharat Ki Soch's flagship book discussion series, titled "Shastra se Samvad tak," a journey, as the organisers put i...