India, Jan. 11 -- One of the most persistent distortions in modern Indian intellectual life is the portrayal of Hindu revivalism as either reactionary or rebellious, a mirror image of modern revolutionary politics spearheaded by the Left that runs on resentment or exclusion. This framing is not accidental, but a result of a long colonial and postcolonial habit of reading India through borrowed categories, where recovery is mistaken for regression and remembrance is labelled revisionism. Hindu revivalism in the 19th and early-20th centuries was not a rebellion in the modern revolutionary sense. It was not about tearing down an order to replace it with ideological abstraction. Rather, it was about recognition, understanding, and realisation...