Dharampal & PPST

Dharampal was born in 1922 in Muzaffarnagar district of U.P. He joined the freedom struggle in 1940 and was actively involved in the Quit India movement. After independence he joined Mahatma Gandhi’s disciple Mirabehn, in founding a cooperative village near Rishikesh. He was also a founding member of the Indian Cooperative Union. From 1966 onwards he dedicated himself to studying British archives about the social, political and economic systems of pre-colonial India.

This research led to a series of seminal works which documented the vibrancy and creativity of social and economic life in India before the onslaught of British control. Dharampal’s three major books The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983), Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century (1971) and Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition (1971) secure his place in the intellectual history of post-Independence India.

It would therefore be easy for the Dharampal Centennary celebrations, now underway, to focus exclusively on his enormous contributions as a historian. Dharampal did inspire several generations of Indians to do path-breaking work in various spheres – building upon the insights and practices of diverse knowledge systems of the Indian sub-continent, often by learning from practitioners. Thus, it is understandable that many of Dharampal’s admirers and followers tend to ignore the Ayodhya chapter in his life