Maps of the mind: Understanding power through India’s civilisational lens

Power is not only measured in armies, alliances, or economic scale. It is also shaped by how a civilisation understands itself — its memory of victory and defeat, its capacity for renewal, and its willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. India’s strategic worldview today cannot be understood without acknowledging both its philosophical depth and its historical lapses.

India’s civilisational imagination has long privileged inward coherence over outward conquest. Classical Indian political thought, from the Arthashastra to the Upanishadic tradition, treated power as relational and contextual rather than totalising. Influence was something to be stabilised, not endlessly expanded. This produced a worldview that valued equilibrium, legitimacy and restraint.

But restraint, when unaccompanied by institutional adaptation, can become vulnerability.

India’s first major civilisational setback was not military but ideological. The subcontinent’s plural cosmology proved ill-equipped to respond to the absolutist, missionary energy of Abrahamic religions. Hindu civilisation absorbed, accommodated and coexisted — but failed to project itself outward or defend its epistemic core. Over time, India lost narrative sovereignty over its own past.

“A civilisation that refuses to convert others must still learn how not to be converted.”

This pattern repeated itself in the economic domain. India did not lose the Industrial Revolution because of a lack of intelligence or craftsmanship — pre-colonial India was a manufacturing powerhouse. It lost because its civilisational mindset failed to institutionalise technological disruption. The industrial age demanded scale, standardisation and aggressive capital accumulation — all alien to a society structured around continuity and equilibrium.

Colonialism merely completed a process of displacement that had already begun. India entered modernity not as a co-author, but as a subject.

“The tragedy of India is not that it lacked knowledge, but that it failed to weaponise knowledge.”

This historical lag continues to shape India’s present predicament. Despite its rhetoric of strategic autonomy, India remains deeply dependent on Western systems — in finance, technology, defence platforms, intellectual property and digital architecture. The AI and digital revolutions are not unfolding on neutral terrain; they are being shaped by ecosystems dominated by the United States and its allies.

India is a consumer, adaptor and regulator of technology — but not yet a rule-maker.

The civilisational instinct that once resisted ideological rigidity now struggles in an age that rewards speed, disruption and first-mover dominance. India’s pluralism, while morally attractive, often translates into policy hesitation. Strategic autonomy, when not backed by indigenous capacity, risks becoming strategic dependence with better language.

“Autonomy without capability is not independence; it is aspiration.”

Even India’s engagement with global institutions reflects this tension. India seeks reform of the United Nations, IMF and World Bank, but operates within frameworks it did not design. Its challenge to the global order is incremental because it lacks the economic and technological leverage to be disruptive. Moral arguments cannot substitute for material power indefinitely.

Regionally, India aspires to be a stabilising force in the subcontinent and the Indian Ocean. Yet it faces persistent challenges — Chinese infrastructure diplomacy, political instability in neighbouring states, and its own uneven capacity to deliver public goods beyond its borders. Civilisational reassurance works only when backed by economic gravity.

“Influence flows not from memory alone, but from performance.”

None of this negates the value of India’s civilisational lens. It explains why India resists binaries, why it avoids ideological crusades, and why it speaks the language of balance in a fractured world. But civilisations that rely too heavily on memory risk mistaking endurance for strength.

The real test before India is whether it can translate philosophical depth into institutional power. Can a civilisation that once mapped the cosmos now shape the code that governs the future? Can a society that mastered metaphysics learn to dominate platforms, data and algorithms?

“Civilisational wisdom survives history; civilisational power must be rebuilt in every age.”

India’s maps of the mind remain rich, layered and humane. But in an era defined by technology, capital and narrative warfare, those maps must now be supplemented by hard infrastructures of power. Otherwise, India risks repeating an old pattern — moral authority without material command.

The future will not belong to civilisations that merely remember who they were. It will belong to those that can reinvent themselves without losing their soul.

Can India trust the West?

Western commentary has a strange habit: it grows loudest precisely when India refuses to play the role scripted for it. With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to New Delhi on December 4 and 5 now concluded, the chorus has returned. 

The Telegraph of the United Kingdom even asked, with colonial astonishment, “Can the West trust India?” It is a revealing question—revealing not of India’s conduct, but of a worldview in which the West is the custodian of global virtue and others are meant to obey.

Yet millions of Indians are asking a different, more ancient question: Can India trust the West? The answers forming in the Indian mind are shaped not by editorials but by history, memory, and lived experience. “A nation’s trust is not won by sermons; it is earned by solidarity,” as one might say—and solidarity is something the West offers only when convenient.

History, for Indians, is never an abstraction. It has weight, texture, and blood. In 1971, as India intervened to stop a genocide in East Pakistan, the United States did not support the world’s largest democracy. Instead, Washington dispatched Task Force 74—a powerful naval armada led by the USS Enterprise, the world’s largest nuclear carrier—to the Bay of Bengal, signalling that India was to be intimidated into silence. 

In contrast, the Soviet Union responded with astonishing clarity: nuclear-armed submarines and cruisers sailed from Vladivostok and shadowed the American fleet, making it clear that New Delhi would not stand alone. The mighty task force, sent to bully a young India, found itself checkmated and withdrew quietly. “In moments of darkness, one does not forget the hand that reached out,” says an old proverb, and India has not forgotten.

This is what Russia means to India: not sainthood, not perfection, but reliability. And reliability, in a world of shifting allegiances, is worth more than eloquent lectures delivered from editorial pages soaked in selective morality. Those who now scold India for hosting Putin conveniently ignore their own hypocrisies. European LNG imports from Russia rose after the Ukraine war. Western corporations continue to operate in Russia through legal and financial loopholes. Western nuclear reactors still depend on Russian uranium. 

“Morality enforced selectively is not morality—it is strategy disguised as virtue.”

Then there is the present. President Donald Trump’s second-term policies have shown India a mirror it did not seek but cannot unsee. His open tilt toward Pakistan, the imposition of tariffs on Indian goods, and his repeated jabs at India’s economy have made it clear that the West’s friendship is transactional. The new American doctrine, stripped of its diplomatic cosmetics, is simply: America first, and everyone else somewhere far behind. That leaves nations like India with no illusions. Trust, to exist, must be mutual.

Against this backdrop, Western outrage over India’s engagement with Russia feels both performative and patronising. If meeting Putin equals endorsing war, then why was there silence when Trump welcomed him? Where was this indignation when China hosted him at SCO summits attended by dozens of nations? Why is India singled out? The uncomfortable truth is that the anger is not moral; it is racialised. It emerges from the belief that Western nations may act in their interest, but India must act in accordance with theirs. 

“The coloniser’s voice lingers long after the empire has died.”

India does not support invasions, but neither will it abandon an old ally to satisfy the fleeting indignation of distant commentators. Nations, like individuals, are defined by how they remember their friends. India will protect its interests, honour its partnerships, and walk its own path without apology. The world may frown, lecture, or protest. But sovereignty is not a performance; it is a principle. And India will uphold it—calmly, firmly, and without seeking anyone’s permission.

In the end, the message is simple: we will engage with whom we choose. We remember who stood with us. And we do not need the West’s approval to act as a sovereign civilisation-state.