Public memory is written as much in stone and bronze as in books. For decades after Independence, many of India’s most visible spaces still carried colonial names, vacant pedestals or neutral symbols, as if the Republic hesitated to foreground its own civilisational inheritance.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inherited in 2014 a civilisation that had been politically free for seven decades yet remained mentally shackled by psychological colonialism.

For much of independent India’s history, religious infrastructure was treated as a cultural obligation at best and a political liability at worst.

India has never had just one language. It speaks in 780 voices. For much of independent India’s history, this plurality was treated as a governance problem, like a fault line between Hindi- and non-Hindi-speaking states, between regional-language speakers, and between the north and the south. The political energy spent on navigating this divide was rarely invested in honouring what lay beneath it.