Reimagining the Nation: The Rise of India as a Civilizational State and its Implications for Global Politics in the Twenty-first Century

This article advances a theoretically grounded argument that India constitutes an enduring civilizational continuum, articulated through the analytic registers of sacred geography as spatial ontology, an unruptured religio-philosophical episteme, structural continuities in polity and governmentality, the intergenerational reproduction of socio-cultural institutions, and a self-reflexive civilizational consciousness sustained by mechanisms of cultural memory. Deploying a decolonial theoretical apparatus, the article contends that India’s civilizational framework positions it as a privileged locus of enunciation from which to reconstitute decolonial epistemology and thereby contest the hegemonic epistemological architectures of Western modernity that have historically monopolized the categories through which the world is rendered intelligible. The article further theorizes that the post-2014 conjuncture inaugurates a “civilizational reset”—a structural reordering of domestic policy and international engagement through which India’s normative and material influence upon the international system has been recalibrated, generating a viable conceptual alternative to postcolonial historiographical and geopolitical paradigms.