Few lands that have been touched by Christian or Islamic imperialism have managed to remain both unconverted and geopolitically intact. In the short span of just over a century, the entire African continent saw its indigenous spiritual systems, once held by over three-fourths of its population, reduced to a mere fraction, supplanted by imported theologies that destroyed native cosmologies and community bonds. 

India, or Bharat, stands out as the lone civilisational exception to that fate. Despite a thousand years of invasions, proselytisation, and colonial re-engineering, Sanatan Dharma remains the living soul of this land, guiding more than 75 per cent of its people.

And yet, the imperial project is not over. The battlefield has shifted from armies to academia, from swords to scholarship, from religious missionaries to cultural ones. What we face today is not colonialism in the old sense, but a sophisticated intellectual imperialism disguised as “academic inquiry” and “human rights activism.” The empire that once sought to subjugate India politically now seeks to fragment it ideologically.

The recent controversy surrounding Francesca Orsini, a Hindi scholar from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), perfectly illustrates this continuity of imperial intent. To the casual observer, a white academic specialising in an Indian language may seem harmless, even flattering. But scratch the surface, and a deeper agenda appears. Orsini has consistently used her academic platform to undermine Indian nationalism and delegitimise the cultural unity that binds Bharat together. Her writings accuse Hindi, a language that evolved organically as the voice of a civilisation of “hegemonising” other Indian tongues. Her activism extends beyond the classroom: in 2020, she introduced a resolution in the Seattle City........

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