Dr. Pravesh Kumar Srivastava, Professor

Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture & Archaeology, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi, India

Biography

Dr. Pravesh Kumar Srivastava is a Senior Professor of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology at Banaras Hindu University, India. His scholarship focuses on Indian historiography, colonial Indology, religious history, and the reinterpretation of India’s ancient past from indigenous intellectual traditions. He has published widely on the impact of European scholarship on Indian history and is currently engaged in international projects examining the global construction of Asian civilizations.

Topic

Rewriting Asia’s Ancient Past: Indian and Chinese Civilizations Beyond Colonial Historiography

Abstract

Asia’s great civilisations—particularly India and China—possess some of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated intellectual, religious, and cultural traditions. Yet the way these civilisations are studied, represented, and taught in modern academia has been deeply shaped by European colonial scholarship of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Colonial Indology and Sinology did not merely interpret Asia; they actively re-constructed it through Western conceptual categories, philological priorities, and imperial political interests. As a result, many indigenous historical frameworks, knowledge systems, and civilisational self-understandings were marginalised or distorted. This keynote proposes a critical re-examination of how Asia’s ancient past was written under colonial conditions and how India and China can now reclaim their historical narratives on indigenous and intercultural foundations. Drawing upon Indian historiographical traditions, Sanskritic sources, Buddhist transmission networks, and the long history of India–China intellectual exchange, the paper argues that Asia was not a passive object of Western knowledge, but a self-generating world of ideas, institutions, and civilisational logics. By comparing the colonial construction of Indian and Chinese histories with pre-modern Asian modes of recording, transmitting, and interpreting the past, the lecture highlights the need for a new Asian-centred historiography. Such a framework does not reject global scholarship, but re-anchors it in Asian epistemologies, languages, and cultural memories. In an era when Asia is reasserting its intellectual and geopolitical presence, rewriting its own ancient history is not merely an academic exercise—it is a civilisational necessity. India and China, as two of the world’s oldest living civilisations, have a shared responsibility to lead this historiographical renewal.