Lifestyle

Pots, Pans, and the Architecture of an Economy

Ajay Sharma I Author, India Beyond the Blips

Archaeologists often get mocked in certain circles as the “pots-and-pans people.”
A throwaway line meant to belittle a discipline.
Ironically, those pots and pans have done more to reconstruct India’s economic history than speculative civilisational commentary.

This is not about romance.
It is about method.
And pottery - humble, fragile, abundant - is among the most powerful scientific tools we have for understanding how a civilisation actually worked.

ndia’s past is often narrated through stone—temples, forts, ruins, monuments.
But India’s real civilisational footprint was never stone.
It was systems.

Systems that travelled.
Systems that scaled.
Systems that still power the global economy.

The very idea of revisiting history provokes discomfort. In some quarters, it borders on sacrilege-as if historical writing carries the sanctity of revealed truth. Any attempt to revise it is treated the way one treats a challenge to gospel: with outrage, not inquiry.

And yet, even religious studies have a shelf life.

History, by contrast, is often treated as timeless.

Revisiting the Arthashastra is not an exercise in nostalgia.

It is a reminder that India once operationalised the very systems that we now treat as paperwork - daily, tightly, and with clear lines of responsibility.

For more than two millennia, India ran markets, long-distance trade, and detailed accounting regimes that were exacting, verified, and enforceable.

They were not perfect. But disciplined enough to keep a large economy functioning across shocks and dynasties.

Long before modern textbooks tried to explain these same ideas with different terminology. 

The journey from Vedas to Advait Vedānta is a journey of evolved human consciousness. This highest state of consciousness in a man is Shivattva (What is Shivattva is Ramattva, and what is Ramattva is Krishnattva). As a piece of life, as a body, it is a certain amount of earth, water, air, fire, and ether or ākāśa. And there is a fundamental intelligence that puts all these things together in a particular way to make life out of it. There is a profound and unimaginable level of intelligence that can make simple things like air into life. This intelligence that makes life happen is “consciousness.” What is Not consciousness is Wakefulness, Self-consciousness, and Alertness. Consciousness is the very basis of creation. It is boundless in its nature (body, psychological space, emotional space and energy space all have limited boundaries). 

History is not just about the past—it is also a mirror for the present. Agnitandav of 1948 recounts a chapter of India’s history that many would prefer to forget: the wave of violence that engulfed Brahmin families in Maharashtra following Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination. The events may be over seven decades old, but their lessons remain deeply relevant in today’s India, where caste tensions, political manipulation, and social divides still simmer. Remembering 1948 is not about reopening wounds—it is about ensuring that such wounds are never inflicted again.

The realization of the Ātman, or Atmajñāna, is Sanātana Dharma’s highest possible Ādhyātmika attainment – with Atmajñāna comes the decisive Vedāntic realization that Ātman and Brahman is one single consciousness. The true Ādhyātmika life of Sanātana Dharma is integral and practical, not idealistic or escapist. Sanātana Dharma, as a darśhana, has always been dynamic and evolutionary; there are no regulating body for the Dharma deciding on the heresies, and blasphemies etc. (These words / practices don’t find any mention in any of the dharmic texts) Being Ādhyātmika, a practicing Sanātani must also be a practicing yogi, one whose life is an unbroken pursuit of the one Self in all. Wherever and whenever the Yogi has been eclipsed by the priest or the scholar, Sanātana Dharma has degenerated into ritual and dogma.  

ndia’s democratic journey is often celebrated for its diversity, vibrancy, and resilience. Yet beneath the surface of elections, campaigns, and policy debates lies a persistent reality: caste continues to shape politics. Even decades after independence, the echoes of caste-based mobilization, favouritism, and rivalry influence how communities vote, how leaders are chosen, and how development reaches—or bypasses—certain groups.

Sanātana Dharma reflects a certain darśhana around Jñāna (Jñāna is the realization by direct cognition that in this changing universe there is nothing but Chaitanya that is consciousness, that is of the form of the seer and the seen, pervading all things, that is the same in all) and Bodhā (consciousness). All of Sanātana darśhana moves towards the dissolution of duality, and what dissolves is not duality but the ‘perception’ of duality. Sanātana darśhana is not monistic but is based on oneness of being in and through all differentiations and diversities, where none of the differentiation and diversity is lost in the oneness. The oneness of Sanātana Dharma is not mathematical but ontological, a spiritual experience and realization of Tad Ekam (That One). 

Reasonable discussion among the educated classes in India seems to be veering around to the inevitability of a break-up of Pakistan within the next three to five years. The exact time does not matter, and what is more meaningful is that a country that was set up as a client of the West, has since transformed itself as a rentier state, a garrison for hire, a cricket team with a country attached, an army with a country attached, a non-country, a collapsed state, a Muslim seminary, a poverty wracked land with a ruined riverine system that was the grain bowl of a country that was ahead of India in most economic indicators till 2000.

“Unravelling Sanātana Bharat” – Bharat’s samskriti, and Sanskrit

Sanskrit language has been the unifying substrate of our dharmic samskriti and has profoundly shaped it. Dharma and Sanskrit are deeply intertwined. Without doubt, it is an understanding of Sanskrit, its inherent harmony and generative powers that enables dharma to flower. 

The non-translatable nature of Sanskrit and its deep meanings are compromised by the cultural digestion of dharma into the West through the inadequate translation of vocabulary. In the course of this digestion, crucial distinctions and understandings are lost, important direct experiences of the Rishis sidelined, and the most fertile, productive and visionary dimension of dharma eradicated and relegated to antiquity. Here are few examples demonstrating the non-translatability of the Sanskrit expressions, their commonly used English equivalents that are compared, and their limitations exposed: 

Ātman is not soul 

Why I Wrote Agnitandav of 1948

I grew up listening to fragments of memories of riots of 1948. But they were often spoken in hushed tones, as if wrapped in shame or fear. Writing this book became my way of giving voice to those silences, so that the next generation does not inherit only shadows or false narrative where history should have stood. Couple of years ago, my father and I discussed writing about these events. We started compiling such events from various places and families. Thus the first book (in Marathi) got published. Over the period, we got more information which I included in this English edition for broader audience.