Bravehearts of Bharat by Vikram Sampath

Indic Books — entry · Journal & E-Magazine — Book Review

Ask a schoolchild to name India’s warriors and the list runs out quickly — not because the warriors did, but because the textbooks did. Vikram Sampath’s Bravehearts of Bharat: Vignettes from Indian History (Penguin, 2022) is a deliberate act of restoration: fifteen portraits of men and women who defended their lands and traditions, drawn from every corner of the map and every century of the second millennium.

The range is the point. Lalitaditya Muktapida of Kashmir, whose empire the chronicles compare to the great conquerors and whom almost no one now names. Rani Abbakka Chowta of Ullal, who fought the Portuguese for decades. Lachit Borphukan, whose Ahom forces turned the Mughals back at Saraighat. Banda Singh Bahadur, Martanda Varma, Chand Bibi, Kanhoji Angre — sailors, queens, generals, ascetics-turned-soldiers. Sampath, a trained historian, keeps the apparatus honest: sources cited, legends flagged as legends, and the drama allowed to come from the events rather than the prose.

Read as a set, the vignettes dismantle the laziest of our inherited storylines — that resistance was rare, regional, or futile. What they show instead is a continuous, geographically distributed instinct of defence that our civilizational memory kept better than our curriculum did.

Who should read it: students meeting un-textbooked history for the first time; readers of our History & Civilization shelf — where the Heroes of Resistance sub-topic now has its founding book. Browse more titles on the Indic Books shelf.

Credits: entry by Indic Warriors. Book: Vikram Sampath, Bravehearts of Bharat: Vignettes from Indian History (Penguin Random House India, 2022).