God of Christians, hence of Jews and Muslims, always gave his commandments, via a prophet, in writing, as a book.

Illustration/Devdutt Pattanaik

We confuse literacy with wisdom. This is because when subjects like history and archaeology and linguistics were being invented in the 19th century, colonial scholars declared civilisation begins with writing.

This posed a problem for India.

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The earliest writing was found on Ashokan edicts, which are 2,300 years old. Vedic people, who lived 3,000 years ago in the Ganga river basin, chose to transmit knowledge orally. A thousand years before that, in the Indus river basin, the Harappans used symbols to communicate, that is mostly likely not a script like the cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia, or the hieroglyphic or ancient Egypt, that could be used to compose prose and poetry.

There was panic in India’s........

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