The Long Siege is a compact yet intellectually dense work that examines the last five centuries of India’s historical trajectory of colonial expansionism, tracing its roots to accelerated scientific and technological developments. It is less a conventional work of history than a civilizational argument grounded in history—one that reconstructs the Indian past as a series of ruptures, in order to point to the various structural and psychological failures, and ensure that such subservience is not repeated in the face of emerging forms of Western technocratic power. Written for readers already at least a little familiar with historical discourse, it operates at a meta-level—framing a broader argument about the nature and evolution of colonization itself. Giri frames the last 500 years as a “long siege”—a multi-layered, sub-conventional conflict waged across cognitive, psychological, and technological domains. The central failure, in his telling, was not merely political disunity but an inability to recognize and respond to the deeper undercurrent: the militarization of science and the emergence of what he terms “strategic sciences.” While Europe systematically aligned scientific inquiry with warfare, logistics, and imperial expansion, Bhārata, despite its intellectual resources and civilizational depth, struggled to perceive this shift in its totality.

“The colonizers left without a fight and voluntarily; or rather, they shape-shifted conveniently to enter inapparent realms, existing amidst us but unseen to the senses.” Giri frames Bhārata as the last enduring civilizational repository of chirantan knowledge, uniquely tasked with bearing the simultaneous pressures of modernity, civilizational amnesia, and internal resistance to evolution. Drawing from history, he argues that virtually every domain of human activity—science, trade, communication—has been progressively instrumentalized and weaponized under colonial expansion. Colonization, in this view, is an ongoing undercurrent, sustained by unchecked human desire and now operating through subtler, less visible forms of power. Against this, Bhārata’s civilizational framework—rooted in ṛta, or cosmic order—is positioned as an organic alternative to synthetic, imposed systems of knowledge and organization. The long struggle of the past 500 years is thus framed as an effort to preserve not only knowledge itself, but the ecological and ethical modes of knowing, which are tightly aligned with nature and spiritual upliftment. While acknowledging the immense human and cultural losses incurred, Giri suggests that what ultimately endures are forms of psychological, spiritual, aesthetic, and environmental wealth, all intrinsically tied to this deeper civilizational order.

Giri foregrounds the maritime control over India as a central force in establishing British presence—an often under-theorized instrument of colonial dominance in India. Giri argues that colonial power was never merely about the circulation of goods, but about monopolizing the infrastructures that enabled their movement: ports, shipping networks, naval strength, and the scientific knowledge that sustained them. Efforts such as the indigenous shipping ventures associated with figures like Walchand Hirachand are thus not isolated entrepreneurial acts, but strategic attempts to reclaim logistical sovereignty in a system designed to exclude Indian participation. The Swadeshi movement’s boycott of British goods, while symbolically potent, is shown to have had limited structural impact so long as control over maritime routes and port cities remained firmly in colonial hands. By situating port cities like Bombay and Calcutta as both entry points of empire and incubators of resistance, Giri expands the geography of the freedom struggle into the domain of global trade and naval power. The argument extends further: India’s relative decline, he suggests, was not inevitable, but contingent upon a failure to adapt to a rapidly transforming world where maritime law, industrial science, and blue-water naval capabilities had become critical. 

Colonialism thus emerges as a sophisticated system of logistical and epistemic control, one that could not have been dismantled through political resistance alone. What was required—and only partially realized—was a coordinated effort to rebuild indigenous capacity across shipbuilding, scientific training, and maritime governance. Unlike the relatively constrained kingdoms of the subcontinent, European states leveraged naval power to create vast extraterritorial arenas for experimentation, extraction, and technological refinement. This expanded the field of domination—stretching across oceans and colonies—enabling a continuous feedback loop between discovery, deployment, and domination. In contrast, Bhārata’s scientific and political imagination remained territorially bounded, even as it was being drawn into an increasingly globalized and weaponized order.

So also in the domains of astronomy, mathematics, and the sciences — which are situatated as critical arms of geopolitical power — Giri points to a striking asymmetry: while pre-modern Indian astronomy, as evidenced in the works of scholars like Raja Jai Singh and Pandit Kamlakar Bhatta, remained conceptually sophisticated, it suffered from a sustained absence of institutional patronage—particularly in the development of instruments such as telescopes and observatories. In contrast, European powers were rapidly integrating advances in optics, physics, and navigation into state-backed military and maritime projects, thereby converting scientific inquiry into strategic capital. While Giri makes a valid observation about the deficiencies in the Indian way of thinking, one may argue that this tendency to convert all domains of knowledge into extractive value systems—though historically effective in enabling expansion—is not necessarily a desirable or sustainable model for the world at large, especially when contrasted with more ecologically and cosmologically integrated knowledge traditions.

Giri’s insight here is that the divergence was not epistemic but infrastructural and institutional. Indian knowledge systems were not necessarily inferior; rather, they were not embedded within a political economy that could scale, instrumentally deploy, and continuously innovate upon them. The presence of Jesuit astronomers in Indian courts, and their interactions with figures like Jai Singh, further underscores this paradox—an exchange of knowledge occurring alongside an asymmetrical consolidation of power. Scientific collaboration, in this sense, unfolded within a broader matrix of imperial ambition, where even astronomical observations were entangled with navigation, artillery, and territorial expansion.

This culminates in a more unsettling proposition: that the rise of European dominance was underwritten by a tight nexus between scientific institutions, such as those linked to the Royal Society, and the commercial-military apparatus of the East India Company. Observatories, surveys, and scientific expeditions were not merely scholarly enterprises but extensions of imperial logistics and intelligence. Against this backdrop, India’s relative decline appears less as a failure of knowledge and more as a failure to institutionalize, patronize, and strategically deploy that knowledge in a rapidly transforming technopolitical landscape.

Building on this, Giri turns to the question of industrialization and the intellectual foundations of freedom, highlighting how early 20th-century Indian thinkers and industrialists recognized that political independence was inseparable from technological and economic self-sufficiency. He draws attention to efforts such as the 1936 Bombay Manifesto and the parallel emphasis, articulated by figures like Subhas Chandra Bose, on developing a “science of freedom”—a systematic study of empires, political structures, and liberation movements. What emerges is an argument that the struggle against colonization required not only resistance, but a rigorous, almost scientific understanding of power itself. 

The narrative also foregrounds the structural constraints imposed by colonial rule on Indian scientific and industrial potential. Through examples ranging from Prafulla Chandra Ray to Jagadish Chandra Bose, Giri illustrates how intellectual and technical talent was systematically under-recognized, underpaid, or institutionally stifled, revealing a deeper asymmetry in the production and validation of knowledge. In response, figures such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya advanced a vision of Swadeshi industrialization—rooted in skill-building, local manufacturing, and technological education—as the material basis for civilizational resurgence. At the time of the swadeshi movement, thinkers and revolutionaries believed that a “Japan-like industrialization to keep European colonialism in check was like a  'secret formula that Bharatiya thought leaders wanted to explore, but it couldn't happen without being discreet.” Giri’s broader insight here is that the freedom struggle involved rebuilding the very capacity to produce knowledge, industry, and institutions on indigenous terms. Yet, much of this history remains fragmentary, with networks of collaboration, experimentation, and resistance still insufficiently understood—pointing to the need for a more expansive inquiry into the economic and scientific dimensions of colonization and decolonization. In this context, the book could have benefited from a more granular exploration of even more specific domains through which European powers—particularly England—mechanized and industrialized, and the corresponding ways in which India’s indigenous industries were systematically undermined or displaced. A closer engagement with these asymmetries would further strengthen the argument that colonial expansion did not operate on anything resembling a level playing field, but was structurally tilted through technological, economic, and institutional advantage.

The Long Siege is a well-researched and engaging work that traces India’s prolonged struggle for technological and political autonomy. Its insights are sharp, consequential, and deeply relevant to contemporary debates, making it a quick and interesting read for those interested in Indian history, geopolitics, and strategic thought. Giri ends on a cautionary note: the future of power will no longer be anchored solely in visible instruments of force, but in subtler domains—particularly, the human mind. If earlier phases of colonization were driven by control over land, sea, and industry, the next may unfold through cognition, perception, and technological mediation. The urgency of the book, then, lies in its call to recognize this longue durée of conflict and to develop the intellectual and institutional capacities necessary to navigate what may be an even more complex phase of civilizational contestation.