A particular notion of freedom emerged in India against the backdrop of liberal political theory during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The encounter produced a series of complicated subplots that reordered Indian intellectual and cul tural traditions. In his recent book Indian Ideas of Freedom, Dennis Dalton studies leading Indian intellectuals to establish that the Indian conception of freedom ar-ticulated its civilisational ethos and was not derivative of the Western model. While the author shows how the articulation of freedom by modern Indian intellectuals powerfully challenged Western political theory, a problem lies with his insufficient analysis of the cognitive damage wrought by colonialism and thus, he leave incom-plete more fundamental task of reconstructing it within tradition and culturality.