Holistic education is an educational philosophy and practice that aims to nurture learners’ intellec-tual, emotional, social, physical, ethical and spiritual development. It seeks to form persons rather than merely train performers, and therefore challenges narrow educational models that reduce learning to ex-amination success, employability, or the mechanical acquisition of information. This paper examines the philosophical roots and contemporary relevance of holistic education in independent India. It traces the idea from Vedic and Upanishadic reflections on knowledge, the Gurukula tradition, and major Indian ed-ucational thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Sri Aurobindo, J. Krishnamurti and Sri Sathya Sai Baba. It also places these Indian traditions in dialogue with Western edu-cational thinkers such as Plato, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Montessori, Dewey, Steiner and Smuts. This paper further analyses the post-Independence education commissions and policy frameworks, culminating in the National Education Policy 2020. The central argument of this paper is that holistic education in India should not be merely understood as a contemporary policy slogan or a nostalgic return to the past; rather, a historically rooted, philosophically rich and socially relevant educational framework that should be critically recovered for the present. This paper also argues that the crisis of the present-day educational system is not only curricular or administrative but also cultural in nature: education has increasingly become capable of producing skilled individuals without necessarily forming the morally grounded, emotionally stable, socially responsible and spiritually sensitive human beings. In this context, holistic education becomes not an op-tional supplement but a necessary reorientation of educational purpose. At the same time, this paper maintains that the recovery of holistic education must be critical and inclusive. Ancient and modern tradi-tions must be examined in relation to caste, gender, access, social equity, institutional practice and imple-mentation. This paper therefore moves beyond a descriptive survey and presents holistic education as a living framework for addressing youth mental health, value erosion, social fragmentation, examination pressure and the gap between policy vision and classroom reality in contemporary India.5313