Mainstreaming Indian Knowledge Systems Marks A Paradigm Shift In Educational Institutions

The establishment of centres of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) at various higher educational institutions (including IITs, central, state and private universities) reveals the educational and developmental trajectories of the country.

The move announces India’s coming of age as a society confident of its intellectual legacies and their continuing resonance.

These centres sanctioned by the Ministry of Education are intended to promote India’s knowledge traditions, through teaching and research, cutting across both para vidya (spiritual knowledge) and apara vidya (empirical knowledge).

In the process, they are expected to engage with jnan, vignan and jeevan darshan through rigorous analysis while reflecting on the unique experience of India as a civilisation.

Lest the effort is misunderstood as revival of learning from a bygone era that has no contemporary relevance, the ministry declared that such a quest “includes knowledge from ancient India and, its successes and challenges, and a sense of India’s future aspirations specific to education, health, environment and indeed all aspects of life.”

That means, the project is both aspirational and reflexive.

Institutional Foundation Of Disciplines

Academic disciplines and research domains are not made in heaven. They are made on the earth by earthly people and for earthly purposes. The conception and evolution of academic disciplines are historical, and so are subject to time as much as they are subject to place; they appear and disappear in response to state/market/societal patronage or its absence.

Most of the disciplines that we imagine as carved in stone didn’t exist some 200 years earlier.

In ancient times, disciplines such as law and medicine did exist and in some cases divinity, rhetoric and grammar that demanded special information and training. Most social sciences disciplines like psychology, sociology, anthropology, political economy came into existence in the nineteenth century and some like English literary studies in early twentieth century.

That said, many of these established disciplines, by description and prescription, saw the West as the pinnacle of human evolution and that is how Western practices became ideals for non-Western and colonised societies. If sociology established the normativity of the modern West, anthropology mainstreamed the deviance of the pre-modern rest.

As we witness an explosion of universities amidst an ever-increasing demand for education and research, new disciplines and programmes (for example, patent law, health policy, sports psychology among others) are now emerging to respond to the complexity of the times. That means, if IKS is indeed an institutional initiative, so were many disciplines.

In the Akhila Bharatiya Siksha Samagam 2023, organised by the Ministry of Education, it was recognised that IKS need to be “scientifically integrated, including tribal knowledge and indigenous & traditional modes of learning” and should “encompass topics such as mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, yoga, architecture, medicine, agriculture, and so on”.

Now the question is how on earth such disparate topics can be brought under an umbrella called IKS, and what is the organising principle of such an endeavour that can connect exact sciences such as astronomy or mathematics with kavya shastra or citrasutra.

These are rhetorical questions and are intended to delegitimate rather than understand IKS. As mentioned earlier, all disciplines are products of time. The aspiration to be a knowledge capital is not an unusual aspiration any more than the aspiration to be a strong economy or a thriving democracy.

Similarly, bringing together Indian approaches to education is already envisioned in the National Education Policy. For the first time in independent India, the country is looking at producing well-rounded, well-grounded and organically trained human capital who are neither nervous about interrogating Western knowledge nor shy about promoting Indian traditions.

The IKS is an umbrella discipline like development studies, public policy or management studies, or more focused domains like gender studies, race and ethnicity studies, area studies and even religion studies that must bring philosophers, historians, literary critics and sociologists together.

The Promise Of IKS

This is common sense. But we all know, common sense is singularly uncommon. In a climate of outrage, and in an academic culture that was one-dimensional for the better part of twentieth century, various domains of IKS have elicited suspicion and even derision among some academics.

A section of intelligentsia and academics see this as another way of indoctrination by the government of a right-wing party. It does not take time to understand that such articulations are not made by experts or academics trained in IKS, but mostly by outsiders to the field.

This is unfortunate, though predictable. But it serves a useful purpose for IKS. It helps us look at the field with reflexivity and distance, and at the same time avoid the pitfalls of brash, secularist and culture-denying knowledge that consumed us after independence. The IKS guides us to imagine another geography outside the West to be the source of knowledge.

The nay-sayer would persist saying, “look, professional courses are intended to impart a skill that is useful for the market. What about IKS that can at best help one delve deep into some textual traditions?” That means, IKS at best can operate as knowledge, but without any relevance in the market.

It is true that institutional effort has been limited to the establishment of IKS centres where academics/researchers from various domains such as astronomy, yoga, architecture, aesthetics, philosophy come together to engage in research.

These are early days; a little more investment and patience will do no harm to sustain a system that does not resist demands of validation and application. There are institutions which have started offering programmes in heritage management, Indian architectural technology as well as in general IKS; many more are offering courses around IKS subjects.

Long before the introduction of IKS centres, some institutions already had robust programmes in Hindu studies, ayurveda and yoga. The challenge will be to make the graduates market ready and for that a whole industrial and institutional complex have to be put in place to streamline the process.

Subjects, more so disciplines, are conscious actions of our informed choosing. They are as much reflections on our times and institutions, as they are their products. It has always been the case; it will most likely remain the same.

If we forget the historically contingent nature of disciplines and domains and lose our perspective, it will be a disservice to the cause of knowledge. The IKS project offers a unique opportunity to revisit otherwise ‘frozen facts’ of academic subjects/disciplines and find alternatives that does not deracinate us nor does its vocabulary make us dismissive of Indian ways of knowing. It is an inward experience.