Indian Knowledge Systems in the Archive: Manuscripts, Epics, Knowledge Practices and the Making of a Living Epistemic Tradition
Dr. Manish Kumar C. Mishra
Associate Professor, Department of Hindi
K. M. Agrawal College of Arts, Commerce & Science, Kalyan (West), Maharashtra, India
Abstract
Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) are increasingly invoked in Indian higher education, public policy and cultural discourse, yet the term risks becoming either an uncritical celebration of the past or an excessively narrow synonym for a few classical Sanskrit traditions. This article develops a historically grounded and methodologically cautious account of IKS as a plural, multilingual and evolving knowledge ecology. Taking the May–June 2026 special issue of Srijan Samay, “Bharatiya Jnana Parampara: Bahuayami Vidyashakhaon ka Sanskritik Chintan Pravah,” as a contemporary corpus and point of departure, the study reads its range—from language, Buddhist thought, journalism, painting, devotional literature, tourism, tribal knowledge and environmental thought to artificial intelligence, education, music and dramaturgy—as evidence of a deliberately interdisciplinary conception of knowledge. The article places this contemporary framing in dialogue with the National Education Policy 2020, University Grants Commission guidelines, the Ministry of Education’s IKS Division, and established scholarship on Sanskrit cosmopolitanism, vernacular public spheres, intellectual history, education, science and indigenous knowledge. It argues that the strongest contemporary case for IKS lies not in claims of civilizational exceptionalism but in a disciplined programme of preservation, philology, translation, comparison, empirical inquiry, community participation and responsible innovation. A distinction is proposed between textual knowledge, embodied/practical knowledge, ecological/community knowledge, aesthetic knowledge and institutional knowledge. The paper also examines the role of Indian languages in epistemic democratization, the relationship between classical and vernacular traditions, the educational implications of NEP 2020, and the opportunities and risks created by digitization and artificial intelligence. It concludes with a research and curriculum framework designed to make IKS academically credible, socially inclusive and globally dialogic.
Keywords: Indian Knowledge Systems; Bharatiya Jnana Parampara; NEP 2020; higher education; Indian languages; indigenous knowledge; interdisciplinarity; knowledge democratization; digital humanities; cultural heritage
1. Introduction: From “heritage” to a researchable knowledge system
Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), or Bhāratīya-jñāna-paramparā, has moved rapidly from the margins of specialist Indological, historical and philosophical study into the vocabulary of Indian education policy. The shift is institutionally visible. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 calls for an education system rooted in Indian ethos while remaining committed to quality, equity, constitutional values, multilingualism, multidisciplinarity and global knowledge exchange. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has subsequently issued guidelines for incorporating Indian knowledge into higher-education curricula and for training faculty in IKS. The Ministry of Education’s IKS Division now supports research centres, competitive research projects, internships, faculty development, documentation and dissemination. These developments make IKS not merely a cultural theme but a consequential academic field requiring clear definitions, robust methods and defensible standards of evidence.
The attached May–June 2026 special issue of Srijan Samay provides a useful contemporary snapshot of how IKS is being conceptualized beyond a single discipline. Its editorial framing describes Indian knowledge tradition as a civilizational knowledge culture concerned with balanced relations among the human person, society, nature and the wider cosmos; it emphasizes synthesis, coexistence, dialogue, plurality, compassion, environmental responsibility and collective welfare. More importantly for academic analysis, the issue explicitly presents IKS as multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary, connecting philosophy and science, literature and society, education and culture, language and knowledge, environment and life-philosophy, art and spirituality, folk and classical traditions, history and contemporaneity, and tradition and modernity. The table of contents operationalizes this breadth through articles on linguistic traditions, Buddhist philosophy, global ethics, musical journalism, Ajanta painting, Hindi film songs, bhakti, cultural tourism, Hindi periodicals, Deori oral traditions, digital media and artificial intelligence, environmental thought, education, music, tribal art, Indian languages, the Nīlamata Purāṇa and Nāṭyaśāstra.
This range is intellectually productive, but it also exposes a central problem: if IKS includes philosophy, language, medicine, mathematics, agriculture, arts, ritual, ecology, education, media and community knowledge, what makes these diverse domains part of one analytically coherent field? A satisfactory answer cannot be “because they are Indian.” Knowledge traditions are internally diverse, historically contested and continuously transformed by translation, migration, religious debate, political power, colonialism, print capitalism, modern science and global exchange. A serious IKS framework must therefore distinguish provenance from validity, cultural significance from empirical demonstration, and preservation from endorsement.
This article proposes that IKS is best understood as a historically layered knowledge ecology: a network of texts, practices, institutions, languages, pedagogies, communities and techniques through which knowledge was generated, tested, transmitted, contested and adapted in South Asia and in connected intellectual worlds. “System” should not imply a single closed doctrine. Rather, it names relations among multiple systems—Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Islamic-Persianate, regional, artisanal, medical, mathematical, aesthetic, agrarian, tribal and modern—whose interactions produced changing forms of knowledge. Such a definition allows scholarship to recognize civilizational continuity without erasing discontinuity, plurality or conflict.
The paper has five objectives: first, to clarify the conceptual scope of IKS; second, to identify its principal epistemic domains and modes of transmission; third, to examine language and vernacularization as mechanisms of knowledge democratization; fourth, to assess the educational and policy significance of IKS after NEP 2020; and fifth, to propose safeguards for research, curriculum design and digital dissemination. The argument throughout is that IKS becomes academically stronger when it is treated neither as a museum of glorious achievements nor as a category to be dismissed in advance, but as a field open to philological precision, historical criticism, comparative inquiry, empirical validation and ethical debate.
2. Source base and method
The article uses a qualitative, interpretive and comparative method. The attached Srijan Samay special issue functions as a contemporary primary corpus for understanding the present-day breadth of IKS discourse. Its editorial statement and contents are not treated as neutral definitions; rather, they are read as evidence of how an interdisciplinary cultural journal in 2026 organizes the field. The issue’s explicit claim that Indian knowledge cannot be adequately understood through disciplinary fragmentation provides a working hypothesis to be tested against policy documents and scholarship.
Three additional source clusters are used. The first consists of official policy documents: NEP 2020; UGC guidelines on incorporating Indian knowledge in higher education; UGC faculty-orientation guidelines; and public information from the Ministry of Education’s IKS Division. These sources establish what the contemporary Indian state and higher-education regulators mean by curricular integration, faculty capacity building, interdisciplinarity and the use of primary texts. The second cluster consists of scholarly works on language, knowledge and intellectual history, including Sheldon Pollock on Sanskrit and political-cultural power, Francesca Orsini on the Hindi public sphere, Vasudha Dalmia on nineteenth-century cultural nationalism, Ulrike Stark on print, and works in the history of Indian science and mathematics. The third cluster consists of scholarship on indigenous and local knowledge, sustainability and education, used comparatively to avoid treating IKS as an isolated national category.
Methodologically, the paper adopts four safeguards. First, historical claims are separated from normative claims. A practice may be historically important without being scientifically effective, and a text may be philosophically profound without constituting empirical science in the modern sense. Second, primary texts should be read in their languages or in accountable critical translations wherever possible. Third, claims that ancient texts “anticipated” modern discoveries require especially high evidentiary thresholds. Conceptual resemblance is not equivalent to historical priority or experimental demonstration. Fourth, community knowledge must not be extracted from its custodians without attention to consent, attribution, benefit-sharing and intellectual-property concerns.
The approach is therefore sympathetic but critical: it seeks to recover neglected epistemic resources while resisting anachronism. This position is consistent with the special issue’s own most productive tendency—its movement between classical sources and living practices, between arts and sciences, and between preservation and contemporary application.
3. The archive as argument: manuscripts, critical editions and the material life of knowledge
Indian Knowledge Systems become intellectually more persuasive when the discussion begins not with generalized civilizational claims but with objects that can be inspected: manuscripts, recensional variants, commentaries, catalogues, critical editions, inscriptions, instruments and the histories of the repositories that preserve them. The archive changes the question from ‘What did ancient India know?’ to a more demanding sequence: What text or practice is being cited? In what recension? In which script and material form? When can the witness be dated? What commentarial tradition accompanies it? How did it reach its present repository? Which modern edition mediates our access to it? These questions do not diminish tradition. They disclose the actual labour by which tradition survives.
The Rigveda collection at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), Pune, offers an exemplary case. UNESCO’s nomination dossier records thirty Rigveda manuscripts in the collection and emphasizes their variation in scripts, accentuation marks and support materials. It also notes that sixteen contain Sāyaṇa’s bhāṣya and five contain the Padapāṭha. Particularly significant is a Kashmir manuscript written on birch bark in Śāradā script. The dossier further records that one manuscript now at BORI was used by F. Max Müller in preparing his nineteenth-century edition of the Rigveda with Sāyaṇa’s commentary. This single archival cluster therefore links oral preservation, manuscript culture, commentary, colonial-era philology and modern critical editing. IKS here is not an abstract inheritance: it is a chain of transmission whose stages can be historically reconstructed.
The collection history is equally revealing. The UNESCO dossier traces systematic manuscript-collecting in the Bombay Presidency from 1868 and lists major collectors including Georg Bühler, F. Kielhorn, R. G. Bhandarkar, Peter Peterson, Kathavate, S. R. Bhandarkar, K. B. Pathak and V. S. Ghate. Such histories complicate easy oppositions between ‘indigenous knowledge’ and ‘colonial archive’. Colonial institutions created classificatory regimes and asymmetries of power, but Indian scholars, pandits, collectors and later research institutes also used the resulting collections to produce new editions and histories. The archive is therefore a site of both epistemic disruption and recovery.
A second major case is the Bhagavadgītā manuscript collection entered in UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register in 2025. UNESCO describes the Gītā as a 700-verse, eighteen-chapter text embedded in the Bhīṣmaparvan of the Mahābhārata and stresses its cumulative intellectual character. For IKS research, the important point is not merely the Gītā’s fame but its location inside an epic argumentative world. Arjuna’s viṣāda is not answered by one proposition; the dialogue moves among action, knowledge, discipline, devotion, selfhood, duty and liberation. Its intellectual significance lies partly in the capacity to hold apparently competing orientations in a structured conversation. A manuscript-centred study can then ask how commentaries, scripts, regional copying traditions and translations stabilized or redirected that conversation.
The Mahābhārata itself demonstrates why critical editions matter. An epic transmitted for centuries across regions cannot responsibly be treated as though every printed verse belongs to one fixed authorial text. The BORI Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata, produced through comparison of a large manuscript base, is therefore not merely a publishing achievement; it is an epistemological lesson. It shows that textual tradition can preserve plurality, interpolation, regional variation and editorial choice. For IKS pedagogy, teaching the existence of recensions and textual criticism is more valuable than presenting the epic as an undifferentiated storehouse of quotations.
The Rāmāyaṇa presents a comparable challenge. Vālmīki’s Sanskrit epic generated extensive regional, linguistic, performative and devotional afterlives. The history of Rāma-kathā is consequently a history of reinterpretation: Sanskrit textual traditions interact with vernacular retellings, oral performance, temple cultures, painting, theatre and modern media. An IKS framework should resist the temptation to collapse these into a single invariant ‘Indian view’. The epistemic richness lies in the relation between continuity and reinterpretation—how ethical ideals, political imagination, kinship, exile, kingship and devotion are repeatedly rethought in new linguistic and social settings.
A third archival object of exceptional relevance is the Nāṭyaśāstra manuscript registered by UNESCO in 2025 and preserved at BORI. UNESCO foregrounds its systematic treatment of nāṭya, abhinaya, rasa, bhāva and saṅgīta. This is precisely the kind of source that unsettles modern disciplinary boundaries: dramaturgy, musicology, bodily technique, architecture of performance, poetics and psychology of aesthetic response are organized within a single knowledge architecture. The celebrated rasa framework is not simply a list of emotions; it is a theory of how represented states, performance conventions and spectatorship generate a distinctive aesthetic experience. Later thinkers, especially Abhinavagupta, transform the theory further, reminding us that IKS develops through commentary rather than through passive preservation.
Rare books are another layer of the archive. The nineteenth-century Sacred Books of the East series, edited by F. Max Müller and published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press from 1879, is historically important not because it provides final translations, but because it documents a decisive moment in the global reclassification of Asian textual traditions. Its first volume, The Upanishads, placed selected Upaniṣadic texts within a comparative ‘sacred books’ project. Modern scholarship must read such editions twice: first for the Indian texts they helped circulate, and second for the Orientalist categories through which those texts were presented to English-reading publics. The history of IKS is therefore also the history of its translation into modern disciplinary and global vocabularies.
The Upaniṣads themselves provide a model of knowledge as inquiry rather than inventory. Dialogues such as those associated with Yājñavalkya, Gargī, Maitreyī, Naciketas and other interlocutors stage questions about self, death, ultimate reality, language and the limits of conceptual knowledge. Their importance for contemporary education lies not in converting metaphysical propositions into scientific claims, but in recovering a pedagogy of sustained questioning. The textual form matters: knowledge emerges through challenge, counter-question, analogy, negation and reflection. This dialogic structure should inform how IKS is taught.
The Vedic corpus also requires conceptual restraint. Terms such as ṛta, yajña, vāc and brahman belong to historical semantic fields that cannot be translated by one modern equivalent. Ṛta, for instance, is often invoked in contemporary writing as ‘cosmic order’, but its meanings must be reconstructed from Vedic usage rather than made to carry later ecological or scientific theories automatically. Likewise, the famous Nāsadīya hymn (Rigveda 10.129) is valuable for its speculative openness about origins; its final interrogative movement is intellectually striking precisely because it does not close cosmological uncertainty with a simplistic assertion. Such passages reveal a tradition capable of questioning the limits of knowledge itself.
Taken together, these examples suggest an archive-led definition of IKS: not a catalogue of ancient achievements, but a historically transmitted field of arguments, techniques and practices whose evidentiary traces survive in manuscripts, oral lineages, material objects, commentaries, translations and living communities. The archive does not freeze knowledge. It makes change visible.
Figure 1. First page of the UNESCO Memory of the World nomination dossier for the Rigvedasaṃhitā, Rigvedasaṃhitā-Padapāṭha and Rigvedasaṃhitā-bhāṣya collection. Source: UNESCO Memory of the World nomination dossier, Ref. 2006-58; National Mission for Manuscripts and Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. Reproduced here as an archival document, not as decoration.
Figure 2. UNESCO nomination dossier page recording the rare Kashmir birch-bark Śāradā manuscript and the nineteenth-/early-twentieth-century history of manuscript collecting. Source: UNESCO Memory of the World nomination dossier, Ref. 2006-58, p. 3.
Table 1. Archival objects that can anchor an evidence-based IKS research programme
Object / corpus | Repository / edition | Knowledge problem | Methodological value | Status / source |
Rigveda manuscript collection | BORI, Pune | Orality, accent, recension, commentary | Manuscript comparison; history of philology | UNESCO Memory of the World, 2007 |
Bhagavadgītā manuscript collection | BORI / IGNCA nomination | Epic dialogue; transmission; commentary | Codicology, reception history, comparative philosophy | UNESCO Memory of the World, 2025 |
Nāṭyaśāstra manuscript | BORI, Pune | Rasa, bhāva, abhinaya, music and performance | Text-performance comparison; aesthetics | UNESCO Memory of the World, 2025 |
Mahābhārata Critical Edition | BORI, Pune | Recensional plurality and editorial reconstruction | Textual criticism; stemmatic comparison | Critical-edition tradition |
The Upanishads, Sacred Books of the East, Vol. I | Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1879 | Translation and Orientalist mediation | History of translation; reception; comparative philology | Public-domain rare-book record |
4. What counts as an Indian Knowledge System?
The expression “Indian Knowledge Systems” is grammatically plural for good reason. Premodern South Asia did not possess a single university curriculum, a single language of scholarship, or a single theory of valid knowledge. Sanskrit intellectual traditions developed elaborate śāstric disciplines; Pali and Prakrit preserved Buddhist and Jain canons and commentarial cultures; Tamil and other regional languages produced philosophical, literary, devotional and technical knowledge; Persian became a major language of administration, historiography, literature and science in large parts of the subcontinent; and innumerable oral and occupational communities transmitted agricultural, ecological, artisanal, healing and performative knowledge without reducing it to canonical texts.
The UGC’s faculty-orientation framework is notable because it defines IKS across the humanities, engineering, medicine, agriculture, community knowledge systems, fine and performing arts and vocational skills, and asks that traditional subjects be mapped to modern disciplinary fields. This broad formulation aligns closely with the 2026 Srijan Samay special issue. The convergence suggests that contemporary IKS discourse is not confined to metaphysics or religious texts. It is concerned with the entire infrastructure of knowing: categories, methods, skills, memory practices, institutions and applications.
For analytical clarity, I propose five overlapping epistemic domains. The first is textual-conceptual knowledge: philosophical systems, grammar, logic, poetics, jurisprudence, mathematical treatises, medical compendia and other codified traditions. The second is embodied-practical knowledge: yoga, performance, craft, architecture, music, agricultural technique and therapeutic practice, in which competence is acquired through disciplined doing. The third is ecological-community knowledge: local taxonomies, water management, forest use, seed selection, foodways, weather knowledge and ethnobotany transmitted through communities. The fourth is aesthetic-symbolic knowledge: narrative, visual art, music, dance, theatre and ritual forms that encode social memory, ethical reasoning and theories of emotion. The fifth is institutional-transmissional knowledge: gurukulas, monasteries, temples, courts, guilds, households, print institutions, universities, archives and now digital platforms that determine who can access knowledge and under what conditions.
These domains overlap. Nāṭyaśāstra, for example, is simultaneously textual, aesthetic, embodied and institutional. Ayurveda combines textual theory, clinical observation, materia medica, apprenticeship and regional practice. A tribal painting tradition may function as art, ecological memory, ritual practice and intergenerational pedagogy. The analytical advantage of this five-domain model is that it prevents a narrow canon from monopolizing IKS while also preventing the category from becoming so broad that it loses meaning.
A second distinction is necessary between “knowledge about India” and “knowledge traditions produced, circulated or transformed in India.” Colonial ethnography, for example, generated knowledge about India but often through classificatory regimes tied to colonial power. Conversely, Indian intellectual traditions frequently absorbed ideas from outside the subcontinent. Astronomy, medicine, mathematics, language and art developed through exchange across Central Asia, West Asia, the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia. IKS should therefore be studied through connected histories rather than civilizational isolation. Its originality often lies precisely in translation, synthesis and adaptation.
Figure 3. A relational map of IKS domains. Source: author’s synthesis based on the Srijan Samay special issue, UGC guidance and the analytical model developed in this article.
Domain | Typical sources | Research methods | Contemporary interface |
Textual-conceptual | Śāstra, commentary, manuscripts | Philology, intellectual history | Philosophy, linguistics, mathematics |
Embodied-practical | Performance, craft, yoga, apprenticeship | Practice research, ethnography | Arts, design, health |
Ecological-community | Oral knowledge, agriculture, local taxonomies | Fieldwork, participatory research | Sustainability, biodiversity |
Aesthetic-symbolic | Music, painting, theatre, narrative | Aesthetics, iconography, performance studies | Creative industries, cultural memory |
Institutional-transmissional | Gurukula, monastery, press, university, digital archive | Social history, media studies | Education, publishing, digital humanities |
Table 2. Five-domain analytical model for Indian Knowledge Systems. Source: author’s synthesis.
5. Epistemology: plurality, debate and methods of knowing
Any account of IKS that emphasizes only accumulated content misses a more fundamental contribution: Indian traditions developed sophisticated arguments about what counts as knowledge. Classical philosophical schools debated pramāṇas—means or warrants of knowledge—such as perception, inference, comparison, testimony, postulation and non-apprehension. Different schools accepted different combinations and interpreted their scope differently. The result was not epistemic uniformity but a culture of structured disagreement.
This matters for contemporary IKS because it offers an internal resource for critical method. Appeals to tradition alone are insufficient; Indian philosophical traditions themselves repeatedly asked how a claim is known, what kind of evidence supports it, what produces error and how rival positions should be answered. Nyāya’s concern with inference and debate, Buddhist analyses of perception and conceptual construction, Mīmāṃsā reflections on testimony, and Jain doctrines of perspectival complexity demonstrate that plurality and argument are not external modern impositions on Indian thought.
The dialogical form is equally important. Upaniṣadic conversations, Buddhist debates, scholastic commentaries, Jain disputation, philosophical bhāṣyas and later vernacular dialogues all show knowledge emerging through question, objection, response and reinterpretation. This is a useful corrective to pedagogies that present IKS as a fixed list of achievements to memorize. A contemporary classroom faithful to the intellectual spirit of these traditions should reconstruct arguments, compare commentaries, test translations and invite counter-positions.
The Srijan Samay editorial’s emphasis on dialogue, plurality and synthesis is therefore not merely rhetorical; it can be connected to historically recognizable practices of debate. Yet synthesis must not be confused with the erasure of difference. Buddhist critiques of Brahmanical categories, Jain disagreements with both Buddhist and Vedic schools, materialist positions associated with Cārvāka/Lokāyata, devotional challenges to hierarchy, and later social-reform critiques all belong to the history of Indian knowledge. A plural IKS curriculum should teach disagreements as disagreements rather than retroactively harmonizing them.
This epistemic pluralism also clarifies the relation between IKS and modern science. The most defensible approach is neither to claim that every modern scientific discovery already existed in ancient India nor to deny that premodern Indian scholars made significant contributions. Historians have documented substantial work in mathematics, astronomy, linguistics and medicine. But responsible scholarship must reconstruct what a text actually says, its date and manuscript history, the procedures available to its authors, and the relation between mathematical models, observations and metaphysical assumptions. The historical achievement becomes more impressive, not less, when described accurately rather than through retrospective exaggeration.
6. Language, translation and the democratization of knowledge
Language is not a neutral container for IKS; it is one of its principal institutions. The special issue explicitly identifies Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Apabhraṃśa, modern Indian languages and regional speech forms as carriers of knowledge across generations. This observation is crucial. The history of Indian knowledge is partly a history of movement between elite and vernacular languages, oral and written forms, manuscript and print, and now analogue and digital media.
Sanskrit’s transregional role is central to the history of intellectual and literary production. Pollock’s account of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” demonstrates the extraordinary reach of Sanskrit as a language of political and cultural expression across South and Southeast Asia. Yet the story does not end with Sanskrit. Vernacularization created new publics and new epistemic possibilities. Bhakti poetry, regional religious traditions, medical manuals, agricultural sayings, oral epics, women’s songs and artisanal vocabularies often carried knowledge that was absent from, or differently organized than, elite textual traditions.
Modern print transformed this ecology. Orsini’s work on the Hindi public sphere and Stark’s study of the Naval Kishore Press show how print institutions created new reading communities and new forms of authority. The Srijan Samay article on Hanuman Prasad Poddar and Shriram Sharma Acharya extends this question directly into IKS: it argues that Kalyan and Akhand Jyoti translated and reinterpreted classical knowledge for mass Hindi readerships. Whether one accepts all of the article’s evaluative claims or not, its central insight is significant: access is epistemological. When knowledge moves from a specialized language to a vernacular, the population entitled to interpret it changes.
Translation, however, is never merely simplification. Technical concepts often resist one-to-one equivalence. Dharma, rasa, pramāṇa, śabda, prakṛti, doṣa, guṇa or śūnya can be mistranslated if modern English categories are imposed too quickly. Good IKS scholarship therefore needs bilingual or multilingual competence, glossaries, transliteration standards and attention to commentarial variation. Translation should make knowledge accessible without pretending that conceptual differences have disappeared.
This has direct educational implications. NEP 2020’s support for Indian languages can strengthen IKS only if it is accompanied by high-quality academic resources. Universities need critical editions, reliable translations, annotated readers, terminology databases and digital corpora. Vernacularization must also move in both directions: important scholarship produced in Indian languages should become available in English and other world languages, while global scholarship on Indian traditions should be translated into Indian languages. The goal is not linguistic enclosure but epistemic circulation.
Figure 4. Proposed living-knowledge transmission cycle. Source: author’s synthesis.
7. Education: gurukula, university and the NEP 2020 moment
Education is one of the most visible contemporary sites of IKS. The special issue includes discussions of ancient education, holistic development and NEP 2020, while its editorial frames education as the formation of physical, mental, intellectual, ethical, cultural and spiritual dimensions of the person rather than the transmission of information alone. This holistic vocabulary overlaps with NEP 2020’s emphasis on multidisciplinary learning, critical thinking, ethics, constitutional values, Indian languages, arts and culture.
Historical gurukula models are often invoked in contemporary discourse, but they should be approached with specificity. There was no single timeless gurukula system. Educational institutions varied by period, region, discipline, social group and religious tradition. Brahmanical residential learning, Buddhist monasteries, Jain institutions, temple schools, maktabs and madrasas, courtly instruction, artisanal apprenticeship and household transmission coexisted and changed. Nalanda and other major monastic centres are important, but they should not be made to stand for all education in premodern India.
What can contemporary higher education legitimately learn from older pedagogies? First, sustained teacher-student intellectual relationships matter. Second, learning through practice and apprenticeship remains indispensable in arts, languages, laboratory work, field research and crafts. Third, memorization, when combined with interpretation, can be a sophisticated cognitive technology rather than a synonym for rote learning. Fourth, ethical formation and social responsibility can be explicit educational goals without displacing disciplinary competence. Fifth, interdisciplinarity is most effective when students acquire depth in at least one field before making cross-disciplinary connections.
The UGC faculty-orientation guidelines are especially valuable because they call for exposure to the common philosophical foundations of IKS, fundamental vocabulary and primary texts, and encourage multidisciplinary course design. This moves IKS beyond ceremonial inclusion. A university cannot responsibly offer IKS courses simply by adding isolated lectures on famous ancient achievements. Faculty require language training, historical method, source criticism and familiarity with relevant modern disciplines.
A credible undergraduate IKS curriculum might therefore contain four layers: (1) foundations—concepts, languages, sources and historiography; (2) disciplinary modules—mathematics, medicine, ecology, aesthetics, linguistics, philosophy, polity or technology; (3) field/practice components—archives, manuscripts, craft communities, performance, ecological documentation or museums; and (4) a research-methods component requiring students to distinguish textual evidence, oral testimony, experimental evidence and interpretive argument. Assessment should reward source-based reasoning rather than patriotic assertion.
The policy opportunity is substantial, but so is the risk. If IKS becomes a compulsory identity marker rather than an open field of inquiry, it will lose academic credibility. Conversely, if universities ignore Indian intellectual traditions because they do not fit inherited disciplinary boundaries, they reproduce an impoverished curriculum. The productive middle path is rigorous integration.
8. Science, mathematics, medicine and the problem of retrospective claims
IKS discussions often become most controversial when they concern science. India’s historical record contains genuine and globally significant achievements: place-value notation and sophisticated mathematics; astronomical modelling; grammatical analysis; medical theorization and pharmacological traditions; metallurgy; architecture; water management; and complex technologies of craft production. The scholarly task is to describe these achievements with chronological and textual precision.
In mathematics, the works associated with Āryabhaṭa, Brahmagupta, Bhāskara and later Kerala mathematicians deserve study within the history of mathematical reasoning, not merely as symbols of national pride. The history of zero, place-value notation, algebraic procedures and trigonometric computation is transregional and cumulative. Claims of priority must be based on datable texts and careful comparison. Similarly, Indian astronomy combined observation, computation and inherited cosmological assumptions; it interacted over centuries with Greek, Persian and Islamic astronomical traditions.
Ayurveda offers another instructive case. Classical texts such as the Caraka Saṃhitā and Suśruta Saṃhitā are indispensable sources for the history of medicine in South Asia. They contain elaborate systems of diagnosis, regimen, materia medica, surgery and medical ethics. But historical significance and present clinical efficacy are distinct questions. Contemporary claims about specific therapies should be evaluated using appropriate pharmacological, toxicological and clinical methods. This does not diminish Ayurveda; it distinguishes history, theory and evidence-based application.
The same principle applies to yoga. Yoga is simultaneously a philosophical, ascetic, embodied and now global health practice with multiple historical genealogies. Modern research can investigate effects of specific practices on measurable outcomes, but such research should not retroactively turn every classical yogic claim into biomedical fact. Productive dialogue occurs when categories are translated carefully and when modern methods are used without erasing the conceptual world of the source tradition.
A mature IKS research culture therefore needs historians of science working with Sanskritists and regional-language scholars, clinicians working with historians of medicine, engineers working with historians of technology, and statisticians working with practitioners. Interdisciplinarity should increase standards of evidence, not lower them.
9. Ecology, agriculture and community knowledge
Environmental thought is one of the strongest areas for contemporary IKS research because it brings texts, practices and community knowledge into direct relation with urgent global problems. The special issue devotes substantial attention to environmental thought and to tribal and regional knowledge. Its Telangana tribal-art study, for example, treats art forms as repositories of indigenous knowledge transferred across generations and embedded in materials, techniques, livelihoods and cultural life. Such work demonstrates that knowledge is often stored in practice rather than in propositions.
Community ecological knowledge may include local species classifications, seasonal indicators, soil and water practices, food preservation, forest management, seed selection, grazing patterns and disaster memory. International scholarship on indigenous and local knowledge has shown that such knowledge can contribute to biodiversity conservation and climate adaptation, but it must be documented with care. Local knowledge is not automatically sustainable, and communities are not timeless ecological guardians. Practices change with markets, state policies, technology, migration and environmental degradation.
The ethical dimension is crucial. Documentation projects should recognize knowledge holders as collaborators rather than “informants” from whom data are extracted. Researchers should address prior informed consent, attribution, community control over sensitive knowledge and benefit-sharing where commercial applications may result. India’s debates over traditional knowledge and biopiracy make these concerns especially important.
A research programme on IKS and sustainability should combine textual environmental ethics with field-based study. Classical ideas concerning restraint, interdependence and duties toward living beings can be examined alongside historical irrigation, sacred groves, agrarian institutions and contemporary community practices. The aim should not be to claim a uniquely ecological civilization; South Asian history also contains deforestation, resource conflict and inequality. Rather, the task is to identify usable ideas and practices, test them in context, and understand the institutions that made them viable.
This approach also broadens the meaning of expertise. Farmers, pastoralists, artisans, forest communities, healers and performers may possess knowledge that is systematic even when it is not formally credentialed. Universities can create respectful interfaces between academic and community knowledge through field schools, community archives, practitioner-in-residence programmes and co-authored research.
10. Arts, aesthetics and knowledge beyond propositions
The 2026 special issue is particularly valuable in refusing the common assumption that knowledge is confined to science, philosophy or textual scholarship. Its articles on Ajanta, Bundi painting, music, Hindi film songs, Nāṭyaśāstra and tribal art point toward aesthetic knowledge: ways of knowing embodied in form, rhythm, image, performance, affect and technique.
The Nāṭyaśāstra is exemplary. It is not simply a manual of theatre; it brings together dramaturgy, acting, gesture, music, stagecraft and a theory of aesthetic experience. The concept of rasa has generated centuries of debate in Sanskrit poetics and continues to shape scholarship in performance and literary studies. Treating rasa as “knowledge” does not mean converting aesthetic experience into a scientific proposition. It means recognizing that cultures develop systematic vocabularies for attention, emotion, embodiment and interpretation.
Visual traditions likewise encode technical and social knowledge. Ajanta’s murals can be studied through iconography, pigment technology, narrative composition, patronage, architecture and religious history. Miniature painting traditions involve materials, workshop practice, inherited motifs and regional aesthetics. Tribal and folk arts often connect design with cosmology, ecology, gendered labour and ritual. In each case, the artwork is both an object and a record of practice.
Music provides another example of embodied systematization. Rāga and tāla traditions involve classification, memory, improvisation and pedagogy. Their transmission historically depended heavily on oral and embodied instruction, even when theoretical texts existed. Modern notation captures only part of this knowledge. Digital archiving therefore needs audiovisual documentation, metadata about lineage and performance context, and attention to performers’ rights.
Cinema and popular music further demonstrate that IKS is not restricted to “ancient” India. The special issue’s inclusion of Hindi film songs and cultural journalism suggests a continuum in which inherited ethical, mythic and aesthetic vocabularies are reworked through modern media. This is analytically important: living traditions survive not by remaining unchanged but by entering new genres, technologies and publics.
11. Print, media and knowledge publics
Knowledge requires infrastructures of circulation. Manuscripts, recitation networks, pilgrimage routes, monasteries, courts, libraries and teaching lineages historically performed this function; print radically expanded it. The special issue’s study of Kalyan and Akhand Jyoti offers a case of what may be called “knowledge journalism”: periodical media organized not primarily around breaking news but around the translation, interpretation and popularization of cultural and philosophical knowledge.
The study’s comparison between Hanuman Prasad Poddar and Shriram Sharma Acharya is analytically useful because it identifies two modes of popularization. One is preservationist and devotional, seeking wide access to canonical material while minimizing reinterpretation. The other is reformist and synthetic, translating inherited knowledge into the language of modern science, health, social reform and personality development. These are not the only possibilities, but they represent a recurring tension in IKS: fidelity versus adaptation.
The history of the Hindi public sphere shows that language, print technology, price, distribution and editorial authority shape what becomes “common knowledge.” A cheap vernacular edition can transform access as dramatically as a new interpretation. This insight should inform current digital policy. Digitizing a manuscript is not enough if metadata are poor, scripts are not searchable, translations are absent or access is restricted. Conversely, mass accessibility without textual accuracy can accelerate misinformation.
Media studies also introduces questions of power. Who edits the canon? Which communities appear as knowledge producers and which merely as objects of representation? How are caste, gender, region and religion negotiated? The attached special issue includes feminist, Buddhist, tribal, linguistic and regional perspectives, indicating an effort to broaden the field. Future IKS publishing should deepen this plurality by including Dalit-Bahujan intellectual histories, women’s knowledge traditions, Islamic and Persianate contributions, Northeast Indian traditions, borderland exchanges and histories of dissent.
The democratization of IKS should therefore be measured not only by audience size but by participation in interpretation. A genuinely public knowledge system enables readers, communities and students to question, annotate, translate and produce knowledge, not simply receive it.
12. Digital humanities and artificial intelligence
Digitization has created the possibility of an IKS research infrastructure unimaginable a generation ago. Manuscript catalogues can be linked; OCR can make printed editions searchable; computational linguistics can assist morphological analysis; geographic information systems can map institutions and transmission routes; audio archives can preserve endangered performance traditions; and machine learning can support pattern discovery across large corpora.
The special issue explicitly includes an article on digital media, artificial intelligence and ethical values, signalling that contemporary IKS discourse is already confronting this transition. The key question is not whether AI is “compatible” with tradition, but how digital systems alter authority, interpretation and access. Large language models can summarize or translate texts at scale, but they can hallucinate citations, flatten conceptual distinctions and reproduce biases in digitized corpora. For IKS, where diacritics, polysemy, manuscript variants and technical vocabularies matter greatly, these risks are acute.
A responsible digital IKS programme should therefore follow a human-in-the-loop model. Machine transcription should be verified by trained readers. Translations should retain links to source passages. Datasets should record edition, manuscript provenance, date, language and uncertainty. Community-controlled knowledge should not be uploaded indiscriminately. Copyright and traditional-knowledge rights must be respected. AI-generated reconstructions should be visibly labelled.
Digital tools can also help correct asymmetries. Much scholarship in Indian languages remains poorly indexed internationally. Multilingual search and translation can make Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Telugu, Assamese and other scholarship more discoverable. Conversely, digital corpora can help students compare Sanskrit or Pali terms across translations. The ideal is not technological substitution for scholarship but technological amplification of accountable scholarship.
There is also an ethical opportunity. Indian philosophical discussions of intention, action, responsibility, selfhood, testimony and harm can enter global AI ethics as comparative resources. But such engagement should be philosophical, not ornamental. Concepts should be reconstructed in context and tested against contemporary problems such as algorithmic accountability, data justice and automated decision-making.
13. IKS, inclusion and the politics of the canon
Every knowledge canon is selective. The institutionalization of IKS therefore raises questions about inclusion that cannot be postponed. Which texts, languages, communities and disciplines receive funding? Who is authorized to teach them? What happens to traditions that challenge dominant social arrangements? Can a curriculum celebrate intellectual achievement while also examining hierarchy, exclusion and historical conflict?
A strong IKS framework should distinguish critique from rejection. Feminist readings, caste critiques, subaltern histories and minority perspectives do not weaken Indian knowledge traditions; they reveal how knowledge was socially situated and how access was structured. The special issue’s inclusion of feminist voice, tribal knowledge, Buddhist education and regional traditions points toward such a plural model, though the field can go much further.
Gender is especially important because many forms of knowledge were transmitted in domestic, artisanal and oral settings where women’s contributions were less likely to enter formal archives. Food knowledge, healing, childbirth practices, songs, textile production, ritual and ecological memory often have gendered histories. Recovering these requires oral history and ethnography alongside textual study.
Caste and occupation are similarly central. Artisanal and technical knowledge may have been preserved within hereditary communities while simultaneously constrained by social hierarchy. To celebrate a craft without studying the social organization of labour is incomplete. IKS research should therefore ask both “what was known?” and “who was permitted, required or prevented from knowing and practising it?”
Religious plurality also demands a wider frame. Indian intellectual history includes deep interactions among Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Islamic, Persianate, Christian and other traditions. Astronomy, medicine, music, architecture, language and literature developed through exchange. A national knowledge framework that excludes these interactions would be historically inaccurate. “Indian” should describe a dynamic space of production and circulation, not a religious boundary.
14. Global relevance without civilizational exceptionalism
The phrase Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam has become a prominent shorthand for India’s civilizational contribution to global ethics, and the special issue includes an article that explicitly places it within a framework of global leadership. Such concepts can be meaningful in international dialogue, especially when connected to hospitality, interdependence and human solidarity. Yet global relevance is strengthened by careful translation and comparative reasoning rather than by claims of superiority.
IKS can contribute to global scholarship in at least four ways. First, it expands the archive of philosophy and intellectual history, challenging narratives in which theory is overwhelmingly Greco-European. Second, it contributes historical cases to the global histories of mathematics, medicine, linguistics, astronomy, ecology, arts and education. Third, living practices such as yoga, Ayurveda, classical music and community ecological knowledge provide sites for contemporary research. Fourth, Indian debates on pluralism, nonviolence, duty, selfhood, consciousness and aesthetics can enter comparative philosophy and ethics.
But exchange must be reciprocal. Indian scholars should engage critically with global methods, and international scholars should take Indian languages and categories seriously. The aim is neither Western validation nor civilizational isolation. It is a polycentric knowledge world in which traditions meet under conditions of methodological fairness.
This is also why connected histories matter. Indian numerals travelled; Buddhist texts moved across Asia; Sanskrit literary forms circulated widely; Persian and Arabic sciences entered South Asia; colonial institutions transformed education and classification; modern Indian thinkers engaged European, Islamic and Asian thought. IKS is globally relevant because it has always been connected, not because it developed in a sealed civilizational container.
15. A framework for rigorous IKS research
The expansion of IKS programmes makes methodological quality an urgent institutional issue. I propose six safeguards.
First, textual fidelity. Claims must cite identifiable primary texts, preferably critical editions or reliable editions, with chapter, verse or section references where possible. Quotations should be checked in the original language when the argument depends on technical meaning.
Second, historical contextualization. Texts and practices must be dated as carefully as evidence allows. Later commentaries should not be projected backward. Terms such as “science,” “democracy,” “psychology” or “technology” should be used cautiously when describing premodern categories.
Third, empirical testability where applicable. Philosophical, literary and aesthetic claims require interpretive argument; medical, agricultural or engineering claims may require experimental or field validation. The method must fit the claim.
Fourth, inclusion and ethics. Research should identify knowledge holders, social location, gender and community context. Field research requires consent and fair attribution. Sensitive or commercially valuable traditional knowledge requires protection.
Fifth, linguistic access. IKS research should invest in languages, translation and terminology. English-only scholarship cannot adequately represent a multilingual archive, but Indian-language scholarship also benefits from international discoverability.
Sixth, contemporary relevance without forced equivalence. Researchers should ask what a tradition can contribute today, but they should not manufacture resemblance to modern theories. Sometimes the most valuable result is difference: an alternative conceptual vocabulary can expand contemporary thought precisely because it is not identical to a modern discipline.
These safeguards can be built into peer review. Journals and funding agencies could require authors to specify source type, language competence, evidence standard, community ethics and the distinction between historical reconstruction and present-day application. Such a template would improve credibility across the field.
Figure 5. Six safeguards for responsible IKS scholarship. The numerical values are conceptual priorities, not empirical measurements. Source: author’s framework.
16. Curriculum and institutional recommendations
The institutional future of IKS depends on whether universities can convert broad policy enthusiasm into durable scholarly capacity. The first priority should be faculty development. The UGC’s orientation guidelines correctly recognize that disciplinary experts may need additional familiarization with IKS. Short workshops are useful introductions, but serious teaching requires longer pathways: language training, summer institutes, manuscript studies, history-of-science methods, ethnography, digital humanities and team teaching.
Second, universities should create source laboratories rather than only lecture courses. An IKS lab might contain digitized manuscripts, facsimiles, dictionaries, databases, recordings, maps, replicas of instruments and access to field documentation. Students could learn how knowledge is reconstructed from evidence.
Third, curriculum design should be modular and discipline-sensitive. Engineering students might study historical materials, water systems, architecture and measurement; literature students might study poetics, multilingual translation and print publics; medical students could study the history and epistemology of Ayurveda alongside evidence evaluation; environmental students could work with community ecological knowledge; media students could examine knowledge journalism and digital dissemination.
Fourth, universities should develop community partnerships. Artisans, performers, farmers, healers and tradition-bearers can serve as practitioners-in-residence, but their participation should be remunerated and intellectually credited. Community engagement should not become a decorative demonstration detached from research.
Fifth, IKS needs international collaboration. Comparative projects with Chinese, Islamic, African, European and indigenous knowledge traditions can prevent parochialism and illuminate historical connections. Joint digital editions, history-of-science projects and comparative philosophy programmes would position IKS within global scholarship.
Finally, quality assurance must be explicit. Courses should publish learning outcomes, reading lists and evidence standards. Student work should be assessed for source use, conceptual clarity, comparison and critical reasoning. Universities should resist both sensational claims and reflexive dismissal. The field will mature when rigorous disagreement becomes normal.
17. Colonial modernity, epistemic rupture and the problem of recovery
A deeper account of Indian Knowledge Systems must confront colonial modernity without reducing intellectual history to a simple story of destruction followed by revival. Colonial institutions transformed the conditions under which knowledge was classified, taught and authorized. Surveys, censuses, legal codification, Orientalist philology, modern universities and English education generated new archives and disciplines while simultaneously displacing older institutional ecologies. Bernard Cohn’s analysis of colonial “forms of knowledge” is useful precisely because it shows that knowledge and governance were intertwined: classification was not an innocent description of India but part of the technology through which colonial rule rendered society administratively legible. Yet colonial institutions also preserved manuscripts, produced grammars and editions, and created forms of historical inquiry later appropriated by Indian scholars. The legacy is therefore contradictory rather than singular.
This contradiction matters for present IKS discourse. “Decolonizing” knowledge cannot mean rejecting every method associated with the modern university. Philology, archaeology, historical criticism, statistics and experimental science are not reducible to colonial ideology. Nor can decolonization mean treating every precolonial claim as self-validating. A more intellectually productive programme asks how colonial categories reorganized Indian traditions, which forms of knowledge lost institutional support, which were recoded as religion or folklore, and how Indian thinkers responded creatively to new epistemic conditions.
The recovery of IKS should consequently be reconstructive rather than restorative. There is no untouched precolonial knowledge world to which a twenty-first-century university can return. What can be recovered are texts, practices, vocabularies, arguments and institutional memories. These can then be studied in relation to modern disciplines without assuming either equivalence or incompatibility. This reconstructive approach allows the field to acknowledge rupture while avoiding nostalgia.
18. Knowledge, power and social location
Knowledge is never socially weightless. Indian traditions contain remarkable theoretical achievements, but access to literacy, institutions, occupations and authoritative interpretation was historically uneven. A serious IKS framework must therefore ask not only what knowledge existed but who produced it, who transmitted it, who was excluded from it, and whose knowledge was left outside textual archives.
This question is especially important when moving from śāstric knowledge to artisanal, agrarian, oral and community traditions. The maker of an instrument, the cultivator who reads soil and season, the performer who carries a repertoire in embodied memory, or the woman who transmits domestic medicinal and food knowledge may be a sophisticated knowledge-holder even when the archive does not name that person as an “author.” The category of authorship itself can privilege textual cultures over distributed and collective knowledge.
Caste, gender, occupation and region must therefore become analytical variables in IKS research rather than external political additions. The point is not to judge every historical tradition by present norms, but to understand the social organization of knowledge. This also improves contemporary policy. If universities invite traditional practitioners merely to demonstrate crafts while academics retain exclusive interpretive authority, the hierarchy of knowledge is reproduced. Co-teaching, co-authorship, remuneration, attribution and community-controlled documentation are more meaningful forms of epistemic inclusion.
19. Comparative epistemology and the possibility of global dialogue
The international significance of IKS will depend on its ability to enter comparative conversations without being translated into a set of approximate Western equivalents. Comparative epistemology begins with conceptual patience. Nyāya inference should not automatically be called Aristotelian logic; rasa is not simply “emotion theory”; dharma is not exhausted by “religion” or “ethics”; and Ayurvedic categories cannot be mapped mechanically onto biomedical categories. Comparison becomes illuminating only after differences have been reconstructed accurately.
At the same time, conceptual incommensurability should not become an excuse for isolation. Indian theories of testimony, inference, selfhood, consciousness, language, aesthetic experience and ethical action can be placed in dialogue with contemporary philosophy, cognitive science, literary theory and ethics. Such dialogue should be reciprocal: Indian concepts may illuminate problems in modern disciplines, while modern research may expose limits or hidden assumptions in inherited frameworks.
This comparative orientation also prevents IKS from becoming nationally self-enclosed. Knowledge in South Asia was historically connected to Buddhist Asia, the Persianate world, Islamic scholarship, Mediterranean astronomy and later European science. Studying transmission, translation and adaptation can replace simplistic “who discovered it first?” debates with richer questions about how knowledge travels and changes. The result is a global intellectual history in which India is neither peripheral nor artificially isolated.
20. From documentation to research programmes: a future agenda
The next phase of IKS scholarship should move from general celebration and compilation toward problem-driven research programmes. Documentation remains essential because manuscripts, oral traditions, craft practices and endangered languages can disappear. But documentation becomes scholarship when it is connected to questions, methods and comparative evidence.
Five research programmes are especially promising. The first is a multilingual history of concepts, tracing how technical terms change across Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Persian and modern Indian languages. The second is the history of knowledge institutions: monasteries, temples, courts, madrasas, guilds, presses, colleges and universities. The third is practice-based research on crafts, performance, agriculture and ecology, designed collaboratively with knowledge communities. The fourth is critical history of Indian sciences, combining textual expertise with the relevant modern scientific discipline. The fifth is digital knowledge infrastructure: interoperable manuscript metadata, verified corpora, dictionaries, annotated translations and ethical audiovisual archives.
Research funding should favour projects that can state a precise problem, identify primary evidence, explain the competence of the research team, and specify what would count as a meaningful result. The current IKS Division’s emphasis on original, serious and deep scholarly research offers an institutional basis for this shift. The field will gain international credibility when its strongest projects are replicable where replication is appropriate, transparent about uncertainty, and publishable in both specialist IKS venues and mainstream disciplinary journals.
21. Discussion: IKS as a living, contested and future-oriented field
The evidence considered here supports three broad conclusions. First, IKS is best understood as an ecology rather than a canon. The attached special issue’s range is not an accidental miscellany; it reflects a core feature of Indian knowledge history—the interdependence of text, language, practice, art, community and institution. The challenge is to give this breadth analytical structure.
Second, transmission is as important as content. Sanskrit and other classical languages, vernacular literatures, oral traditions, print periodicals, universities and digital platforms each reshape who can know and interpret. The study of Kalyan and Akhand Jyoti in the special issue is valuable precisely because it makes mediation visible. Knowledge democratization is not achieved simply by declaring heritage universal; it requires translation, affordability, pedagogy and access.
Third, the future of IKS depends on critical confidence. A defensive field seeks validation through exaggerated claims of priority. A dismissive field assumes that tradition cannot produce knowledge relevant to modernity. Critical confidence avoids both. It can acknowledge major achievements, historical limitations, social exclusions, intercultural borrowing and unresolved questions without anxiety.
This orientation also changes the meaning of “revival.” Knowledge traditions cannot simply be restored to a precolonial state. Modern universities, constitutional democracy, mass literacy, digital media, contemporary science and global intellectual networks have changed the conditions of knowledge. The task is reconstruction and renewal: preserving sources, recovering languages, documenting practices, testing claims, inviting critique and creating new applications.
In this sense, the most important contribution of NEP 2020 and the institutional IKS initiatives may be the opening of a research agenda rather than the delivery of a settled body of answers. The quality of that agenda will depend on universities, journals, archives, communities and scholars.
22. Conclusion (preliminary synthesis)
Indian Knowledge Systems should be approached as a plural and evolving field of intellectual, practical, ecological, aesthetic and institutional knowledge. The 2026 Srijan Samay special issue demonstrates the breadth of contemporary IKS discourse by bringing language, philosophy, education, journalism, arts, environment, tribal knowledge, digital media and cultural practice into a shared frame. Official policy has reinforced this movement: NEP 2020 places Indian ethos, multilingualism and multidisciplinary learning within a national educational vision; UGC guidelines call for curricular integration and faculty preparation; and the Ministry of Education’s IKS Division has created a dedicated infrastructure for research and dissemination.
The opportunity is significant. IKS can enrich curricula, recover neglected archives, strengthen Indian-language scholarship, support community knowledge, diversify global intellectual history and generate new comparative research. But the opportunity will be lost if the field becomes a repository of unverifiable claims. Academic credibility requires primary sources, historical method, linguistic competence, empirical testing where appropriate, social inclusion, research ethics and transparent peer review.
The central proposition of this article is therefore simple: the strongest defence of Indian knowledge is rigorous scholarship. A tradition that contains centuries of debate does not need protection from questions; it needs better questions. A multilingual civilization does not need reduction to a single canon; it needs infrastructures that allow its many voices to be studied together. And a living knowledge system does not survive by repeating the past; it survives by transmitting, testing, interpreting and renewing knowledge in response to the present.
Under these conditions, IKS can become more than a policy slogan or heritage category. It can become a mature interdisciplinary field—historically responsible, methodologically plural, ethically aware and capable of contributing to global conversations about education, sustainability, technology, culture and the purposes of knowledge itself.
Table 3. Contemporary institutional architecture for IKS
Instrument / institution | Core emphasis | Academic implication | Source |
NEP 2020 | Indian ethos, multilingualism, holistic and multidisciplinary education | Creates policy space for IKS within mainstream education | Ministry of Education, 2020 |
UGC faculty-orientation guidelines | Faculty familiarization, primary texts, common vocabulary, multidisciplinary courses | Requires capacity building rather than superficial curricular insertion | UGC, 2023a |
UGC curriculum guidelines | Incorporation of Indian knowledge in higher education | Encourages structured curricular integration | UGC, 2023b |
IKS Division, Ministry of Education | Research, centres, internships, documentation and dissemination | Builds a national research and implementation infrastructure | IKS Division, 2026 |
Srijan Samay special issue | Multidisciplinary cultural framing across languages, arts, education, environment and media | Shows how contemporary scholarship is broadening the field | Srijan Samay, 2026 |
References
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Note on sources and verification
The user-supplied May–June 2026 Srijan Samay special issue is used only as a secondary reference corpus for its thematic range and contemporary framing of IKS. It is not reproduced visually. The evidentiary centre of the present article is instead formed by primary and archival materials, critical editions, official manuscript-register documentation, rare-book records and established scholarship. Archival images reproduced in the paper are identified by repository/document source. Historical, philosophical and empirically testable claims are kept analytically distinct; no claim of ancient scientific priority is accepted merely on the basis of conceptual resemblance.
16A. Colonial knowledge, decolonization and the reconstruction of IKS
The contemporary recovery of Indian Knowledge Systems is inseparable from the history of colonial knowledge. British rule did not simply “destroy” an intact indigenous system, nor did it merely introduce modern education into an intellectual vacuum. Colonialism reorganized institutions, patronage, language hierarchies, archives and categories of knowledge. Orientalist scholarship collected, edited and translated major Sanskrit, Persian and vernacular texts, while colonial administration simultaneously classified populations, standardized legal and educational categories and privileged forms of knowledge useful to governance. The result was a paradox: traditions became newly visible through print, philology, surveys and museums even as many of their living institutional contexts were weakened or subordinated.
Bernard Cohn’s work on colonial forms of knowledge is particularly useful here because it shows that surveys, censuses, ethnography, law and language policy were not passive descriptions; they helped constitute the objects they claimed to record. “India” became knowable to the colonial state through classificatory technologies. This insight matters for IKS because modern researchers often inherit categories produced in that period. Terms such as tribe, caste, religion, customary law, classical language and folk culture may carry administrative histories that need to be examined rather than treated as transparent.
The colonial transformation of education was equally complex. English-language institutions created new professions, new publics and access to global scientific and political thought, while older forms of patronage and learning lost institutional power. Indian intellectuals responded in multiple ways: reform, revival, translation, synthesis, rejection and appropriation. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries therefore belong fully within IKS history. Modern Indian thinkers did not merely preserve a precolonial inheritance; they re-described it under new conditions.
This is where the language of “decolonization” requires precision. Decolonizing knowledge cannot mean discarding every method, institution or discipline that developed under colonial or European influence. Modern historical criticism, archaeology, linguistics, laboratory science and the research university are now part of India’s intellectual infrastructure and have been transformed by Indian scholars. Nor can decolonization mean replacing one closed canon with another. Its academically productive meaning is the correction of asymmetries: restoring neglected sources; enabling Indian languages to function as languages of advanced scholarship; questioning Eurocentric narratives of universal history; recognizing indigenous categories; and making space for multiple epistemic traditions in comparative inquiry.
A decolonized IKS programme should therefore be additive and critical. It should ask why some Indian works became canonical while others disappeared; why certain disciplines were translated and others ignored; how colonial archives shaped present knowledge; and how modern nationalist projects created their own selections. It should also study the role of Indian scholars, printers, reformers, teachers and communities who used modern institutions to recover and reconfigure older traditions.
The print history discussed in the attached special issue is a good example. Vernacular periodicals did not simply transmit unchanged ancient wisdom. They selected, translated, edited, priced, illustrated and contextualized it for modern publics. That process created new knowledge forms. A Hindi reader encountering an Upanishadic idea in a twentieth-century magazine was participating in a different epistemic situation from a student in a traditional Sanskrit lineage. Both may be connected to the same text, but the medium, authority structure, audience and interpretive horizon differ.
This historical awareness protects IKS from nostalgia. It also creates richer research questions. Instead of asking whether “ancient Indian education was better,” scholars can compare institutional purposes, access, pedagogy and social structure across periods. Instead of asking whether colonialism “ended Indian science,” historians can trace changing patronage, translation networks, technologies and professional identities. Instead of assuming a single break between tradition and modernity, researchers can identify continuities, hybridities and reinventions.
Such an approach also improves global comparison. European knowledge traditions themselves changed through encounters with Arabic, Persian, Indian, Chinese and colonial worlds. Modern science is not the property of one civilization; it is a historically global enterprise, though institutions of power have distributed recognition unevenly. IKS scholarship can contribute to a more accurate global history by documenting Indian actors and sources without turning interconnected history into competitive civilizational scorekeeping.
The purpose of reconstruction, then, is not to reverse history. It is to create conditions in which Indian intellectual archives can be studied with the same seriousness routinely granted to Greek, Latin or modern European traditions, while remaining open to criticism from within and outside those traditions. This is a more demanding project than celebration, but it is also more durable.
16B. Three illustrative case studies: grammar, mathematics and performance
The interdisciplinary character of IKS becomes clearer when examined through concrete cases. Grammar, mathematics and performance differ radically in subject matter, yet each demonstrates how Indian traditions joined systematic classification, pedagogy, commentary and practice.
The first case is Sanskrit grammar. Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī is one of the most celebrated works in the history of linguistic analysis. Its importance lies not in a vague claim that it “invented modern computer science,” a popular but misleading formulation, but in the extraordinary formal economy of its rule system. The grammar uses technical devices, ordered operations, metalinguistic conventions and compressed sūtra form to describe a large portion of Sanskrit morphology and derivation. Later commentarial traditions, especially Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya, demonstrate that grammar was not a static code but a site of argument about usage, correctness, meaning and analysis. For contemporary IKS, this case illustrates the value of studying a primary text in its own technical vocabulary before making comparisons with modern formal systems. Computational linguistics may find Pāṇinian categories useful, but the historical Pāṇinian system and a modern programming language should not be collapsed into each other.
The second case is mathematics. Indian mathematical traditions developed across astronomy, computation, commerce and scholarly problem solving. Place-value decimal notation and the treatment of zero are central to global mathematical history. Brahmagupta’s seventh-century work contains explicit rules involving zero and negative quantities, while later mathematicians developed algebraic and astronomical procedures of great sophistication. The Kerala school’s work on infinite series has attracted particular attention in histories of mathematics. Here again, precision matters. Historians should distinguish a series expansion used in a particular computational context from later European formulations of calculus, while still recognizing the mathematical originality of the Indian work. The best scholarship avoids both denial and anachronistic equivalence.
This case also reveals transmission. Numerals and mathematical techniques travelled through multilingual networks linking India, the Islamic world and Europe. The global history of mathematics is therefore an ideal antidote to civilizational isolation. Indian contributions become more, not less, significant when their circulation is documented. A knowledge system is visible not only in invention but in teaching, notation, commentary, adaptation and movement.
The third case is performance. The Nāṭyaśāstra and later aesthetic traditions show a different kind of systematization. Here the object is not numerical calculation or linguistic derivation but performance and aesthetic response. Gesture, movement, voice, stage organization, music and emotion are brought into a structured framework. The theory of rasa, elaborated by later thinkers, asks how represented emotion becomes aesthetic experience. This is knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositions alone; it requires bodies, spectators, trained perception and repeated practice.
The performance case is especially relevant to the Srijan Samay special issue because the journal is devoted to visual and performing arts and includes a study of the historicity and structural development of the Nāṭyaśāstra. It shows why arts belong within IKS not as decorative heritage but as disciplined epistemic practices. A dancer knows through trained movement; a musician knows through tonal and rhythmic structures; an actor knows through embodied techniques of expression. Written theory and practical lineage interact but are not identical.
Taken together, the three cases support the five-domain model proposed earlier. Grammar is primarily textual-conceptual but also pedagogical and institutional. Mathematics combines textual reasoning with computational practice and transregional transmission. Performance is aesthetic-symbolic and embodied-practical, supported by textual and institutional traditions. No single method can study all three adequately. Philology, history of science, mathematics, performance studies, ethnography and digital analysis each contribute different forms of evidence.
The cases also suggest a model for curriculum design. Rather than offering a survey course filled with disconnected “ancient achievements,” an IKS course could organize itself around carefully documented problems. Students might reconstruct one Pāṇinian derivation, compare translations of a grammatical term, solve a historical mathematical example, examine the manuscript history of a text, observe a performance demonstration and then reflect on what counts as evidence in each domain. Such pedagogy would make IKS intellectually active.
Finally, the cases clarify the meaning of relevance. Pāṇini need not be called a computer scientist to matter to contemporary linguistics. Brahmagupta need not be described as a modern algebraist to matter to the history of mathematics. Nāṭyaśāstra need not be translated into neuroscience to matter to performance theory. Their relevance can rest on the power, distinctiveness and historical influence of their concepts. Comparison with modern disciplines is valuable when it illuminates both sides and misleading when it erases difference.
This principle should guide the field as a whole. IKS earns global academic attention through close reading, reconstruction, comparison and demonstrable insight—not through inflated equivalence. The more precisely traditions are understood, the more confidently they can enter contemporary conversations.
19. Final Conclusion
The central challenge facing Indian Knowledge Systems scholarship is no longer whether the field deserves attention; policy, institutional investment and a rapidly expanding literature have already ensured that it will receive attention. The more consequential question is what kind of field it will become. It can become a loose catalogue of heritage claims, vulnerable to exaggeration and disciplinary scepticism, or it can become a rigorous meeting ground for philology, history, philosophy, science, social research, community knowledge and creative practice.
The evidence assembled in this paper favours the second path. The Srijan Samay special issue is significant because its multidisciplinary architecture implicitly rejects a narrow definition of knowledge. Its contents move from language and philosophy to journalism, ecology, education, art, music, tribal practice and digital technology. NEP 2020 and UGC guidance similarly frame IKS as a multidisciplinary educational project, while the Ministry of Education’s IKS Division is building research and dissemination infrastructure. The institutional conditions for a serious field are therefore emerging.
Academic legitimacy, however, must be earned continuously. Primary sources must be cited accurately; translations must be accountable; historical claims must be dated; scientific claims must be tested by appropriate methods; community knowledge must be documented ethically; and social exclusions must be part of the analysis. The distinction between preservation and validation should remain clear. Not every inherited practice will prove useful today, and not every philosophically valuable concept needs scientific validation to be worth studying.
The article has proposed a five-domain model—textual-conceptual, embodied-practical, ecological-community, aesthetic-symbolic and institutional-transmissional—together with six research safeguards: textual fidelity, historical context, empirical testability where relevant, inclusion and ethics, linguistic access and responsible contemporary comparison. These tools are intended not as a final taxonomy but as a practical framework for curriculum design, peer review and research planning.
The future of IKS will also be multilingual and digital. Indian-language scholarship must be strengthened at advanced levels, while translation should connect regional and classical archives to global scholarship. Artificial intelligence can assist transcription, search and comparison, but human verification, provenance and conceptual precision are indispensable. Digital access should expand the circle of interpreters without severing knowledge from its communities and contexts.
Ultimately, Indian Knowledge Systems are most compelling when understood as a history and practice of inquiry. Their inheritance includes not only answers but arguments; not only texts but skills; not only elite canons but vernacular and community traditions; not only continuity but critique and reinvention. To study that inheritance rigorously is not to diminish civilizational memory. It is to take it seriously enough to submit it to the highest standards of scholarship.
Such an approach allows IKS to participate confidently in a plural global knowledge order. It neither asks the past to provide ready-made solutions to every modern problem nor assumes that modernity has rendered the past obsolete. Instead, it creates a disciplined conversation across time, languages, communities and methods. That conversation—critical, evidence-based, inclusive and creative—is the most promising form of continuity available to a living knowledge tradition.
