Premium

Let’s resist easy indictments of Indian Knowledge Systems

Yogendra Yadav’s indictment of Sanskrit reflects an old intellectual habit in India. Part of this is Dravidian politics. But part of it comes from the long shadow of the Macaulay project

AI alone cannot define national advancement. It is a tool, not a civilisational framework.

Written by: Swati Ramanathan, Ramesh Ramanathan

4 min readJun 8, 2026 06:20 AM IST First published on: Jun 8, 2026 at 06:20 AM IST

Yogendra Yadav is among modern India’s serious public intellectuals. He brings depth and domain knowledge to most subjects he writes about. But Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), to our understanding, is not one of them. This is only reasonable, given the scale and complexity of the topic.

Yadav begins a recent article (‘State push for Indian knowledge systems is a farce. But dismissing them is a mistake’, IE, May 19) with a disparaging critique of state patronage for IKS as “a state-sponsored farce”. But can it happen without state leadership? Globally, every major intellectual and cultural shift has required not just social energy but political leadership as well. Many of us disagree with the BJP on many counts. But its centrality in creating the context for the recent flowering of IKS activity is hard to dispute. The larger issue, though, is not political. It is intellectual.

Yadav makes several critiques of the current IKS effort — that it is backward-looking, overly text-based, dismissive of oral traditions, excessively Brahmanical (read Sanskritic), and seeks validation through Western categories. Essentially, IKS is little more than a selective glorification of ancient Sanskrit texts, dismissive of, in his words, “farming and artisanal communities that we call uneducated and backward”.

But who is making this argument? There is no prescribed pedagogy for IKS. No scholar or practitioner suggests Indian knowledge systems begin and end with Sanskrit. We ourselves support an open-source IKS initiative focussed precisely on the oral and folk traditions Yadav describes as ignored. That work is independent of the state, but exists because of the opening the state created.

Yadav’s indictment of Sanskrit reflects an old intellectual habit. Part of this is Dravidian politics. But part of it comes from the long shadow of the Macaulay project. Even while critiquing the “pathetic political project” of seeking validation from the West, Yadav wants IKS to be “future-oriented” and “connected to modern science” — categories emerging from a Western framework.

Can we really imagine a serious, vibrant IKS without the richness, diversity and depth of Sanskrit material? Tamil, Bhakti, Buddhist, Jain and countless vernacular traditions all carried deep philosophical and spiritual insight. But Sanskrit functioned as a connective layer — a space where India debated consciousness, selfhood, ethics, reality and liberation in a systematic way.

Acharya Tripathi’s book, which Yadav praises, is about India as a knowledge culture in which Sanskrit is connective tissue across regional streams of meaning-making; his larger concern is the rupture colonial education inflicted on that inheritance. Similarly, Allama Prabhu and Basavanna, in the 12th century, were not seeking to dismantle Sanskritic civilisation. Their Kannada vachana movement was a spiritually grounded social reform emerging from Indic traditions.

This is not to deny the historical exclusions of Sanskritic and Brahmanical learning. But Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and scholars like Kapil Kapoor pointed to a balanced approach. Vivekananda’s answer was not to reject Sanskrit but to take knowledge beyond enclosures and make it available to all. Aurobindo warned that “it will not be a good day for India when the ancient tongue ceases entirely to be written or spoken”.

The contrast with the West is striking. Through the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism, modernity and postmodernism, it kept engaging its classical inheritance. Greek and Latin were critiqued and reinterpreted, but never treated as foreign to the civilisation that grew from them. India, unusually, developed a habit of separating Sanskrit from the living traditions around it.

The IKS movement marks the beginning of something important — not a triumphalist declaration of past glory, but a serious effort to rediscover, study, debate, and revive India’s own knowledge traditions. The process will be messy. There will be exaggerations, oversimplifications and political appropriations. But the answer cannot be to retreat into strawman arguments.

The writers are co-founders of JANA Group. Views are personal.