• Get a brief understanding of IKS. This article is a rejoinder to an article by C. P. Rajendran and S. Sabhapandit that IKS needs to be inclusive. Sad to say that respected authors Rajendran etc. do not understand Indic Thought.

This article has three authors Gautam R. Desiraju, Anshuman Panda and Deekhit Bhattacharya.

How does a country think? How ought a country to think? India’s independence in 1947 was accompanied by hopes that the country’s bondage to Macaulayist thinking would yield to a more appropriate and time tested model based, say, on the thinking of trailblazers like Aurobindo, Tagore and Vivekananda who synthesized tradition and modernity in their quest for a new India—in other words the Indian Knowledge Systems, popularly referred to as IKS. 

This hope was reinforced in the very first Article of our Constitution that defined India as Bhārat, acknowledging immediately our ancient civilizational heritage.

Belying these expectations, however, the colonial mindset got further entrenched in the decades that followed, possibly in a desire among us Indians to enter the ‘modern’ world. In this process, India started getting viewed by Indians as a superstitious, caste ridden and unscientific country. IKS was discredited as something narrow and obscurantist; the aping of the West continued. The political drive to dismantle an indigenous Bhāratiyatā in favour of an amorphous quasi-Western ‘India’ that would continue to remain in intellectual serfdom to an economically dominant West, identified in IKS a mortal enemy. All this was nothing other than following America's rules-based order—on the softer socio-cultural side.

In an article “Indian knowledge systems need to be inclusive to live up to Constitution’s spirit”, (New Indian Express, 30 September 2025, C. P. Rajendran and S. Sabhapandit) propagate trite claims, to wit that the foundational principle of IKS is ‘Hindu exceptionalism’. IKS is unscientific, per them, and imposes a single privileged mode of knowing which is derived from ‘upper caste’ Vedic and Sanskritic traditions. According to them, IKS also ignores the ‘heterodoxical’ contributions of Buddhism, Jainism, Cārvaka and Islamic thinking, among others. Such strawman arguments reveal a paucity of good faith inquiry.

Hindu as a religious identity distinct from Bauddh, Sikh, Jain and other Indic traditions is a product of colonial census and patronage aimed at social balkanisation. Even a casual perusal of the works of savants like Nagarjuna, Guru Gobind Singh, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Ramana Maharishi, J. Krishnamurthi and S. Radhakrishnan would dispel any misgivings one might have about the narrowness of Hindu doctrines. Read Characteristics of Indian Philosophy

Bhāratīya, our age-old endonym, derives from the root bhṛ, meaning that which bears forward or sustains. It has scriptural and geographical connotations but, in essence conveys that Bhāratiyas are those who carry forward the message of universal Truth and the methods to actualise it. Bhāratiyas are an eternal succession of seekers.

India’s claim on truth is not exclusivist, nor a monopoly of any sect, prophet, or method. IKS maintains that the Truth is one, and the wise know it by different names; the contextual is not a negation of the universal. We hold that truth can be arrived at through multiple paths, be expressed in multiple ways, and must be obtained through investigation rather than being accepted as dogma. Inherently lacking exclusivist zealotry, IKS is incapable of exceptionalism. “Thousands of years ago, our sages said, Ekam sat vipra bahuda vandati. The truth is one, the wise call it by different names.”

The modes of investigation within IKS are interestingly called darshanas, i.e. perspectives. This does not refer to the operations and functions of the physical eye, but to means of experiencing truth in one’s innermost being. Bauddh and Jaina schools of thought are also termed darshanas, although nāstika (non-Vedic), with a long history of mutual intellectual exchange and debate. They are integral to IKS. However, the Cārvaka idiom, while being a product of our knowledge tradition, lies beyond IKS. This is not because it is materialistic but because it promotes hedonism. Unsurprisingly, this school of thought went extinct in the face of debate.

Debating has been an essential part of IKS throughout its history, with compendiums written on how to debate and decide a winner. The free spirit of inquiry that Rajendran mentions in his article is the bedrock of IKS. However, his dogmatic imposition of just one school of thought as ‘inclusivity’ is not.

The misconception that IKS is anti-science exists for two reasons:

First, being victims of repeated invasions and subsequent colonization that targeted our educational and research systems, Indians developed a protectionist rigidity around their traditions, at the expense of an ever-inquiring IKS research methodology. This resulted in academic stultification and eventually stagnation. When confronted with modernity, we could not engage on an equal footing with the West and defaulted into cargo cult behaviour. The concomitant distancing from IKS that we experienced during this time simply led to full ignorance of IKS itself—India was in a state of profound nadir by the beginning of the 20th century in all ways.  Read  Indian Foundations of Modern Science

Second, modern science didn’t emerge in a vacuum. When Abrahamic religions began their mission of world conquest with a single professed Truth to which all must submit, they shackled rational inquiry—Galileo Galilei was imprisoned and Giordano Bruno burnt at the stake. When resistance burst forth during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, the needle swung to the other extreme. Nullius In Verba, On Nobody’s Words, became the motto of science. Even as this led to a slew of discoveries and inventions, science still operated within the straight jacket of exclusivity, of denial of anything not perceivable by the senses. It also led to a distinction between sciences and arts, the one being real and the other abstract. 

The limits of perception, the ‘naïve realism’ that follows, and its impact on science has been a matter of serious consideration amongst scholars in the West, to which IKS meaningfully contributes, even as it is criticised back home. To quote Bertrand Russell, “Naïve realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows naïve realism to be false. Therefore naïve realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false.” 

In contrast, IKS keeps the door open for metaphysical interpretations of reality, without confining reality to perceptual inquiry. IKS is multidisciplinary by its very nature, for it does not curb, can or crush other disciplines or modes of seeking knowledge.

To summarise, understanding the complexity and contextuality of reality is the kernel of IKS.

Rajendran asserts that IKS denies scientific inquiry and curtails inculcation of scientific temper. In this context, a word must be said about this scientific temper itself.

While ‘scientific temper’ should ideally have been associated with rationalism and realism, it has been transformed in post-independence India into a tool of cultural engineering by an Anglophile elite who feel that it is something that only the state can bestow, for the people are innocent of it. How different is this attitude from the colonial assertion that the entire literature of India and Arabia was worth less than a single good shelf of a European library? The beatification of post-Enlightenment catchwords like ‘scientific temper’ that must be exegesised by a neo-Western academic priesthood is, in itself, a gravely unscientific dogma.

If instead of scientific temper, had the Indian State focused on fostering the joy of discovery, the people would not have wallowed in a manufactured inferiority where they were made to believe that their indigenous knowledge was spurious and worthless. They could have built on that knowledge, learned new things on their own terms, and discarded the old, when necessary, in a changing smritiī. Learning then would have become a self-generated impulse, and this is also the traditional, organic methodology of IKS where people move from a small, contextual truth to a larger universal Truth. In this approach, even the state learns much from the people in a truly democratic fashion because the joy flows in both ways. The Truth stands above even the divine in IKS—Satcittānanda.

A multitude of viewpoints could exist in parallel in India for thousands of years because of IKS. We should strive to preserve this and update it wherever gaps in our understanding have crept in. It is IKS that holds the truth to be amenable to debate, disputation, and discussion. To extol critical pluralism while simultaneously negating IKS is criminally disingenuous.

The authors are IKS researchers based in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. We acknowledge support from the IKS Division, Ministry of Education.

To read articles by Prof Gautam D and others

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5. Science of Indian Knowledge Systems – IIT Kharagpur

6. Who Drafted and how Indian is the Indian Constitution

7. What is the meaning of Shruti and Smriti in Sanatan Dharma