Can India Reclaim Its Knowledge Traditions Without Narrowing Scientific Inquiry?

A mathematics classroom should be one of the easiest places to separate cultural pride from political argument. The subject appears almost perfectly universal: a proof either works or it does not; an equation does not change its truth because it is written in Sanskrit, Malayalam or English. Yet mathematics has become an unexpected site of a larger argument in Indian education — over whose knowledge deserves recognition, how that knowledge should be taught, and where cultural recovery must stop and scientific inquiry must begin.

The debate became particularly visible when the University Grants Commission released a draft undergraduate curriculum for mathematics under the National Education Policy framework. About 900 Indian mathematicians subsequently signed a petition seeking its withdrawal. Their objections were not limited to Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS); they also raised concerns about the coverage of core mathematics, applied mathematics and the design of electives. But the inclusion of courses such as Kala Ganana (traditional Indian time calculation), Bharatiya Bijganit (Indian algebra) and Shulba Sutra brought a deeper question to the surface: can an education system recover its intellectual inheritance without allowing that recovery to dictate what students must believe?

Two ideas are easily confused here. Indian civilisation made important contributions to mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy and other fields, and those contributions deserve serious study. That historical proposition is different from saying that an idea should be treated as established knowledge simply because it belongs to India’s past. The first concerns history; the second concerns how knowledge is established. A serious university must keep the distinction clear.

The Ministry of Education’s policy framework makes clear that the incorporation of IKS into higher education is now an official curricular initiative. Its guidelines call for IKS to be incorporated into higher-education curricula, including through credit-bearing courses and in relation to students’ major disciplines.

The problem is not whether India has a scientific past

There is little value in pretending that India’s intellectual history begins with the arrival of modern Western education.

The history of mathematics itself provides striking examples. Madhava and later mathematicians of the Kerala school developed infinite series for sine, cosine and arctangent centuries before their rediscovery in Europe. Historical scholarship has traced these results to texts including the Tantrasangraha-vyakhya and the Yuktibhasha, demonstrating that sophisticated mathematical work existed within India’s own intellectual traditions.

The significance of that history does not depend on lowering the standards by which mathematical knowledge is evaluated. It becomes more interesting when treated as mathematics rather than mythology.

A student who encounters a mathematical argument developed in a different historical and linguistic setting can ask useful questions: What problem was being solved? What assumptions were made? How was the result derived? How does the method compare with later developments elsewhere? What was original, and what was inherited? Which claims have documentary support?

Those questions turn historical knowledge into an object of inquiry. They allow students to recognise an intellectual achievement while examining the evidence that establishes it.

The danger begins when historical significance is replaced by civilisational triumphalism.

Mathematics cannot be made more Indian by making it less universal

One argument for giving greater attention to Indian mathematical traditions is that the history of mathematics has often been narrated through a predominantly Western lens. Manjul Bhargava, the Fields Medal-winning mathematician and a supporter of the broader project, has argued that contributions from non-Western civilisations have sometimes been neglected and that recovering India’s mathematical achievements can inspire a new generation.

Historical recognition matters. Intellectual traditions should not disappear simply because later textbooks were written elsewhere.

But correcting one historical imbalance should not produce another. Mathematics is created by human beings living in particular cultures, while mathematical validity is not owned by those cultures. The social history of mathematics can be Indian, Greek, Arab, Chinese or European; its propositions do not become nationally owned property.

A mathematical discovery can therefore have a cultural birthplace without having a cultural nationality.

That distinction matters in the Indian debate because describing mathematics as entirely “Western” is as misleading as describing it as exclusively “Indic”. The history of who developed particular ideas deserves investigation, but the truth of a mathematical proposition depends on its reasoning, not the identity of the person who produced it.

The real test is what happens inside the classroom

This is where the IKS debate should move away from slogans.

Suppose an undergraduate mathematics programme includes an elective on traditional Indian astronomical calculations. Students could study historical calendars, astronomical observations and computational methods, reconstruct calculations and examine the assumptions behind them. They could then compare those methods with modern astronomy and mathematics.

A different classroom could present the same historical claims as established truths because they are ancient, treating questions about evidence as disrespect towards tradition.

The important distinction is whether students are being asked to investigate a knowledge tradition or simply accept its claims because of where they came from.

The UGC’s own faculty-orientation guidelines recognise that integrating IKS requires faculty capacity-building and familiarisation with Indian Knowledge Systems. That matters because the quality of IKS teaching depends not merely on adding a subject to a syllabus, but on whether faculty are equipped to teach it seriously.

The UGC’s Learning Outcomes-based Curriculum Framework provides a compatible academic principle. Its approach allows institutions flexibility in programme design while expecting students to develop the ability to reason, analyse evidence and critically evaluate ideas. Historical and civilisational material can therefore be included without removing the standards through which academic claims are examined.

An elective on kala ganana, for example, can become intellectually serious if students calculate the motion of celestial objects, examine calendar systems, use mathematical methods and assess the evidence behind historical claims. In that form, the subject becomes an opportunity to understand how mathematical reasoning developed in a particular civilisation.

The subject is strengthened, rather than weakened, when students are allowed to examine it critically.

Criticism is not rejection

The controversy over the mathematics curriculum also demonstrates why universities need a culture in which disagreement remains legitimate.

The 900 mathematicians who opposed the draft raised concerns about academic and career consequences, including the treatment of core and applied mathematics and the design of electives. Their objections to the IKS component were therefore part of a wider argument about curriculum quality, not simply a rejection of Indian intellectual history.

At the same time, criticism of a curriculum does not establish that the proposed curriculum would necessarily damage mathematical education. That conclusion would require evidence of actual educational outcomes, which the present debate does not provide.

Nor does the presence of an IKS component automatically make a curriculum ideological. The more useful question is how IKS appears in the syllabus, what status its claims are given, and whether students are allowed to interrogate them.

The same standard should apply to every body of knowledge. A claim derived from an ancient Indian text should be investigated seriously. A claim derived from a medieval European text should be investigated seriously. A contemporary scientific claim should be investigated seriously. None should receive automatic acceptance merely because of its origin.

The best defence of tradition is intellectual scrutiny

The strength of a knowledge tradition should be demonstrated through the evidence and reasoning that support it, not through insulation from criticism.

Consider the history of the Kerala school. Its significance does not depend on declaring that Indian mathematicians “invented everything first”. It lies in demonstrating particular mathematical developments, locating them in historical texts, reconstructing their reasoning and understanding their relationship to the evolution of mathematics.

That approach turns heritage into an object of inquiry rather than a collection of claims to be defended.

A university should encourage students to investigate Indian traditions with the same curiosity they bring to any other intellectual tradition. That means historical evidence, comparison, reconstruction, criticism and revision. Some claims will survive that scrutiny; others may not.

That is not an insult to tradition. It is how knowledge advances.

Where scientific temper enters

Scientific temper is useful here because it provides a method for dealing with claims, not a verdict about which culture produced them.

The questions are straightforward: How do we know this? What is the evidence? Can the claim be tested? What assumptions does it depend on? Can another person reproduce the reasoning? What would make us change our mind?

The UGC’s Learning Outcomes-based Curriculum Framework explicitly connects scientific reasoning with analysing, interpreting and drawing conclusions from data and critically evaluating ideas, evidence and experiences from an open-minded and reasoned perspective.

Those habits matter far beyond physics or mathematics. They are equally relevant when studying history, philosophy, medicine or traditional knowledge.

An Indian mathematical tradition can therefore be studied as a genuine historical achievement and then examined rigorously. Ancient astronomical practices can be reconstructed without requiring students to treat every associated cosmological belief as scientifically established. Students can take pride in the sophistication of an intellectual tradition while remaining willing to identify its limitations.

Cultural history and scientific inquiry do not have to compete. They answer different questions, and a good university should be capable of handling both.

The university should resist both kinds of reduction

The debate becomes impoverished when it is reduced to two camps.

One approach can treat indigenous knowledge as suspect because it is associated with a cultural or political project. The other can treat indigenous knowledge as valuable simply because it is indigenous.

Both give up intellectual independence, though in opposite directions.

Modern knowledge has a history shaped by particular cultures, but cultural authenticity is not evidence of truth. At the same time, the fact that an idea comes from an older tradition is not a reason to dismiss it before examining the evidence.

The mathematics curriculum debate offers a better possibility. Indian knowledge can be recovered historically without being insulated from criticism. Cultural context can be taught without becoming a substitute for evidence. Traditional methods can be reconstructed without assuming that historical importance automatically makes them scientifically valid today.

Modern disciplinary knowledge need not be diminished to make room for them.

What should India actually reclaim?

Perhaps the most important thing to reclaim is not a list of supposedly ancient answers.

It is a tradition of asking difficult questions.

If Indian mathematical history is placed before students merely to produce pride, its educational value remains limited. If it is presented as something they can examine, reconstruct, challenge and connect to contemporary mathematics, it becomes intellectually alive.

That changes the purpose of cultural recovery.

The goal is not to replace one civilisational hierarchy with another, nor to preserve an artificial wall between India’s intellectual past and the modern university. It is to bring that past into the university on the same terms as every other serious body of knowledge: with curiosity, evidence, comparison and criticism.

That is the line between recovering a knowledge tradition and turning it into doctrine.

India does not have to choose between cultural confidence and scientific temper. The stronger form of cultural confidence is one that can withstand scrutiny. And the strongest university is not one that tells students which civilisation to admire; it is one that gives them the intellectual freedom and disciplinary tools to discover what is worth admiring — and why.