Ancient Indian Knowledge in Modern Education: Why and How
India had its own vibrant scientific culture and knowledge tradition that helped it remain a developed country with the highest GDP for millennia. Some of its insights are being discovered to be highly relevant and valuable even today – in mathematics, linguistics, logic, aesthetics, psychology, management and wellness sciences to name a few. However, the bulk of these discoveries are being made outside the realm of formal higher education and research by individuals out of personal curiosity and dedication. Several recent conferences have enabled such discoveries to be showcased and discussed. They helped raise awareness of the richness and rigour of Ancient India’s knowledge discipline.
However, to perform further systematic study and transform the insights into useful applications requires educating the younger generation in India’s traditional knowledge at a large scale and harnessing their collective intellectual prowess for further research and innovation. This can only be done under the aegis of formal higher education.
Indic Knowledge Areas
According to the Indian perspective, the subject matter of scientific inquiry can be broadly classified into subjective sciences, objective sciences and knowledge sciences. Subjective sciences deal with the essential nature of oneself. It includes psychology and consciousness studies with applications in education, leadership, wellness and peace. Objective sciences deal with the study of the Universe and its resources, forces, their properties and utilization. The bulk of modern science including physical sciences, engineering, technology, medicine, social and political sciences fall und er this category. Knowledge sciences deal with the systematic study of knowledge as a phenomenon – its nature, its generation, communication and organization. The modern areas of linguistics, Math, logic, knowledge engineering, computing and information sciences fall under this category.
Indic Knowledge: Examples of Contemporary Value
Recent discoveries are reaffirming India’s immense contributions to all three areas, especially to subjective and knowledge sciences where modern understanding has several gaps. A five-year study was conducted at the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth, Tirupati, of rainfall prediction in diverse regions of India based on panchanga calculations vs. Meteorological weather models. It revealed that the panchanga model achieved 60-80% accuracy compared to 40-70% with the modern models because the former considers several more parameters than the latter. Similarly, recent study of India’s Bakshali manuscript of 200 C.E. by the US and UK researchers revealed that it contains algorithms to compute square roots 4x faster than comparable numerical algorithms till recently. As another example, Ayurveda mentions that a cause for nightmare dreams could simply be indigestion. This has implications for psychological counselling. The amount of precision visible in India’s architectural marvels points to a highly developed mathematical tradition that is seamlessly blended with aesthetics, logistical and engineering excellence even without sophisticated modern tools.
India’s analogue of modern science is the shaastra, which has a rigorous definition based on the concept of Yukti or rationality and rules to model real-world phenomena. All Indian shaastras employ a common methodology of structured inquiry and discourse derived from its three native fundamental knowledge sciences – the science of language (vyaakarana), the science of discourse (mimaamsa) and the science of inference (nyaaya). Moreover, Sanskrit is the preferred language of India’s scientific discourse because, due to its systematic structure, it is the only natural language that can also be repurposed for precise and concise communication essential for scientific discourse. In contrast, modern inquiry invented a whole new language – mathematics – for that purpose. The emerging discipline of knowledge engineering and AI based on computing and information sciences can benefit from India’s approaches to knowledge modelling for more natural human-machine interfaces.
MIT Institute for Indic Knowledge Studies (MIT IIKS) endeavours to bring this vast spectrum of Indic knowledge into contemporary mainstream education for the benefit of students and professionals alike.
—Sai Susarla
— The author is the Director, MIT Institute of Indic Knowledge Studies
