Today, as India is taking her rightful place in the world order, more and more people recognize the need to get back to our roots and revive our traditional knowledge systems. The demand for content on our Vedic Knowledge systems have exponentially increased. Indic Studies courses and curriculums are virtually mushrooming overnight. Social-Media memes and Whatsapp forwards with astonishing claims about our Vedic knowledge are doing the rounds. Most of this is met with scepticism and sometimes even violent objection. In this midst of all of the chaos how does one differentiate truth from fiction and evaluate the information available to us?

To answer that question, we need to dig a little deeper into what our Indic Knowledge Systems are all about. The source of all knowledge is believed to be the Vedas and it is said that our Vedas are eternal. Despite being so ancient, they have always managed to stay relevant across millennia. The key to this has been our unbroken lineage of Rishis, shastric-scholars and teachers who have always managed to club insight with innovation by providing perspectives aligned with the societal needs, contemporary to those times.

The Vedas have always been interpreted according to the perspective of our seers. Our tradition has provided multiple lenses for this through the various darshanas of Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Sankhya, Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta. The 6 Vedangas of Jyotisha, Vyaakarana, Chandas, Kalpa, Nirukta and Siksha provided the right skills to students to understand and preserve the knowledge of our Vedas and transmit them intact to the next generation of custodians. Through a well-rounded gurukula-based education system, our ancestors have faithfully carried the sacred mandate of protecting the Vedas by adhering to time-tested ways of imparting and preserving our knowledge systems.

The past hundred years have seen a systematic and comprehensive dismantling of our traditional ways of learning due to anti-Dharmic forces. As a result, not only have our Shastras stopped evolving but it has also allowed westernized education to overshadow it. Many of us know that today’s world owes a lot to India, whether it is in the advancement of mathematics, medicine, linguistics or even modern computing. Much of the seeds of today’s knowledge has come from our Vedic tradition although there has been a concerted effort to erase its Dharmic origins. If India is to assume her role as Vishwa-Guru, it is important that as Indians we go back to our Vedas and rediscover them with a new and renewed lens.

However there exists a problem. Compared to the size of the world population it is a mere handful of students who have actually gone through the rigour of the traditional gurukula system and who have the expertise to read our scriptures. In the meanwhile, the world has changed rapidly and not necessarily for the better.

We need a new army of people, call them intellectual Kshatriyas if you may, who can combine the best of our shastric wisdom with the knowledge and experience of the contemporary world. It is this group of people who will need to look back at the shastras, separate truth from fiction, understand their true purport and come up with new solutions from our time-tested repository of knowledge. The catch is that we don’t have the luxury to put all of them through the traditional educational rigour of a gurukula system.

MIT IIKS was founded with precisely this objective – to create the next generation of Application-oriented Shastric Scholars – people who can straddle both the traditional as well as modern world with ease. At MIT, guided by capable faculty from traditional backgrounds, students are taught not just Shastric content, but also the structure that will enable them traverse this world independently with ease. Through our different programs Students from diverse and modern backgrounds are trained to understand our Sanskrit texts, read and interpret them and come up with new applications based on their domain expertise. Get associated with MIT IIKS and join the growing army of intellectuals who are willing to deep-dive into our knowledge base and take forward the work that our Rishis and Munis started thousands of years ago.