From the Indian Knowledge System to the Plural Knowledge Systems of India

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its project of Indian Knowledge System (IKS) have been trying to cast a sanitized and monolithic understanding of Indian culture, centered on high-caste Vedic Hinduism. In the name of curricular and pedagogical innovations, BJP is promoting myths as realities, pseudo-sciences as sciences, and erasing selective histories. This article elaborates on how the idea of “Indian tradition” is being distorted, fictionalized, and cherry-picked to align it with the high-caste Hindu ideological foundations of the BJP. Such an approach has generated problematic frameworks of sanitized knowledge-making mechanisms. The article also proposes that the Plural Knowledge Systems of India can be considered an alternative knowledge system to address the challenges posed by the IKS.