The overarching aim of the Conference is to deliberate on the sensitive and crucial task of strategically managing the resurgence of IKS, and pave way for its meaningful rise. Said differently, the focus is on how we must imagine and create the early childhood of the IKS ecosystem that is now being reborn
This is an opportunity that comes once in hundreds of lifetimes. Knowledge systems once dead, rarely come back to life. Civilizations that are finished globally, have not resurfaced. Bharatiya civilizational knowledge has, however, suffered a slightly different fate; it has withstood millennia of distortions, tortures, and replacements. Arguably, it has been kept alive, through unbroken traditions of practice over millennia.
Many consider the worst epistemic violence is now over. The socio-political environment is now beginning to be favorable after a long, long time. The excitement for this resurgence is plenty; reflected in the increasing confidence of popular media’s portrayal of IKS, the rise in open fora on IKS-related themes in disparate settings from gated communities’ parks to schools and colleges, and even political choices that people of India are making.
As society begins to find its long-lost confidence and pride in its heritage, it is the role of scholars and thinkers to lay out plans for desirable cultural futures. The force of markets and that of the Western intellectual order is significant. In the last several hundred years, European political thought has become the staple framework of understanding society and science. It is the only modernity the world knows and therefore dictates every aspect of modern-day scholarship. Intellectual elites in India, for a variety of reasons and often helplessly, have adopted and disseminated Western philosophies and sciences to explain Indian experiences and the Indian past, and are even casting Indian futures in them. The Western idea of the Self is a prominent intellectual force that has begun reshaping societies, and younger generations in India who go to English-medium schools.
More importantly, how do we relearn what we learnt, and unlearn what we unlearnt?
We are therefore inheriting a complex churning of civilizational confidence without appropriately recognizing the civilizational knowledge frameworks. The next few years will be crucial in this churning.
Back to About