The civilisational trap in the Indian Knowledge Systems debate

From Ayurveda’s influence on European botany to modern research labs, knowledge has always crossed borders. The IKS project risks forgetting that history

Do you have a niggling suspicion of “Western” medicine? It’s understandable. As a mind-boggling number of Indians will queue up to tell you, such foreign concoctions are drastic measures. For routine ailments, indigenous remedies, or a naturalised citizen like homeopathy, will suffice. Quite apart from whether this advice works in specific cases, it does something else: It dethrones “Western” medicine from its position of privilege — as doctors often emphasise, there’s no such thing as “Western” medicine, only modern medicine — and casts it into a swamp of relativism. It calls into question the objective primacy of modern science, the foundation on which modern medicine is built. As ChatGPT would say, it’s not just medical; it’s epistemic — relating to knowledge itself.

As a debate on Indian Knowledge Systems unfolds in these pages, it’s important to emphasise that, as the name signals, this is also about building an epistemic paradigm. If it were simply about understanding the intellectual traditions of the past as part of the study of history, it would be called Indian Intellectual History and would be contextualised by other, more materialist, types of history. If it were simply about documenting living oral and folk traditions, that would be part of an entirely different field. Drawing on traditional practices to create sustainable architecture is a third, separate area. All these are entirely laudable and uncontroversial aims, and the research ought to be strongly supported and conducted to global standards of scholarly rigour. The Brahmanical nature of many Sanskrit texts is no reason not to study them; rather, anti-caste scholars should study the Dharmashastras precisely because they were Brahmanical and provided the jurisprudential scaffolding of the pre-modern caste system.

However, bringing these and other fields together, under the rubric of “knowledge systems”, makes them part of the fashionable “civilisational” agenda, which seeks to recover an authentic Indian paradigm of knowledge. The question is, to what end? Would exploring, say, pre-modern Indian science or mathematics through anything other than a historical lens serve any progressive purpose? Would this advance the global understanding of science or mathematics as it currently stands?

In seeking an alternative knowledge system, such a project implicitly relativises modern science, handing it over to the “West” and forfeiting any Indian claim to it. This depends on, and props up, the old, hackneyed notion that there are such things as discrete and insular “civilisations”. In this telling, “Western Civilisation” traces an unbroken arc from Ancient Greece and Rome to present-day Europe and America. It chooses to forget that this is a story Europeans started telling themselves a few centuries ago, replacing the older framework of “Christendom”. It also forgets the multifarious influences that went into the formation of both the “West” and of modern science. For instance, consider Hortus Malabaricus, the 17th-century botanical treatise compiled by the governor of Dutch Malabar, drawing to a great extent on the Ayurvedic knowledge of Itty Achudan, a traditional Ezhava physician of Kerala. In the 18th century, Carl Linnaeus, who laid the foundations of modern plant and animal taxonomy, used Hortus Malabaricus as his main reference for South Asian flora, basing his Latin names on the existing Malayalam ones. Is this Western knowledge?

Pre-modern Indian scholars worked within a living tradition, engaging with each other across time and space and expanding the base of knowledge with each generation; often, they sneaked in original contributions under the guise of commentaries. If Patanjali’s Mahabhashya was a commentary on Panini and Katyayana, Bhartrhari’s Mahabhashyatika was a commentary on Patanjali, and so on. That world, which survived into colonial times, has vanished. Reconstructing it, or rather, constructing something new, building an edifice on pre-modern foundations to address modern problems and engage with contemporary science, would be an inauthentic, laboured, and ultimately quixotic enterprise.

Let’s turn to a neighbouring country, our fellow “civilisational state”. What often comes up in discussions of China is its astonishing progress in all scholarly fields, be it STEM, the social sciences, or the humanities. Is it all thanks to working within its own traditional or reconstructed paradigm of knowledge? Well, one has heard of communism with Chinese characteristics. But one does not often hear of chemistry with Chinese characteristics.

The writer is senior assistant editor, The Indian Express. [email protected]