When we embark on the study of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), our instinct is to jump straight into the systems themselves—delving into ancient astronomy, metallurgy, or classical grammar. But one must take a step back: One asks, What is Indian?
Answering a Question with a Question
I open with a foundational definition:
“Indian is anything that comes from India or belongs to India.”
This seems straightforward, but it immediately triggers a deeper inquiry: What is India?
Far from being an evasion, responding to a question with a counter-question is a time-tested educational device. Traceable to Western Socratic dialogues, ancient Chinese criteria checks, and India’s own Nyaya sutras and Upanishadic teacher-student exchanges, this dialectical technique forces us to examine our underlying assumptions. You cannot qualify a system of knowledge as “Indian” if you have not clearly defined the entity from which that knowledge springs.
Defining the Land and its People
A political map showing 28 states and 8 union territories offers a modern factual snapshot, but as Chanakya (Kautilya) noted over two millennia ago, a nation-state relies on two inseparable pillars: territory and people.
To understand why this specific landmass nurtured such a continuous, dense population, the authors examine geography and climate:
- Natural Protection: Hemmed in by the Indian Ocean to the south and mountain ranges to the north, the landmass offered relative safety for centuries.
- Equable Climate & River Basins: Situated largely between the Tropics, blessed with the monsoons, and nourished by perennial rivers, the region provided optimal conditions for agriculture.
This fertile, safe terrain allowed a massive human population to coalesce and thrive over millennia without requiring radical disruptions to its core way of life.
Culture as a Refraction of Geography: Diet and Language
The text demonstrates how “Indian” identity emerges organically from these physical conditions:
- Dietary Wisdom: Faced with a high population density, animal husbandry was optimized for traction and dairy rather than meat. The staple diet evolved around grains, pulses, and milk products—yielding timeless, unifying dishes like khichdi (or bisi bele bath/pongal) and kheer (payasam). The taboo against slaughtering bovines was rooted in economic survival before being reinforced by religious custom.
- Linguistic Continuity: Across hundreds of regional dialects, Indian languages share a structural substratum. Features like subject-object switching (ergativity) unite Indo-Aryan and Dravidian tongues alike. Sanskrit acted as an enriching “father” language supplying vocabulary across regions, while local native structures provided the “mother” matrix.
Why Defining “Indian” First is Essential for IKS
Why must a discussion on knowledge systems begin with soil, rivers, rice, and grammar?
Knowledge does not exist in a vacuum. It is an emergent property of a civilization reacting to its environment. Western Knowledge Systems (WKS) grew largely out of reductionist models built to analyze discrete, isolated data points. By contrast, Indian Knowledge Systems are fundamentally holistic and context-driven.
Think of the Banyan Tree metaphor introduced by the authors:
- The Soil: The foundational Indian identity—geography, climate, diet, and linguistic structures.
- The Trunk: Accumulated wisdom refined across millennia.
- The Branches: Specific systematic disciplines (astronomy, medicine, logic).
If you try to study the branches (the knowledge systems) while ignoring the soil (what makes them “Indian”), the entire structure loses its nourishment and meaning. Defining “Indian” first establishes the specific socio-ecological substrate from which this problem-solving paradigm grew. Without this foundation, IKS risks being treated merely as an exotic collection of historical curiosities rather than a coherent, living methodology.
For more on this, go to “Indian Knowledge Systems – A Primer” by Desiraju, Panda and Bhattacharya, recently published by Khanna Books and available on Amazon at https://tinyurl.com/444djvny