The formal Indian education system inherited from British policymakers famously known as Macaulian system has kept the Ancient Indian knowledge heritage out of the reach of the budding young students, citing reasons of lack of rigor and scientific value. This is arguably an incorrect perspective. However, truth is otherwise. Ours is one of the only continuing, surviving ancient civilization with huge repository of knowledge created by the forefathers, which can provide great value for any society. It enables the current generation to understand the thought processes and frameworks, analyse the received wisdom in a contemporary context and provide new opportunities to assimilate the accrued wisdom and synthesize new knowledge.
Therefore, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex body for technical education spanning the Engineering and Management Education in India while revising the curricula in 2018, introduced a mandatory non-credit course on Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) along with courses on constitution of India and environment science. While there are several books on the latter courses, unfortunately, there are no textbooks currently available for the subject that will help students understand the various components of IKS. Hence a textbook for the course on Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) is a timely and valuable contribution to the education system in the country and I am happy to note that this book has been written to address the requirements of this course.
India is a nation with a long civilizational history with recorded history, cultural artefacts, and evidence pointing to more than five millennia of existence. Not surprisingly, such a society would have discovered enormous knowledge cutting across various dimensions of human life and existence. Despite a continuous onslaught of foreign invasions for more than a millennium, the knowledge practices have more or less remained intact and have been passed on from generation to generation 'orally. There have also been attempts to record the knowledge and practices in written form in the last millennium. However, during the last 200 years, this knowledge has been relegated to the background and the knowledge paradigm of the West has been imposed on the Indian society. Even after Independence, no concrete efforts were made to introduce indigenous knowledge in the educational curriculum formally.
However, knowing the thinking patterns and the knowledge repository created by the forefathers provides great value for any society. It enables the current generation to understand the thought processes and frameworks, and synthesize new knowledge. Arguably, no society can hope to flourish by simply severing itself from its past and embracing alternative ideas alien to the indigenous thoughts and practices. After some time, the need to revisit will be strongly felt, and the Indian society is currently going through such a phase.
The policymakers and the government have taken cognizance of this and have taken several steps to address this requirement. One of the steps is to introduce a course on the Indian Knowledge System (IKS) in higher educational institutions. Unfortunately, we do not have a textbook to teach this course. This textbook responds to this growing need felt by the Indian society at large and is primarily intended to facilitate offering a one-semester or two-semester course on IKS to undergraduate and graduate-level students.
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