How should we respond to the recent governmental push for Indian Knowledge Systems? This question lies at the heart of the article by Swati Ramanathan and Ramesh Ramanathan (‘Let’s resist easy indictments of Indian Knowledge Systems’, IE, June 8) in response to mine (State push for Indian Knowledge Systems is a farce. But dismissing them is a mistake’, IE, May 19). I am grateful for their attention despite the fact, which they correctly note, that I possess no “domain knowledge” in this field. My thinking on this subject draws upon three decades of “homeschooling”, informal learning from Professor Madhulika Banerjee, also my wife, whose life’s work has focussed on IKS, much before the expression became acceptable or fashionable. I am also grateful to Ramanathans, whose work on urban civic issues I have admired for long, for venturing into this field, as it illustrates why larger debates like this one must not be left to domain experts.

This debate needs to be opened up for wider public scrutiny. Before we do so, it is necessary to get rid of a basic misreading that runs through the Ramanathans’ critique. My article sought to question a widespread tendency among liberal and progressive circles that dismisses IKS on the suspicion that it is obscurantist, irrational and backward. I argued that it is an intellectual and political mistake to dismiss IKS, even though the present government’s motives for pushing this are dubious, its framing is distorted and the outcomes are farcical. I illustrated this point by celebrating two recent books on India’s intellectual traditions. It is astonishing, and frankly embarrassing, to see that Ramanathans present my argument as an “indictment of Indian Knowledge Systems”. In doing so, they may have gone against the first principle of Indian philosophical traditions that insist on purvapaksha, a fair and rigorous reconstruction of the argument that you seek to critique.

Let’s be clear. The debate is not about whether or not IKS deserves more attention than it has had in Indian academic and intellectual life. The debate should be about framing our approach to IKS, about why and how we study IKS. Equally, the debate is not about the value of Sanskrit learning. In a breathtaking leap of logic, Ramanathans interpret my critique of excessive focus on Brahminic texts as an indictment of all Sanskritic learning. It is a particularly odd reading, as one of the books my article celebrates is an introduction to the Sanskrit intellectual tradition by Acharya Radhavallabh Tripathi, a renowned Sanskrit scholar. The debate is also not about the value of many of the Brahminic metaphysical texts that constitute the core of Indian philosophy. I cannot possibly disagree with Ramanathans on the value of these intellectual traditions. The real debate should be about whether IKS should be equated with Sanskritic learning or with Brahminic texts, whether our focus should be limited to these, to the exclusion of other languages, non-Brahminic and non-Hindu traditions and to non-metaphysical and non-textual forms of knowledge. That is the debate I had hoped to initiate.

The Ramanathans focus on another valid but secondary issue, about how one should respond to the recent state-sponsored push for Indian knowledge systems, something my article characterised as farcical. We have a genuine disagreement here. The Ramanathans suggest that we should adopt a non-political lens on this issue and welcome this much-belated start of a journey to collate our own learning instead of aping the West. They suggest that while the state support for IKS may have its limits, it can be overcome by independent initiatives as the state has not laid down a syllabus for IKS and has not prevented anyone from undertaking any other form of inquiry.

To my mind, this is an excessively naive reading. In a lecture on IKS, Acharya Tripathi reminds us of a standard protocol of Sanskrit poetics: We must inquire into the prayojana — purpose or intent — of any text or intellectual project. A dominant ideology is not imposed with an official syllabus, but through policy signals, selective state patronage, a nudge to private philanthropy, and ideological statements. Even cursory attention to the spurt in state sponsorship of IKS would lay bare its prayojana, its political agenda. On a generous reading, the current focus on rediscovery of India’s intellectual heritage is closely aligned with the political project of establishing India as the “vishwaguru”. Tripathi points out that this supremacist project is out of sync with Indian intellectual traditions. More specifically, this is closely tied to the political agenda of freeing India from 1,000 years of “gulami”. Worse, this is about reducing Indian intellectual heritage only to Brahminic, Sanskritic and textual traditions of knowledge and cultivating an uncritical mindset about these. This reading does not depend upon any deep interpretative move. This prayojana is writ large for anyone to see, reiterated every day by the political bosses and their intellectual minions.

Yet we cannot assume that this political agenda actually translates into what is being sponsored under the IKS rubric. That can be checked easily by examining the list of 390 projects, programmes and centres funded by the IKS division of the Ministry of Education. Even a cursory glance at the project titles shows a clear bias: Chronologically, the list privileges ancient and classical India, to the exclusion of medieval and modern India. Linguistically, it privileges Sanskrit over all other classical and ancient languages like Pali, Tamil or Kannada. Methodologically, it privileges texts and shastras over practices and living traditions of knowledge, like handlooms and metalwork practised by a range of non-savarna castes, which made India a centre of global attention. Oddly for an initiative that seeks to establish the autonomy of our knowledge system, each of the “ancient Indian technologies” identified for research is legitimised by using only the parameters of modern scientific research.

Thus, state-sponsored IKS is not just tainted by supremacism, communal bias and caste exclusivism. Above all, it is disappointingly derivative in its intellectual ambition, hostage to the very system of knowledge that it seeks to challenge. That is why the much-needed and much-delayed focus on IKS must be accompanied by a careful scrutiny of the underlying and unstated politics of knowledge.

The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor, Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. Views are personal