On the second of February 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay compressed an empire’s educational ambition into a single sentence: “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”. The line is often quoted as insult, and it was one. Its deeper consequence, however, lay elsewhere. It licensed a curriculum in which India’s own sources became objects of antiquarian curiosity rather than instruments of disciplined thought.
Independent India did not consciously ratify that contempt; it did something less dramatic and more durable. It allowed the colonial syllabus to survive by inertia. Two centuries on, an Indian school-leaver can recite Newton’s three laws and the Krebs cycle, but has rarely been asked, even in passing, to open the Āryabhaṭīya, the Caraka Saṃhitā or the Arthaśāstra. Plato, Hobbes, Descartes and Freud appear in our textbooks as makers of knowledge; Kauṭilya, Caraka, Suśruta, Āryabhaṭa, Gautama and Rāmānuja appear, if at all, as cultural names detached from method. The correction now required is neither religious instruction nor political theatre.
It is the recovery of a knowledge corpus that is old, internally reasoned, and fit for critical use. The policy doorway is already open. The National Education Policy 2020 names ancient Indian knowledge as a resource to be researched, enhanced and put to new uses, and calls for accurate accounts of traditional Indian knowledge in the curriculum, expanded translation, and stronger classical-language institutions. The National Curriculum Framework 2023, prepared under NCERT, lists “Rootedness in India and Indian Knowledge Systems” as a cross-cutting theme.
In June 2023 the University Grants Commission required a small but mandatory share of credits in every degree programme to be in Indian Knowledge Systems, and the All India Council for Technical Education has seeded a dedicated IKS division across engineering campuses. The question is no longer whether the State may begin. It is whether universities will do the work with enough intellectual honesty to make the beginning respectable. Consider governance first. The Arthaśāstra is not a pious text masquerading as administration; it is a cold manual of statecraft. Its saptāṅga theory of the state ~ sovereign, ministers, country, fortified town, treasury, army and ally ~ belongs naturally in any public-administration syllabus. Its maṇḍala scheme of buffer states and natural enemies, and its ṣāḍguṇya analysis of the six diplomatic measures, can be taught alongside the structural realism that international-relations students now learn through Mearsheimer: not as nationalist ornament, but as indigenous analytic vocabulary.
The Nītiśāstra tradition supplies another register ~ prudence, restraint, counsel, consequence. No civil servant needs to copy Kauṭilya; many would benefit from being made to argue with him. Medicine offers a still clearer case. The Caraka Saṃhitā, especially its Sūtrasthāna, treats health through cause, symptom, diet, conduct, pharmacology and the physician’s obligations; the Suśruta Saṃhitā’s Sūtrasthāna classifies surgical instruments and procedures with a precision that belongs in any history-of-medicine syllabus. None of this exempts Āyurveda from evidence; it invites it.
The PLOS ONE multicentric randomised trial of AYUSH-64 as adjunct care in mild and moderate Covid-19, published in March 2023, is one example; randomised double-blind trials of Withania somnifera, gathered into a meta-analysis in Phytotherapy Research in 2022, are another. In May 2025 the World Health Assembly adopted the Global Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025-2034, which speaks of integrating safe and effective traditional medicine where appropriate; it does not, by itself, validate every claim made in the name of Āyurveda. That distinction matters. It is, in fact, precisely the distinction a serious curriculum is meant to teach.
Astronomy demands the same sobriety. Āryabhaṭa’s Āryabhaṭīya is not improved by exaggeration; it is impressive enough when read accurately. In its Kālakriyāpāda and Gola sections he posits 1,582,237,500 eastward rotations of the Earth in a single mahāyuga of 4,320,000 sidereal years. The sidereal day that follows from his arithmetic is twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes and 4.1 seconds; the modern measurement gives 4.091 seconds. He held that the Earth turns on its axis a thousand years before Copernicus would publish the same idea in Europe. The decimal positional notation that organises every modern calculation is itself an inheritance whose lineage runs through Bakhshali and Brahmagupta, not through any European hand.
A modern classroom can honour Āryabhaṭan only by refusing to make him a mascot. Philosophy completes the argument. The six darśanas are not loose spiritual opinions; they are technical schools with rules of inference and rival accounts of reality. The Nyāya-sūtra opens by naming sixteen categories of inquiry and accepts pratyakṣa, anumāna, upamāna and śabda as the means of knowledge ~ material that belongs in any logic and epistemology curriculum.
Rāmānujācārya’s Viśiṣṭādvaita, set out in the Śrībhāṣya and the Vedārthasaṅgraha, distinguishes cit, acit and Īśvara without dissolving difference into illusion or reducing matter to consciousness ~ a position that reads, in modern dress, as a thoughtful neighbour to the debates from P. F. Strawson onward on the unity of subject.
The tradition’s description of the Veda as apauruṣeya is part of its self-understanding; it cannot be the evidentiary ground for a public curriculum. The ground must be argument. The Dharmaśāstras require a harder courage. They contain passages no honest reader can defend; they also contain the longest sustained argument in any tradition about the nature of normative authority, the limits of custom, and the relation of law to social reality. To teach them critically is not to endorse them.
It is to train students in historical anthropology, legal sociology, gender analysis and the study of power. A civilisation that cannot read its difficult texts will either sentimentalise them from a distance or surrender them to polemicists. The classroom is the one place where reverence, rejection and evidence can be compelled to sit at the same table. The real objection is politicisation, and it is serious.
A careless syllabus can turn scholarship into slogan; a frightened syllabus can turn ignorance into neutrality. The cure for politicisation is not curricular amnesia. It is scholarship strict enough to distinguish inheritance from indoctrination. That cure has names and addresses. It means UGC-funded translations and peer-reviewed critical editions, prepared through institutions such as the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, the classicallanguage universities and established Indology departments. It means graduate electives in Indian Knowledge Systems at central universities, with carefully designed pilot modules in selected CBSE schools.
And it means integrated teaching: Kauṭilya in political theory, Caraka in medical humanities, Āryabhaṭa in the history of science, Nyāya in logic, Rāmānuja in metaphysics, and Dharmaśāstra in social-science method. The remedy for political instinct is not to keep the texts closed; it is to place them where political instinct cannot reach them ~ in a seminar room, with primary languages, comparative reading and an external examiner. The argument is not exotic. Japan’s Meiji reformers absorbed Western learning at speed yet built their new schools on the moral and institutional capital of Tokugawa-era Confucian, Shinto and Buddhist traditions.
China, after a curriculum revision between 2014 and 2017, returned its Confucian Analects to the gaokao without sliding into theocracy. Finland teaches the Kalevala as living literature and gives Sámi knowledge its place in the classroom and policy alike. India’s case is larger, older and moreinternally diverse than any of these ~ which is an argument for better design, not for avoidance. Macaulay’s shelf need not be burnt, nor worshipped. It can remain where it belongs ~ one shelf in a larger library.
The classrooms of this country will, this academic year, send out a generation of school-leavers fluent in Newton and Kepler, and that is no loss. The loss is that very few among them will have been told that, in 499 of the Common Era, a man writing at Kusumapura held the Earth turning on its axis and counted the stars to within an arc-second of accuracy. The shelf was never empty. The neglected question is whether India will, at last, give its students the key to the room that was locked behind it.
(The writer, a practicing Chartered Accountant and a Vedantic Scholar, can be reached at kannan@cakt.in)