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........

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