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Breaking Free: Decolonizing Education through IKS

Breaking Free: Decolonizing Education through Indian Knowledge Systems

– Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Snapshot:

The Indian way is the recognition of India as a gyan bhumi that not only produced great art, architecture, sciences, and engineering, but also created knowledge texts that continue to guide contemporary life.

This writer has written previously about the need for mainstreaming Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) or Bharatiya Gyan Parampara (BGP) in the university system that acknowledges the reality of India as a cultural and economic powerhouse.

The naysayers would still demand to know if there is any structuralist principle that connects disparate disciplines and domains under the umbrella term IKS. The easy way to respond to them would be the refusal to find such a principle.

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Mainstreaming Indian Knowledge Systems Marks A Paradigm Shift In Educational

Mainstreaming Indian Knowledge Systems Marks a Paradigm Shift in Educational Institutions

– Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Snapshot:

The establishment of centres of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) at various higher educational institutions (including IITs, central, state and private universities) reveals the educational and developmental trajectories of the country.

The move announces India’s coming of age as a society confident of its intellectual legacies and their continuing resonance.

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Making Sense Of Modi’s Temple Investment: Cities Of Gods And A New Idea Of Urban Aesthetics

Making Sense Of Modi’s Temple Investment: Cities Of Gods And A New Idea Of Urban Aesthetics

– Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Kashi Vishwanath corridor complex (PMO)

Snapshot:

  • Temples as public places is not a new concept, but never before this idea has been operationalised with such zeal in recent times. 

  • As PM Modi oversees a renewal and rejuvenation of temples, he is also giving a reality-check to those who believed progress and urban life to be an irreligious or even anti-religious activity.

This year’s Deepavali witnessed a celebration at Ayodhya like never before, with the Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy participating in the aarti on Sarayu river. A few weeks back, PM Modi had inaugurated the re-developed Mahakaleswara temple complex in Ujjain. 

Earlier he had presided over the transformation of Kashi dham from a medieval neighbourhood with its dirty and narrow lanes to an ideal temple town with amenities and conveniences that is already the envy of any planned city. 

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Beyond Secular Cities: Temples As An Urban Experience

Beyond Secular Cities: Temples As An Urban Experience

–  Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala
Snapshot

  • The transition of the city from the abode of Gods to the space of reason and money is a recent phenomenon that was guided by the advent of industrialisation, instrumental modernity, and mercantilism.

    However, this supposed contradiction of urban life and religion, even in modern Western cities, is more of a convention (or even convenience) rather than any field-based evidence.

Today “the city” is seen as a manifestation of human reason, where agentic rational humans come together to build spaces for optimising resources, creating conveniences for a meaningful life, and generating surplus.

Since economy and rationalisation are the justificatory principles for a modern city, more often than not, a city is often represented as “Godless” — secular at best and rootless at worst.

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