Let’s resist easy indictments of Indian Knowledge Systems
4 min readJun 8, 2026 06:20 AM IST First published on: Jun 8, 2026 at 06:20 AM IST Yogendra Yadav is among modern India’s serious public intellectuals. He brings depth and domain knowledge to most subjects he writes about. But Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), to our understanding, is not one of them. This is only reasonable, given the scale and complexity of the topic. Yadav begins a recent article (‘State push for Indian knowledge systems is a farce. But dismissing them is a mistake’, IE, May 19) with a disparaging critique of state patronage for IKS as “a state-sponsored farce”. But can it happen without state leadership? Globally, every major intellectual and cultural shift has required not just social energy but political leadership as well. Many of us disagree with the BJP on many counts. But its centrality in creating the context for the recent flowering of IKS activity is hard to dispute. The larger issue, though, is not political. It is intellectual. Yadav makes several critiques of the current IKS effort — that it …
