Hindusthan ka Vikas : Ek adhunik Hindu prayog is what I want my title to be translated into. I would like to say at the outset that it is no attempt to exclude any other community from the development of the country. There is an attempt in India to imitate the western development models because of the premise that these models are perfect and the belief in western superiority in science. Before I try and dismantle that belief I would like to take a look at how the academia in this country has systematically undermined Indian knowledge and Indian knowledge systems. It goes without saying that we should accept any idea that is useful given that our conditions are conducive to that idea. People's distrust in the academics today is the result of their denigration and degradation of all things Indian rather all things Hindu as saffron terror. All the knowledge and schools of thought that have emanated from India will have saffron shade no matter how much you try to delink it with it's root sources. The Vedic religion, then the Jain and the Buddhist and Sikh religion and all the different schools of philosophy among these religions have saffron all over them. The Vedic religion being the oldest has had it's influence on Jain discourses and the Jain ideas along with the Vedic principles do show their traces in Buddhism and the amalgamation of all these ideas and principles and systems have shown their confluence in the Sikh tradition along with an Islamic shade in the Sikh rituals. It is obvious that the influence of any past knowledge does not take away the glory and the creativity of new knowledge. Every new religion brought along with it a new stream of thought which answered some old questions and posed many anew. All this ought to have by the dawn of Industrial revolution been organised into a systematic Pan-Hindu body of Knowledge and the specialisation among this body of knowledge of any one organic part could have been a matter of deeper academic enquiry. The organic synthesis of all these religions and along with it the common culture and knowledge only added to the net cultural capital of the Indian people and their material output in the world. The segregation of these schools in the modern system has led to much confusion and will only lead to more failures in developing a contemporary pan Indian narrative on the various moral, ethical and scientific issues. All these schools are saffron in essence and so any attempt to formalise them into a University or high school syllabus will be rightly called saffronisation by the critiques. The criticism of the marxists and the muslims and other communities should be considered and can always be weighed against what they are saying what does it mean when we say that our education needs to be Indianised. The marxists and the muslims fear that the Indianisation of the education might lead to dogmas creeping in , in the form of facts and could be deceptive and defective. Also there is an element of religion-neutrality which is how secularism is defined in India. Dharma is a Sanskrit non translatable and should be viewed as so in practice. Let us say that more and more Universities have whole rooms and libraries dedicated to Indian philosophy and another for Western philosophy then it is very much clear that Indian philosophy students will find books on Vedantism,adavait vedanta,Syadvad,paticca samupad etc which are all Indian (Hindu) streams of philosophies. Now if ever such a situation arises the very criticism of the marxists etc is actually an act of arrogance where in they are asking the question "Why are we learning Hindu philosophy ? "or "how can we learn hindu philosophy for it is useless according to Marx". Their problem with the word hindu should be addressed by themselves and others concerned and also the inevitability of saffronisation of education when introducing Indian knowledge systems should be recognised which is fairly obvious at least to me. The word Hindu definded as anyone born to the east of the Indus River and west of the Himalayas and whose religion also originating in this land is a Hindu is an accurate definition both historically and logically. Minority communities in India need not fear because they also are identified with that epithet abroad and it should be no shame to anyone to be identified as a Hindu.
The choice of Indianisation of our education system has been made by the people or at least people have raised concerns along similar lines (some people call it decolonisation) and so the issue has to be looked at without any political bias. The people have recognised the value of Indian knowledge and other non western systems of knowledge and hence the demand for change.The first step would be to try and accumulate all the above mentioned knowledge from the above mentioned knowledge systems/religions into one body of knowledge which is organic in the sense that a Sanskrit language dictionary or nomenclature book (panini's grammar etc)will make it easy for any scholar to study any similar idea within these different schools and the same Sanskrit will also aid when different ideas are studied across different schools of Hindusthan. Such an effort which is very difficult but a possible task should ensure that all attempts by fake godmen and malicious political opportunists to insert untrue and non factual peculiarities and dogmas in this body oranique can be averted. Such a body of knowledge is to be maintained by the government and should be a very flexible body in terms of what can be added and what not but only after critical examination. A government with unending will can take up this task and I hope one of these days one of these governments can carry out this Agni Yatra.
So far we have talked about schools of thought or knowledge systems and even vaguely used the world religion to accommodate all the fruitful ideas and dogmas of our organic self sufficient culture. This is all tatvagnyan or philosophy. A similar and immediate need to re write the history and philosophy of science cannot be overstated. It definitely need not be written citing religious books or storybooks or according the whims and demands of a few hindu zealots but rather by recognising the work of the scholars who in this instance themselves did not set out to be science and math historians but had to take up the task for the current history and philosophy of science is full of Church dogma and western bias. (one such scholar is CK Raju) As mentioned earlier there needs to be a critical examination of the already told history which already has been dismantled and is already being challenged.
Only after efforts in these 2 aspects of decolonisation or Indianisation of our education system can we in the most original and Indian way possible harmonise our view of the world with modernity for every culture has it's own way of blending in with the modern way of life but it has to be original and organic. The success of the above mentioned tasks will see a revival of lot of our values blended in with modernism o modernity, what have you but it will be an original cultural growth of the Indian people and not a 2nd rate copy of the west.
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