For a few decades now, a project called the ‘Indian Knowledge System’ (IKS) has sought to integrate traditional Indian wisdom into modern educational curricula. There is a legitimate quest to reclaim India’s indigenous intellectual history and to elevate an informal cultural aspiration into a part of education — but the IKS of today is not it.

The real IKS might focus on the linguistics of Panini, the Nyaya school of logic, the Kerala school of mathematics, the development of Wootz steel, and so on. But the IKS being institutionalised, including under IIT-Mandi director Laxmidhar Behera, is concerned with “Puranic science”, mythology as history, ritual as technology, and an open contempt for verifiability.