Timeless Wisdom

India has often been accused of neglecting its own intellectual inheritance in favour of borrowed canons. Now, the University Grants Commission (UGC) has attempted something quietly radical by wanting its undergraduates to grapple with the mathematics of their own civilisation. A draft curriculum prepared under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 proposes modules on Kala Ganana - the traditional reckoning of time, Bharatiya Bijganit (Indian algebra), the mathematical insights embedded in the Puranas, and the astronomy of texts such as the Surya Siddhanta and Aryabhatiyam. This is no nostalgic dalliance. It is a recognition that the intellectual traditions of Hindu civilisation are not curios of the past, but deep wells of knowledge that can illuminate the present.

For decades, Indian students have been taught mathematics in a fashion borrowed wholesale from Europe, with a genealogy that jumps from Euclid to Newton and then lurches towards the abstractions of modern algebra. Yet India’s own masters like Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and Bhaskara were mapping planetary orbits, devising algebraic identities and calculating the value of π to astonishing accuracy long before Europe’s Renaissance.

To recover that lineage is intellectual self-respect.The curriculum’s eclecticism is striking. It asks students to study the Paravartya Yojayet Sutra, to explore the Panchanga, the Indian calendar still used to calculate auspicious muhurtas for rituals and to compare Vedic units of time such as ghatis and vighatis with Greenwich Mean Time and Indian Standard Time.

Some may scoff by questioning what need a budding mathematician could possibly have for the metaphysics of cosmic time? The answer lies in breadth. A civilisation that once measured the shadow of a gnomon in Ujjain to fix its prime meridian should not be ashamed to teach its students that science, like culture, has always been entangled with myth and ritual.

This initiative also deserves praise as it insists on integration rather than isolation. Students are not being asked to abandon modern mathematics. Instead, they are to see Vedic and classical Indian techniques as part of a longer continuum. Political science students will be exposed not only to Western thinkers but also to the statecraft of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, to Jain and Buddhist treatises, to the poetry of Kalidasa and the chronicles of Kalhana. Mathematics students will be taught that algebra did not arrive in India by accident of colonial curricula, but that it has roots in Sanskrit treatises as venerable as those of Europe’s Latin scholars.

Preserving such facets of Hindu civilization is about recognising that the past was richer, more diverse, and more inventive than the textbooks of the 20th century ever admitted. To introduce students to the elegance of Vedic timekeeping and the grand cosmologies of the Puranas is to expand their imagination of what mathematics can be and of knowledge itself. In doing so, India is equipping its youth with a deeper, more rooted sense of intellectual possibility.