Decolonising Knowledge: Reclaiming the Indian Knowledge System

Abstract

For centuries, one civilization had been allowed to decide what constitutes ―knowledge‖. Everything outside its frame was quietly filed away as belief, custom, or superstition. This unipolar viewpoint systematically pushed non-dominant civilizational paradigms into obscurity, entrenching deep cognitive hierarchies. This paper asks how such a claim came to feel natural in the first place, and what it cost the traditions it pushed aside. By studying and analysing Indian Knowledge System, it has been traced how an entire intellectual inheritance was not simply forgotten but actively unmade, and how that unmaking left its mark on the way people came to see their own past. Instead of focusing on the conventional schools of thought, this paper questioning not just the design of historical narratives, but the transformative potential unlocked when diverse civilizational traditions are fully acknowledged.