We often hear of the “idea of India”, by which is meant contemporary India, sometimes with the corollary that India did not exist as an identifiable entity before the colonial era and is somehow an “unnatural country”. Yet from early times, integrating mechanisms were at work across this landmass to create — deliberately or not — a diffuse, fluid, multifarious, adaptable, assimilative, but also tangible, well-defined and distinctive pan-Indian identity. Those mechanisms resulted in shared concepts and practices in fields as diverse as polity and governance, arts and literature, sacred geography and pilgrimage, sacred ecology, religion, sciences and technologies, among other knowledge systems.

This fourth edition of IIT Gandhinagar’s course on Indian Knowledge Systems will be co-taught by several eminent scholars from various fields, who will investigate the elaboration of the ancient “idea of India”. The course’s outcome will be a deeper understanding of India’s underlying cultural unity, which at the same time encouraged infinitely diverse manifestations. As Tagore put it, “The unity of India has been and shall always be a unity in diversity.”