Revisiting History in perspective of colonial scenario and onward..
Philosophy in pre-colonial India was far from something like an academic discipline as we understand it today; this was very much a part of socially legitimated agenda, and the philosophers had a well defined / secured role to play within the system of socio-economic hierarchy in different ways.
But colonial India brought a definite end to this socio-economic structure along with the typical style of thought / knowledge dynamics nourished within that very framework. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of colonial response to West in India was about different socially engineered artifacts to substantiating myths as Truth …, ‘powered’ mainly by different levels of commitments to the framework of Binaries like Traditional-Modern , secular-religious , Colonial –National and like .. One of the consequences of these social artifacts was typically about the different ways our Traditional knowledge store ( our collective attitude towards the content of this store !) was started getting redefined in a restructured social context.Of course, ‘What constitutes Knowledge’ is well known to have been redefined quite often in course of History of civilization right from the beginning, and keeping this in view , ‘our knowledge’ – referred to any cultural origin, seems to be no more than successfully unstable ! But the typical mode of instability, revealed in course of colonial redefinition, compelled us (in Bengal as well as India), for the first time, to make sense of an altogether new question in our historical perspective yet –
How much of the ‘traditionally received’ Knowledge can be meaningfully integrated with ‘another’ knowledge system of the-then Western origin reached India by that time?
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14th Nalanda Dialog 