A free, fully online national conference on India's knowledge traditions and their bearing on the present, across law, governance, philosophy, science, health, environment, language and the arts.
Indian Knowledge Systems are not a museum. The mathematics that carried zero and the decimal place into the world, the grammar Panini wrote that still reads like a formal specification, the clinical texts behind Ayurveda, the treatises on statecraft and dispute resolution, the water and forest practices that kept dry regions alive: these were working bodies of knowledge, built and corrected over centuries by people solving real problems.
A good deal of it was set aside during the colonial period, not because it stopped working but because a different account of what counts as knowledge was installed over it. NEP 2020 has asked universities to bring these traditions back into teaching and research. That is easy to announce and hard to do well. Done carelessly it becomes nostalgia or slogan. Done seriously it means reading the primary sources, testing the claims, and asking where an old method still answers a question we have today and where it does not.
This conference is an invitation to do the serious version. We want papers that go to the texts and the practices, that argue rather than celebrate, and that connect a tradition of knowledge to a problem someone is actually trying to solve now, in law and governance, in health and environment, in language and education, in science and craft. Critical work is as welcome as recovery work. What we are not interested in is hagiography on one side or reflexive dismissal on the other.
Contributions move through two stages. An author first submits an abstract of 250 to 300 words, which the editorial committee reviews. On acceptance, the author submits the full paper, which then goes through double-blind peer review. Only accepted full papers are presented. Participation is free for everyone, presenters and audience alike, and the conference is held entirely online.
Between ten and fifteen selected papers will be published in a peer-reviewed journal. Other selected papers will appear in an edited volume carrying an ISBN. Every presenting author receives an e-certificate.
Adv. Gyan Prakash Kesharwani and Mr. Prasanna Kumar Shukla. The advisory and organising committee will be announced shortly.
The full call for papers, with the submission portal and the confirmed dates, opens soon. Institutions and departments interested in associating with the conference are welcome to write to us now.
