“Indian Knowledge System” via
IIT-Kharagpur Calendar 2022

A Fascist Register?

Ashoke Mukhopadhyay

The Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, West Bengal, published this year a special calendar (henceforth IIT-KC) for 2022 in which they have posted in the pages of the successive months different aspects of Indian Knowledge System (IKS). This has naturally provoked a host of debates in the country and abroad. People are expressing their opinions—for or against. Some renowned historians and scientists of our country have already placed some valuable criticisms. The IITs are the centres of excellence in science and technology education in India. These are highly valued in the world. What they say has a great impact on the public opinion. If they say something that is gravely disastrous, we are duty bound to take sides and put forward our critical views in this running discourse. 

[One]

What is This “Indian Knowledge System”?

We are severely jolted at the outset at the phrase Indian Knowledge System. We are also astonished to see most of the critics of the IIT-KC gloss over this phrase. They did not subject it to any critical examination. Perhaps they are unaware of the danger such postmodern lexicons pose through this phraseology.

However, barring the few advocates and greedy intellectuals of the saffron fold, anybody associated with the process of acquisition of knowledge knows that knowledge admits of no geographical boundary. Knowledge has its place of origin. But whatever is knowledge is a possession of mankind the world over. Historiography records the where and when of the knowledge generated first. Pythagoras was born in Samoa of Greece, but nobody considers the theorem assigned to his name a part of the Greek system of knowledge. Similarly, the theories of gravitation or organic evolution are not British system of knowledge. Nor is the modern theory of relativity German or Jewish system of knowledge. Nobody so far thought like this. For the same reason the concept of zero and decimal value placement system of numbers that originated in China and India are not Indian or Chinese system of knowledge. It is not that Portugal has a different number concept or that Bolivia views organic evolution differently. It is likewise ridiculous to argue that Kenya does not require the Apollonius’ theorem in their geometry or that the law of gravitation is invalid in Malaysia, where the ripe mangoes, severed from the branches of the tree, fly upward.

The great poet Tagore once wrote in one of his essays, “What is true has no geography.” [Tagore 1989, 619-20] This small statement is of tremendous importance. If the BJP/RSS agree to accommodate this in their “Indian system of knowledge”, there will be havoc.

This is an essential character of knowledge. Anything man got to know since the beginning has become impersonal and multi-personal knowledge. Then and thereby it became an integral part of universal knowledge. There is nothing as knowledge reserved for a nation or a country.

Let us take a simple example. When Mr X of the village M under Sundarban came to know that there are crocodiles in the river which may knife through a man’s leg under water, the entire village M absorbed the information. The people of other adjacent villages also got to know this. Thereafter whoever came to Sundarban received this knowledge. This is no more a knowledge of the village M only. On the other hand, because of the spread of this information outside, the people of the village M did not lose it. They did not feel the need to “restore” the knowledge.

This means, the universality of knowledge does not deprive the land where it originated first or the people who did it, of that knowledge. When the people of France came to know of Newton’s law of gravitation, England lost nothing. Whatever knowledge, similarly, India had developed, spread to the world but did not leave India. The knowledge is still extant there, well received and recognized in detail. There is no need to “restore” it and brand it as Indian system of knowledge. Open a standard book on the history of sciences in India by both Indian and foreign authors and you will see ample evidence. I had myself referred to around 31 such works in a paper presented to a workshop organized by the Asiatic Society Kolkata. [Mukhopadhyay 2006] 

Unless there is some ulterior motive!

They need to project and “restore” something as ancient Indian knowledge system, for the reason that the world does not recognize that as knowledge proper, and/or has already rejected as fiction and myth. We are at a loss to see how a renowned institution like the IIT Kharagpur could stoop so low as to succumb to the fanatic claims of the ruling party at the centre.

[Two]

Kashyapa Means Turtle

Seven sages—who are they?

The IIT-KC referred to seven “rhishi”s who are claimed to be the first among the ancient wise men of the country. Please note the names: Kashyapa, Bharadwaja, Gautama, Jamadagni, and so forth. Long back first some English commentators and following them Khiti Mohan Sen [Sen 1946, 98-107] and Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay [Chattopadhyay 1959, 76-122] showed in great detail that these names actually indicate totems of the ancient people belonging to both the Vedic and non-Vedic tribes. In the post-Vedic times, after some hundreds of years, when the oldest Puranas began to be compiled and written, the totems were viewed as real persons, the first member of the concerned family tree, and wise men or sages. 

Let us explain.

Kashyapa means the turtle. In the Rigvedic times one of the Vedic tribe considered themselves being born of the turtle. So the turtle was their totem. Similarly, those who regarded their progeny to have come from the cow (gau), called themselves Gautama. Bharadwaj (< bharat + vaj) was a species of well running horses. That also became the totem of a group or phratry. Examples may be extended. The Sandilya phratry refers to the group which thought they had descended from the Sanda (the ox). Vatsa implied the calf. It was also the totem of some group of people in a tribe.

So on and so forth. Sen had supplied with no less than a thousand totems of this kind.  

Agni (fire), Surya (the Sun), Chandra (the Moon) etc. were totems of some tribes too.

Hence the presentation of these names as sages is thoroughly wrong. To present them as wise men, it is necessary to mention what specific knowledge each of these names had produced, when and in which field, with proper evidence. Otherwise attachment of rhishi or muni to these names does not add to their importance even by a Nano gram. Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar had strongly objected to such attachment to the ancient names in one of his essays on the Sanskrit Language and literature. [Vidyasagar 1972, 121]

However, a party that adopted a programme to demolish a statue of Vidyasagar may be hardly expected to pay heed to his objections. The rarity of intelligence is another matter.

[Three]

Mathematics and Language

They have found 0 and 1 in the Rig-Veda. I don’t see how. In the four Vedas and the thirteen basic Upanishads I did not see the mathematical concept of zero. As numerical concepts, three and seven recur here and there. For example, there are references to the three Vedas (Atharvaveda was not regarded as a Veda in ancient times), seven rivers (saptasindhu), etc. Although where they mention the seven rivers, there are actually names of ten streams [Rv 10/75/6], which shows the inaccuracies in their counting. However, when Sayan provides explanation of this hymn, he wrote “seven river streams”, thereby implying that the people by then had acquired correct counting. The concept of 1 seldom occurs, and mostly in opposition to the idea of many. A very famous statement runs as—“Ekam sadvipra bahudha badanti”. [Rv 1/164/46] This means, learned men call the same thing by many titles.  

The IIT-KC found the decimal numeral system in the ten divisions of the Rig-Veda, which they attribute to the Vedas. On the contrary, it is nowadays a common knowledge that the Vedas were composed, recited, propagated and memorized through an oral tradition for at least five to seven hundred years (1500/1250 to circa. 750 BCE). When the entire collection of hymns began to be compiled in a written form since, the verses were divided into the ten mandalas. So this use of the decimal numeral system was due to the 100-th or 150-th successors of the Vedic scribes, not to the scribes themselves. These IIT people aren’t surely as ignorant as not to know this.  

On the basis of this discovery of number system they claimed Sanskrit to be the most suitable language for computational sciences, tacitly indicating computer.

A simple question will occur to anybody, if one’s brain is open to that: Those who are using computers and/or smartphones are surely aware that all instructions in these devices are in American English. Even if you choose to work in Bengali or Hindi, you have to select the option through that same language. Where is Sanskrit in that series of operations? Have any of you seen?

Secondly, computer works with a non-natural language having no direct truck with any human speech. It is a sort of computational and symbolic language with only two letters—‘0’ and ‘1’. A computer receives and transmits all information based on these two letters. The nature of working of a computer may be best understood by looking at the URL we attach with an essay, news, audio and video clips, etc. as links on the net. These are still now composed of the Phoenician alphabets and not the Devnagari. Have you seen a URL composed of the Sanskrit alphabets so far? Even the BJP and RSS put up their links with the same English letters and symbols.

The third question is, what do you mean by a scientific language? Why should a particular language be a scientific one? All languages in the world have emerged in a natural human social process, and are therefore equally rational and equivalent. Yes, there are differences among them—in the size of vocabulary, grammatical structure and gnosiological capacity as well. It is true that Sanskrit had an exemplary capacity to convey ideas. But in the middle ages when the vernaculars like Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Hindi (and Urdu), Tamil. Malayalam, Telugu, Kanada, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, etc. developed with greater capacity, Sanskrit began to lag behind. However, the Brahmanic tradition continued to impose Sanskrit over the other languages in order to preserve its dominance and deprive the common masses of the intellectual practices. As a result the language became isolated from the people and gradually died. Today Sanskrit is totally divorced from the knowledge process. This is something not only we the “Seku-Maku” assert, but even Swami Vivekananda, their icon, had also alerted us about it. 

Let us hear:

“In our country, owing to all learning being in Sanskrit from the ancient times, there has arisen an immeasurable gulf between the learned and the common folk. All the great personages, from Buddha down to Chaitanya and Ramakrishna, who came for the well-being of the world, taught the common people in the language of the people themselves. Of course, scholarship is an excellent thing; but cannot scholarship be displayed through any other medium than a language that is stiff and unintelligible, that is unnatural and merely artificial? Is there no room for art in the spoken language? . . . No artificial language can ever have that force, and that brevity and expressiveness, or admit of being given any turn you please, as that spoken language. Language must be made like pure steel — turn and twist it any way you like, it is again the same — it cleaves a rock in twain at one stroke, without its edge being turned. Our language is becoming artificial by imitating the slow and pompous movement — and only that — of Sanskrit. And language is the chief means and index of a nation’s progress. . . . 

Language is the vehicle of ideas. It is the ideas that are of prime importance, language comes after. . . . Just look at Sanskrit. Look at the Sanskrit of the Brâhmanas, at Shabara Swâmi’s commentary on the Mimâmsâ philosophy, the Mahâbhâshya of Patanjali, and, finally, at the great Commentary of Achârya Shankara: and look also at the Sanskrit of comparatively recent times. You will at once understand that so long as a man is alive, he talks a living language, but when he is dead, he speaks a dead language. The nearer death approaches, the more does the power of original thinking wane, the more is there the attempt to bury one or two rotten ideas under a heap of flowers and scents. Great God! What a parade they make! After ten pages of big adjectives, all on a sudden you have — “There lived the King!” Oh, what an array of spun-out adjectives, and giant compounds, and skilful puns! They are symptoms of death. When the country began to decay, then all these signs became manifest.” [Vivekananda 1989; cited from the online text]

So at least Vivekananda had no doubt in his mind about the decadence of the Sanskrit language in our time.

Now the Union Government since the time of the democratic and socialist Rajiv Gandhi to the present Hindu Right communal BJP has been spending billions of rupees to resuscitate the dead language of Sanskrit, although without any hope. Sanskrit has become irreversibly a library/museum language, quite useful for the study of India’s ancient past, but not as a vehicle thought or learning. 

They also claim that Sanskrit is the original, the oldest, the mother of all the Indo-European languages. This comes at a time when it is more or less universally acknowledged that Sanskrit is the last of that classical group of languages. Even the Vedas were not composed in Sanskrit but in a spoken form of proto-Sanskrit, which being moderated and modified gave birth to the Sanskrit language as it is known today in its written form.

The learned men of the IIT-KC commented, perhaps inadvertently, in the page of February: “Sanskrit means the most perfected and cultured among languages.” Oh my! They did not understand that directly the claim of maternity had thereby fallen. Perfection and cultivation need time, imply something already extant being processed to produce a better outcome in course of time. The trouble is that the brains stuffed with cow, cow dung and cow urine are hardly capable of judging which two claims are mutually inconsistent.

So all these claims of the IIT-KC makers are also thoroughly baseless, misfactual, unhistorical and illogical.

[Four]

Astral and Cosmological Theory?

The IIT-KC claimed, astronomy and cosmology had developed in ancient Indian Vedic period to such a degree that it is relevant still today.

As regards fact, the text that related to the celestial objects was called Vedanga Jyotish. Despite the title, it had nothing to do with the Vedas or their time. For the six Vedangas were composed after Upanishadas, during King Asoka’s time. And its knowledge level was very limited, in fact only a small part of the solar system. The terms like jagata, sangsara, brahmanda, etc. that appeared in the Vedic and post-Vedic literature did not extend far beyond this earth. It mentioned the Venus, Mars and Jupiter but not Mercury or Saturn. There is no distinction yet between the planets and the stars. The Moon occupies more space than the sun. It did not know the existence of the meteors or the comets. 

They have enrolled Varahamihira, the astronomer of the sixth century in the IKS. The same Varahamihira had placed the Graeco-Roman astronomy that came to India during the tenure of Alexander higher than the Vedanga jyotish. He held the ancient Indian astronomy as “durvibhrasta” (that is, strayed away). We are afraid this information will not find a place in the IKS of these people. 

Despite the absence of most of the members of the solar system, it is beyond the comprehension of our limited knowledge system how they visualized the universe in the Vedanga jyotish. 

There are many other false claims. Recently the astrophysicist Rajesh Kochhar and a member of the National Science academy ParthaPratim Majumdar showed in an essay that the Calendar mentioned certain hymns from the Rigveda which actually were not there. [Kochhar and Majumdar 2022] The implicit idea is—Let us claim whatsoever, who is there to check everything!

[Five]

Immigration of the Vedic Tribes

IIT-KC projected two highly disputable theses, which the authors seem to have consciously done. Readers may be aware that these are RSS agenda since its inception:

1. The “Indo-Aryans” did not migrate to India from outside; they are the original inhabitants of this land and migrated westward;
2. Harappan civilization is a part of the Vedic “civilization”. The Vedic sages had created the Indus civilization. These two are not distinct and separate.

RSS holds that the theses of immigration of the Vedic people from outside and the separation of the Harappan civilization from the Vedic settlements are part of foreign conspiracy.

Let us see one by one.

Agenda (a). Let me first of all point out to a serious mistake committed by most of the historians of India, not excluding the Marxist and materialist writers. It is unpardonably wrong to label the founders of the Vedic culture as “Aryans”, “Indo-Aryans”, “Vedic Aryans”, etc. For better clarity and veracity let us call them the Vedic tribes.

The fact that these Vedic tribes had migrated from the west and settled at the Sindhu-Ganga sub-Himalayan peninsula—was conceived till fifty years back as a social scientific hypothesis. Today the hypothesis is pretty confirmed by hordes of hard facts. Earlier the hypothesis had only linguistic support; however, that conjecture was so strong that starting from IswarChandra Vidyasagar and Akkhay Datta in the nineteenth century to Suniti Chatterjee, B. K. Ghosh, and even R. C. Majumdar, associated with the Hindu Mahasabha, had accepted the thesis without doubt. They showed no hesitation for the lack of archaeological evidence till then. 

In the last fifty years lots of archaeological data began to pour in. For instance, let us take the case of horse fossil. It is known to all that horse is not a natural animal in Indian region. There is not a single horse fossil in the archaeological sites of Mehergarh and Harappa. In other words, in the vast region of north western undivided India, for roughly six thousands of years (8000-2000 BCE) the absence of horse remains compels one to accept the fact that horse did not exist in this area. On the contrary, Rig-Veda refers to horse a large number of times, at least 215 times. That means the Vedic people had an intimate relation with the horse. If they are the original populace of the north west India, how could they find horse? Where, or wherefrom? How did horse appear in the Vedic literature?

Does the IIT-KC make any attempt to reply to these queries?

No, instead of citing any scientific hard fact they cited some emotional statements from the writings of the religious preachers like Swami Vivekananda and Aurobinda. This is akin to citing Tagore’s verses in support of a solution of certain quantum mechanical problem; or, bringing in human genome to analyze a poem of Tennyson. Can’t one do this? Ya, surely one can; only with the risk of committing preposterous errors.

In Europe there are horse fossils since very olden times. That implies, the horse is a natural animal there. A horse remains have been excavated in Iran which dated back to 4000 BCE. The earliest horse fossil near the Harappan sites is from 2200 BCE. That is to say, these also make a calendar. Horse is coming from the west to the east in the wake of time. That is, some people are bringing them. A community of people who are acquainted the animal is goading them here.

We may adduce much more facts and arguments. One of my junior friends has recently discussed them at great length in an essay. [Das 2022] Kochhar and Majumdar have also mentioned many salient things. 

Is it possible to deny these facts?

It is, if you have an interest. Just as Comrade Lenin had once remarked, “There is a well-known saying that if geometrical axioms affected human interests, attempts would certainly be made to refute them.” [Lenin 1977, 31] What to speak of the question of migration of the Vedic people.

What is the interest involved here?

To support another thesis of the RSS lobby: Hindus are purely indigenous, and the Muslims are foreigners. They want to use this as an extra lever in their hate campaign against the Muslims. Now, if the predecessors of the present generations of the Hindus were also outsiders at some point of time, the hate politics would lose a prop. So this thesis must be pushed up at any cost. Seated in the saddle of the Union Government, the BJP is now in a position to depute directors in the central institutes like the IITs. They are appointing loyal Sangh brand people to these posts. And there are always some people who want to have a slice of the cake of power. Those men are producing the RSS theses wherever necessary and when.

However, had this result come up in the course of an independent research, they could gain something positive. This imposed product is anything but reliable and is easily identified as the political creed of the rulers. But it could be hardly anything else, with the generous Union funding on cow urine research.   

They thought the prestige of the IIT would make the false thesis acceptable beyond doubt. Sorry, the world system of knowledge did not accept it.  

[Six]

Harappa Civilization vs. Vedic Culture

Let us look at the second thesis or the agenda (b): Indus civilization is a part and continuation of the Vedic “civilization”. The Vedic sages had created it. These two are not ethnically distinct and separate.

This is another agenda of the RSS family. We must have Harappa. The Vedic sages must be made the architect of this advanced culture. They are adopting multitudinous exercises to achieve this false feat. For the last forty years, they had been trying to restyle the dry channel of Ghaggar-Hakra in Haryana and Rajasthan as the “Vedic Saraswati River”, call the ancient settlements there as Vedic homes and revise the Indus Civilization as the Saraswati Civilization. Then it would be very easy to grab the Indus Valley Civilization as being a product of the Vedic heritage. 

With this aim in view The BJP lobby organized a geology conference in 1997 at the Maharaj Shahjirao University in Vadodara, Gujarat. They made a collective attempt to misinterpret the IRS satellite images of the Sindhu River system and impose the palaeochannels of Satadru and Yamuna Rivers on the dry beds of Ghaggar-Hakra as the Vedic mythical Saraswati River. [Radhakrishna and Merh eds. 1999] It had influenced a number of serious historians of the land. I had at that time endeavoured to expose the game in some essays. [Mukhopadhyay 2000; Mukhopadhyay 2002] I am trying to continue the work in my recent writings in some Bengali portals. [Mukhopadhyay 2022] 

Why can’t Harappa Civilization be considered a part of Vedic culture?

1. First, in the evolutionary scale of history Harappa represents a higher, urban culture, spread well over 500,000 square miles in the north western part of the undivided India, in the sites like Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Chanhu-Daro, Dholabira, Kalibangan, etc. Vedic culture is a pre-urban rural nomadic and pastoral mode of life. History demarcates between culture and civilization with certain well defined desiderata. One cannot wish it away.
2. Indus valley Civilization came to an abrupt end around 1850 BCE (why and how I shall narrate later). India arrived at another urban stage in the fourth century BCE next, when we came to know of the sixteen great city states. In the intervening period of one millennia and a half, there is no evidence of brick built houses, walls, sewage system, grain storehouses, etc. If the Vedic people were able to create the Harappa urban culture, how is it that they failed to do so in the later period for so long a time?        

3) All the Harappan sites bear evidences of agriculture and trades. That is, they had developed an organized agrarian and commercial economy. The Vedic culture, as reflected in the Vedic and late-Vedic literature, bespeaks animal domestication. And the main form of food gathering is of plunder of the crops and animals of the surrounding alien tribes. There is no trace of agriculture and trading. The legends of Ahalya and the story about of Sita in Ramayana indicate that the descendants of the Vedic tribes had been able to invent agriculture only by the time of the second stage of the accretion of the epic, that is, in the post-Buddha times.

4) The sites of the Indus Valley Civilization elicit quite a large assortment of evidence relating to writings, alphabets, weights, numerals, counting and measurement. On the other hand, in the life of the Vedic culture, writing and grammar are mentioned only after the eighth century BCE, and documents of the earliest scripts, the Brahmi scripts, refer to the fourth century BCE. If the same community of people had created both the Harappan and Vedic cultures, the discrepancies defy adequate and satisfactory explanation.

5) We have already mentioned the case of horse as a separator. Now almost all the communities of people speaking any of the Indo-European tongues had the use of chariot as a fast running light vehicle, especially in war. Its wheel has spokes, which match the vehicle of the nomadic and marshal tribes. The Indus sites, on the contrary, evince carts with heavy wheels, fit for slow movement and for bulk of cargoes. This type of carts is absent in the Vedic communities, just as the chariots are not found among the Indus settlements. 

6) Had Harappan civilization really been the creation of the Vedic community the Sanskrit and Vedic scholars would have been able to read the Harappan seals. They should have on perseverant and consistent efforts recognized the alphabets and the writings. The fact that this remained as yet an unfulfilled task is another hard evidence that at least the two cultures had no linguistic linkage. 

We may of course talk of many other differences. But I feel whatever little I have mentioned here may suffice to see the distinctiveness of the two cultures—Sindhu Civilization and Vedic culture. The Calendar makers have pretty faithfully reiterated the RSS dogma without bothering the least for the facts, evidence and standard historiography. While betraying their blind sincerity to the antiquated doctrine it also exposed their utter lack of commitment to truth and knowledge. 

Let us deal with the question of the expiry of the Harappan civilization. A debate continues as to whether and how much the first waves of migration of the Vedic people had any impact on the end of this developed system. For, on the one hand in some sites like Mohenjo-Daro there are signs of murder and plunder and also of people leaving the havens in a hurry. On the other, there are some references in the Rig-Veda about destruction of cities, especially a city called “Hariupia” (= Harappa?) [Rv 6/27/25] and Indra, the captain of the deities, is no less than fifty times hailed as “Purandar” (= destroyer of cities). These had led some historians to hold the aggression of the incoming Vedic tribes responsible for the destruction of the Indus Valley settlements. [Wheeler 1968; Kosambi 1975, 72-75]

But later researches went against this possibility. It is more or less confirmed now that the highly developed copper-bronze culture of Harappa at some point confronted a grave environmental disaster. The denudation of the green cover for roughly two millennia to promote agriculture and urbanization in the Sindhu valley led to gradual diminution of precipitation, and on account of growing aridity the soil eventually lost the capacity to capture the moisture molecules. The Thar desert expanded in area. As a result much before the Vedic tribes’ arrival and settlements, the region was evacuated. [Habib 2002]

Thus, in view of the facts concerned one may affirm that there is not a single common element between the Harappan and Vedic cultures which may connect them as a continuous tradition. Those who disown these differences are actually disregarding the historical evidences and trying to impose their bigoted beliefs upon the course of history. This represents a long drawn psychological attraction to “Aryanophilia”.

Once we may get over this illusory attraction, I think, we Indians may feel pride in both the heritages of the Indus Valley Civilization and the Vedic culture. It is immaterial that they are not linked by any common thread of ethno-cultural elements, and there being no “Saraswati River”. All the people of the countries of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the common descendants of those who belonged to these two cultures. And they are the heir to a mixed culture created by them as well as combined with many other later currents. Properly understood, the pride in this inheritance is much heavier. 

The trouble is, the Sangh family and the present ruling party at the centre are strongly biased against the idea of such a pluralistic mixed culture. They want to construct the Indian history in a single brand of monolithic Brahminical male dominant emotional monotone glossing over all the diversities. It has its typical political basis in a fascist tendency, which we have to see through.

[Seven]

Myth—Fascist Need

Those who study fascism in various corners of the world and try to see the general trend of fascist propaganda observe: “Fascist politics, however, makes room for the study of myths as fact. In fascist ideology, the function of the education system is to glorify the mythic past, elevating the achievements of members of the nation and obscuring the perspectives and histories of those who do not belong. . . . In fascist ideology, the goal of general education in the schools and universities is to instill pride in the mythic past; fascist education extols academic disciplines that reinforce hierarchal norms and national tradition. For the fascist, schools and universities are there to indoctrinate national or racial pride, conveying for example (where nationalism is racialized) the glorious achievements of the dominant race.” [Stanley 2018, 46-47]   

This has been and still is one of the common aims of the fascist forces starting from Italy and Germany to this day. They try to glorify ancient past history of the nation or the dominant race they take to represent with more fictions than facts, and when in power, they propagate the myths based on falsehood from the pulpit of the higher educational institutions. The IIT-KC has done the same thing and with the same aim in view. 

If we are interested in the true history of India, if we want to study the history of science and technology of ancient India with facts and about the real people who made the contributions possible, the false propaganda of the IIT-KC must be opposed and exposed.

References

• Debiprasad Chattopadhyay (1959), Lokayata: A Study in ancient Indian Materialism; People’s Publishing House, Delhi. [Available online]
• Radhapada Das (2022), “Kharagpur IIT Calendar 2022 – A false religious fundamentalist propaganda about Sindhu and Vedic Civilization” (in Bengali); Purbanchal website; 3 February 2022.
• Irfan Habib (2002), The Indus Civilization; Tulika Books, New Delhi.
• Rajesh Kochhar and Partha Majumder (2022), “A Terrible Bargain”; The Stateman, 31 January 2022. [Available online]
• D. D. Kosambi (1975), An Introduction to the Study of Indian History; Popular Prakashan, Mumbai.
• V. I. Lenin (1977), “Marxism and Revisionism”; Collected Works, Vol. 15; Progress Publishers, Moscow.

• Ashoke Mukhopadhyay (2000), “Rigvedic Sarasvati River: Myth or Reality”; Breakthrough, December 2000. [Available online]
• Ashoke Mukopadhyay (2002), “The Truth about Rigvedic Sarasvati River: A pseudo-scientific revision of history and geography”; Socialist Perspective, Vol. 29 No. 3-4 (December 2001 – March 2002).   
• Ashoke Mukhopadhyay (2006), “The Science and Technology Policy 2003 at a Glance”; in Naresh Chandra Datta and Tulika Sen (2006 eds.), Aspects of History of Science; Asiatic Society, Kolkata [available online].
• Ashoke Mukhopadhyay (2022), “Sangh Lobby’s Geographical Science: Vedic Saraswati River”; Othervoice Portal, 8 January 2022 (in Bengali).
• B. P. Radhakrishna and S. S. Merh (1999), Vedic Sarasvati: Evolutionary History of a Lost River of Northwestern India; Geological Society of India, Bangalore.
• Khiti Mohan Sen (1946), Caste system; Vishwabharati, Kolkata (in Bengali).
• Jason Stanley (2018), How Fascism Works: The politics of Us and Them; Random House, New York.
• Rabindra Nath Tagore (1989), “Medium of Instruction”; Works, Vol. 9 (in Bengali); Vishwabharati, Kolkata.
• IswarChandra Vidyasagar (1972), “An Essay on the Sanskrit Language and Sanskrit Literature”; Vidyasagar Works, Vol. 3, edited by Gopal Haldar; Sakkharata Prakashan, Kolkata (in Bengali).
• Swami Vivekananda (1989), “The Bengali Language”; Works in English, Vol. 6; Adwaita Ashrama, India; cited from online edition.
• R. E. M. Wheeler (1968), The Indus Civilization; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

[Author is an activist of people’s science movement and the founder general secretary of CESSTUSS, Kolkata.]