For more than a thousand years before the printing press reached the Indian shores, wisdom travelled as water does, trickling through oral traditions, gathering in royal courts and seats of learning, and now and then flooding whole civilisations. Long before the term ‘Indian Knowledge System’ entered policy documents and university syllabi, India’s scholars, doctors, mathematicians and poets were already talking to the wider world, borrowing from it and being borrowed in turn. Nowhere is that conversation more moving, or more useful to remember today, than in the long friendship between Sanskrit learning and the Arabic and Persian texts that arrived with traders, wandering scholars, travelers, Sufi mystics and, eventually, emperors. It matters because this is not simply old history. Ayurveda’s way of thinking about the whole person, not just the illness, is being studied seriously by medical professionals today. The old grammarian Panini, who wrote down the rules of Sanskrit over two thousand years ago with astonishing precision, is still admired by people who build language software for computers. Yoga and meditation, once practised quietly in ashrams, now help millions of people manage stress and anxiety, backed by real research. And the older habit this story is really about, people from different faiths sitting down together, learning each other’s languages, and taking each other’s ideas seriously, is something India could use more of right now, at a time when it often feels easier to shout past each other than to sit and listen.
The story begins in modernday Baghdad in Iraq. By the eighth century, the rulers there were paying scholars to translate Sanskrit books into Arabic. One of these was a great work on astronomy and mathematics by the Indian scholar Brahmagupta, which Arab scholars came to know as the Sindhind (derived from the Sanskrit word siddhanta, meaning “system” or “treatise”), which later known as Zij as-Sindhind. It served as a foundational milestone for mathematics and astronomy. Through this one book, Indian numerals, including the idea of zero, which changed mathematics forever, began travelling westward. They eventually reached Europe through Arabic texts, which is why the world still calls them, a little unfairly, “Arabic numerals”. A few centuries later, a scholar named AlBiruni actually moved to India, learned Sanskrit properly, and wrote a book called the Kitab alHind, trying honestly to explain Indian religion, science and philosophy to readers back home. He treated Indian ideas with the same seriousness he gave to Greek philosophy, not as some exotic curiosity. It remains one of the earliest examples anywhere in the world of one civilisation trying, patiently, to understand another.
This habit of translation grew much bigger under the Mughals. In the late sixteenth century, Emperor Akbar set up something like a royal translation office, the Maktab Khana, where Brahmin priests and Persianspeaking scholars worked side by side, translating India’s great epics into Persian, the language of his court. The Mahabharata became the Razmnama, the “Book of War”. The Ramayana, the Atharva Veda and the Yoga Vasistha, also known as Maha Ramayana, were all translated too. Akbar was not doing this out of idle curiosity. He genuinely wanted to understand the land and people he ruled, through their own stories. No one took this further than Akbar’s own great-grandson, the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh. He studied both Islamic mysticism and Hindu philosophy seriously, and came to believe something quite bold: that Sufi thought and Vedantic philosophy were, deep down, describing the same truth in different words. In 1657, working closely with Sanskrit scholars in Varanasi, he finished translating fifty Upanishads into Persian, in a book he called the Sirr-i-Akbar, “The Greatest Secret”. An earlier work of his, the Majma-ulBahrain, “The Confluence of Two Oceans”, laid Sufi and Hindu ideas side by side to show how closely they echoed each other. Dara lost the fight for the throne to his brother Aurangzeb and was killed in 1659, but his book survived him, and travelled far beyond anything he could have imagined.
Over a century later, a French scholar named Anquetil-Duperron came across Dara Shikoh’s Persian Upanishads and translated them into Latin. That Latin version began circulating among European thinkers at a time when the West knew almost nothing about Indian philosophy and traditional knowledge. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer read it and called it the most comforting and elevating book he owned, saying it had been the solace of his life and would be the solace of his death. This was not a oneoff accident. For centuries, the Islamic world had been the great bridge carrying knowledge between East and West translating Greek philosophy into Arabic, learning Indian mathematics and astronomy, and passing all of it onward into Europe through Muslim Spain and the Middle East. All of this came apart under colonial rule. Persian stopped being India’s administrative language in 1837 when the East India Company replaced it with English and vernacular languages, and much of the machinery that had kept this three-way conversation between Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic scholars alive fell away with it. Colonial schooling taught Indians to see their own sciences and philosophies as “traditional”, lesser cousins of a supposedly more advanced Western knowledge. A living, growing scholarly practice slowly turned into old manuscripts, gathering dust in archives, admired by a handful of specialists but forgotten by everyone else.
From the framework of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 to dedicated university programmes and research support, and even in the wider public’s eagerness to engage with older traditions, Indian Knowledge Systems are receiving a long-overdue spotlight. It offers a genuine opportunity to students. Some universities are already showing what this integration could look like in practice. In this endeavour, Jamia Millia Islamia, a central university founded on the very ideals of composite learning, has begun offering structured programmes on Indian Knowledge Systems and curriculum design for higher education, bringing scholars together to think through how this material can actually be taught rather than merely archived. Coming from an institution with deep roots in the Indo-Persian and Indo-Islamic scholarly tradition, this is a fitting and encouraging step, one that other universities across the country would do well to follow. This is precisely why teaching this history lessons is so important. Most Indian students finish education never knowing that their own heritage have left an indelible mark on the modern-day knowledge, whether Mughal prince translated the Upanishads, or that a European philosopher considered that translation one of the most important books he ever read, or that Indian numerals reached the West through Arab scholars who thought them worth passing on.
That is not a small gap. It shapes how an entire generation sees its own past, often leaving young people with the mistaken idea that Indian thought either had no contact with the outside world, or was somehow lesser because of it. Bringing this into classrooms, as the NEP encourages, is not about sentiment. It is about getting the story right. Students must understand Indian knowledge is something that travelled and grew, rather than something frozen in place until the British arrived. There is real work still to be done. Huge numbers of old Indo-Persian manuscripts sit uncatalogued in archives from Delhi to Rampur to Hyderabad to Patna, waiting for someone to read them. India needs scholars who can move comfortably between Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, instead of keeping these languages locked away in separate university departments that never talk to each other. The real lesson here is not that every tradition secretly agreed with each other. Beneath the surface of today’s discourse lies an older truth that India has always been an exponent of sustained debate and discussion. The willingness to engage earnestly across religious and linguistic boundaries is not a modern phenomenon but an age-old intellectual legacy that has survived far longer. This history once travelled all the way from a Sanskrit text to a Persian translation to a Latin edition to a philosopher’s writing desk in Germany. It can travel again into today’s classrooms, if we are willing to know it. That sense of belonging to a global intellectual lineage is the most valuable textbook we could ever offer.
*The writer is a Head of the Department of Persian and member of the Indian Knowledge System Committee of Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. The views expressed in the article are personal