Imagine a world in which Western college students feasted on ideas and arguments from China and India, but not from the West itself. They never grappled with Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Virgil, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Dante, Shakespeare, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, Mill, Dostoevsky, Marx, Darwin, or others. They only heard of these figures because they were required to memorise a list of their names and most famous works in high school. If they wanted to know more, they turned to a popular comic series aimed at children that sketched the lives of these figures, and sometimes even their ideas, though sketchily. All that remained in the West was a faint memory of the greatness of these figures, and since they lay unread, nobody quite knew why they were great.

In our imagined world, the widespread ignorance of the Western greats was not innocent. Some reasoned, badly, that only what they had studied could have value, and since they had not studied the Western greats, they could not be valuable. Others lamented a lost golden age of the West, though were embarrassed to find themselves at a loss to spell out what made it golden. Some supplemented their lamentation with a sense of historical grievance and impoverished themselves by refusing to study ideas and arguments from China and India. Alarmingly, some took a more sinister turn by projecting outright fantasies as a salve to their sense of inferiority: the President of the United States even insisted against all evidence that it was the

West, not China, that invented gunpowder! What nobody did was to read the greats.

What is merely a thought experiment about the West is India’s sad reality. Indian college students feast on ideas and arguments from the West, but seldom grapple with the original texts of our own traditions. They memorise lists of authors and famous texts in school, read Amar Chitra Katha, but have not immersed themselves in the ideas and arguments found in those texts. The costs of that ignorance are all too apparent. The Left either ignores our traditions as politically suspect or views them only through Leftist spectacles. The Right talks selectively about our traditions, but only in the service of bolstering national pride, rather than in the service of truth. What almost nobody does is read our traditions in a way that is sensitive, sophisticated, and critical. Happily, there is a single exception to this dismal story: Ashoka.

Since the beginning of Ashoka, “Indian Civilisations” has been one of our Foundation Courses. Cartoonish conceptions of our cultural heritage do not survive first contact with the texts themselves. Students find the texts they encounter to be far more surprising, interesting, and challenging to their preconceptions than they had imagined. Indian Civilisations leaves students with a sense of the novelty, subtlety, and rigour of Indian traditions.

Apart from its value to students, Indian Civilisations at Ashoka will be a significant site of knowledge creation in the future. The American philosopher Hilary Putnam once quipped that a classic is a text that grows smarter as you do. There is a universe worth of classic texts that could find their way into Indian Civilisations: the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra, Vyasa’s Mahabharata and Valmiki’s Ramayana, Shankara and Ramanuja’s Vedanta, Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Nammalvar’s Tiruvaymoli, Cuntarar’s Tevaram, the poetry of Kalidasa, Akka Mahadevi, Kabir, Surdas, Mirabai and Tulsi Das, Jayadev, Tukaram, the Buddhist Suttas, Mahayana Sutras, and treatises by Nagarjuna, Shantideva, Kamalshila, the Tattvartha Sutra, works by Amir Khusrau... this incomplete list gives an indication of the size of the cultural terrain that begs exploration. Course lectures grow up to be books: as Ashoka grows and more iterations of this course emerge, expect to see a flood of scholarship shedding new light on texts not generally discussed in the public domain.

Kranti Saran is Assistant Professor of Philosophy