Indian Knowledge System in Digital Commerce: Integrating Ancient Wisdom into Contemporary E-Commerce Frameworks

The confluence of India's millennia-old knowledge traditions and the rapidly evolving landscape of digital commerce presents a paradigm of profound intellectual and commercial significance. Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), encompassing disciplines such as Arthashastra (statecraft and economic governance), Ayurveda (life sciences), Yoga (mind-body practices), Vastu Shastra (environmental architecture), and diverse schools of philosophy and ethics, contain within them sophisticated frameworks for commerce, resource allocation, consumer psychology, and ethical trade. This paper examines how these ancient bodies of knowledge are being re-contextualised, applied, and commercialised within the digital economy. Drawing upon a chronological review of ten peer-reviewed studies spanning 2005 to 2024, this research maps the trajectory of scholarly interest in IKS-informed digital commerce, identifies key thematic clusters, and proposes an integrative model for embedding traditional wisdom into modern e-commerce strategy. The findings suggest that IKS principles offer actionable insights for sustainable business ethics, personalised consumer engagement, and trust-building in digital marketplaces—areas where contemporary digital commerce continues to face significant challenges. This paper contributes to the growing discourse on decolonising knowledge in business education and practice, while simultaneously identifying gaps that future research must address. A conceptual model—the IKS-Digital Commerce Synergy Model (IDCSM)—is introduced to organise the findings across four interrelated dimensions: product innovation, ethical governance, intellectual property, and knowledge transmission.