Integrating Technology, Humanities, and Indian Knowledge Systems for Viksit Bharat’s Higher Education

The vision of a Viksit Bharat sets its higher education system a threefold task: to absorb advancing technology, to sustain the humanising work of the humanities, and to recover the depth of India’s own knowledge traditions. These are often pursued separately, and sometimes as rivals. This paper argues that they are strongest when integrated, and that Indian Knowledge Systems supply the principle by which technology and the humanities may be reconciled. The occasion for the argument is the arrival of generative artificial intelligence in the university, which now performs on demand a large part of what higher education has traditionally taught and assessed summarising, analysing, comparing, and composing often faster than the student examined on these operations. The development forces a question at once practical and philosophical: what does higher education accomplish that a machine cannot, and where should the machine be placed? The answer proposed here returns to a distinction already present in Indian epistemology, the Upaniṣadic difference between aparā vidyā, the lower knowledge of information and the disciplines, and parā vidyā, the higher knowledge that issues in realisation and self-understanding (Radhakrishnan, 1953). Artificial intelligence, it contends, is a powerful instrument of aparā vidyā that cannot enter the domain of parā vidyā, which the university exists to serve. Drawing on the doctoral research from which it arises, the paper synthesises classical Indian aesthetics (Rasa, Dhvani, Vakrokti, and the ideal of the sahr̥daya) and the Vedāntic learning sequence of Śravaṇa–Manana–Nididhyāsana into an integrated framework for higher education, within which technology is assigned a real but bounded role. Its principal field of application is English literary studies, where a brief textual illustration shows how Indian aesthetic categories and a contemplative classroom rhythm may reshape the reading and teaching of literature in an age of intelligent machines. Related throughout to the National Education Policy 2020, the paper concludes that such an integration offers Viksit Bharat a higher education in which the most advanced tools serve, rather than supplant, the oldest ends of learning.