I think I found an answer to what is (and can be) “Indian” in Indian knowledge systems. Ironically, the realisation and resolution to this perennial search for something authentically Indian dawned on me in Hungary where I was on a fellowship at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. The answer is perhaps an anti-climax and perhaps too simple for those attempting to decolonise Indian knowledge systems and retrieve what we can genuinely claim to be “ours”. But before I get to that, let me take you on a journey that I went on.The journey began in a café in Buda where I had a scheduled meeting with an American journalist and cultural anthropologist, Marc Roscoe Loustau, researching reporting and writing on religion and nationalism in and from Central Europe. We chatted for about an hour about various things, rather eclectically as free-flowing conversations often are – Hungarian elections, Ukraine, my ongoing project of Hindutva aesthetics, Ram Mohan Roy, Gandhi, Nehru, RSS and, most importantly, Ambedkar. It was then that he told me about Ambedkar Isköla (school) just three hours away from Budapest.The thought of a school named after B.R. Ambedkar all the way in Hungary was both intriguing and oddly exciting. A week later, I was in Miskolc, a city in Hungary’s north-eastern region, standing in front of a blue building with Tibor Derdák, the headmaster of Ambedkar Isköla. ‘Get off the tram at the Ujgyöri Piac stop. You’ll see a blue building with a red gate. It’s the only blue building that you’ll see around.”As I walked into the school, I was struck by how “present” Ambedkar was on every wall, every frame and ethos of the school. From the colour of the building, to his posters, to painted slogans “Jai Bhim”, “educate-organise-agitate”, to a classroom named “Nagpur” (honouring the city where Ambedkar converted the Buddhism in 1956), Ambedkar clearly was the living idea and the inspiration for Ambedkar Isköla – a school using his ideas, his principles, his values for the upliftment and empowerment of Hungary’s (and Europe’s) largest ethnic minority, the Romas.‘The Romas are the Dalits of Hungary and Ambedkar, their ‘gypsy icon’,” said Tibor Derdák, “a guiding light for a way forward and upwards.”But the question still remained – how did a school for the Romas in Hungary, come to be inspired by and named after Ambedkar, an Indian citizen, an Indian Dalit, father of the Indian constitution? Unlike Tagore – whose visit to Balaton Füred in Hungary (1926) was commemorated with an installation of his bust on Tagore Sétány (promenade) – Ambedkar had never set foot in Hungary, let alone in the provincial city of Miskolc where the High school was located.The story goes back to 2005. While travelling in Paris, Hungarian sociologist and former MP, Tibor Derdák, read the book, Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability, by French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot. ‘This book was the first real information we got about caste discrimination in India and Dr. Ambedkar’s transformative fight against it. His conversion [to Buddhism] story was very interesting and relevant to us’, Tibor Derdák said reflectively sitting in his small office, full of books, pictures and slogans of Ambedkar.Also read: Eroding Scientific Rationality Is Undermining Knowledge Production in IndiaThe “us”, I guessed, referred to both Tibor Derdák and the co-founder of the school, Roma activist János Orsós. As I saw Tibor engage with the Roma students, it was evident that the “us” also included the discriminated, segregated, ethnic minority, the Romanis (Romas) of which Tibor Derdak considered himself to be a part of.Sitting in Derdak’s office, seeing him talk with such reverence, even perhaps affection, it sure was a moment of pride for me. It’s rare to find footprints of Indian thought and such defining influence in predominantly white parts of the world. As thoughts often move, sometimes rather sporadically and randomly, mine did too.Only my way back, I found myself asking the question: would Ambedkar make the cut in courses and curricula of “Indian Knowledge System” (IKS), where all three components – Indian, knowledge and system – are singular? One Indian. One knowledge. One system. The short answer is, he wouldn’t. Both by standards of “antiquity” and “decoloniality” that IKS upholds, Ambedkar would fail to make the cut. He is way too influenced by “Western” knowledge traditions and way too opposed to Vedic knowledge System.Much of Ambedkar’s thought is a contrast and a challenge to what is Vedic and Sanatani. The legacy Indic-ideas are in complete contrast to Ambedkar’s ideas of fraternity, rights, representation and annihilation of caste. Ambedkar’s attraction and subsequent conversion to Buddhism was not just because the Buddhist faith granted equal status to all. As part of the nāstika tradition, Buddhism challenges the very authority of the Vedas, addressing not just the symptom but the root and the rudiment of Caste (varna and jati included) that can be traced back to the Vedic tradition.A second reason why Ambedkar would be discarded by IKS curricula is because he fits the bill of a colonised maansikta (mindset). Consider the influences on Ambedkar. John Dewey’s pragmatism and his idea of democracy as an ‘ethical way of life’ (at Columbia University); Fabian Socialism that shaped Ambedkar’s ideas of social democracy as a necessary condition of democracy (at London School of economics); French Revolution ideals of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’.Together, they shaped two of Ambedkar’s greatest contributions to world of ideas and knowledges. One, of rights as needs: that abstract liberal guarantees and rights are meaningless without the fulfilment of basic material needs, a point so insightfully framed by one of India’s leading minds, Upendra Baxi. And two, that democracy cannot flourish except under conditions that allow for the widest possible participation and representation.The school in Miskolc, Hungary is not named after John Dewey, or after Jean Jacques Rousseau who inspired the French revolutionary motto of “fraternity” (so central to Ambedkar’s thought), or after the Fabian society. It is named after Ambedkar, in whom their ideas alchemised to generate what was quintessentially ‘Indian’. Yet Ambedkar is an inauthentic claimant to a place in the pantheon of IKS. That he is tolerated and used politically, is no measure of the “Indianness” or inclusion of his ideas.Ambedkar is case in point, an example of what is not considered a part of “Indian knowledge” by IKS, a pet project of the Hindutva regime. Its quest for what is authentically Indian is pedagogically bogus and politically communal. Thinkers, philosophers, thought, philosophy, theory, knowledge, all and everything, exist simultaneously in many systems as also outside of these systems. In dialogue or in opposition, in tandem or in tussle, they always move in spaces that are concurrent, intergenerational, melding into an alchemy that cannot be epistemically or politically “purified”.Also read: Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s Legacy as a Social Reformer Remains UnparalleledIn a middle-school chemistry class, we learnt about physical and chemical reactions. Physical changes were those whose component parts can be separated into their original constituent units even after the reaction has taken place – melting ice, sugar or salt dissolving in water etc. Chemical changes were those in which the starting materials combine and are transformed into an entirely different product. Indian knowledges, existing in multiple systems, multiple eras are an example of the latter.What then is IKS about, if not the intergenerational, cumulative, evolving pathways of knowledges that have rooted and branched in India? Certainly, it is not about reviving traditions of philosophical materialism (Charvak/Lokayat), or the Ajñana school of skepticism, or the Nyaya school of logic, or Panini’s linguistics, or Kerala School of Mathematics and Astronomy. Critical, plural, diverse traditions such as these are unreliable tools for painting a uniformly saffronised picture of what is ‘Indian” and what is outside, who is Indian and who is outside.Quite to the contrary, it is, as Vasudevan Mukunth so accurately called out, IKS is a “Trojan horse”. In its belly it hides ‘“Puranic science”, mythology as history, ritual as technology and an open contempt for verifiability’. This Trojan horse is then sent to universities, included in NEP, aggressively pushed into university curricula, to wage a war against science, humanities, arts and everything that’s plural, heterodox and richly contesting.Focussed on Vedic, Sanatani, Puranic traditions, IKS is ostensibly about “decolonizing” knowledge. It is about purifying the authentic (Hindu) strands from influences and contaminants of from the colonizing influence of what it deems to be Western, liberal, democratic and Islamic. In the end, after the “modern-western-liberal” and the “medieval-Islamic-syncretic” traditions are excluded and expunged, what we are left with is a distillation of ancient-Hindu-Indian, where India equals Hindu in knowledge and in nation.To retrieve a liberal India, one has to reclaim what Indian is and what Indian knowledge is, for knowledge holds the key to how we imagine and identify ourselves both as a community and as a nation. Which is why the answer to the question – what is Indian knowledge – must necessarily be kept uncluttered and uncomplicated. The short, simple and actually sweet answer is this: Any knowledge that we use to make sense of the India we live in, to understand and explain and make it better, is part of the Indian knowledge systems (and non-systems).Rajshree Chandra teaches political science at JDMC, Delhi University. Much of this piece was written when she was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Adavnced Studies, Central European University.