Last summer, I taught a course called Quantitative Reasoning and Mathematical Thinking. Much of it was focussed on the history of mathematics in India: numbers in the Vedas, the geometry of the Sulbasutras and the work of Pingala, Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskaracharya, and Ramanujan.

Teaching this course was among the pleasures of my year.

It was also difficult. A large part of what I did in that classroom was not teaching what Indian mathematicians had achieved, but separating it from what they did not.

We read SG Dani’s ____Myths and Reality: On ‘Vedic Mathematics’ to see why a set of arithmetic shortcuts compiled and published in 1965 has nothing to do with the Vedas, and Rick Briggs’s Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence to trace where the claim that Sanskrit is “the language of AI” or the most logical programming language ever, came from – and to see that the paper itself says no such thing.

We worked through why a genuine theorem from the Sulbasutras is not made truer, or more Indian, by attaching to it claims it does not support.

Teaching topics in Indian Knowledge Systems meant defending it from pseudoscience. The boundaries between science, culture, belief and pseudoscience are narrow, and a lot of work in this field involves keeping them clear and separated.

What helps tell science from pseudoscience is a single test. A scientific claim can be refuted: it commits to a prediction that could fail, and if the prediction fails, the claim is wrong. A claim that no possible observation could contradict is not science – whatever its mathematics or its numbers.

While this is not a complex idea, applying it takes training. Most people starting out in science, reasonably, rely on a shortcut instead: if a claim comes from a respected institution, they take it to be sound. That shortcut works only as long as the institutions hold the line themselves.

Increasingly, in Indian science, they do not.

Mind, Brain and Consciousness Conference 2026

In June, IIT Mandi’s Indian Knowledge System and Mental Health Applications Centre hosted the third edition of its Mind, Brain and Consciousness Conference. This was held under the patronage of the Indian Knowledge Systems Division of the Ministry of Education and included a 275-page abstract book, 19 keynote lectures, 250 technical presentations, and eminent scientists among attendees and chair.

Attendance was reportedly mandatory for several groups of students.

On page 13, the book of abstracts lists the conference themes in a single sequence: cognitive neuroscience, brain-computer interfaces, yoga and meditation, science of reincarnation, energy chakras and Pancha Kosha – the “Vedic framework that maps human existence from gross matter to pure consciousness”. The sequence helps transfer the credibility of the first items to the last.

The rest of the book tells the same story. Some of the work was legitimate: Alzheimer’s detection through electroencephalogram, brain-computer interfaces for paralysed patients, Sanskrit natural language processing.

Much of it was not. A full special session was devoted to a “Theory of Quantum Emotion” running three hours across 14 papers. Another paper constructed a “Kalpa Recurrence Operator acting on civilizational phase space” with sophisticated mathematical notation, but no physical mechanism.

A session presented jyotisha, the traditional system of astrology, as a scientific theory with applications to criminology. Papers on Pranic Healing that taps into “the universal life force” reported a 114% improvement in anger control.

Nasa’s ‘Om’, cow urine and medicine

The 102nd Indian Science Congress of 2015 is a well-known example of this trend, but this year alone has produced several more.

In March, IIT Madras marked the 250th anniversary of the Carnatic composer Muthuswamy Dikshitar. The keynote speaker spent the address conflating modern physics with Vedic metaphysics, presenting a NASA sonification of Big Bang pressure waves as proof that the early universe produced the syllable “Om” and misdating and misquoting the physicists he cited.

In June, IIT Roorkee announced a study claiming that distilled cow urine has antiviral activity against chikungunya, one of about 10 papers from the government’s SUTRA-PIC programme, which received nearly Rs 98 crore for research on cow-derived products. After a physician raised concerns about research integrity, the journal opened an investigation, as The Print reported.

On accountability

Institutions and conferences like these draw genuinely accomplished researchers and academics. These are people who sit on funding committees and help decide what counts as legitimate inquiry. When they place pseudoscience beside science, they send out a larger signal. It reaches students choosing what to study, administrators deciding what to fund and a public that reasonably assumes someone checked.

Equally important is the impact of such a phenomena on the work on Indian Knowledge Systems. There is excellent research to be done in the space of Indian philosophy, the history of mathematics and sciences and even pharmacology and traditional medicine.

The condition is that it be done as science: claims that can be falsified, results that can be replicated and honest engagement with the evidence that already exists. Held to that standard, this work strengthens Indian science. Exempted from it, it does the opposite.

I doubt that Chanakya, Sushruta, Dignaga, Hemachandra, or Ramanujan would have been proud of this daily legitimisation of pseudoscience.

Aalok Thakkar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Ashoka University.

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