IF India
Infinity Foundation India was incorporated in Aug 2016 at Chennai with the aim to carry out activities conducive to the character of the Indian Nation and to the advancement of national integrity, education which will help build an Indian civilizational grand narrative. Activities of IFI will be to conduct research, and programmes such as lectures, demonstrations, seminars, workshops, conferences through any & all effective means & media and to publish and disseminate information & intellectual analysis emerging from such research and activities into the prevalent discourse regarding the Indian civilizational narrative.
There are four tracks of activities:
- A: Original R&D/book publishing on various topics that establish the grand narrative of our civilisation
- B: Swadeshi Indology Conference series: This will nurture new scholars to take up the subject matters from A, produce more scholarship and publish more books. The idea is to build a Home Team of intellectuals of the highest standard.
- C: E-learning: Here we plan to develop courses based on topics where we have research leadership.
- D: Outreach. This includes popular level mass distribution, using media and social media.
One of the main initiatives of Infinity Foundation India (IFI) is Swadeshi Indology. Since the past two centuries, Indology has been controlled by Western scholars and institutions and they have applied Western methods of studying Indian civilization. While this has brought several benefits, it has also suppressed our own drishti in interpreting our civilization. After independence, rather than disrupting this structure and replacing it with indigenous approaches, in many ways things became worse. Indian scholars have become trained to think like Western Indologists. As a result, a large part of our intellectual apparatus has remained colonized. Many of the advanced intellectual institutions of India (higher education, media, administrative services, etc.) as well as school education have been proudly spreading ideas of India that are biased and tilted towards the premises of Western Indology. The dominant discourse is not promoting India, and is in many ways subverting it from the roots.
IFI has been a pioneer in exposing this and in giving responses from the Indian point of view. We have coined the term Swadeshi Indology to refer to this new approach to disrupt Western Indology and construct our own traditional interpretations.
Developing Young Scholars Through Research and Apprenticeship
A major goal of IFI is to train at least 108 young scholars in Swadeshi Indology over the next few years. This is to be achieved through their independent research presented in our conferences, through workshops we conduct for them, and through opportunities for them to serve as research assistants for our senior scholars.
