Locating Indian knowledge in modern libraries: Incorporating the traditional classification of knowledge in India

Abstract

Historically, Indian Knowledge, has been classified into Aṣṭādaśa-vidyāsthānas (अष्टादशविद्यास्थान), eighteen abodes of knowledge. This classification scheme assigns an appropriate place for all components of Indian knowledge in a consistent system. In modern libraries, based mainly on the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), there is no natural place for the corpus of Indian Knowledge (IK), and different components of IK get split over widely separate diverse classes. In this article, we describe India’s traditional classification of knowledge and propose a national modification of the DDC to incorporate the former. The proposed scheme shall ensure that the diverse corpora of IK are compactly brought together in Indian libraries. This shall help the students and scholars appreciate the breadth and depth of IK and also the interconnectedness of its different components. It is impossible to understand the history of any element of IK, including Indian Sciences and Technologies, without comprehending the interconnectedness of the entire corpus.