Digitise, Decode, Defend: Gautam Adani Calls For India's Vedic Knowledge Revival

At the Adani Global Indology Conclave, Gautam Adani, founder of the Adani Group, opened by grounding the moment in his personal legacy: the early lessons that shaped his understanding of beauty, devotion, and dharma, passed down not as stories but as a lived framework of values.

Since the announcement of this initiative, he said, many have asked: why does Indology matter? For him, Indology is the disciplined study of philosophy, art, medicine, mathematics, architecture, language and governance.

"When we study Indology, we do not look back to live in history, we look forward so that the best of history lives through us," said Adani.

He invoked Nalanda, not as a singular tragedy but as a pattern. Bharat’s greatest injuries came from the systematic destruction of its knowledge infrastructure, said Adani. Their fall erased hundreds of years of wisdom in a single generation. "Our knowledge was seamlessly stolen and ruthlessly mined. Civilisations do not fall by sword alone. They fall when their memories are left unguarded," he stated.

If those were the assaults of the past, today’s challenge is quieter but equally dangerous, pointed out the moghul. New invasions do not arrive with armies or flags; they come disguised as tools of convenience that shape how a society reads, thinks and remembers. This, he warned, is the new phase of soft warfare — the struggle for cultural memory and public thought.

The next frontier that will decide who leads and who follows is AI. "Are we ready for what comes next? Progress cannot be paused, and in the case of AI, it has already arrived. AI is becoming the world’s new teacher — the guide to our past and the keeper of civilisational memory. This is where the danger lies," said Adani.

He outlined three emerging threats: First, the threat of invisibility. In the world of AI, data gravity means that if we do not digitise files, we are erasing them from the future.

Second, the threat of cultural compression. Indic knowledge is layered with commentary and context, but large language models flatten meanings. Once its context dies, culture dies.

Third, the threat of alien judgement. AI models built on Western safety norms behave like blindfolded gatekeepers, unable to recognise the essence of Vedic practices or their depth — often dismissing them as mythology or harmful.

To meet this civilisational moment, Adani laid out five recommendations:

• Build the Bharat Knowledge Graph — a single digital source of truth connecting texts, timelines and ideas.

• Create an India-centric corpus.

• Strengthen the human loop by empowering scholars to analyse, refine and correct AI systems.

• Invest in human guardians — establish Indology AI chairs across universities, train scholars to speak Sanskrit and Python, and mobilise corporates to co-create next-gen cultural techno-experts.

• Make every college a new Nalanda, where ancient wisdom meets modern innovation.

He then announced Rs 100 crore towards building the Bharat Knowledge Graph and supporting scholars and technologists who will contribute to this Indology mission.

“This,” he concluded, “is the repayment of a civilisational debt.”