Problem “Indian philosophy” is today a familiar academic name, yet what this name gathers together—Veda, Upaniṣads, Buddhist, Jain, Cārvāka, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, Tantric, grammatical, Navya-Nyāya, and many regional intellectual traditions—was not always classified in the same way in history. The question of this chapter is: how did the colonial knowledge-system read, divide, combine, and turn this plural intellectual geography into the modern educational object called “Indian philosophy”? The first caution is that colonial scholarship did not create every taxonomy from nothing. Indian traditions had a long history of classifications such as darśana, mata, siddhānta, śāstra, sampradāya, āstika/nāstika, Vedic/non-Vedic, pūrvapakṣa/uttarapakṣa, Buddhist–Jain–Brahmanical controversy, and the six darśanas. Thus the simple claim that “Indian philosophy is a colonial invention” would be historically improper. The second caution is that precolonial classification and colonial classification are not the same thing. In the colonial age, printing, census, university curricula, Orientalist philology, missionary polemic, museums and archives, translation, comparative religion, comparative philology, and the European history-of-philosophy framework changed the scale, audience, and authority of classification. The central question in this transformation is: “What came to count as philosophy?” Traditions that could be presented through a Sanskrit textual corpus, systematic doctrine, canonical authors, metaphysics, logic, or a recognisable “system” gained visibility. Oral, vernacular, ritual, embodied, artisanal, women’s, lower-caste, regional, or practice-centred forms of knowledge were often moved into separate compartments labelled “religion,” “custom,” “folklore,” “law,” “superstition,” or “ethnography.” Within European intellectual history, “philosophy” had its own disciplinary boundaries. When Indian materials were translated into this category, concepts such as mokṣa, dharma, pramāṇa, śabda, apūrva, śūnyatā, anekānta, and abhāva were divided among modern compartments such as metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, and religion. This translation was useful, but it was not neutral. The separation of “religion” from “philosophy” was not always applicable to Indian classical traditions in the way it was in the European university. Philosophical texts could bring epistemology, liberation, ritual, language, ontology, and soteriology into a single structure. Colonial curricula often cut these knots apart, treating philosophy as abstract doctrine and religion as belief or practice. The question of “Hinduism” stands near the centre of this chapter, but the conclusion must remain cautious. Nineteenth-century institutions made the label broader, more standardised, and more convenient for census and curriculum; yet there were also precolonial histories of diverse Hindu identities, umbrella categories, and inter-school unification. Colonial consolidation cannot therefore be called a total invention. The canon of the “six systems” likewise had precolonial antecedents, but colonial scholarship and later textbooks made it a more stable, teachable, bounded list. That stability could make Jain, Buddhist, materialist, grammatical, tantric, devotional, and many other philosophical formations appear secondary. Philology had a double character. The editing, dictionary-making, grammatical analysis, translation, and recovery of Sanskrit manuscripts made an invaluable contribution to preserving Indian intellectual history. But when textual philology became a means for discovering the “essence” of a civilisation, living practice, vernacular debate, and contemporary intellectual actors could be pushed to the periphery. Comparative philology made the powerful scientific discovery of the relationship between Sanskrit and the Indo-European languages. Yet when scholars leapt from language-family to race, civilisation, and mental character, a taxonomy of knowledge could become a political hierarchy. This chapter will keep linguistic achievement distinct from racialised extrapolation. Colonial classification was not simply a unilateral construction by European scholars. Paṇḍits, munshis, translators, copyists, local informants, schoolteachers, printers, reformers, and Indian intellectuals also participated in category-making. Collaboration took place within unequal power relations, but erasing local agency would once again oversimplify history. Indian thinkers did not merely receive colonial categories; they redefined them. Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, Dasgupta, Hiriyanna, and other modern writers established “Indian philosophy” within global philosophical discourse while also arranging inherited categories in their own ways. To call this process merely mimicry is inadequate. The colonial university preferred the linear chronology of a “history of philosophy.” Indian traditions, however, developed through commentary, sub-commentary, reinterpretation, debate, textual layering, and simultaneously active schools in ways that do not fit simple linear succession. Narratives such as “Vedic age → systems → decline → revival” therefore raise methodological questions. The stereotype of a “mystical East” and a “rational West” was especially damaging to the reception of Indian philosophy. Rationally rigorous traditions such as Nyāya, Navya-Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Buddhist logic, and Jain epistemology destabilise such a binary. Yet modern representation often made Vedānta stand for the “Indian mind.” One special question in this chapter concerns Mithila. How were the regional intellectual geographies of Nyāya/Navya-Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Sanskrit scholasticism, manuscript culture, and Maithili language history included in—or omitted from—the all-India textbook narrative of “Indian philosophy”? It is equally mistaken to treat a region as a miniature of civilisation or as a footnote to the national canon. The consequences of classifying knowledge are institutional: which texts enter syllabi, which subject headings libraries assign, which catalogues receive manuscripts, under which disciplinary names university posts are created, which languages receive translation grants, and who gains recognition as a “philosopher.” Taxonomy becomes a politics of visibility. The aim of this chapter is neither to demonise colonial scholarship nor to treat it as innocent description. The question is: what did classification see, what did it preserve, what did it distort, what did it stabilise, and how did Indian intellectuals appropriate, resist, revise, and re-establish it? Parallel Philosophy derives one methodological rule from this history: “Knowledge without classification is difficult; but treating classification as the final structure of reality is dangerous.” Taxonomy is a useful instrument, not self-evident proof of ontology. Core Proposition The core proposition of this chapter is that colonial rule did not abolish the pre-existing distinctions of Indian philosophy. Rather, according to its philological, educational, religious, and administrative needs, it amplified, standardised, and globalised some distinctions, subordinated others, and created some new composite categories. To understand the effect of colonial classification, four levels must be distinguished: indigenous taxonomy; Orientalist/missionary representation; colonial institutions; and modern Indian reappropriation. These four levels are interconnected, but they are not synonyms for one another. To say that “Indian philosophy” is a modern category does not mean that Indian philosophical thought is modern. The modernity of the category and the ancient or medieval history of its content are different questions. Without this distinction, history falls into the nominalist error: “The name came later, therefore the thing did not exist earlier.” A major technique of colonial knowledge was systematisation: arranging vast textual diversity into system, founder, scripture, doctrine, school, and chronology. This makes the transmission of knowledge easier, but it also makes fluid boundaries and internal disagreements within schools less visible. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र A second technique of canonisation was the selection of “representative texts.” The unequal visibility of the Upaniṣads, Bhagavad Gītā, Vedānta, Manu, and selected śāstras did not represent the entire Indian intellectual field, but in the global imagination they were often made to do so. Translation was a third technique. English and European terms such as “religion,” “philosophy,” “law,” “caste,” “soul,” “matter,” “atheism,” “orthodoxy,” and “monism” became bridges to Indian concepts. Comparative inquiry would have been difficult without such bridges; distortions arose when the bridge was treated as an equation of identity. Periodisation was a fourth technique. The schema that praised “ancient classical India” for high philosophy while narrating later India as degeneration could unite Orientalist admiration with colonial paternalism, presenting colonial rule as an agent of renewal. In this schema, living paṇḍit traditions could appear merely as “survivals.” Religious classification was a fifth technique. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and others were organised as bounded religions in textbooks, censuses, law, and comparative religion. Some boundaries corresponded to precolonial identities; others obscured overlap, shared ritual, intellectual borrowing, and regional multiplicity. Philological genealogy was a sixth technique. The comparative-linguistic discovery of kinship between Sanskrit and European languages was real; turning an Aryan linguistic relationship into a racial or civilisational hierarchy was a leap from science to ideology. Any critique of classification must preserve this distinction. Institutions of knowledge were a seventh technique: Asiatic societies, colleges, universities, examinations, presses, catalogues, libraries, and journals. A category becomes durable when institutions repeat it. Taxonomy is not merely an idea in a book; it becomes curricular infrastructure. Modern Indian intellectuals transformed this infrastructure creatively. English-language histories of Indian philosophy used the terms of the modern academy to demonstrate the sophistication of Indian systems. They reveal both agency within a colonial frame and intellectual reconstruction. The existence of precolonial six-darśana templates disproves the simple invention-thesis regarding the colonial “six systems” canon. European books and syllabi, however, played an important role in turning this sixfold arrangement into a globally recognisable standard image. Nicholson’s thesis about premodern unification provides an important correction: the process of seeing Hindu philosophical traditions as a wider family predates the nineteenth century. Critique of coloniality must therefore explain mechanisms of transformation without erasing continuity. Richard King’s framework concerning the power of definition shows that categories such as “religion” and “mysticism” have histories of their own. Their use for Indian materials is fair only when the convenience of translation and conceptual imposition are examined separately. Halbfass’s India–Europe encounter approach encourages comparative philosophy to read the relation as a historical encounter rather than as one-way projection. Indian self-understanding also changed after the European encounter; therefore “the West represented India” and “India represented itself anew” are both proper subjects of study. The parallel maxim of this chapter is: “Treat a colonial category neither as complete truth nor as mere falsehood; examine its genealogy, institutional power, indigenous antecedents, translation losses, and later reappropriations.” Principal Arguments First argument—precolonial taxonomy was real. Sarvadarśana-style compendia, philosophical doxographies, polemical texts, scholastic curricula, and commentary traditions listed, ranked, and classified rival positions. On this basis it is inconsistent to call colonial classification a total invention. Second argument—precolonial taxonomy was not uniform. Different authors counted systems differently; the number “six” was not a historical universal. The fixed six-darśana list in modern textbooks is therefore one historical selection, not the totality of premodern reality. Third argument—early nineteenth-century essays such as H. T. Colebrooke’s “On the Philosophy of the Hindus” were important stages in presenting Indian systems in comparative and systematic form to a European readership. Through such presentation, Indian philosophy became a recognisable object within global learned discourse. Fourth argument—Max Müller’s The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (1899) gave wide prestige to the six-system image among Anglophone readers. Yet his book was not the origin of the sixfold pattern; it was an example of the modern scholarly consolidation of existing classifications. Fifth argument—Orientalist admiration was ambivalent. The antiquity and subtlety of Sanskrit literature and philosophy could be praised while a narrative of “ancient greatness—modern decline” simultaneously served to present colonial rule as a medium of renewal. Sixth argument—missionary representation exerted a different pressure. By making Hindu texts and rituals objects of theological polemic, Christian categories such as “true religion/false religion,” idolatry, superstition, and monotheism entered the classification of Indian traditions. Seventh argument—comparative religion in the nineteenth century created a scalable taxonomy of “world religions.” Vast internally diverse traditions were presented as bounded entities within this model, and philosophy could then be read as the intellectual essence of a religion-family. Eighth argument—Vedānta, especially Advaita, received disproportionate opportunity to represent “Indian philosophy.” Textual availability, reform movements, European metaphysical interest, universalist presentation, and later Indian self-representation all worked together in this development. Ninth argument—this Vedānta-centring had a double result. On one side it enhanced the global prestige of Indian thought; on the other it could reduce the visibility of Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Jain, Buddhist, materialist, grammatical, ritual-theoretical, and region-specific traditions. Tenth argument—the category of “mysticism” reshaped the global image of Indian religion and philosophy. Emphasis on experience, unity, inwardness, and spirituality created a useful cross-cultural theme, but argumentative, linguistic, legal, ritual, political, and material dimensions of Indian traditions could fall into its shadow. Eleventh argument—the philosophy/religion distinction was imported, yet Indian thinkers later used it productively. For example, the claim that “Indian philosophy is philosophy, not merely religion” became a strategy for resisting colonial hierarchy. A category can be imposed and emancipatorily appropriated at the same time. Twelfth argument—Sanskrit textualism created a hierarchy of knowledge. Sanskrit’s classical prestige rested on proper scholarly grounds, yet vernacular intellectual histories in Maithili, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Persianate traditions, Urdu, and others could be pressed beneath an all-India Sanskritic canon. Thirteenth argument—manuscript cataloguing was a great instrument of preservation. Without metadata such as title, author, subject, recension, and repository, many texts would today remain difficult to access. Yet catalogue subject headings also direct later researchers to think within predetermined categories. Fourteenth argument—printing increased textual stability. A printed “standard edition” became a curricular base in place of manuscript variation. This can improve philological accuracy while making the living plurality of variant scholastic traditions less visible. Fifteenth argument—university examinations demand standardised answers. Rubrics such as “name the six systems,” “orthodox versus heterodox,” and “idealism versus realism” make complexity teachable but reduce the open-endedness of historical debate. गजेन्द्र ठाकु रक समानान्तर दर्शन — खण्ड २ Sixteenth argument—European “-ism” formations offer an example of category reification: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Vedantism, and so forth. Once a noun is formed, fluid practices can appear as bounded entities. Yet the history of indigenous collective labels cannot be denied, nor can invention be proved merely from a suffix. Seventeenth argument—the modern translation of āstika/nāstika as “orthodox/heterodox” is often misleading. Depending on context, the criterion may concern Vedic authority, doctrinal allegiance, theism, or something else; the Christian ecclesiastical sense of “orthodox” does not automatically apply. Eighteenth argument—the translation “atheism” is likewise complex. Sāṃkhya, Mīmāṃsā, Buddhist, Jain, and Cārvāka positions raise different questions concerning gods, a creator, the Veda, self, liberation, and causal order. A single label of atheism can erase conceptual differences. Nineteenth argument—the binary “idealism/materialism” provides comparative convenience, but categories of Indian ontology do not fit wholly on this axis. Vijñānavāda, Advaita, Sāṃkhya, Vaiśeṣika, and Cārvāka each possess their own technical vocabulary. Twentieth argument—translating Nyāya/Navya-Nyāya as “logic” provides useful recognition, but nyāya is not merely formal logic; it forms a broader project involving pramāṇa, debate, epistemic defeat, inference, language, ontology, and liberation. Twenty-first argument—the category “law” creates a similar problem in translating Dharmaśāstra. If its multiple dimensions of norm, ritual, custom, jurisprudence, and social order are treated as equivalent to modern state-law, conceptual flattening results. Twenty-second argument—the earliest encounters in comparative philosophy were often asymmetrical: European philosophy functioned as the universal benchmark while Indian thought became the particular specimen. Decolonial correction does not require reversing the hierarchy; it requires making the criteria of comparison mutually explicit. Twenty-third argument—the Aryan language hypothesis is a landmark of comparative linguistics. Trautmann’s analysis shows how linguistic kinship later became linked with race science and was used to construct racial theories of Indian civilisation. A valid linguistic finding must be kept distinct from racial extrapolation. Twenty-fourth argument—racial and civilisational classification also affected the chronology of philosophy: broad mental types such as “Aryan genius,” “Semitic mind,” and “Dravidian culture” could turn intellectual history into biological or civilisational essence. Twenty-fifth argument—Indian reformers were not passive recipients of colonial categories. They made terms such as “Hinduism,” “Vedānta,” “universal religion,” and “Indian spirituality” into instruments of anti-colonial dignity, social reform, national identity, and global dialogue. Twenty-sixth argument—modern Indian histories of philosophy were simultaneously acts of recovery and reconstruction. Surendranath Dasgupta, Hiriyanna, Radhakrishnan, and others used English academic genres to give systematic exposition to vast traditions; it would be unjust to call these works merely colonial derivatives. Twenty-seventh argument—the effect of modern canonisation remains visible in present syllabi. A course organised around the six systems, Buddhism/Jainism, and a Vedānta-heavy structure is common, while philosophy of language, aesthetics, ritual theory, political thought, gendered knowledge, and vernacular reasoning are often scattered across other departments. Twenty-eighth argument—the colonial archive was not only an instrument of power but also a repository of evidence. Critical use does not mean abandoning the archive; it means reading it together with metadata provenance, institutional purpose, missing voices, and the history of its categories. Twenty-ninth argument—classification sometimes became a means of rediscovering suppressed traditions. Without manuscript surveys and philological editions, many Buddhist, Jain, and Sanskrit works would not have entered modern circulation. A mixed history of preservation and appropriation must therefore be acknowledged. Thirtieth argument—translation loss is unavoidable, but it can be managed to a reversible degree. If a technical term is preserved in its original Devanagari/IAST form together with a provisional translation, contextual definition, and cross- reference, false equivalence can be reduced. Thirty-first argument—the singular “Indian philosophy” is useful heuristically, not essentialistically. The category can remain useful if its multilingual, sectarian, regional, caste, institutional, and historical plurality is kept explicit within the singular term. Thirty-second argument—“Western philosophy” is not homogeneous either. Greek, scholastic, Islamic-European encounters, continental, analytic, feminist, postcolonial, and many other streams exist. Comparing one plural tradition with another fictive unity produces a double distortion. Accordingly, the parallel method will ask five questions of every classification: who made the category? What antecedents existed? Which institutions spread it? What evidence was excluded? How did later actors change the use of the category? Only after these five questions can colonial classification be assessed fairly. Historical criticism is strongest when contribution, asymmetry, continuity, innovation, omission, and appropriation are examined together. Pūrvapakṣa First pūrvapakṣa: criticism of colonial classification is unnecessary; after all, labels such as “six systems,” “Hinduism,” and “Indian philosophy” are useful and widely accepted today. Before replying, their real utility should be conceded; the question is to understand historical cost alongside utility. Second pūrvapakṣa: every modern taxonomy is colonial and should therefore be completely abandoned. This conclusion is impossible and self-contradictory because research itself cannot proceed without classification. The problem is not taxonomy, but unexamined taxonomy. Third pūrvapakṣa: colonial scholars were merely agents of domination, so their philology has no scholarly value. This would be a genetic fallacy. The validity of a textual edition, linguistic comparison, or manuscript description must be tested by evidence, not merely by the political location of its author. Fourth pūrvapakṣa: colonial scholarship created every intellectual category in India. Precolonial doxography, lists of darśanas, sectarian identities, and śāstric boundaries refute this claim. Fifth pūrvapakṣa: the opposite extreme—colonial rule had no effect on classification because Indian categories already existed. Once the institutional power of print, university, census, comparative religion, philology, and global circulation is considered, this conclusion also fails. Sixth pūrvapakṣa: emphasis on a Sanskrit canon automatically proves a Brahmanical conspiracy. Questions of power and hierarchy are necessary, but the real scale, technical sophistication, and transregional role of the Sanskrit textual archive must also be acknowledged. Criticism should be evidence-specific. Seventh pūrvapakṣa: vernacular = subaltern and Sanskrit = elite. Historically this binary is far too simple. A vernacular may be courtly, Sanskrit may circulate beyond elites, and bilingual actors are common; social location must be tested text by text. Eighth pūrvapakṣa: “Hinduism” is entirely a colonial fiction. Evidence for precolonial collective identities and philosophical unification limits this strong thesis. Colonial modernity is better understood as playing a role in standardisation and reconfiguration. Ninth pūrvapakṣa: “Hinduism” existed for thousands of years in exactly the same form as today’s bounded religion. This opposite essentialism likewise ignores variation, historical change, and institutional modernity. Continuity is not identity of form. Tenth pūrvapakṣa: the use of Western categories corrupts Indian thought. Translation is necessary for comparison; the problem arises when a provisional bridge of translation becomes an assertion of ontological identity. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र Eleventh pūrvapakṣa: indigenous categories are always more authentic. Indigenous taxonomies too may be polemical, hierarchical, exclusionary, and historically situated. Authenticity is not a substitute for criticism. Twelfth pūrvapakṣa: decolonising Indian philosophy means merely adding more Indian authors. Representation is necessary, but token inclusion is insufficient without changing categories, syllabus architecture, language access, method, archives, and criteria of evaluation. Uttarapakṣa First uttarapakṣa: there is no need to abolish a useful category; make its genealogy visible. A textbook may speak of the “six systems” while also explaining that lists historically varied and that the modern canon is the result of selection. Second uttarapakṣa: read a colonial scholar’s claim by two tests—philological/empirical accuracy and classificatory framing. One may be correct while the other is problematic. This two-level test avoids blanket praise or blanket denunciation. Third uttarapakṣa: discovering indigenous antecedents does not negate colonial influence. Continuity and transformation should be read together: old darśana taxonomies plus modern print and university standardisation. Fourth uttarapakṣa: translation is not dictionary equivalence but argumentative negotiation. Pramāṇa may be translated as “means of knowledge,” but the school-specific meanings of the term should be opened up in a footnote or glossary. Fifth uttarapakṣa: teach canonical texts together with excluded domains. Nyāya with Navya-Nyāya; Vedānta with Mīmāṃsā; Brahmanical systems with Buddhist, Jain, and Cārvāka traditions; Sanskrit with vernacular intellectual archives. Sixth uttarapakṣa: do not mistake the administrative separation of “religion” and “philosophy” into departments for historical truth. Where a text joins ethics, ritual, logic, liberation, grammar, and ontology, interdisciplinary reading is necessary. Seventh uttarapakṣa: read modern Indian philosophers not as merely derivative but as category-transforming agents. Works written in English prose can also be authentic parts of Indian intellectual history. Eighth uttarapakṣa: add provenance to the colonial archive. When using an edition, catalogue, survey, or translation, record— where possible—the collector, informant, institutional aim, date, selection rule, and missing material. Ninth uttarapakṣa: comparative categories should be reciprocal. If Advaita is called “idealism,” ask to what extent. If it is compared with Kant, Kant’s categories too should remain under explanatory scrutiny. Comparison should not become one-way assimilation. Tenth uttarapakṣa: make region an analytical scale rather than a supplement to the national canon. Intellectual ecologies such as Mithila, Bengal, Maharashtra, the Tamil region, and Kashmir make the internal diversity of “Indian philosophy” concrete. Eleventh uttarapakṣa: do not lower evidential standards for the inclusion of marginalised knowledge. Oral history, embodied practice, craft knowledge, women’s testimony, and local-language texts can all be sources; provenance, corroboration, and contextual interpretation apply to all of them. Twelfth uttarapakṣa: the goal of decolonial correction is not reverse purity but classificatory pluralism. The same material may be read through several lenses—darśana, religious studies, intellectual history, social history, philosophy of language, and regional archives. Indian Dialogue The Indian dialogue begins with indigenous doxography. Various sarvadarśana-style works listed, ordered, and criticised rival views; this tradition makes it clear that classification itself was part of Indian intellectual practice. Attention must be given to the multiple senses of the āstika/nāstika distinction. The modern translation “orthodox/heterodox” is convenient, but without reference to Vedic authority, acceptance or rejection, polemical context, and school-specific usage, this label can mislead. Pairings such as Nyāya–Vaiśeṣika, Sāṃkhya–Yoga, and Mīmāṃsā–Vedānta show histories of interaction, but modern textbook pairings did not have equal intensity in every period. Intellectual history must read internal evolution within each pair. If Buddhist and Jain philosophies are placed only in “non-Hindu” religion chapters, the central debates of Indian epistemology, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics become fragmented. The philosophical map must be reconstructed through cross-religious polemics. Cārvāka/Lokāyata is a fine example of how the problem of sources becomes a problem of category history: much of the material survives in opponents’ texts. The label “materialism” may be useful, but the limitation of fragmentary and hostile transmission must remain explicit. To dismiss Mīmāṃsā merely as ritualism reveals the narrowness of colonial and modern philosophical categories. Its technical work on language, hermeneutics, epistemology, duty, injunction, absence, testimony, and related topics deserves a central place in philosophy curricula. To call Nyāya “Indian logic” is a half-truth. Alongside logic it addresses perception, testimony, error, self, God, liberation, and ontology. Navya-Nyāya’s analysis of relations invites comparison with modern analytic philosophy, but not a claim of identity. Correcting Vedānta-centring does not mean diminishing Vedānta. The real significance of Advaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, and other Vedānta traditions should be acknowledged without making them synonyms for the whole “Indian mind.” Andrew Nicholson shows unifying projects among premodern thinkers; this evidence challenges the thesis that Hindu unity was only colonial. Yet it does not eliminate the effect of later colonial standardisation. David Lorenzen’s “Who Invented Hinduism?” debate exposes the limits of strong constructionism. The methodological lesson is that the name of a category, collective identity, theological unity, institutional boundedness, and census definition are five separate questions. From Rammohun Roy to Vivekananda, modern reform discourse recombined categories of scriptural canon, monotheism, universalism, reason, and religion. This intellectual agency should not be treated as a mechanical effect of colonial discourse. By presenting Vedānta in a global modern idiom, Vivekananda enhanced Indian philosophical dignity; at the same time, this success strengthened the image Vedānta = India. The same process can be emancipatory and selective. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan performed the historic work of placing Indian philosophy on an equal footing with modern university philosophy. Criticism may today address his Vedāntic weighting or essentialism, but his institution-building contribution to intellectual decolonisation should be evaluated separately. Surendranath Dasgupta’s multi-volume A History of Indian Philosophy is a landmark of vast textual scholarship. The modern “history of philosophy” genre has limitations of its own, but the importance of source recovery and systematic exposition cannot be denied. M. Hiriyanna’s Outlines of Indian Philosophy exemplifies twentieth-century university pedagogy: it constructs a narrative through Vedic, early post-Vedic, and system-based divisions. The genealogy of such textbooks helps explain the structure of present syllabi. B. R. Ambedkar’s critique of caste changes the scope of Indian intellectual history. If “Indian philosophy” is confined to metaphysical systems, philosophical work on social hierarchy, dignity, justice, and institutional reason falls outside the canon. Phule, Savitribai, Periyar, Narayana Guru, anti-caste, and feminist traditions challenge philosophy to expand its canon. Inclusion is not merely identity representation; it restructures philosophical questions of knowledge, dignity, hierarchy, education, and self-respect. The conclusion of the Indian dialogue is that criticism of colonial classification becomes fruitful only when precolonial plurality, modern Indian agency, anti-caste/feminist challenges, and institutional history are seen within the same map. गजेन्द्र ठाकु रक समानान्तर दर्शन — खण्ड २ Mithila’s Parallel Perspective The question of Mithila is not merely a “regional example” in a national textbook. Nyāya, Navya-Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Dharmaśāstra, Sanskrit education, manuscript traditions, the Maithili language, popular intellectual life, and the cultural geography across India and Nepal constitute its intellectual ecology. First rule: Mithila must not be declared “the source of all Indian philosophy.” Where there is historical attribution, cite sources; where there is only intellectual affinity, call it parallel dialogue. Study Mithila’s contribution to Nyāya/Navya-Nyāya on the basis of specific evidence concerning authors, lineages, manuscripts, scholastic centres, and chronology. Broad civilisational pride is not a substitute for scholarship. If colonial catalogues divide Mithila’s manuscripts into separate departments such as “logic,” “law,” “religion,” and “grammar,” the modern researcher should recover the original scholastic interconnections. A catalogue heading should guide research, not become an ontology. Pañjī/genealogical archives are not part of philosophy’s traditional canon, yet they constitute a knowledge-system of classification, identity, norm, memory, and social authority. When they are used as philosophical sources, they should be read together with social-historical evidence and normative critique. Grierson’s linguistic classification is an important source for the documentation and global scholarly visibility of Maithili. At the same time, the umbrella “Bihari,” dialect/language labels, and the survey grid should also be examined as historical administrative taxonomies. Both the value of documentation and the politics of classification should be acknowledged. Linguistic taxonomy affects the philosophical canon. If Maithili material is consigned to a peripheral shelf called “dialect literature,” vernacular argument, ethics, social thought, and intellectual prose may become invisible to the history of philosophy. The Mithila–Nepal relationship requires study of intellectual circulation older than modern national borders. Manuscripts, teachers, marriage networks, pilgrimage, courts, and languages within one cultural zone may later have been classified separately in national archives. The national category “Indian philosophy” and the national category “Nepali philosophy” can impose later state frames upon older circulation. Cross-border intellectual history should instead be written from the provenance of sources. The impact of colonial education in Mithila should not be read simply as Sanskrit versus English. Vernacular schooling, examinations, employment, print, legal administration, and new professions altered structures of intellectual authority. Printed editions transform manuscript variation into a standard text. In critically editing Mithila manuscripts, variant readings, scribal notes, ownership marks, and metadata from local commentaries should be preserved. While constructing a regional canon, the mistakes of the national canon must not be repeated. A list of famous male Sanskrit scholars alone is not “Mithila philosophy”; women’s songs, social reform, anti-hierarchy voices, vernacular essays, modern debates on science and education, and legal-political thought may also be relevant according to the strength of the sources. It is not automatically proper to declare folk song or oral tradition “philosophy.” Philosophical use becomes justified when concepts, norms, selfhood, justice, suffering, agency, relations, or world-views can be shown through argumentative or recurrent patterns supported by evidence. To call Mithila painting a direct philosophical text of ontology or feminism may be an exaggeration; yet it can serve as an interdisciplinary source for questions of representation, gendered labour, ritual space, ecology, commodification, and visual knowledge. District gazetteers, settlement reports, censuses, linguistic surveys, and court records may record Mithila’s social categories as if they were “fixed facts.” Contemporary research should examine the date, purpose, administrative incentives, and local informant networks behind such colonial archives. Archival silence is especially important here. The relative absence of a group from written Sanskrit or official records does not prove the absence of philosophical thought; yet silence is not a licence for invention either. Oral, material, vernacular, legal, and family archives should be triangulated. A modern digital archive such as Videha can rewrite the classification of regional intellectual history. If metadata records script, language, genre, place, date, author, source type, certainty level, and relation to the canon, searchable plurality becomes possible. Problems of Maithili Unicode and OCR constitute a new question of epistemic classification. A text that is not machine-readable is almost invisible to search engines; technical infrastructure is therefore a new gatekeeper in modern canon formation. If Maithili, Tirhuta, Sanskrit scholastic prose, and regional archives are underrepresented in AI training corpora, machine summaries of “Indian philosophy” will repeat the dominant English/Hindi canon. Corpus diversity is therefore a methodological necessity. Mithila’s parallel maxim is: “Do not treat region as an example from the margins; make it a laboratory for testing classification— where national, linguistic, scholastic, caste, gender, archival, and border categories collide with one another.” Contemporary Applications Today a university syllabus audit can record the genealogy of each module’s categories: where did the “six systems” formulation come from? What are the limits of translating āstika/nāstika as “orthodox/heterodox”? How do the scopes of “Hindu philosophy” and “Indian philosophy” differ? Digital-library subject headings can be revised into a multi-tag architecture. A Nyāya manuscript need not be classified only as “Hindu philosophy”; it may also receive tags for logic, epistemology, Sanskrit, Mithila, commentary, and manuscript culture. If an AI knowledge graph creates a single edge “Nyāya = Hindu logic,” oversimplification becomes encoded. Relation types, temporal qualifiers, school variants, and confidence fields are necessary. In LLM benchmarks, rote items such as “Name the six orthodox schools” should be paired with second-order questions such as “Why is this classification historically contingent?” This would measure a model’s critical historical literacy. In collaborative knowledge systems such as Wikipedia, a lead sentence can reify a category. Article architecture can use separate sections for premodern names, colonial standardisation, modern usage, and scholarly debate. A museum or exhibition gallery on “Indian philosophy” should not consist merely of busts plus the six schools. It should also show manuscripts, diagrams of debates, translation history, print culture, vernacular texts, women and anti-caste thinkers, and colonial catalogues. Textbook publishers should give technical terms in their original script where appropriate—pramāṇa, darśana, āstika/nāstika, and so forth. English equivalents should be marked as provisional in the glossary so that students understand the limits of equivalence. Citation practice should record edition history when colonial editions are used. Which manuscripts formed the base, who edited the work, what translation choices were made, and whether a later critical edition exists should be documented for research transparency. When language technology constructs an “Indian philosophy corpus,” a Sanskrit-heavy selection should not be described as representing all India. Multilingual sampling should include Pali, Prakrit, Tamil, Persianate materials, Maithili, Bengali, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, and other traditions. Search-engine rankings may place popular Vedānta pages at the top for the query “Indian philosophy.” Curated knowledge panels can balance school diversity, historical periods, and regional traditions. गजेन्द्र ठाकु र When education policy teaches Indian knowledge systems, it should avoid nationalist inversion: claims such as “the West had no logic” or “India had everything first” weaken scholarly confidence. Contributions should be stated specifically and grounded in source and chronology. A comparative-philosophy seminar can use reciprocal concept mapping: Aristotle–Nyāya, Frege–Navya-Nyāya, hermeneutics– Mīmāṃsā, and so forth. Every comparison should contain columns for similarity, difference, and “no claim of historical influence.” Archive metadata should include uncertainty fields: author certain/probable/disputed; date exact/range; provenance known/unknown. The categorical certainty of a colonial catalogue should not be imported without re-examination. Local heritage projects making claims such as “ancient philosophical centre” should define a documentary threshold. Inscriptions, dated manuscripts, lineage records, contemporary references, and later memory represent different levels of evidence. AI-generated bibliographies can hallucinate historical titles. Scholarly workflow should therefore require ISBN/catalogue/primary-scan verification, author-title normalisation, and clear distinction among editions. If an OCR system cannot recognise Tirhuta or old Devanagari, a digital archive becomes systematically biased. Script-specific OCR evaluation, a human correction layer, and image-text linking are parts of epistemic inclusion. Public history should write both the contributions of colonial scholars and the imperial context in which they worked. Instead of a “hero” or “villain” binary, a mixed-legacy model should be adopted. A classification dashboard could serve as a practical research tool: indigenous label | colonial label | modern textbook label | known limitations | alternative classification. Such a format makes the history of categories transparent. The contemporary maxim is: “A database column, a syllabus heading, and an AI ontology all create modern darśana-lists; therefore the design of classification is itself a philosophical responsibility.” Chapter Conclusion The history of the colonial classification of Indian philosophy is neither a story of total invention nor one of neutral discovery. The three-level interaction of precolonial taxonomies, colonial institutions, and modern Indian reappropriation shaped the modern canon. Labels such as “six systems,” “Hinduism,” “Indian philosophy,” “orthodox/heterodox,” and “mysticism” can be useful, but their historical scope, translation losses, and institutional genealogies must remain explicit. Philology, manuscript editing, comparative linguistics, and cataloguing made invaluable scholarly contributions; to invalidate these achievements automatically because of their imperial context would itself be contrary to evidence. At the same time, textualism, Sanskrit-centrism, Vedānta-centring, racial/civilisational extrapolation, rigid world-religion taxonomy, and university simplification could narrow plurality. Acknowledging this mixed legacy provides the strongest historical perspective. Scholarship such as Nicholson and Lorenzen limits strong colonial-invention theses; King, Cohn, Trautmann, Halbfass, and others illuminate modern transformations of category, power, encounter, and classification. The value of this debate lies not in a binary victory but in analytical precision. Modern Indian thinkers were not passive recipients. Dasgupta, Hiriyanna, Radhakrishnan, reformers, anti-caste thinkers, and many regional intellectuals rewrote modern “Indian philosophy.” Mithila serves in this chapter as a methodological test case: Nyāya/Navya-Nyāya, Sanskrit scholasticism, Maithili language classification, manuscript archives, and the India–Nepal intellectual geography expose the limits of national and colonial categories. The digital age does not end the problem of colonial taxonomy; metadata, search ranking, OCR, ontology, benchmarks, and training-corpus classification create a new infrastructure of categorisation. Parallel Philosophy concludes: “Classify, but write the genealogy of the classification; compare, but do not assume equivalence; build a canon, but conduct an exclusion audit; preserve tradition, but do not exempt it from criticism.” From this perspective, decolonising Indian philosophy does not mean removing Europe from the syllabus; it means repositioning Indian intellectual plurality within a more precise, multilingual, evidence-based, and reciprocally global dialogue.