TOK situations from India
Where a case comes from changes what it can show. These are the situations in the library drawn from india.
- India
Restoring murals nobody saw painted
Every intervention on the Ajanta cave paintings, from colonial-era varnishes that darkened them to modern cleaning that removes those very varnishes, embodies…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Objectivity
- India
A dance banned, then rebuilt
Colonial-era campaigns pushed hereditary temple dancers out of practice, and Bharatanatyam was later revived largely by urban reformers who reshaped its…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- India
Counting Bhopal's victims
Official, judicial and activist counts of deaths from the 1984 gas leak differ by tens of thousands, diverging on time windows, causation standards and whose…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Responsibility
- India
What the Chipko villagers knew
In the 1970s, Himalayan villagers, many of them women, embraced trees to stop commercial felling, arguing the forests' real yield was soil, water and air…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Values
- Culture
- India
Evacuating a million people on a forecast
Before Cyclone Fani struck Odisha in 2019, forecasts triggered the evacuation of over a million people, and the death toll stayed in double digits where a…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Certainty
- Responsibility
- India
Demonetisation and the missing counterfactual
India's 2016 note ban was declared a success and a failure by credentialled economists looking at the same aftermath. With no parallel India that kept its…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- Values
- India
The night the exit polls were wrong
Ahead of India's 2024 general election results, exit polls converged on a sweeping majority for the incumbent alliance; the counted votes delivered something…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- India
Rewriting yesterday's growth rate
When India moved to a new GDP methodology, recalculated back-series produced growth figures for earlier governments that differed sharply from the numbers…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- India
The Green Revolution's two ledgers
High-yield wheat varieties helped end famine-scale scarcity in India, and decades later the same programme is cited for depleted aquifers, soil damage and…
Enduring · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Values
- India
Music that lives in a lineage
Indian classical music passes from guru to disciple through years of imitation, correction and presence, with notation treated as a skeleton at best. A raga's…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- India
The script nobody can read
Thousands of short inscriptions survive from the Indus Valley civilisation, yet after a century of attempts, no decipherment commands consensus, and scholars…
Enduring · History
- Interpretation
- Certainty
- India
When a region goes offline
India records among the world's highest counts of regional internet shutdowns, imposed on public-order grounds. During each one, journalism, schooling,…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- India
Jantar Mantar: architecture as instrument
In the 1720s Jai Singh II built enormous masonry instruments in Jaipur and Delhi, sundials and sextants the size of buildings, to sharpen astronomical tables.…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Explanation
- India
Calculus before Newton, in Kerala
Mathematicians of the Kerala school, beginning with Madhava in the fourteenth century, derived infinite series for pi and trigonometric functions centuries…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Truth
- Perspective
- India
Two forecasts of the same monsoon
Farmers across India read bird behaviour, flowering patterns and wind for the monsoon's arrival, while the meteorological department runs ensemble models, and…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
The library that burned for months
Nalanda drew scholars from across Asia for centuries until its destruction around 1200, its manuscript collections reportedly burning for months. What survives…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- India
A film, a queen, and a fight over the past
Protests over the film Padmaavat turned on a figure known mainly from a sixteenth-century epic poem rather than contemporary chronicles. Crowds defended the…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- India
Binary patterns in Sanskrit prosody
Pingala's ancient treatise on Sanskrit poetic metre enumerates syllable patterns in ways that parallel binary representation and combinatorial rules formalised…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Culture
- Explanation
- India
Reading Ashoka after two thousand years
When James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script in the 1830s, rock inscriptions across the subcontinent suddenly spoke, and Ashoka re-entered history after…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Interpretation
- India
Ramanujan's unproven theorems
Srinivasa Ramanujan filled notebooks with thousands of results, many stated without proof and attributed by him to intuition or the goddess Namagiri.…
Enduring · Mathematics
- Justification
- Interpretation
- India
The ancient theory of why art moves us
The Natyashastra's rasa theory, some two thousand years old, systematically explains how performance transforms depicted emotion into felt aesthetic experience…
Enduring · The arts
- Interpretation
- Explanation
- India
The right to ask the state what it knows
India's Right to Information Act lets any citizen demand documents from public authorities, and activists have used it to surface everything from ration fraud…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- India
Reading the colonial archive against itself
The Subaltern Studies historians argued that South Asia's archives, largely produced by colonial administration, recorded peasants and rebels only at the…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Objectivity
- India
Reconstruction surgery in an ancient compendium
The Sushruta Samhita describes surgical techniques including nasal reconstruction, and European surgeons in the colonial period documented Indian practitioners…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Truth
- Culture
- India
Drumming you can speak
Tabla players learn compositions as spoken syllables, bols, before ever touching the drum, and can recite an entire piece aloud. The syllable is the unit of…
Enduring · The arts
- Culture
- Explanation
- India
Who designed the Taj Mahal?
The Taj Mahal's architect is credited variously to several named figures, with the documentary record thin and contested, while the thousands of craftsmen who…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Evidence
- Power
- India
How do you count wild tigers?
India's tiger estimates moved from pugmark tracing to camera traps and stripe-pattern recognition, and the headline number rose partly because the method…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Certainty
- India
The turmeric patent and the grandmother's proof
In 1995 a US patent was granted for using turmeric to heal wounds, a practice Indian households had relied on for generations. India's research council…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Power
- India
The textbook called Vedic Mathematics
The calculation shortcuts published in the twentieth century as Vedic Mathematics are useful and teachable, but historians of mathematics find no source for…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Power
- Justification
- India
A billion identities in one database
Aadhaar links welfare, banking and identity to biometric records for over a billion people, and when a fingerprint fails to match or a record misfires, the…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Responsibility
- India
Ayurveda meets the randomised trial
India funds research ministries for both biomedicine and traditional systems like Ayurveda, and disputes recur over whether centuries of documented clinical…
Current · The human sciences · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
Counting caste for the first time since 1931
India's 2027 census, its first fully digital one, will enumerate caste across all communities for the first time in nearly a century. Every design choice,…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Interpretation
- India
Whose air quality number is right?
On a smoggy Delhi morning, official monitors, embassy sensors and cheap home devices can disagree by wide margins, and the choice of averaging window changes…
Current · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Objectivity
- India
Mapping rights onto a forest
India's Forest Rights Act asks communities to document customary use of land their ancestors never surveyed, converting remembered practice into GPS points and…
Current · The human sciences
- Power
- Culture
- India
Editing the national textbook
Successive revisions of India's national school textbooks have added, trimmed and removed episodes, with each round defended as correction and attacked as…
Current · History
- Perspective
- Power