Conclusion
The commitment to indigenous Indian economic thought continued into the early decades of the twentieth century, but was mainly lost after independence. Despite pioneering work on Indian ideas, now there is hardly any school or centre in any university/institute which recognizes the importance of Indian economic thought from a contemporary perspective.
After India became a republic in 1950, many universities and colleges were created across the country, some with teaching and research programmes in Indian economic history, although not so much for Indian economic thought. The teaching of Indian economic thought as a core subject was continued until 2004 at the University of Madras, but was then discontinued. There are some colleges and universities created recently that teach the history of Indian economic thought, but only as optional subjects for undergraduate students.
However, after the emergence of Western free market economics, India has not attempted to look back at its own indigenous tradition of market economics once practised decades or even centuries before. This is a point which few are willing to take from Indian economists like S.V. Doraiswami, C. Rajagopalachari, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, B.R. Ambedkar, B.R. Shenoy and Radhakamal Mukherjee. Looking forward the future of India is promising and, if nurtured properly, it could reengage with the ‘lost’ path of the pioneering contributions of Indian economists who envisioned distinctive ideas for India’s own needs.
It is clear that there was a large amount of literature in ancient India providing moral, social and economic codification for ways of pursuing prosperity. It is also clear that the independence movement in India shifted radically the way in which economic thinking prevailed in India after British colonial rule. In the process, the insightful ideas of ancient India vanished, partly because of the social divisiveness of aspects of the Hindu religion. Western thinking also played a role in highlighting social ills within the broad structure of Indian society. While it is true that many useful ideas depicted in ancient literature were sidelined, at the beginning of the twentieth century there were some pioneering Indian economists who re-employed elements of ancient economics. But this tradition was only briefly rediscovered and quickly vanished. Since then it has been a long journey of forgotten traditions, while the academic community engaged on the paths of Marxist and neoclassical economics up to very recently. Nevertheless, there is hope that the past antiquities of Indian economic thought could be re-introduced to young minds, who may pursue them rigorously and with great interest.