A survey of Michel Danino’s work provides context to the widespread unease surrounding the Supreme Court’s adverse remarks about him. – Swarajya Staff

The Supreme Court on 11 March ordered a blacklisting of three experts involved in drafting a controversial chapter on ‘corruption in the judiciary’ for a Class 8 NCERT textbook.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi described the NCERT director’s response as “disturbing” after it emerged the chapter had been rewritten without disclosing details of the new experts or approval processes.

The court directed the Union government and states not to associate with Professor Michel Danino, Suparna Diwakar and Alok Prasanna Kumar, who were involved in drafting the earlier chapter.

An affidavit by NCERT Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani stated that Michel Danino had supervised the drafting of the chapter, whilst educator Suparna Diwakar and legal researcher Alok Prasanna Kumar were also involved in the process.

The bench directed the Union, all states and all institutions receiving state funds to disassociate them from rendering any service which would mean payment from public funds.

The court observed it had “no reason to doubt that Professor Michel Danino along with Ms Diwakar and Mr Alok Prasanna Kumar either does not have reasonable knowledge about Indian judiciary or they deliberately, knowingly misrepresented the facts in order to project a negative image of the Indian judiciary before students of class 8 who are at an impressionable age. “

However, the three individuals can approach the Supreme Court for modification of this order, the court added.

Who is Michel Danino?

Michel Danino, born in 1956 in Honfleur, France, is a French-born Indian author, scholar, and educationist who has lived in India since 1977 and holds Indian citizenship.

Drawn to Indian civilization from his youth, influenced by Sri Aurobindo and Auroville, he settled in India and became a lifelong student of its ancient heritage. A visiting professor at IIT Gandhinagar, where he supports the Archaeological Sciences Centre, Danino has authored key works including The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati (2010), exploring the Vedic river, and Indian Culture and India’s Future (2011). He has also co-edited textbooks on Indian knowledge traditions and edited Sri Aurobindo and India’s Rebirth (2018).

The Supreme Court’s comments give his critics fresh ammunition to attack him.

Danino has been a target of suspicion in certain academic and media circles for years. The charge is familiar: he writes sympathetically about ancient India’s civilisational achievements, he has defended the physical existence of the Sarasvati river, he has questioned the Aryan invasion theory. This, the accusation runs, makes him a scholar whose conclusions are predetermined by ideology rather than evidence.

Those who make this accusation have, with remarkable consistency, declined to engage with his works.

What the Evidence Actually Looks Like

The Lost River, Danino’s most comprehensive work, is an investigation into the Sarasvati—the river celebrated in the Rig Veda that later texts describe as “disappearing.” The question of whether this river had a physical existence, and if so where, has become entangled in Indian political controversy. Critics therefore treat any scholarly work that argues for its historical reality as ideologically motivated.

What those critics rarely discuss is how Danino builds his case.

The book draws on geological surveys conducted by the Geological Survey of India; on satellite imagery analysed from NASA’s LANDSAT series, France’s SPOT series, and India’s own IRS satellites; on nuclear isotope dating of groundwater samples carried out by scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre; on bore-hole data drilled by American hydrologist Robert Raikes near the Harappan site of Kalibangan; on a 1986–1991 hydrogeological survey of the Cholistan Desert conducted by two German scientists, M.A. Geyh and D. Ploethner; and on remote-sensing research published by three scientists of the Indian Space Research Organisation.

This is before one counts the 19th-century British surveyors, the French CNRS mission of the 1980s, the American and Japanese researchers, and the Indian archaeologists whose fieldwork Danino synthesises across more than 400 pages.

The accusation of ideological bias is, in other words, being levelled at a book whose evidentiary base spans four continents, two centuries of scholarship, and at least six scientific disciplines.

Satellite imagery from a NASA programme does not adjust its findings based on Indian political conditions. German isotope hydrology does not take instructions from the RSS. Either the geology is sound or it is not—and critics who wish to challenge Danino’s conclusions are obliged to say which data they dispute and why.

The Quality That Distinguishes a Scholar from an Ideologue

There is a further dimension of Danino’s work that his critics have chosen to overlook: his explicit, consistent acknowledgement of uncertainty and dissent.

In the prologue to The Lost River, he writes that whatever perspective his readers choose to adopt, he will be satisfied if they feel enriched by the inquiry.

In the body of the book, he returns repeatedly to scholars who hold different views, notes where the evidence is genuinely contested, and presents his own synthesis as a reasoned interpretation rather than an unchallengeable verdict. “We will hear diverse viewpoints,” he writes, “learn from every one of them, and I will present my own, while weighing and trying to reconcile inputs from a variety of disciplines.”

This is not a rhetorical formula. It is borne out in practice. Danino does not suppress inconvenient findings. He discusses the minority of scholars who have questioned whether the Vedic Sarasvati was located in India at all, or whether it existed as a physical river.

He engages with their arguments before offering his rebuttal. He flags, more than once, the limits of what the evidence can establish. He distinguishes between what is demonstrated, what is probable, and what remains speculative.

A partisan sophist does not do this. An intellectual demagogue selects evidence, suppresses alternatives, and presents conclusions with a certainty the record does not support. Danino does the opposite—and the contrast with the certainty his critics bring to their dismissals of him is, in itself, telling.

The Argument His Critics Would Rather Not Have

Perhaps the most uncomfortable dimension of Danino’s scholarship—uncomfortable, specifically, for those who accuse him of serving a political agenda—is that his sharpest criticism is directed not at ancient India’s detractors but at the Indian state’s failure to take its own intellectual heritage seriously.

In an article in The Hindu in 2015, Danino notes that no Indian university has a department dedicated to the history of science. He notes that the best online resource for India’s classical mathematicians—a tradition that includes Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Bhaskaracharya, Mahavira, and Narayana Pandita—is maintained not by an Indian institution but by the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

He notes that significant research contributions to the field in recent decades have come from scholars in the United States, France, Japan, and New Zealand, while their Indian counterparts have worked, in his words, “with little or no institutional support.”

This is not a celebration of ancient India’s greatness. It is a damning audit of post-Independence India’s intellectual priorities. If his agenda were simply to flatter a political constituency, he would not write this. He writes it because it is true, and because a scholar whose subject is being neglected has an obligation to say so regardless of whose discomfort it causes.

The same essay makes an argument that deserves to be read in full by everyone who has dismissed Danino as a partisan. He argues that mainstream Indian historiography’s silence on India’s genuine scientific and mathematical achievements—its failure to give Brahmagupta or Sushruta the space it gives to kings and dynasties—has created the vacuum that fantasists have filled.

The absurd claims about ancient aircraft and Vedic nuclear weapons that embarrass serious scholars arise, at least partly, from a historiography that has told Indian students their civilisation produced nothing worth studying.

Danino’s prescription is not mythologising. It is rigour: document the real achievements, teach them properly, and there will be no room left for the fabrications.

A scholar who builds his case on German groundwater surveys, NASA satellite data, and French archaeological missions is not producing ideology. A scholar who acknowledges competing viewpoints, flags the limits of evidence, and invites his readers to draw their own conclusions is not producing propaganda. A scholar who criticises his own country’s institutions for neglecting the very field he is defending is not writing to please a political master.

In the same way, a scholar who included a section on problems with one of India’s most important institutions in a school textbook is only enabling informed civic understanding among young students. – Swarajya, 16 March 2026

Prof. Michel Danino has actually rescued the NCERT by lifting it out of the morass into which the Leftist establishment had sunk it. … The reforms to history textbooks under Danino’s leadership were long overdue and are in the right direction. – Sandeep Balakrishna

Michel Danino, in many ways, is reminiscent of the gurus of the ancient Indian parampara. Unassuming and quiet, yet a powerhouse of scholarship, which is matched only by his dignity and unimpeachable intellectual integrity.

I have had the immense fortune of learning from him for nearly two decades. On the several occasions I have met him, the experience has always been enriching, fruitful and, above all, ennobling.

In fact, if at all I have managed to contribute in any meaningful way in the area of Bharatavarsha’s history and cultural heritage, I owe a huge debt of gratitude—which I cannot repay—to Danino’s stellar body of work.

The areas of his scholarly investigations are daunting even for professional scholars—exposing the bogus Aryan Invasion Theory, tracing the trajectory of the Saraswati River, archaeology, ancient Indian knowledge traditions, nuances of the Puranas and epics, prehistoric studies, Harappan art and town planning, marine archaeology….

From a larger perspective, Danino has created a substantial and qualitative scholarly legacy in his own lifetime and continues quietly on his chosen path away from the public glare, away from any temptations of celebrity.

I speak from personal experience.

The distinguished positions he has held—most notably as Visiting Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gandhinagar and, lately, as Chairperson of the NCERT—are not only entirely deserving but reflective of his eminence.

The Supreme Court, which took suo motu cognisance of a chapter on judicial corruption in an eighth-standard NCERT textbook, has meted out rather high-handed treatment to Danino.

In many ways, it is a tacit admission of its ignorance of his distinction.

There are legions of students and scholars who literally venerate Danino.

Without exaggeration, Danino—a Frenchman by birth and an Indian citizen for over three decades—is one of the finest cultural patriots of India.

He is deeply anchored in the philosophy and ideals of Sri Aurobindo, one of twentieth-century India’s greatest mystic-saints.

To put this in context, Danino has actually rescued the NCERT by lifting it out of the morass into which the Leftist establishment had sunk it.

Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians, a classic exposé of the NCERT (apart from the Humanities department of the HRD ministry), is perhaps the most devastating critique of this morass to date.

But the late scholar N.S. Rajaram supplies an even more stunning data point that Shourie’s book does not contain.

He mentions how Nurul Hasan—Indira Gandhi’s favourite Education Minister—ran the NCERT like a czar and the consequences thereof.

“NIEPA is a particularly influential body that administers and oversees educational policy in India.

NCERT controls textbooks and other materials that are used in schools and colleges in India…

Through his control of these two powerful bodies, Nurul Hasan became the education czar in India…

A single example should help give an idea of the dangers of this centralised feudal educational policy.

For over 20 years, H.S. Khan—Nurul Hasan’s favourite—headed the history and sociology division of the NCERT.

He is known to hold the view that India became civilised only through the introduction of Islam.

This, incidentally, is also the official Pakistani line…

This is taking the Aryan invasion idea a giant step backwards…

In 1986, on Khan’s initiative, textbook writers in all the states were directed to change the version of history to accord with the anti-Hindu model.”

Yet not one court back then took umbrage at these flagrant distortions of history done at the behest of sitting ministers and high-ranking bureaucrats.

The reforms to history textbooks under Danino’s leadership were long overdue and are in the right direction.

Yet the Supreme Court has taken severe objection to one solitary chapter dealing with judicial corruption and has used its power disproportionately against a widely respected scholar and academic.

Its wording is troubling, to say the least.

“… We have no reason to doubt that Professor Michel Danino, along with Ms Diwakar and Mr Alok Prasanna Kumar, either does not have reasonable knowledge about the Indian judiciary or they deliberately and knowingly misrepresented the facts in order to project a negative image of the Indian judiciary….

There is no reason why such persons should be associated in any manner with the preparation of curriculum or finalisation of textbooks….

We direct the Government of India and all states/UTs/universities etc. to disassociate the three of them forthwith and not assign any responsibility involving public funds.”

Since my own schooldays, there have been any number of chapters in textbooks dealing with political and bureaucratic corruption.

Yet, as far as I can remember, there were no cases or punitive court actions against their authors.

To state the obvious, judicial corruption is a reality.

One is reminded of the recent case of Justice Yashwant Varma, which sent nationwide shockwaves and led to impeachment proceedings against him.

Omitting the mention of uncomfortable truths—judicial corruption in this case—will not make them disappear.

One is tempted to use the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction, but this issue is perhaps one of the clearest signs of the times we live in.

Or rather, an illustration of a timeless truth of history beautifully captured in the Mahabharata:

sulabhāḥ puruṣā rājan satataṃ priyavādinaḥ |
apriyasya tu pathyasya vaktā śrotā ca durlabhaḥ ||

“O King, it is easy to find people who always say pleasant things.

But it is extremely rare to find someone who speaks the unpleasant but beneficial truth, and even rarer to find someone willing to listen to it.” – News18, 13 March 2026

› Sandeep Balakrishna is an author, editor, columnist, public intellectual and an independent researcher. He is the founder and chief editor of The Dharma Dispatch.