3 min readBhopalApr 4, 2026 07:05 AM IST
Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan Thursday said Ujjain is the original centre of global time calculation and called for undoing the damage done by colonial era education policies, asserting that India must shed the “Macaulay mindset” within the next ten years.
Addressing a gathering in Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain, Pradhan said India’s major spiritual centres must be seen as more than places of faith. “If we study all those places deeply, read their history, and examine the character of their civilisation, whether it is Ujjain, Kashi, Kanchi, or Puri Dham, all of these are living laboratories rooted in Indian knowledge tradition, where science, art, culture, literature, and spirituality coexist,” he said.
On the question of timekeeping, Pradhan argued that since the intersection of the Prime Meridian and the Tropic of Cancer lies at or near Ujjain, the city’s ancient title as the abode of Mahakal, Master of Time, has a firm scientific and geographical basis.
“Any calculation of time would be incomplete without Ujjain. The colonial rulers took it from us in the name of Greenwich Standard Time and gave it to Europe. But its original centre is Ujjain, Avantika, this is the land of central India,” he said.
Pradhan cautioned that merely asserting India’s claims would not be enough. “The rivals of Indian intellectual tradition will say for centuries: these are snake-charmers trying to impose superstition. That is not so. Today there is a need to prove this, to demonstrate this,” he said.
On education, Pradhan set a 10-year target to reverse the damage he attributed to colonial era policy. “Within the next ten years, we must undo what Macaulay did in 1835 and 1836. His conspiracy to derail India’s education system succeeded. Today, the time has come. We are implementing the National Education Policy. A collective mindset has formed in the country. We must emerge from the mentality of subjugation, from the colonial mindset, from the Macaulay mindset,” he said.
He also pushed back against what he described as a Western monopoly over the language of knowledge. “The Western world changed the language of this knowledge to limit us and defame us. Knowledge has no monopoly of any one language. Knowledge exists in all Indian languages, in all the world’s languages, in all folk languages,” he said.
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On technology and national security, Pradhan noted that the yardstick of military power had evolved across centuries. “Today the measure of a nation’s military power has shifted from elephants to tanks, warships, aircraft, rockets and now it is about who has how many drones. Drones are being democratised. Who controls the new orbit of spacecraft? Communication has moved to a new orbit. Military capability is now measured in the new orbit,” he said.
Pradhan also cited growing expert opinion linking India’s ancient knowledge tradition to modern frontier technologies. “Centuries ago, Indian mathematicians through Vedic mathematics could solve the most complex problems. Modern experts have started saying that quantum computing and AI tools scientifically emerge from India’s knowledge tradition itself,” he said.
