AI is coming at light speed — and without intervention, it will carry colonial narratives into every Indian home. Krishna Maheshwari, founder of the Institute for Civilisational Studies and CEO of VoltIQ, makes the case for Sanatana AI: a fundamentally different approach to artificial intelligence that reflects Indic epistemology rather than replicating Western colonial discourse.
Drawing on his Harvard MBA, Cornell computer science background, and 15 years building Hindupedia (12,000+ articles, 140 academic citations), Maheshwari argues that how AI derives answers is as important as the answers themselves. His paper on colonial discourse in Indian-American education — in the top 1% of all open-access academic works globally — anchors a call for Indian civilisation to invest in indigenous datasets, foundational models, and AI tools that can de-colonize the very software shaping the next generation’s worldview.

About the speaker:
Founder and CEO of the Institute for Civilizational Studies and a Harvard MBA and Cornell Computer Science graduate with senior experience at Amazon, Dell, and Cloudera.