Knowledge: Changing Contexts and Combination

Conventionally in Indian society, though there have remained a numerically thin category of intellectual or ‘people of wisdom’ to provide society with the required guidance, information, direction, judgement and explanation on a variety of economic, social and natural processes and events, efforts for scientific validation and commercial exploitation of these expertise were not explicit in the public domain. These bodies of knowledge, as we have discussed in chapter three, were neither processed nor certified for mass production and application at a large scale. In contemporary society, the scope and condition of economic exploitation of knowledge has become very explicit with knowledge acquiring a commodity value though with a varied intensity across the social and geographical space. In recent years, along with revolution in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and globalisation of economy, large-scale commercial exploitation and mass production of knowledge, there has been phenomenal increase in use of knowledge in all domains of lives. These have altogether redefined the significance of knowledge workers of all sorts. They have acquired new cultural meaning, political power and economic validity in present-day society. Significantly, knowledge work in India is taking shape in a pre-given order that has not discarded the past.