Film on Guru Shishya Parampara

Guru-Shishya Parampara is one of the cornerstone films from the 10 Indic Films Project, created to examine and illuminate the indigenous education system of Bharat in its full historical, philosophical, and contemporary dimensions. Directed and creatively led by Kshitiz Rai, the film is a deep meditation on how India once learned, lived, and passed on wisdom—not through blackboards and bureaucracy, but through presence, immersion, and living with the guru.

The project was born from a need to dismantle widespread misconceptions. Modern education in India is often seen as a natural evolution, but as the film lays bare, the current system is a British import, implemented systematically to dismantle India’s civilizational backbone. The gurukul system—which once empowered children with rootedness, dharma, and holistic knowledge—was slowly delegitimized, defunded, and pushed into obscurity during the colonial era. What replaced it was a model designed to produce culturally alienated subjects: Indians in color, but British in taste, thought, and value.

Through historical research and civilizational critique, the film challenges the colonial narrative that India was an illiterate land before the British "civilized" it. In reality, as records show, India's literacy and access to knowledge were often higher than that of 18th–19th century Britain, and education was not bound by caste in the ways modern myths suggest. The colonial state deliberately destroyed this decentralized, culturally anchored ecosystem, replacing it with a uniform, industrial system of schooling meant to produce compliant clerks—not courageous minds.

In the present, this foreign framework has morphed into a hyper-commercial, soulless machine. Education has become a commodity, deeply entangled in profit-driven motives, detached from cultural continuity or moral vision. The film critiques this ongoing decay while presenting the Guru-Shishya Parampara not as nostalgia, but as a living, viable alternative.

To portray this with honesty and depth, the film crew travelled extensively across Bharat, filming in active gurukuls that still carry the tradition forward. These included Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s gurukuls, Adi Shankaracharya Peethams, Sharada Peetham, Udupi Mathas, and gurukuls in Kerala, Kashi, and Karnataka. Across each of these locations, the team interacted with acharyas, students, and seers—witnessing the quiet power of an educational system that nurtures character, not just competence.

What emerged was not just documentation, but revelation. The serene daily lives of students, their rituals, their studies, their physical and spiritual discipline—everything spoke of a tradition still breathing, though unseen by most. These are institutions that teach logic, astronomy, philosophy, ethics, languages, and even modern subjects—debunking the myth that gurukuls only focus on religious rote.

The pedagogical heart of the Guru-Shishya system is that the student learns not just from instruction but through osmosis—by living with, observing, and embodying the guru’s wisdom. It's not transactional; it's transformational.

The film was released on Prachyam OTT and was received with heartfelt praise across civilizational content communities. Many viewers described it as an awakening—a gentle yet powerful push to reimagine what education could mean if rooted in Bharatiya thought, values, and cosmology.

More than a documentary, Guru-Shishya Parampara is an offering—an ode to the system that once made Bharat a wisdom civilization, and a call to remember, reclaim, and revive it with clarity and courage.