In Kalaripayattu, the martial art of Kerala, knowledge of the body’s vital spots is “the most secretive and last-taught part of a student’s training.” An account of the art on a University of Exeter site says it is “given only to students in whom the master has complete trust.” It is “seldom given completely to any one student even within a family.”
One practitioner quoted there puts it simply: “no one parts with this knowledge completely.”
Every year since 1845, the Bathini family of Hyderabad has given out a fish remedy for asthma on Mrigasira Karthi, the day that marks the onset of the monsoon. Patients are given a live murrel fish stuffed with a “secret herbal paste.” Many people believe it to be a traditional remedy for asthma and other breathing problems.
The family’s story is that on a stormy night in 1845 a holy man from the Himalayas knocked on their door. The next morning, as he was leaving, he “whispered the secret formula of the fish cure” to Veeranna Goud. The formula has stayed in the family. His great-grandsons continued to give out the fish.
The singer Kesarbai Kerkar began to train under Ustad Alladiya Khan in 1921. According to Wikipedia, she reportedly set a condition that he “should not train other disciples except them.” Alladiya Khan died in 1946.
In Haridwar, around 2,000 pandas, priests of the holy city, “preserve the lineages of their clients in the ‘Bahi khatas’,” the registers they keep. “The clientele of a particular panda is decided on the basis of the village, district and the state they come from,” DT Next reported in 2021.
Before written records, the pandas “used to memorise the names, clans and places of origin, and pass down the information orally to their next generations.”
“Are you a cistern or a channel?” This is the title of a study by Jatinder Kumar Jha and Biju Varkkey of IIM Ahmedabad in the Journal of Knowledge Management. They interviewed research and development professionals in Indian pharmaceutical firms about why they hide knowledge from colleagues.
They found six triggers: distrust, a competitive work environment, perceived career insecurity, lack of recognition, lack of reciprocation and lack of confidence in one’s own knowledge. The hiding took forms such as “playing innocent” and “counterquestioning.”
Tunday Kababi opened in Lucknow in 1905. According to Wikipedia, its kebab “is said to incorporate 160 different spices.” Esquire India reports that the recipe “still remains a family secret.”
Accounts of the number differ. Others speak of at least 100 spices, or of 125 ingredients.
Raaz: a secret. The Rekhta dictionary gives “mystery, secret, confidential, clandestine.”
Bhed ki baat: a matter of secrets. Rekhta defines it as a secret, a mystery, a thing to be hidden.
Vidya nama narasya rupam adhikam prachchhanna-guptam dhanam. Knowledge is a person’s greater beauty, a hidden and guarded wealth. These are the opening words of verse 20 of the Nitishataka, the hundred verses on conduct by the poet Bhartrihari.
The verse appeared in the Sanskrit paper of the Maharashtra Class X board examination in 2023.
In 1977, during the Emergency, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi called a general election. Her private secretary R.K. Dhawan later explained why, in an interview with Karan Thapar on India Today television. “She believed the IB report that she would get a majority,” he said. “It was P N Dhar who handed over an Intelligence Bureau report that prompted her to declare elections.”
Dhawan also said that she “was not aware of her son’s activities during Emergency and no complaints against him ever reached her.” She lost.
The Arthashastra, the ancient treatise on statecraft attributed to Kautilya, sets out how the king’s spies report to him. Reports reach the court through several separate lines of spies.
In R. Shamasastry’s translation: “When the information thus received from these three different sources is exactly of the same version, it shall be held reliable. If they (the three sources) frequently differ, the spies concerned shall either be punished in secret or dismissed.”