About the Author

Pharansis Hansdak is the founder of a new philosophy of education grounded in Santal indigenous thought. His three-volume work, GAKHUR — A Philosophy of Education, argues that the purpose of schooling is not the production of performance but the formation of human beings whose judgment can be trusted — and that building that argument on a concept from one of the oldest living civilisations of the Indian subcontinent is not cultural sentiment but intellectual necessity.

Early Life and Context

Pharansis was born in 1996 in Kataldighi, a small village in the Pakur district of Jharkhand — a landscape that sits at the edge of the Santal heartland, where the rhythms of community life and the memory of an ancient civilisation are still present in daily existence.

It is from this ground that his thinking about education, formation, and human wisdom first took root. Long before it became a philosophy, Gakhur was simply part of the world he grew up in — a quality he recognised in certain people, a standard the community applied without ever needing to argue for it. The task of articulating what that standard actually meant, and what it demanded of education, would take years of contemplation to develop into the work it has become.

Education and Formation

His formal education moved across a range of institutions and traditions — from a Christian missionary school in rural Birbhum to government middle and high schools in Jharkhand, and eventually to St Aloysius College in Mangalore, where he completed a triple-major Bachelor of Arts in English, Economics, and History.

The most formative intellectual period of his life was the decade from 2014 to 2024, during which he lived and trained as a Jesuit scholastic — a member of the Society of Jesus, the Catholic religious order whose intellectual tradition is among the most rigorous and humanistically demanding in the history of education. The Jesuit life is, among other things, a sustained education in interiority: long periods of solitude, contemplative practice, philosophical study, and the kind of slow, unhurried engagement with foundational questions that ordinary institutional life rarely allows.

It was during this decade that the ideas which eventually became the GAKHUR Philosophy of Education were not merely thought about but genuinely lived with — examined from every angle, tested against experience, and revised in the light of genuine encounter with the complexity of human formation. Pharansis left the Jesuit life in 2024 following a personal shift in certain convictions — a transition he describes not as a rupture but as the honest expression of the same intellectual integrity that his formation had developed.

Current Work

Pharansis is currently completing a Bachelor of Education, bringing the same philosophical seriousness that shaped GAKHUR to the question of what genuine educator formation actually requires in practice.

His second major philosophical work, Living Without Guarantees: A Philosophy of Responsibility in an Uncertain World, extends the same contemplative method to a different domain: how human beings navigate responsibility, judgment, and meaning in conditions of genuine uncertainty — conditions that cannot be resolved by any system, doctrine, or framework, but only by the quality of the person who faces them.

He has also founded SantalStudies.com — The Santal Civilization Project, an independent scholarly initiative developed within the broader intellectual framework of the Santal Studies Research Organisation. The project is dedicated to building a comprehensive, structured, and disciplined digital knowledge archive of the Santal civilisation.

The Santal people are among the oldest indigenous communities of the Indian subcontinent, with a history, language, philosophy, and cultural tradition whose depth and internal coherence have rarely received sustained scholarly attention.

This work engages carefully with available linguistic, historical, and cultural sources to bring clarity and structure to a body of knowledge that remains widely dispersed and underrepresented in formal scholarship. It is not archival in the passive sense. It is a contribution to the ongoing life of a living civilisation — grounded in the recognition that preserving, organising, and understanding what a people have known, made, and carried across generations is among the most serious responsibilities of scholarship.

A Note on the Work

There is a thread that runs through everything Pharansis has written and founded: the refusal to accept inherited frameworks at face value when the evidence of their inadequacy is visible in the lives of actual people.

In education, that means refusing the assumption that performance is formation. In ethics, it means refusing the assumption that certainty is the precondition of responsibility. In scholarship, it means refusing the assumption that only certain traditions of knowledge deserve serious institutional attention.

What distinguishes his work from commentary or critique is that its questions were lived before they were written. The philosophy of Gakhur was not conceived at a desk. It was tested in a decade of contemplative formation, revised in the encounter with failure and uncertainty, and written by someone who had already paid the price of taking his own questions seriously.