It involves building a deep familiarity with the opponent's point of view before criticising it, similar to the modern day device of steelmanning.
It is a dialectical approach, taking a thesis by an opponent ('purva pakshin') and then providing its rebuttal ('khandana') so as to establish the protagonist's views ('siddhanta').
The purva paksha tradition required any debater first to argue from the perspective of his opponent to test the validity of his understanding of the opposing position, and from there to realize his own shortcomings.
His other objective is to draw attention to the Christian-centric focus of the West's archive of knowledge and its historical involvement in the systematic suppression of the dharmic worldview and ways of life to be found in the works of Indologists.
By problematizing the way in which Dharma has been represented by Western scholarship, he exposes the asymmetrical nature of the relationship that obtains between the powerful discipline of Indology and its disempowered subjects, the Indians (334).