The Hindu : Plea to strengthen Indian heritage

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 17, 2002

National

National

Plea to strengthen Indian heritage

The International Forum for India's Heritage (IFIH), an apolitical body recently launched by over 150 founder members, including eminent academics, scholars, scientists and artists, has appealed to the President of India, the Prime Minister, the Human Resource Development Minister, and other dignitaries, to help strengthen and rejuvenate Indian heritage.

In a letter, Michel Danino, convener, IFIH, and P.R. Krishnakumar, Managing Director, Arya Vaidya Pharmacy, said that every citizen should have full access to our cultural heritage, now falling into neglect.

Indian culture, they said, has been ``the object of increasing indifference and denigration, though it is perhaps the only one left that offers humankind an alternative to self- destruction through blind materialism or religious fanaticism. To rely purely on dominant Western materialistic methods, however effective they may appear at first, can only lead to cultural nihilism and human degeneration. The West's best thinkers themselves have long been warning of this danger.''

The letter said that, a child now went through school ``remaining largely unaware of the essential values that arose from this land _ values such as the divine potential in every human being, self-knowledge and the spirit of inquiry, the oneness and interconnectedness of humankind, respect for pluralism and synthesis.'' Indian students learn about nineteenth-century Western humanism, but remain ignorant ``of our own vasudhaiva kutumbakam or ekaiva manushi jatih. They come, across concepts from Western psychology such as ``personality development'' without learning proven yogic techniques. They are told of the need to foster a ``scientific temper'', but are not shown how the Indian genius was deeply scientific in its quest: thus they are taught arithmetic, but not how zero, the decimal system or the binary notation originated in India; modern astronomy, but not the cosmic worldview ancient Indians had of an eight-billion-year-old universe; relativity but not the fluid Indian concept of time; Darwinian evolution, but not our rishis' own concept of evolution, reflected for instance in the Dashavatar sequence.

The letter said Indian children should not be denied access to those ancient values. All great Indians who fought for the country's freedom _ Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, to name a few _ noted how ``we have been cut off by a mercenary and soulless education from all our ancient roots of culture and tradition'' and called on us to ``create a complete and moving orb of Indian culture.''

Exactly the opposite has been done leading to a stage where the average Indian student ``knows almost nothing of his land's indigenous culture. Indeed, some Western universities today run more courses on India traditions than their Indian counterparts.''

The IFIH urged the dignitaries to recommend major changes in the educational system, so that the essential values of Indian heritage be integrated in all the disciplines taught in schools and universities. The IFIH planned to design a simple yet comprehensive course on India's heritage, including aspects such as science, yoga and spirituality, arts, education, economics and management, woman, Ayurveda, archaeology, ecology, the letter said.

The forum said it did not advocate a return to the past but only wanted the most modern teaching and learning techniques to be used to give new forms to our heritage for the benefit of the younger generations. ``There lies the key to a constructive modernisation of India that will enable it to play its role on the global scene,'' the forum said. It regretted that the recent use of slogans such as ``Talibanisation'' or ``saffronisation'' of Indian education had politicised and sought to prevent ``what should be a sincere, objective national debate on ways to overhaul an educational system that strains the average Indian schoolgirl or schoolboy with an overweight schoolbag, an overburdened syllabus, and a cruelly stressful examination scheme.''

The other signatories to the appeal were: Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Padma Subrahmanyam, Kireet Joshi, D.R. Karthikeyan, Lokesh Chandra, Subhash Kashyap, Vinod Saighal, T.H. Chowdary and B.B. Lal.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National