Indian thought and scholarship has travelled a long way beginning with the Vedas and through the times of Lagadha, Panini, Patanjali, Bharatamuni, Kalidasa and Abhinavagupta, almost up to the time the British merchants came and colonized India and left the traditional institutions and knowledge practices uncared for. In this long period, spanning over several millennia, Indians produced a large corpus of literature touching upon almost every aspect of human life, from the sciences to the literatures, from aesthetics to lifestyle. This presentation will make an effort to showcase some of the Indian contributions in various disciplines that added quality material to world thought and culture. In doing so, it will present certain highlights in each epoch and how the Indians pursued and celebrated knowledge as long as they remained in charge of their own destinies. While Indians during the last one century have, no doubt, done some marvellous work in bringing out their civilizational legacy in the field of mathematical and astronomical sciences, with the publication of some of the original works along with their commentaries, the study of other disciplines, like chemistry, medicine, architecture, metallurgy etc. are yet to be touched upon in any major way. Vast material is lying in the manuscript wealth across various national repositories spread throughout India – estimated to be around 80,00,000! Only a very few of this staggering number has been studied or published. Thus a large corpus of our ancient knowledge is still outside our popular knowledge pool. With various traditional knowledge practices, like medicine, ecology and, art and architecture, getting more foothold in the modern times, reproduction of the earlier canonical textbooks with commentaries and modern expository notes will only strengthen the emerging worldview. Further, if these volumes can also be made available in local/regional languages, it will definitely make learning more interesting and creative. In this context, It will be interesting to note that Indian textbooks in regional languages were continued to be used at centres of indigenous learning till up to the beginning of British rule in India as revealed by 19th century surveys conducted by the colonial government. This presentation proposes to look into these issues while discussing the Indian story of textbooks and their evolution from the ancient times and how they communicated with their intended audiences through the ages.

Indian textbooks: From the beginnings to the modern times

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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