Speaker: Prof. M. D. Srinivas, Padma Shri awardee, Chairman, Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai
The second lecture in the series was delivered by Padma Shri awardee Prof. M. D. Srinivas on the topic “Sanskrit and the Sources of Bhāratīya Jñāna Paramparā.” Prof. Srinivas highlighted that the central challenge facing Indian knowledge traditions is not a scarcity of knowledge but the vastness of material that remains unexplored, noting that India’s intellectual corpus of manuscripts, inscriptions, source texts, commentaries, translations, and archival records has only been catalogued, digitised, and studied in small part. He underscored the interdisciplinary breadth of this tradition, drawing connections across village governance at Uttaramerur, Chola-period healthcare institutions, astronomy, mathematics, manuscript studies, and library classification, thereby challenging the misconception that Sanskrit studies are confined to language and literature alone. He emphasized that Sanskrit instead serves as a gateway to disciplines such as mathematics, medicine, governance, philosophy, linguistics, architecture, and social thought, and noted that significant discoveries still await scholars even within texts published decades ago. He concluded that the task ahead lies not merely in preservation, but in the sustained study, interpretation, translation, and dissemination of this knowledge.