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Workshop on Aesthetics Through an IKS Framework

Aesthetics through an IKS Framework

Brought to you by Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, IIT Madras

The event took place from 29 Nov to 01 Dec 2024.

Workshop Schedule

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Speakers

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Important Dates

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Concept Note:

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Organizing Committee

  • Prof. Rajesh Kumar, Head of Department, Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras
  • Dr. Aditya Kolachana, Principal Investigator, Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, IIT Madras
  • Prof. Jyotirmaya Tripathy, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras
  • Dr. Deepak Paramashivan, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras
  • Dr. Sreenath VS, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras
  • Mr. Sreeram Gopinath, Associate, Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, IIT Madras
  • Mr. Sidhi Vinayak M, Associate, Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, IIT Madras
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Completed Conference

Linguistic Traditions and Structures of Negation in Modern Indian Languages

Linguistics Traditions and Structures of Negation in Modern Indian Languages

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CIKS Talk Series: On Two Localities: Ullavur and Kundratthur

Two Beautiful, Affluent and Self-Governing Localities of India: Ullavur and Kundratthur

Prof. M.D. Srinivas and Dr. Jatinder Kumar Bajaj from the Centre for Policy Studies, Chennai-600069 delivered a talk titled “Two Beautiful, Affluent and Self-Governing Localities of India: Ullavur and Kundratthur” on 11th Sep 2024 at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. 

Dr. Bajaj Spoke about the abundance of grain that the localities produced which was shown to be several times the average annual national yield. He also contextualized the governance model by comparing the yield right from the times of Mughal and British Administration and highlighted the highly successful model followed by the localities. The talk provided several key insights, a major revelation among which was the completely self-governing nature of the localities which also placed a similar status on freedom right from the individual level. 

Prof. Srinivas explained in depth, the distribution model of the grains harvested and showed meticulous data which were recorded in inscriptions that were several hundred years old. The various stakeholders, the beneficiaries who were from all walks of life, from all classes and faiths that highlighted the inclusive nature of the localities, and the process of distribution provided seeds to explore further on the applicability of these principles to solve modern-day problems. Dr. Bajaj ventured to bring out the diversity of the localities as though being crop-rich, agriculture was not the major occupation as there were others in which the majority of the residents engaged in: carpentry, medicine, masonry, dancers and singers and artists etc.  

The talk and the Q&A further dealt with the unique role of temples and the role that the played in supporting the society such as building hospitals etc. which the speakers highlighted from the inscriptions they found.  

The self-governing nature of the localities were of a similar nature as envisioned by Gandhi and even going back to the Vedic Age, the Dharma Sutras and provides us with valuable information to study an Indian village, which, unlike in other civilizations, is unique and displays a unique identity of its own. 
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Blog

Breaking Free: Decolonizing Education through IKS

Breaking Free: Decolonizing Education through Indian Knowledge Systems

– Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Snapshot:

The Indian way is the recognition of India as a gyan bhumi that not only produced great art, architecture, sciences, and engineering, but also created knowledge texts that continue to guide contemporary life.

This writer has written previously about the need for mainstreaming Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) or Bharatiya Gyan Parampara (BGP) in the university system that acknowledges the reality of India as a cultural and economic powerhouse.

The naysayers would still demand to know if there is any structuralist principle that connects disparate disciplines and domains under the umbrella term IKS. The easy way to respond to them would be the refusal to find such a principle.

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Blog

Mainstreaming Indian Knowledge Systems Marks A Paradigm Shift In Educational

Mainstreaming Indian Knowledge Systems Marks a Paradigm Shift in Educational Institutions

– Jyotirmaya Tripathy

Snapshot:

The establishment of centres of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) at various higher educational institutions (including IITs, central, state and private universities) reveals the educational and developmental trajectories of the country.

The move announces India’s coming of age as a society confident of its intellectual legacies and their continuing resonance.

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Completed Event

CIKS Talk Series: On Sanskrit’s Vitality and Role: Some Reflections

CIKS Talk Series: On Sanskrit's Vitality and Role: Some Reflections

The Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, IIT Madras organized the CIKS Talk Series featuring Megh Kalyanasundaram, Director of Special Projects at INDICA, on 29 February 2024 at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. The abstract of the talk and speaker profile are given below:

Abstract:
 
“The ancient and classical creations of the Sanskrit tongue both in quality and in body and abundance of excellence, in their potent originality and force and beauty, in their substance and art and structure, in grandeur and justice and charm of speech and in the height and width of the reach of their spirit stand very evidently in the front rank among the world’s great literatures. The language itself, as has been universally recognised by those competent to form a judgment, is one of the most magnificent, the most perfect and wonderfully sufficient literary instruments developed by the human mind, at once majestic and sweet and flexible, strong and clearly-formed and full and vibrant and subtle, and its quality and character would be of itself a sufficient evidence of the character and quality of the race whose mind it expressed and the culture of which it was the reflecting medium. The great and noble use made of it by poet and thinker did not fall below the splendour of its capacities. Nor is it in the Sanskrit tongue alone that the Indian mind has done high and beautiful and perfect things, though it couched in that language the larger part of its most prominent and formative and grandest creations. … The people and the civilisation that count among their great works and their great names the Veda and the Upanishads, the mighty structures of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti and Bhartrihari and Jayadeva and the other rich creations of classical Indian drama and poetry and romance, the Dhammapada and the Jatakas, the Panchatantra, Tulsidas, Vidyapati and Chandidas and Ramprasad, Ramdas and Tukaram, Tiruvalluvar and Kamban and the songs of Nanak and Kabir and Mirabai and the southern Shaiva saints and the Alwars,—to name only the best-known writers and most characteristic productions, though there is a very large body of other work in the different tongues of both the first and the second excellence,—must surely be counted among the greatest civilisations and the world’s most developed and creative peoples. A mental activity so great and of so fine a quality commencing more than three thousand years ago and still not exhausted is unique and the best and most undeniable witness to something extraordinarily sound and vital in the culture.”
[Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo, Volume 20 (The Renaissance in India and Other Essays on Indian Culture), pp. 314-5]  

 

On Sanskrit’s Vitality and Role: Some Reflections is first a step towards an empirical assessment of the vitality of Sanskrit in the second decade of the twenty-first century and then a reflection on one of its key roles. The first part will explore answers to the following questions — 1) Has anything new and original been published in Sanskrit after it was pronounced dead? 2) If yes, is there a published bibliography of original Modern Sanskrit Literature and which one is the most comprehensive? 3) Are there any trends to observe in contemporary Sanskrit publications? 4) If yes, what has already been identified? — to respond empirically to the pronouncement of Sanskrit’s supposed death. The second part will commence by invoking the role of Sanskrit as “the Great Integrator” (as seen by Dr V. Raghavan) before diving deeper into some facets of that idea using the prism of a recent Sanskrit music album: Bhārata and her Kāśmīra.  
 
Profile:
 
An Indian citizen with close to nine years of lived experience in China, Megh is an alumnus of the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and is currently the Director of Special Projects at INDICA. His post-graduate specialization in Strategy, Leadership and Marketing included a study of research methods. His professional experience includes stints as a Market Leader at a Global Fortune 50 firm while he has served a term on the Board of a Shanghai-based not-for-profit. His academic writings span some aspects of ancient Indian chronology, Indian Knowledge Systems, Landscape in Indic texts, Ancient Indian Jurisprudence, Ideas of India and Philosophy. Other professional and pro-bono pursuits have included building differentiated digital platforms for Indic texts targeted at specific learning and research needs and music. His research-based compositional Sanskrit music album Bhārata and her Kāśmīra has been listed by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. His subsequent music album, Indian Knowledge Systems and Yāskācārya’s Nirukta has recently been accepted for listing by the Vedic Heritage Portal. In 2022, the National Museum Institute invited him to contribute content for multiple projects currently underway, including ones on Jammu Kashmir & Ladakh and Kedarnath. In 2023, he was nominated by the Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) as a Member of a National Committee for an initiative focused on Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh. His work has been featured in two editions (Chennai and Pune) of Vitasta (2023), a multi-city festival focused on Kashmir organized by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India.
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Completed Event

BAWCTM 2024

National Conference on Bridging Ancient Wisdom and Current Trends in Mathematics (BAWCTM) 2024

Chevalier T. Thomas Elizabeth College for Women’s Department of Mathematics IQAC in collaboration with CSIR, Institute of Minerals and Materials Technology, Ministry of Science & Technology, Govt. of India and Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas, Tamil Nadu conducted the National Conference on Bridging Ancient Wisdom and Current Trends in Mathematics (BAWCTM) 2024 on February 19, 2024, at the JJK Auditorium at their College Campus, Chennai-600011.

Dr. Aditya K, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and Ms. Rajarajeswari G, Associate, Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, IIT Madras gave talks on insights from Indian Mathematical texts, Indian Astronomy and the art of calendar making in India respectively.

Dr. Aditya highlighted the unique features of Indian Mathematical texts such as the melodious presentation of concepts in poetry form and elaborated their benefits including the ease of remembrance, destressed learning process and opening new avenues of growth in the students’ holistic development. These insights could well be utilized in developing a viable alternative pedagogical framework that makes Math less intimidating, more inclusive and a joyful subject.

Ms. Rajarajeswari G spoke about the developments of Astronomy in India, their usage of Mathematics and the symbiotic relationship between the two disciplines and the intriguing art of calendar making that uses ingenious algorithms to accurately reckon time for rituals. She also shed more light about the Tamil Mathematical Text Kanakkathikaram written by Kari Nayanar, a regional work on mathematics containing several concepts from basic to advanced level. She also in the process underlined the development of mathematics across the nation and impressed upon the need to bring out more studies on vernacular mathematical works to further appreciate the broader paradigm of Indian mathematics developed by our ancestors across regions and languages.
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Completed Event

CIKS Talk Series: Music of India – A Comparative Study of Karnatak, Hindustani and other Regional Forms of Music in India

CIKS Talk Series: Music of India: A Comparative Study of Karnatak, Hindustani and other Regional Forms of Music in India

The Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras organized the CIKS Talk Series featuring eminent scholar Dr. Deepak Paramashivan on 26 October 2023 at the Department on Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. The abstract of the talk and the speaker’s profile are shared below:

Abstract:
Music of India encompasses a vastly diverse genres and forms such as classical music, semi-classical /light forms of music, folk music, popular and fusion music. There are two distinct schools of classical music that are well known namely, Karnatak and Hindustani. The Karnatak system prevails mostly in the southern part of the country consisting of the states, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. The Hindustani system prevails in the rest of India. Besides these two classical systems of music, there are also a number of regional musical forms that vary from one region to the other reflecting the vast cultural diversity of India. For ex. Bhavageethe,Janapadageethe, and Rangageethe in Karnataka, Nattu padal in Tamil Nadu, Natyageeth and Abhangs in Maharashtra, Soratha and Panihari in Rajasthan, Yenki paatalu and oggu kathaalu of Andhra Pradesh, Bhatiyali Geeth and Rabindra Sangeeth in West Bengal, Lok Geeth in Assam and Pahadi dhun in Himachal Pradesh to name a few. Music being an indispensable component of the Indian life, there is no region of India that does not have a very well developed system of music representing its socio-cultural identity. In this talk, I will give a very brief and elementary introduction to music of India with live demonstration on vocal and Sarangi. I will make some general observations about the influences and interactions between Indian music and musics of other parts of the world.

Profile:
Dr. Deepak Paramashivan is a Sarangi player, composer, actor and ethnomusicologist and currently an assistant professor in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences. He has toured Europe, USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea both as a soloist and collaborating with Ustad Aashish Khan, Pandit Swapan Chaudhary, Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, Pandit Yogesh Samsi, Pandit Birju Maharaj, A R Rehman and the Hollywood music director Rick Boston. He has acted and composed music in Indian films such as the Sanskrit/Kannada bilingual film Ekachakram, Kannada film Maavu-Bevu. Deepak has a PhD in energy and climate engineering, with a gold medal, from the Indian Institute of Science. He received his second doctorate in Music from the University of Alberta, Canada.

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Event

Event: IKS For School Leaders and Educators

IKS for School Leaders and Educators

A workshop on “IKS for School Leaders and Educators” was held on
October 18, 2023 in collaboration with Anaadi Foundation. The event
witnessed the participation of 57 schools and 114 teachers/principals from
Chennai. Participants were educated on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of introducing
IKS subjects at the various grade levels in the schools.
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Completed Event

CIKS Talk Series: From Chaos to Clarity – Yoga Pathway to Cognitive Well-being

CIKS Talk Series: From Chaos to Clarity - The Yoga Pathway to Cognitive Well-being

The Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras organized the CIKS Talk Series featuring yoga Shri. Adinarayanan, founder, Anaadi Foundation and Dharma Gurukulam, on 6 September 2023 at the ICSR Building, IIT Madras. The abstract of the talk and the speaker’s profile are given below:

Abstract:
 
Amidst the bustling complexities of modern life, join us on a journey as we explore the art of transcending chaos and embracing clarity through the pathway of yoga. This talk explores the transformative journey from chaos to clarity through the lens of the yoga pathway to cognitive well-being. Integrating ancient wisdom with modern science, it delves into how yoga practices effectively nurture mental health. Highlighting the synergy between mindfulness, breath control, and postures, the talk illuminates how these practices enhance cognitive resilience and emotional balance. It examines the scientific underpinnings of yoga’s impact on stress reduction, attention enhancement, and emotional regulation. The talk also elucidates the role of yoga in rewiring neural circuits, fostering neuroplasticity, and promoting the brain’s adaptability. Practical insights will be offered for integrating yoga seamlessly into daily routines to cultivate cognitive well-being amidst life’s complexities. 
 
Profile:
 
Sh. Adinarayanan is the founder of Anaadi Foundation and Dharma Gurukulam. With more than a decade of teaching, research and administrative experience, he started Anaadi Foundation in 2015 for global well-being. He has an MS in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University, USA. A deep spiritual experience that he had after graduating inspired him to come back to India to contribute here. He has spent more than 200 days in meditative isolation and silence as a way to understand deeper workings of the mind. Before starting Anaadi Foundation he spent more than a decade at Amrita University teaching courses on CS/IT subjects and Yoga, meditation, Mahabharata and Value education. He also serves as Adjunct Professor of Practice at National Resource Center for Value Education in Engineering (NRCVEE), IIT Delhi and regularly offers courses on Inner Development and Yoga-Cognition-Psychology at IIT Delhi. He was part of the Value Education panel at MHRD and is a fellow of the European Spirituality in economics and society Forum. He has been part of the consultative group for Capacity Building Commission of Government of India. He is the PI for IKS-MoE funded project on Yoga-Ayurveda-Machine Learning.