Three Indian literary works included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Regional Register: What is their significance?
- May 16, 2024
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Three Indian literary works included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Regional Register: What is their significance?
Sub: History
Sec: Art and Culture
Tag: UNESCO’s Memory of the World Regional Register
Context:
- Three Indian literary works, Ramcharitmanas, Panchatantra, and Sahṛdayaloka-Locana, were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Regional Register.
More on news:
- The tenth meeting of the Memory of the World Committee for Asia and the Pacific (MOWCAP) was held earlier this week in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
What is UNESCO MOWCAP?
- The Memory of the World Programme is an international programme aimed at safeguarding, preserving and facilitating access to and the use of documentary heritage.
- UNESCO launched the Program in 1992.
- The Programme includes the inscription of significant documentary heritage on national, regional and international registers.
What is the significance of the works?
Ramcharitmanas:
- Ramcharitmanas is an epic poem in the Awadhi language, composed by the 16th-century Indian bhakti poet Tulsidas (c. 1511–1623).
- It has many inspirations, the primary being the Ramayana of Valmiki.
- This work is also called, in popular parlance, Tulsi Ramayana, Tulsikrit Ramayana, Tulsidas Ramayana or simply Manas.
- The word Ramcharitmanas literally means “Lake of the deeds of Rama”.
- Tulsidas began writing the Ramcharitmanas in Ayodhya in Vikram Samvat 1631 (1574 CE).
- Another version was written in Arabic in the 18th century, highlighting the appeal of the text for West Asia and other parts of the world as well, according to Gaur.
- The Ramayana and Ramcharitmanas are read in not only India but also in other Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.
Panchatantra:
- The Panchatantra is an ancient Indian collection of interrelated animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose, arranged within a frame story.
- The surviving work is dated to about 200 BCE, but the fables are likely much more ancient.
- Vishnu Sharma was an Indian scholar and author who wrote the Panchatantra, a collection of fables
- It is likely a Hindu text, and based on older oral traditions with animal fables that are as old as we are able to imagine.
- The Panchatantra fables were zeroed in owing to their universal moral values.
Sahṛdayaloka-Locana:
- The Sahṛdayāloka-Locana by Acharya Anandvardhana is a critical work that explores aesthetics and literary theory, shaping Indian literary discourse.
- The 15th-century Sahṛdayaloka-Locana, by Kashmiri scholars Acharya Anandvardhan and Abhinavagupta, was chosen because of its aesthetics.
What is the MoW register?
- UNESCO’s MOW programme is an international cooperation strategy aimed at safeguarding, protecting, and facilitating access to and the use of documentary heritage, especially heritage that is rare and endangered.
- UNESCO launched the initiative in 1992 “to guard against collective amnesia”.
- It aimed at the preservation of invaluable archive holdings and library collections all over the world and ensuring their wide dissemination.
- The programme recognises documentary heritage of international, regional and national significance, maintains registers of it, and awards a logo to identified collections.
- It facilitates preservation and access without discrimination.
- It campaigns to raise awareness of the documentary heritage to alert governments, the general public, businesses and commerce to preservation needs and to raise funds.
What are the other items on the list?
- There are 494 inscriptions on the International MoW Register, as of May 2023, according to the UNESCO website.
- It was established in 1998, the MOWCAP Regional Register has inscribed 65 items from Asia-Pacific countries.
- Along with the three Indian items on the list, the Member States inscribed 20 items during the 2024 cycle, at the tenth General Meeting in Ulaanbaatar.
- These included three each from China and Indonesia, and two each from Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Uzbekistan.
- Documents recording significant innovations in business and industrial technology were recognised, such as tea-drinking business entrepreneurship in China.
- Globally applied sugar research and regional cement production in Indonesia.
- Regional literary traditions were celebrated through the recognition of the Philippines’ Indigenous Hinilawod chants, the East Asian legend of the Nine Tripods found on the bronze bas-reliefs in Viet Nam’s Nine Dynastic Urns.