PREVIOUS
✖
Bhagavad Gita and Natyashastra
April 30 , 2025
18 hrs 0 min
49
0
- Manuscripts of the Bhagavad Gita and Bharata’s Natyashastra are among the 74 new additions to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register (MoW) this year.
- With the latest additions, the Register now contains 570 entries.
- The UNESCO has launched the Memory of the World (MoW) Programme in 1992.
- The central project of the MoW Programme was to create a compendium of documents — manuscripts, oral traditions, audio-visual materials, and library and archive holdings.
- These are of “world significance and outstanding universal value”.
- Beginning in 1997, the Register has been biennially updated — with the exception of a lengthy gap between 2017 and 2023.
- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris in 1948, is also among the new entries in the Register.
- With the inclusion of Gita and Natyashastra, India now has 14 entries in the Register, including two joint-submissions.
- These range from the Rig Veda (added in 2005) and the collective works of the Shaivite philosopher Abhinavagupta (added in 2023), to the archives of the first summit meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961 (added in 2023) and the archives of the Dutch East India Company (added in 2003).
- The latter two entries were joint submissions, which India made with Algeria, Egypt, India, Indonesia and Serbia, and Indonesia, Netherlands, South Africa and Sri Lanka, respectively.
- Bhagavad Gita is the part of the Mahabharata.
- It is a Sanskrit scripture comprising 700 verses that are organised in 18 chapters.
- They are embedded in the sixth book (Bhishma Parva) of the epic poem Mahabharata.
- It is considered to be composed in the 2nd or 1st century BCE.
- Natyashastra deals with drama (nāṭya), performance (abhinaya), aesthetic emotion (rasa), feeling (bhāva), and music (saṅgīta), comprising 36,000 verses.
- It is believed to have been codified around the 2nd century BCE by Bharatmuni in Sanskrit.
- The Gita is essentially a dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna, which takes place just before the beginning of the great war of Mahabharata.
Leave a Reply
Your Comment is awaiting moderation.