Share indigenous knowledge with world, says academician

Nagpur: “Are we keeping indigenous knowledge confined to the four walls of a museum or bringing it to modern life,” asked Girishwar Mishra, vice-chancellor of Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University, Wardha.
He was the chief guest at the inauguration of a two-day national seminar on ‘Relevance of traditional knowledge of indigenous tribes in present context’, hosted by Anthropological Survey of India (AnSI), central regional centre, on Tuesday.

Mishra observed, “It is important to see how elements of traditional knowledge can be brought to modern life. Only publishing articles will not suffice. We need to create awareness about various traditions of knowledge.”

“Knowledge is created when we try to understand the world around us. And as the world keeps evolving, we take help of knowledge in our quest for meaning — to solve existential problems. Nowadays, we divide knowledge into two categories — scientific and unscientific. Scientific knowledge is characteristic of documentation, of being available in the public domain. Traditional knowledge is different as it is not documented. It is passed on from ages to ages through oral retelling and in the form of sutras which are easy to remember and recite,” he said.

Taking his point further, he said, traditional knowledge has suffered a downfall as today’s generation doesn’t prefer it. This kind of knowledge used to be shared by members of a community. There is no doubt that traditional and scientific knowledge are both based on experience. Ayurveda is also empirically based knowledge. Lifestyle of a community is linked to tress, food and climate in an area, but science is hell bent on destroying the bio-diversity,” Mishra said.

Earlier, AnSI director Vinay Kumar Srivastava said ancient knowledge is fading fast and there is a need to undertake a comparative study of traditional knowledge versus scientific knowledge to analyse it. “This will happen only when we go and live there, and understand their livelihood,” he added.

AnSI deputy director Sasi Kumar and regional head Ratna Dhar were present.

On Wednesday, professor PC Joshi of the anthropology department, Delhi university, will speak.