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HERITAGE OF INDIA
A. U. PATEL
Dr. Hari, Prof. Thakar, Director of the Institute and invited Guests. It gives me great pleasure to be in your midst this morning and be part of this august gathering. Let me, at the outset, congratulate for the commendable activities undertaken by it for the spread of Sanskrit language and for the efforts made to make the people aware of the rich heritage that our country possesses, and which, unfortunately, not many of us are aware of.
India is a cradle of human civilization and the achievements, of ancient and medieval India in science, literature, arts, astronomy and other fields over thousands of years have inspired creative thoughts of nations far and wide. Analysis of the history and culture of India and India's contribution to world thought began at the end of the 18th century, when Europe once again 'discovered' India and since then a variety of schools have grown up, in Indology. Art, architecture, music, dance, literature and science and a million other things exist, in one seamless whole in Indian culture. It is a mosaic of various strands, a rainbow of the human spirit, never displayed anywhere else in the world.
The French philosopher Laplace, during Napoleon's time, wrote: "It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value position as well as absolute value...We shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity. The zero, shunya in Sanskrit, was used in 2000 B. C.
Jain Education International
In his introduction to 'A Cultural History of India' A. L. Basham observes: "No land on earth has such a long cultural continuity as India, since, though there were more ancient civilizations, they were virtually forgotten by the inhabitants of those lands or were overlaid by new intrusive cultures. In respect of length of continuous tradition China comes second, to India and Greece makes a poor third." The cultural quality and temper of a nation can be gauged to a great extent by its literature and in India the stage was set by the great literature produced in Sanskrit. Indian culture has an organic unity, and Sanskrit language and its literature have been mainly responsible for building up and maintaining this
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