Early Times Report
Jammu, Sept 19: The Department of History, University of Jammu organized a second lecture under the banner of major debates in Indian History by Prof. Heeram Tiwari , Centre for Historical Studies ,Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a Chairperson, Centre for Medical Studies, School of Social Sciences Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He spoke on Delhi on "Memory, Smriti and Text: Interpretation and Tradition in History". In his lecture Prof. Tiwari emphasised the role of memory, Smriti texts and traditions in constructing the historical past.
He began by explaining the etymological and the contextual meaning of smriti. In this context he stated that the initial stages of Smriti texts structurally developed in the form of a new prose genre named Stras, that is aphorism, highly compact precise expression that captured the essence of a fact, principle, instruction or idea. This brevity in expression, he elaborated , was likely necessitated by the fact that writing technology had not developed yet or was not in vogue, in order to store a growing mass of knowledge, and all sorts of knowledge was transferred from one generation to the next through the process of memorization, verbal recitation and listening in the 1st millennium BCE.
Compressed content allowed more essential, densely structured knowledge to be memorized and verbally transferred to the next generation in ancient India. |
