At the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), an autonomous trust under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, Prof. (Dr) Sudhir Lall is presently the Head of the Kalakosa Division, Project Director, Bharat Vidya Prayojana, Project Director, Vedic Heritage Portal (a flagship scheme of the Ministry of Culture) and, Project Director Nari Samvaad Prakalp.

Prof. Lall is committed to bringing forth a holistic view of Indian artistic traditions. He did a Sanskrit Kavyashastric study of the Vamanamahapurana for his Ph. D. from the University of Delhi. He obtained his M.Phil. degree on an interesting Sanskrit composition titled the Bhojaprabandha, from the same University.

Prof. Lall is a keen student of the arts, culture and philosophies. He has trained himself in Sarada and Grantha scripts by means of workshops on Manuscriptology and Paleography. He is a distinguished faculty member of the Post Graduate Diploma in Cultural Informatics (PGDCI), an AICTE recognized course, where he gives classes on Indian Culture and the arts.

Prof. Lall has been an active member of the UNESCO’s project for Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage of India: The Documentation of Indian Oral Tradition of the Vedas. Under the aegis of this project, he undertook extensive field-surveys of South India, especially Karnataka and Kerala. These helped him identify and document some of the most important chanting traditions of the Vedas, which are on the verge of extinction due to the advent of mechanical modernization. He has successfully supervised ritual documentations of the ‘Pratishthotsava’ and the ‘Adhyayanotsava’ at the Varahasvami temple of Mysore.

Awards and recognitions:

• First honoree of the prestigious ‘Acharya Chanakya Samman’ instituted by Indian History Awareness and Research (IHAR), Houston for his contributions to the field of ‘Sanskrit tradition and culture’, in 2022.
• Recipient of the ‘Official felicitation 2022’ of the prestigious Bharatiya Samskriti Sansad, Kolkata for his contributions to the field of Indic studies.

Abstract for the two lectures:

The Eternal Veda: Mapping the Journey of Vedic Chanting

(Talk in two parts)

The Vedas are the fountainhead of Indian Knowledge Systems. The Vedic tradition has come down to us through oral tradition and the transmission of this huge corpus across generations without the loss of even a single syllable is in itself a remarkable story. The result of this unbroken tradition is the UNESCO’s 2003 proclamation of Vedic chanting as “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”.

The proposed talks will take us through that story, highlight the contribution of Indian mnemonic techniques to this transmission process, and will show some examples of this rare but living tradition of Sanskrit. The talks would also present an overall framework of the Indian Knowledge Systems by highlighting how complex techniques like the Prakriti and Vikriti paath have been instrumental in maintaining the flawless oral transmission of the Vedic recensions.