Decolonisation must mean wider archives, more languages, harder questions: FM Sitharaman

New Delhi: India is now self-assured and no longer waits for anyone else’s permission to study and understand its own heritage, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Saturday, calling for a broader and more rigorous approach to the country’s intellectual history.

Addressing the FIHCR Annual History Prize Awards Ceremony & the Dr SL Bhyrappa Memorial Lecture, here, FM Sitharaman said India was revisiting its inscriptions, studying its maritime trade history and returning to its contributions to mathematics while presenting these stories with both “real pleasure” and “real precision”.

The finance minister said this process should form the essence of decolonisation, which cannot merely mean replacing one prescribed textbook with another.

“It has to mean a wider archive, more languages, harder questions, and a much larger circle of scholars who actually get heard,” FM Sitharaman said.

Reflecting on the contribution of Kannada writer and thinker Dr SL Bhyrappa, FM Sitharaman said he never sought to mobilise an army of followers but instead focused on refining the way human beings perceive truth.

Referring to Bhyrappa’s philosophical idea of “Satya mattu Soundarya”, meaning truth and beauty, she said the pursuit of intellectual inquiry was particularly important for a civilisation as old as India.

FM Sitharaman described this process as an “act of intellectual swaraj”. She said political freedom had given Indians the right to govern themselves, while intellectual freedom must give them the right to know themselves.

"It is meaningful that India came to celebrate Dr SL Bhyrappa. His doctoral thesis bore a title that defined his entire destiny: Satya mattu Soundarya - Truth and Beauty," the finance minister stated.

“Let the churning continue and let evidence, rigour and conscience have the final word,” FM Sitharaman said, adding that India should collectively move towards a “golden era of intellectual swaraj”.

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