Srinagar, August 2: Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha on Saturday said that India must take pride in its historical legacy and simultaneously work towards shaping a developed future. Speaking at the Chinar Book Festival at SKICC Srinagar, he said India has endured centuries of foreign invasions, yet its civilization has persisted.
He said that India is the most ancient civilization and added that no external force can destroy its cultural foundation. “Greece, Egypt, Rome — all vanished, but India continues,” he said.
Sinha said India’s civilization did not grow in a single direction, but evolved across fields such as science and spirituality. He said that to move forward, there is a need to transform the country’s cultural, literary, scientific and spiritual development into a knowledge system that reaches all levels of society.
He cited research that describes ancient India as a global engine of culture.
Referring to William Nelson Polk’s book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, he quoted the author as saying that Indian learning, religious insights, and ideas form a core foundation of the modern world.
Sinha said India’s influence in science, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine existed when other regions were still in early stages of development.He added that ancient Indian texts were translated into Arabic and carried to Baghdad and Persia, influencing early scientific thinking in the Islamic world.
According to him, these ideas later contributed to the European Renaissance.
He said the knowledge system of ancient India must be revived and made part of the mainstream education.
He added that India should reclaim its space as a knowledge economy. “This is not a new term for our country. It is part of our civilizational history,” he said.
Sinha said India’s intellectual and scientific contributions have often been ignored or underrepresented in foreign historical narratives. He added that efforts must be made to correct these gaps and pass down knowledge to future generations.
He said that colonial mindsets have weakened the roots of India’s knowledge system, but those roots remain. “We must remove the distortions and bring forward evidence-based contributions of Indian civilization,” he said.
He said monographs and educational tools should be used to introduce younger generations to India’s scientific heritage and contributions to humanity.(KNS).
