Context: Manuscripts of the Bhagavad Gita and Bharata’s Natyashastra are among the 74 new additions to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register this year.

Meaning of the context: With the latest additions, the Register now contains 570 entries.

Learning Zone:

• The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched the Memory of the World (MoW) Programme in 1992 with the aim of “guarding against the collective amnesia, calling upon the preservation of the valuable archive holdings and library collections all over the world, and ensuring their wide dissemination”.
• The central project of the MoW Programme was to create a compendium of documents — manuscripts, oral traditions, audio-visual materials, and library and archive holdings — which are of “world significance and outstanding universal value”. This is the MoW Register.
• Beginning in 1997, the Register has been biennally updated — with the exception of a lengthy gap between 2017 and 2023. In any year, at most two submissions from a country are added.
• The Register contains 13 submissions by India, including two joint-submissions. These range from the Rig Veda (added in 2005) and the collective works of the Shaivite philosopher Abhinavagupta (added in 2023), to the archives of the first summit meeting of the Non Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961 (added in 2023) and the archives of the Dutch East India Company (added in 2003).
• The latter two entries were joint submissions, which India made with other countries.
• This year’s entries champion India’s ancient literary heritage. Both are specific manuscripts — not the text in general — preserved by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune.

Natyashastra: 

• Attributed to the sage Bharata, Natyashastra is an ancient Sanskrit treatise on performing arts. 
• Comprising 36,000 verses, the “Na?yashastra embodies a comprehensive set of rules that define natya (drama), abhinaya (performance), rasa (aesthetic experience), bhava (emotion), sangita (music),” the UNESCO citation says. According to the citation in the Register, it was “codified around the 2nd century BCE.

Bhagavad Gita: 

• Attributed to the sage Vyasa, Bhagavad Gita is a Sanskrit scripture comprising 700 verses that are organised in 18 chapters, embedded in the sixth book (Bhishma Parva) of the epic poem Mahabharata.
• “Bhagavad Gita is a central text in the continuous, cumulative ancient intellectual Indian tradition, synthesising various thought movements such as, Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, and Charvaka,” the UNESCO citation says.

Source : Indian Express