Baidyanath Saraswati

Baidyanath Saraswati (20 January 1932 – 13 December 2013) was an anthropologist and an author of many books on Indian culture, religion, and tribal studies. He held the UNESCO Chair in the field of Cultural Development at the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts (IGNCA, New Delhi) from 1995 – 2002. Saraswati represented the Indian government at the UNESCO meeting in Paris in 1989 on safeguarding folklore, where he served as Vice-Chairman in preparation of a draft recommendation to member states. In 1994, he participated in UNESCO's Barcelona Declaration on the Role of Religion in the Promotion of a Culture of Peace. After N K Bose died in 1972, he founded the N K Bose Memorial Foundation (since closed) in Varanasi, a Gandhian institution conducting social sciences research. It also ran a school as an experiment in self-organizing primary education. Saraswati taught anthropological theories and tribal development as a Visiting Professor at Viswa Bharati and Ranchi University and as a Verrier Elwin Chair Professor at North Eastern Hill University, Shillong. He was Research Professor, and then UNESCO Professor at the IGNCA, New Delhi. He was also a Visiting Professor at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sciciales Maison des Sciences de I Home, Paris in 1988, and at the Institute of Asian Cultural Studies (International Christian University), Tokyo in 1999.

Awards 2004: Honorary Fellowship of the Asiatic Society

2005: Life Time Achievement Award, Indian Social Science Association

Research contributions Saraswati, in his book Pottery Making Cultures and Indian Civilization, found that though traditional technology and social practices among the potters of India were confined to five zones, the technology practiced in all the zones had a common origin from the days of the Indus Valley civilization. Saraswati offered a new classification of culture in terms of the modes of transmission of knowledge: Oral (laukika), Textual (sastriya), and Transcendental (naivrittika). The tribes in India are people of oral tradition, and according to Saraswati, there is nothing in the Indian thought structure nor the traditional organization of Indian society that may correspond to the Western evolutionary notion of the tribe. He wrote extensively on cosmogenic myths of creation in the northeast tribes of India.

Saraswati characterized Sanatan (eternal) Hinduism by five-fold features. It is a religion without an organization and absorbs multiple beliefs and practices without destroying individual identity. He has also "highlighted the points of congruence between religion and science and finds evidence for a paradigm shift in anthropology and cosmology. It challenges the old concepts of social anthropology but strengthens philosophical anthropology by presenting a compelling picture of man in the Universe"

Saraswati traveled across India to explore native categories of thoughts in text and context. His works crystallized the idea of the Sacred Science of Man based on the Indian vision, the scriptural sources, and the indigenous interpretations of man and culture. It emerged as an alternative paradigm in anthropology. He has explored fundamental concepts in Space, Time, Nature, Sound, and Mind, integrating them with anthropology and sociology. His boo Culture and Cosmos investigates the many facets of the core principles of cosmic anthropology.

Select publications

Books authored . (Co-author N K Behura). Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta.

Sacred Science of Man. Institute of Social Research and Applied Anthropology, Calcutta (1993). The Sacred Science of Nature. NEHU, Shillong(1997).

Selected Books edited

Cross-Cultural Lifestyle Studies. IGNCA and New Age International, New Delhi