The oral tradition of Vedic chanting was declared an intangible heritage of humanity by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In a meeting of jury members on November 7, 2003 at Paris, UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura declared the chanting of Vedas in India an outstanding form of cultural expressions.The proclamation says, “In the age of globalization and modernization when cultural diversity is under pressure, preservation of the oral tradition of Vedic chanting - a unique cultural heritage - has great significance.” A total of 80 entries were received for this purpose from all over the world and the jury members included Dr. Richard Kurin, Director of the Center for Folklore and Cultural Heritage of the Smithsonian Institution (United Nations), Spanish author Juan Goytisolo, Yoshikazu Hasegawa from Japan, Ms. Olive W.M. Lewin, pianist, ethnomusicologist, and director of the Jamaica Orchestra for Youth.
The UNESCO declaration has brought international recognition to the excellence of the Vedic chanting tradition of India, which have survived for centuries encoding the wisdom contained in the Vedas through an extraordinary effort of memorization and through an elaborately worked out mnemonic methods. The purity and fail-safe technique devised for Vedic chanting in the ancient times has given us access to this invaluable ancient literature of humanity in its entirety.
India’s Department of Culture, Ministry of Tourism and Culture took the initiative to put up the candidature of the Vedic chanting to the UNESCO. A presentation was prepared by Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts in New Delhi. The Department has also created a five year action plan to safeguard, protect, promote and disseminate oral tradition of Vedic tradition in terms of their uniqueness and distinctiveness, encourage scholars and practitioners to preserve, revitalize and promote their own branch of Vedic recitation and direct the efforts primarily to help the tradition survive in its own context.
Source: Subhamoy Das, About.com
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