New Delhi: Indian Council of Historical Research’s new chairman Arvind P Jamkhedkar said on Saturday that he will encourage a combined approach between various disciplines to understand the Indian past.
The Maharashtra-based Indologist, historian and archaeologist has been picked by the ministry of human resource development to replace Professor Y Sudershan Rao, who demitted office in June 2017. Jamkhedkar is currently serving as the Chancellor of Deccan College, Pune.
The 78-year-old said he will hold consultations with the advisory board of ICHR and encourage combined effort among disciplines to reconstruct the Indian past.
“As the ICHR chief I have been assigned the work of promoting historical studies. I would like to see as far as possible all the different indological, anthropological, archaeological and historical content. Without touching upon these aspects of history, one cannot reconstruct the past,” he told News18.
Jamkhedkar said his background in traditional Indological studies, which is based on languages, cultural studies, and archaeology, will be helpful to understand history and interpret the past.
“My academic upbringing is unusual. I have training in Sanskrit from the pathshala in Pune, and simultaneously, I was going to college. I have studied linguistics, archaeology and cultural studies. I also did my research in Prakrit,” he added.
He said that other institutions like the University Grants Commission should also help in Indology. “In fact, it is being done in different ways by having different centers for Pali, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Persian and other classical languages,” he said.
Jamkhedkar had done his masters in Sanskrit from the University of Pune in 1960. He completed his doctorate in Ancient Indian Culture from Deccan College in 1966.
His research is centered on the Jain Prakrit text Vasudevahindi. He has taught at Dhule, Nagpur and Mumbai, and he was the vice-president of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai from 2007 to 2013. He was also the editor of the Journal of Asiatic Society of Mumbai.
As an archaeologist, he has conducted excavations in 19 sites and was associated with the team of Professor Jagapati Joshi during the discovery of the biggest stupas in the country.
He was also involved in proto archaeology and served as the director of archaeology museum in Maharashtra. Jamkhedkar was also selected as National Lecturer in Archaeology by the University Grants Commission in 1984.
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