World Sanskrit Conference

History

According to the official web-site of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies (IASS), several Sanskrit scholars from major Indian universities perceived that the International Congress of Orientalists "did not allow sufficient scope for full discussion of Sanskrit and allied subjects". These scholars approached the Government of India, which arranged to convene the first International Sanskrit Conference at New Delhi in March 1972. The next year, at the 29th International Congress of Orientalists, Sanskrit scholars from all over the world got together to form the IASS. The main responsibility of the IASS was to organise World Sanskrit Conferences at various places around the world. The 1972 New Delhi conference was retrospectively recognised as the "First World Sanskrit Conference".

The sixteenth conference in Thailand in 2015 received unprecedented support from the Indian government. In what some have called a "display of soft power", India sent a group of 250 Sanskrit scholars, led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who gave the inaugural address in Sanskrit. The conference was also supported by and held in honor of Maha Chakri Sirindhorn, Princess of Thailand, who has supported Sanskrit education, and had received a master's degree in Pali and Sanskrit from Chulalongkorn University.

Dates and venues

The first World Sanskrit Conference was held in Vigyan Bhavan, New Delhi, India between 26–31 March 1972. Dr. Ranganathan was its chairman. Thereafter, conferences have been held as follows:

Future venues and dates

Proceedings

The proceedings of the WSC have been published as follows:

1. Delhi Conference were published in four volumes (vols I-III.1, Ministry of Education and SocialWelfare, New Delhi,1975–80; vols III.2-IV, Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, Delhi, 1981),
2. Weimar Conference in a volume entitled Sanskrit and World Culture (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1986), those of the Varanasi Conference by the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, New Delhi, in 1985.
3. An IASS newsletter informs that the proceedings of the Leiden Conference in several volumes (Brill, Leiden, 1990–92); the Proceedings of the Helsinki and Edinburgh Conferences are in the process of publication by Motilal Banarsidass, New Delhi.
4. The Proceedings of the World Sanskrit Conferences held at Turin (1975), Paris (1977), Philadelphia (1984), Vienna (1990), Melbourne (1994), Bangalore (1997), Turin (2000), Kyoto (2009) have been published in Indologica Taurinensia, which is the official organ of the I.A.S.S. The journal contents are freely downloadable [2].