Heritage and development shall go together said Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Minister of Culture & Tourism, Govt of India at the 243rd Foundation Day of The Asiatic Society in Kolkata today.
"The Asiatic Society has played a historic role in documenting, preserving, and interpreting this continuity. Its manuscripts, journals, and collections are not relics of the past; they are maps of the human mind across centuries. Institutions like Asiatic Society matters today because in this is an age of rapid change Institutions like them perform a quiet but vital function. They slow us down. They insist on depth over immediacy. They privilege understanding over opinion. They remind us that civilizations endure not because they are loud, but because they are thoughtful. The Asiatic Society has endured because it has never chased relevance, " he added.
Founded in 1784, the Asiatic Society holds over 50,000 manuscripts.It has launched two new heritage-technology platforms, "ANUKRITI" and "VIDHVANIKA", developed in collaboration with IIT Kharagpur and C-DAC Kolkata to preserve fragile originals while making their form and content accessible globally.
