What’s in the news?

• Three Indian literary works, Ramcharitmanas, Panchatantra, and Sahṛdayaloka-Locana, were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Regional Register during the tenth meeting of the Memory of the World Committee for Asia and the Pacific (MOWCAP), held recently in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

What is the Memory of the World (MOW) register?

• UNESCO’s MOW programme is an international cooperation strategy aimed at safeguarding, protecting, and facilitating access to and the use of documentary heritage, especially heritage that is rare and endangered. 
• UNESCO launched the initiative in 1992 “to guard against collective amnesia” by calling upon the preservation of invaluable archive holdings and library collections all over the world and ensuring their wide dissemination.
• The programme recognises documentary heritage of international, regional and national significance, maintains registers of it, and awards a logo to identified collections. 
• It facilitates preservation and access without discrimination. 
• It campaigns to raise awareness of the documentary heritage to alert governments, the general public, businesses and commerce to preservation needs and to raise funds.
• The MoW register operates on regional levels as well. 
  • The Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Committee (MOWCAP): It celebrates Asia-Pacific achievements in genealogy, literature, and science. It was formed in 2004.

Additional Information

Ramcharitmanas

• Written by: Tulsidas
• Two Ramacharitmanas manuscripts were sent to UNESCO,
  • One authored by Goswami Tulsidas and the other one written in Arabic in the 18th century, highlighting the appeal of the text for West Asia and other parts of the world as well.

The Panchatantra fables 

• Written by:
• It was selected owing to their universal moral values. 

Sahṛdayaloka-Locana 

• Written by: Kashmiri scholars Acharya Anandvardhan and Abhinavagupta
• It was chosen because of its aesthetics.