Raimundo Panikkar was born of an Indian Hindu father and a Catalan Catholic mother. From his early childhood he was able to adopt, cultivate and speak of different traditions. He got doctorates in Philosophy, Science and Theology. He had lived in India, Europe and the USA for several years teaching and researching. About 25 books and numerous articles were published by him. He also translated an anthology of a thousand pages of texts from the Vedas. Panikkar received numerous prizes and awards. An unconventional thinker, he infringed on many dogmas and prejudices. His intellectual development between the East and the West allowed him to reflect on a continuing philosophical dialogue among different traditions and ideologies. His thought suggests a vision of harmony and concord, to discover the ?human invariant? without destroying cultural diversity, for the realisation of the individual in a continuing process of creation and recreation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kapila Vatsyayan
Kapila Vatsyayan artist and art historian is internationally acknowledged as the pioneer of evolving alternate models of research for establishing inter and intra-relationship of different domains of knowledge and creativity. Her own work moves from a deep understanding of the primary textual sources of the East and West, principally Sanskrit and English, and a direct experience of the arts as performer. It focuses attention on the inter relationship of the concept and creative interpretation in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and dance. The kinetic image enables her to delve deeper into the textual and oral sources and the fundamental metaphysics which govern form and structure of the arts. She has convincingly drawn attention to the sacred geometry which pervades all the Indian arts. As visualiser of the conceptual plan of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, she leaps across many disciplines, questions the conventional boundaries and finally establishes several bridges of communication between traditional thought and modern science. This has resulted in many multi-disciplinary studies of space and time, nature and culture, man and society, chaos and order. Her holistic integral vision is explicit in the volumes she has edited on these subjects. Her first work, Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts, is a milestone by experts the world over. This work was followed by many others including the definitive study of Dance in Indian Painting, The Theoretical Basis of Asian Aesthetic Traditions; Traditional Indian Theatre: Multiple Streams; six volumes on Gita Govinda; Bharata and the Natyasastra; and the Square and the Circle of the Indian Arts. She has edited the volumes on Concepts of Space: Ancient and Modern and Concepts of Time: Ancient and Modern published by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi.
There are no reviews yet.