Workshop on Sharda script inaugurated at Jammu varsity
Tribune News Service
Jammu, August 24
The first national workshop to revive ancient Sharda script was today inaugurated at Jammu University (JU).
The five-day national workshop is being organised jointly by the JU and Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA) in collaboration with the Millennium India Education Foundation, a Delhi-based NGO.
The workshop was inaugurated by Vice Chancellor RD Sharma. Dr SS Toshkhani, renowned Kashmiri linguist and Sharda expert, delivered the keynote address and presided over the function.
The five-day workshop aims at training researchers and Sanskrit scholars in the Sharda script. In the workshop, besides Sharda alphabets, reading practice and translation of manuscripts would be taught to the participants.
This is for the first time that such a workshop has been conducted in Jammu. Such events have been held in New Delhi and Mumbai in the last few years and have trained more than 300 scholars and interested persons in the script.
Prof Rampratap Vedalankar (Rashtrapati Awardee), former Dean, Faculty of Arts, and Head of the Department of Sanskrit, University of Jammu, Surinder Ambardar, MLC, Dr Kirti Kant Sharma, Sharda expert, IGNCA, New Delhi, and HL Wangnoo, president, Kashur Samachar were the guests of honours.
Prof Ramnika Jalali, Dean, Faculty of Arts, Prof Sushma Devi, Head of Department, Sanskrit, University of Jammu, and Dr Uday Kakroo, Director, Millennium India Education Foundation, New Delhi, professors and students were also present.
Prof RD Sharma welcomed the initiative taken by the MIEF and Sanskrit Department to start capacity building training programmes in Jammu and hoped that such workshops would help in creating a large pool of scholars to get engaged in research and translating the manuscripts written in Sharda lying idle in different libraries across the world.
