Second Dr. Vishnu Shridhar Wakankar Memorial Lecture 2018 (Memorial Lecture Published on the Occasion of The Second Dr. V. S. Wakankar Memorial Lecture 2018)

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The Adi Drishya Department of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) is mandated to study and experience the ancient worldview through its different art forms and associated subjects. It partakes of the holistic worldview, so forcefully articulated throughout the Indian tradition(s) and emphasised by modern research.

Humans have expressed enormous creativity in the form of rock art. Rock art, the first creative act of the human being has been traced back to the Prehistoric era. Man's natural imagination perhaps first manifested itself through rock art, a creative and pro-active process that influenced the minds of the people of the time. It involves the deliberate construction of representations reveal its nature in one way or the other. The uniqueness of IGNCA's approach to the arts lies in the fact that it does not segregate the folk and the classical, the oral and the written, the aural and the spoken, and the ancient and the modern. Here, the emphasis is on the connectivity and continuity between the various fields that ultimately relate humans-to-humans and humans-to-nature.

Realising the importance of Adi Drishya studies, the IGNCA created a separate department for it. The department manifests it's academic, research work in the form of publications, international and national seminars, conferences, exhibitions, lecture series and digital and physical databases.

Under the aegis of the Adi Drishya department, the IGNCA has initiated a Memorial Lecture in honour of the eminent archaeologist, art historian and great humanist, Dr. Vishnu Shridhar Wakankar, popularly known as Haribhau, the pioneer of rock art studies in India, and recognised as the Pitahma of rock art studies in the country. Dr. Wakankar has made enormous contributions, which include extensive field work in India and abroad-Europe, North America and the Middle East. He was involved in numerous archaeological surveys and explorations including in the ravines of the Chambal and Narmada rivers, and he also traced the basin of the now dry Saraswati riverbed, said to hold the secrets to much of Indian civilization. Dr. Wakankar was awarded the Padmashree Award, one of India's highest civilian honours in 1975,

This is an annual memorial lecture for which we intend to invite eminent scholars to give lectures on any aspect of the emerging discipline of rock art and its allied disciplines. The first lecture was delivered by Dr G. B. Deglurkar, renowned archaeologist and art historian on 3 April, 2017. The present lecture is the second in the series and will be delivered by Dr. Yashodhar Mathpal, a multifaceted scholar and renowned artist.

IGNCA is in the process of creating a permanent rock art gallery which will showcase our rock art heritage and other related information.

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