The Memory Gap

Earlier this week, two Indian manuscripts—the Bhagavad Gita and the Natyashastra—were inscribed into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, an international catalogue of humanity’s most significant documentary heritage. The Gita, a text of enduring philosophical tension and spiritual clarity, has long been at the core of Indian self-understanding. The Natyashastra, a 2,000-year-old treatise on aesthetics, emotion, and performance, remains the invisible blueprint behind every mudra, every drama staged with rasa in mind.

With a dozen entries spanning Vedic hymns, Jain cosmology, medieval medicine and colonial records, India’s contribution to the list is modest. Among these are the Rigveda manuscripts, the Saiva Siddhanta texts of the Tamil Shaiva tradition, the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, the Jain Shāntinātha Charitra, the Panchatantra fables, and a large corpus of Siddha medical manuscripts in Tamil. Also included are more recent records: archives of Indian indentured labourers, and files from the Non-Aligned Movement’s first summit. What unites them is not genre or ideology, but format: they are works that have survived not only time but archival legibility.

But this is also where Tamil memory, so vivid and vast in its own geography, begins to fade in the global ledger. The only Tamil works currently listed in the register is a set of medical manuscripts—precise in their instructions for preparing herbal decoctions, poisons, antidotes, uterine tonics, and remedies for unseen wind in the gut—and texts on Shiva worship going back up to the 6th Century CE. There is nothing of the explosive emotional intensity of Sangam poetry or the elliptical moral aphorisms of the Tirukkural in the UNESCO archive.

The Sangam corpus, compiled between 300 BCE and 300 CE, remains among the world’s oldest and richest secular literatures. Here, we find elegies for kings, erotics of separation, storm metaphors, battlefield oaths and gentle jokes. The Five Tinai landscapes (mountain, forest, field, seashore, wasteland) become emotional topographies. The Kuruntokai’s short verses are minimalism before minimalism existed. The Pattuppāṭṭu (“Ten Idylls”) are rich in courtly flourish. These are not mere literary texts. They are among the earliest known expressions of non-theistic literary humanism, anywhere in the world. And they remain uninscribed.

Then there is the Tirukural. Often simplistically called a “moral treatise” or an “aphoristic text”, the Kural is better understood as a civic philosophy in verse—spare, syntactic, secular. It spans ethics (aram), politics (porul), and love (inbam), without invoking god more than a handful of times. It is a constitutional document in poetic clothing, one that has been translated into over 40 languages and cited by statesmen, revolutionaries, and rationalists alike. It is, in every sense, a candidate for global memory—not merely for what it says, but for how long it has lived in speech and scholarship.

Sacred Tamil works, too, remain unsent. The Tevaram hymns, the Tiruvacakam, the Divya Prabandham—all are sung daily across Tamil Nadu, inscribed on temple walls, printed in bookstores, shared on WhatsApp as mp3s and PDFs. They live. And yet, their names are absent from this supposed archive of “world memory”.

There are good reasons for this. The UNESCO register demands not just significance but custody—a manuscript, a lineage, a formal nomination process, a translation infrastructure. The Tolkappiyam, Tamil’s foundational text of grammar and poetics, survives only through scattered manuscripts and ancient commentaries. It is too large to ignore, but too elusive to nominate.

This raises a deeper question. Do we need a global memory register at all, when each culture already preserves what it deems vital? Is international recognition anything more than a mirror of soft power? Tamil texts live on not because UNESCO acknowledges them, but because people recite them. A girl learns a Kural before she learns algebra. A singer prepares for Thevaram recitation as if tuning an inner compass. These acts are not archival—they are intimate, continuous, unbroken.

But recognition, even if symbolic, carries weight. It tells the world that these works are not only ours—they are part of the collective imagination of humanity. The point is not validation but invitation: to allow others into our linguistic and philosophical architectures. To say, here is a system of knowledge that survived conquests and fire. Here is a text that has no author and yet speaks in thousands of voices. Here is memory that did not fossilise.

Bhagavad GitaMemory of the World RegisterNatyashastraSangam-eraTamilTamil literatureUnescoWeb Exclusive