The Brahmi Scripts: Architecture, Typology, and Processing
Gautam Sengupta, RKMV 1969
A people without knowledge of its prior history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots, said Marcus Garvey, a prominent promoter of African nationalism who honored the history and culture of Africa while rewriting his roots.
As the proverb says, the 35th Praktani Adda session is particularly pertinent when the intellectual community is beginning to show cracks and crevices as anything Indian or Indic is brought up for discussion from the passages of antiquity.
The Paraktani Adda, addressed by Gautam Sengupta, RKMV 1969, gives us a thorough overview of the history and origins of indigenous Indian script. This Adda's explanation of articulatory phonetics, which led to the development of Aksharas in the Devanagri Varnamala, is valid for most indigenous languages and is quite interesting.
Knowing the maverick of a person who delivers the Adda will give you an idea of the pure perfection of the dish. A former student of the Ramakrishna Mission Vidyapith in Deoghar (1964–1969), Gautam Sengupta later attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1983-1990).
He retired in 2019 and moved to Kolkata after teaching linguistics and cognitive science at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jadavpur University, and the University of Hyderabad. His academic pursuits and areas of interest include computational linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of language, and semantics.
The University of Goettingen, the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, and the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics are just a few of the institutions where he has given plenary or keynote lectures.
He is a fan of Carnatic music and created a Hindi rendition of a more than 500-year-old Carnatic krithi, the first classical Carnatic song to be translated into and sung in Hindi. Project Anukriti is the name of this effort.
The Adda explains in detail the origin of indigenous Indian script and how rich our diction is compared to its western counterpart. The Adda also addresses our rich linguistic heritage and how it has evolved over the ages to give rise to the script of many literarily rich Indian languages.
