“Indian Culture, Art and Heritage” review by Devdutt Pattanaik

on Jun 09, 2021

While studying culture we study people’s food, clothing and shelter preferences, their belief systems, rituals and customs. Art is the expression of culture – in tangible (literature, fine arts, sculptures, fashion, architecture, coins, pots, carvings, etc.) and intangible (performing arts, music, dance and theater) form” . This book shows how amalgamation of these three components – Culture, Art and Heritage – have created, built and resurrected Indian society from its inception, he said.

This book is designed for UPSC aspirants' needs.

In a recent interview with Indian express , Devdutt spoke at length about his new book Precisely, it was around the time when he was giving a motivational talk at Pearson's office, and they came up with the idea of writing something on culture and heritage for UPSC aspirants.

This also brought back memories of him giving the UPSC exam, 25 years ago. He cleared his exams fortunately but couldn’t answer well in the interview as he had a lack of knowledge on heritage and tradition that troubled him a lot. Hence, he wrote this book that will make things easy and simple for aspirants and help them understand the logic behind culture.

This book is very carefully designed in a way that can help aspirants remember things. It comes with contemporary content like The Indian Home, LGBTQ, Women etc. and it is classified by themes such as History, Geography that will help civil services aspirants.

The book has 64 chapters and it is documented in a table format. The idea is to build understanding and the logic behind the culture. The book talks about mythology, with over 250 storytelling images, 100 tables, and 200 examination-based questions.

“I was always interested in writing about art and culture. However, I never thought it would be in a textbook format, so that’s an exciting thing” he said in an interview.