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5:30 PM - 7:30 PM IST
Fifth Pujya Swami Dayananda Saraswati Memorial Lecture
INDICA is pleased to announce the fifth Pujya Swami Dayananda Saraswati Memorial Lecture on Saturday, 26 September 2026 at 5:30 pm IST. The lecture will be delivered by Shri Rajiv Malhotra, Author, Researcher & Founder, Infinity Foundation.
About Pujya Swami Dayananda Saraswati
Pujya Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930–2015) was one of the greatest teachers of Advaita Vedanta in modern times. His teachings combined deep scriptural mastery with the rare ability to communicate timeless truths to contemporary minds. He taught that self-knowledge alone is liberation and that Vedanta is not merely a philosophy to be studied but a way of living with awareness, intelligence, and compassion.
Over a teaching career that spanned more than five decades, Swamiji founded and guided the Arsha Vidya Gurukulams in India and abroad, nurturing a new generation of traditional teachers who continue to share the Upanishadic vision of oneness. His efforts revitalized Sanskrit learning, Vedic education, and the gurukula system, bridging traditional wisdom with modern seekers across the world.
Swamiji also founded AIM for Seva, a movement that extends education, healthcare, and support to underprivileged rural and tribal communities across India. Through this initiative, he demonstrated that dharma is not only to be known and taught but also to be lived through compassionate action and service. His leadership in interfaith dialogues and national conversations helped articulate a confident, inclusive, and knowledge-based understanding of Hinduism one that is rooted in Śraddhā and Ātmavidyā.
The Pujya Swami Dayananda Saraswati Memorial Lecture series was instituted in 2019 to honour his luminous legacy, intellectual rigour, and compassionate vision. Memorial Lectures have since been held in 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2025, each bringing together distinguished voices to engage with ideas and concerns that reflect Pujya Swamiji’s life and teachings. We continue the series as our humble offering of Guru Dakshina, in reverence and gratitude for his extraordinary contribution.
About the Talk
Title: Swami Dayananda Saraswati: My Favourite Intellectual Kshatriya
In this Memorial Lecture, Shri Rajiv Malhotra reminisces about his association with Pujya Swami Dayananda Saraswati and reflects on why he regards him as his “favourite intellectual Kshatriya.” Drawing on their conversations and shared intellectual concerns, he recalls Pujya Swamiji’s clarity of thought, courage in engaging difficult questions, and commitment to representing Dharma on its own terms. The talk offers a personal window into Pujya Swamiji as a teacher and thinker, while exploring the qualities that made his voice distinctive and consequential in contemporary discourse on Dharma and Indian civilisation.
Panelists
Shri Rajiv Malhotra
Speaker
Author, Researcher & Founder, Infinity Foundation
Shri Rajiv Malhotra is an author, researcher, and public intellectual whose work over more than three decades has focused on Indian civilization, Dharma, comparative religion, consciousness studies, and the encounter between Indian and Western knowledge systems.
Trained in physics and computer science, with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence, he pursued a successful career in the United States before becoming an entrepreneur and establishing IT companies across twenty countries. In the early 1990s, he left for-profit work to devote himself full-time to research, philanthropy, and public intellectual engagement.
He is the founder of Infinity Foundation, through which he has supported and undertaken research on Indian civilization, Indian psychology and mind sciences, comparative religion, Sanskrit, and related fields. Under his leadership, the Foundation has supported more than 400 research, education, and community initiatives, including programmes at major universities, and has contributed to bringing Indian psychology and mind sciences into wider academic discussion.
A central concern of hiss work has been how Indian traditions can be understood through their own civilizational categories rather than primarily through frameworks developed in the West. In Being Different, he examines Western civilization from a Dharmic perspective and develops his distinction between integral and synthetic unity. Indra’s Net explores the philosophical unity underlying Hindu traditions, while The Battle for Sanskrit and Sanskrit Non-Translatables examine the interpretation and translation of Sanskrit and Indic concepts and what can be altered or lost when they are detached from their civilizational contexts.
His work has also developed concepts such as History-Centrism, Digestion, U-Turn Theory, Mutual Respect, Breaking India, Indian Grand Narrative, and Sanskrit Non-Translatables. His idea of “digestion,” for instance, describes the process by which elements of Indian traditions may be absorbed into other frameworks while their original philosophical sources and contexts are obscured.
His books include Breaking India, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, Indra’s Net, The Battle for Sanskrit, Academic Hinduphobia, and Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power, as well as collaborative works including Sanskrit Non-Translatables, Snakes in the Ganga, and The Battle for Consciousness Theory. His more recent work extends his longstanding engagement with consciousness and knowledge systems into questions surrounding Artificial Intelligence, technological power, theories of mind, and human agency.
In 2020, Shri Malhotra received the ICCR Distinguished Indologist Award from the Government of India for his contribution to the study and understanding of Indian civilization.
Shri Hari Vadlamani
Host
Founder – INDICA | NICE | CoHari
Shri Hari Vadlamani is the Founder of INDICA, which he has built over the past decade into a multidisciplinary institutional ecosystem for Indian Knowledge Systems, culture, and traditions.
A Chartered Accountant by qualification and a serial entrepreneur, Hari Ji spent over two decades building ventures in infrastructure and energy before founding INDICA in 2015. Under his leadership, INDICA’s work has grown to span education, research, publications, conferences, cultural initiatives, and grant-making, supporting and connecting scholars, practitioners, creators, institutions, and seekers across the Indic knowledge landscape.
His work is driven by the conviction that Indic wisdom can contribute to health, happiness, and harmony for humanity, and by a long-term commitment to building institutions and enabling people who will carry these knowledge traditions forward.