Eighty-five branches.
One rooted year.
Prachinam — प्राचीनम्, "the ancient" — is a year-long public programme of 85 subjects of Sanatana knowledge and the civilisation of Bharat, each delivered on the day the tradition assigns to it, from a single hall in Chennai.
Not a lecture series. A living curriculum.
Forty-four of the eighty-five sessions are activity, not talk: a homa, an eye camp, a stone-carving demonstration, an eight-evening dance festival, an equinox night on the roof. Forty-one are lecture, discourse or formal debate. Every session is documented, transcribed and folded into an annual volume.
One fixed address
Saturday evening (Vidya Sabha) for discourse, Sunday morning (Prayoga Sabha) for practice — same hall, same hour, every week of the year.
Ten families, one root
Veda, Darshana, Itihasa-Purana, Dharma, Upaveda, Kala, Agama, Ganita-Jyotisha, Bhasha-Sahitya, Sanstha-Sankalpa — ten branches of a single trunk.
Every subject, an open door
Each of the 85 subjects carries a short note, expandable key terms, and a direct link to the principal institution in India that still teaches it — so anyone can go further on their own.
Ask Vidyaprakash
A resident assistant on the site answers short questions on India's ancient knowledge, and hands you straight to a web search when the answer needs a source.
The next few sessions
This is a programme you join, not just attend.
Become a Varshika Sadasya (season member), volunteer with the production team, offer a hall or a skill, or simply register to hear about every session as it is scheduled.
Eighty-five articles
One long-form article for every subject on the curriculum, published free, each with its sources credited by link. Begin with the detailed guide to reading and using the Panchanga.
Prachinam — प्राचीनम्
Prāchīnam means the ancient — that which lies before, at the origin. This is the story of Bharat: the civilisation as it stood thousands of years ago, stretching far beyond the borders that define India today, and the knowledge it carried. Eighty-five subjects, ten families, one root, held and handed on by named lineages.
In use, the full title is Prachinam — Bharatiya Vidya Varsha, shortened to Prachinam in publicity and to the Prachinam Sabha when referring to the weekly assembly hall.
01
Guidance
Under the guidance of the tradition's own seats
Prachinam stands under the guidance of the offices of the Shankaracharyas and the seats they head, and of the acharyas, scholars and practitioners who carry these eighty-five disciplines forward.
Guidance is sought from the seats of Bharat's own learning: the peethams, adheenams, pathashalas and research institutes in which these disciplines are held. The curriculum is placed before scholars of standing before it is published, each subject is taught by one whom the tradition recognises, and the programme accepts correction.
02
The Shankaracharyas
Adi Shankara established monastic seats at the four quarters of Bharat. The heads of those seats carry the title Shankaracharya, and the office has continued in unbroken succession since — each incumbent named by his predecessor, each holding a defined territory, a Veda, a Mahavakya and a line of disciples.
The seats maintain pathashalas where the Veda is learned by heart, panchanga offices where the almanac is computed, libraries where manuscripts are copied, and the authority to settle a disputed reading.
Five seats are named here: the four Amnaya Peethams and the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham.
03
The Five Mutts
The four Amnaya Peethams, together with the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham.
04
Leadership
Three names are on the record at the founding of the programme. Full profiles, portraits and areas of curatorial responsibility will be published as the entity is constituted.
Prof. (Dr) M. Ramasubramanian
Profile to be published.
Dr Shankar Raman
Profile to be published.
Ms Ramya Vasudevan
Profile to be published.
05
Coordinating Team
Eight roles, 6.0 full-time equivalents. Names are given as placeholders until appointments are made in the first thirty days of mobilisation.
| Role | Name | Responsibility | Contact |
|---|
All teams, including the 85 sections →
06
The Entity
The promoting entity
Prachinam is promoted by the Naimisha Vidya Foundation — proposed as a Section 8 not-for-profit company, taking its name from Naimisharanya, the forest where the Puranas were narrated to a standing assembly of sages: the tradition's own archetype of a fixed venue holding a long, ordered transmission.
Why a team, not one voice
No single person holds authority across Vedic recitation, Panini's grammar, agamic ritual, bronze casting, clinical Ayurveda and classical dance at once. A team of six full-time roles, plus a volunteer corps of about twenty, curate the ten families across three specialisms: Shastra, Kala and Vijnana.
Why one hall, for now
A fixed address, fixed evening, and fixed habit is how an audience is actually built. Prachinam is designed to run three consecutive years from one hired hall before it earns the record to build a permanent centre of its own.
07
The Destination
The single hall is a starting condition, not the ambition. The programme is built to grow, over four gated phases, into a permanent centre capable of running six to eight events in parallel on any given day — a Veda recitation in one hall, a dance class in another, a clinic in the morning, a manuscript lab in the afternoon, a homa at dusk. Every recording, every relationship, and every member gathered in the hired hall becomes a founding asset of that centre.
See how the year is structured →Ten families. Eighty-five subjects.
Eighty-five disciplines of Bharat, each with its corpus, its lineage and its living practice. Click any subject to open its note, expand its key terms, reach the principal institution that holds it, and read the full article.
Browse the full curriculum
| Sr. | Subject | Family | Traditional occasion | Principal seat in India |
|---|
Links marked ✓ are the institution's own published address. See the disclaimer & credits.
Events, dates & venue
Two fixed weekly slots carry the year, at the Prachinam Sabha — the contracted hall in Chennai (venue to be confirmed on incorporation; see Join Us to be notified). Tithi-based dates move against the Gregorian calendar and are confirmed against the published panchanga each season — read how that is done.
Vidya Sabha
Saturdays, 6:00–8:00pm
Lecture, discourse, debate or symposium — 41 sessions a year.
Prayoga Sabha
Sundays, 8:30–11:00am
Demonstration, workshop, ritual, camp, recital or walk — 44 sessions a year.
Mahotsava weekends
Six across the year
Multi-day festivals — Margazhi, Navaratri, Ayudha Puja, the Arogya Utsava and more.
Where the year peaks
Blog, articles & the panchanga guide
One article for every one of the eighty-five subjects, published free on this site and downloadable as a PDF. Each carries its sources as live links; everything else is drawn from material long in the public domain. Please read the disclaimer and credits.
One article per subject
Each article runs to roughly two thousand words: what the discipline is, its principal texts, its transmission lineage, where it is still taught, what it looks like today, and how to begin reading it. Click to read on the site, or download the PDF.
The teams
Prachinam is run under the guidance of the traditional seats, by a leadership of three, a coordinating team of eight roles, a volunteer corps of about twenty — and eighty-five section teams, one for each subject on the curriculum. A section team is two to four people who own their subject end to end: the speaker, the texts, the handout, the demonstration and the archive record.
Leadership
Prof. (Dr) M. Ramasubramanian
Profile to be published.
Dr Shankar Raman
Profile to be published.
Ms Ramya Vasudevan
Profile to be published.
Coordinating team
Eight roles, 6.0 full-time equivalents. Appointments are made in the first thirty days of mobilisation.
| Role | Name | Responsibility | Contact |
|---|
The eighty-five section teams
Every subject has a named section, a section lead and a support pair. All appointments are open — write to teams@prachinam.com to be considered for a section.
| Sr. | Section | Family | Section lead | Support |
|---|
Volunteer corps
About twenty volunteers carry registration, hospitality, ushering, camp assistance, social media and Mahotsava crewing. Roster published each quarter. Join the corps →
Join Prachinam
Register as a season member, volunteer, speaker, or simply to be kept informed. This form is built to submit straight into a shared spreadsheet — see the note at the bottom for how a web team wires that up.
Prachinam — Join Us
doPost(e) appends a row). Replace SHEET_ENDPOINT in the page script. Until an endpoint is set, submissions are held locally and shown as a confirmation only. Registrations are also mirrored to namaste@prachinam.com.
Contact us
For programme queries, speaker nominations, venue partnerships, press or sponsorship — write in, and the right curator will follow up.
Naimisha Vidya Foundation (proposed)
Prachinam — Bharatiya Vidya Varsha
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
General enquiries: namaste@prachinam.com
Speaker nominations: parampara@prachinam.com
Section teams & volunteering: teams@prachinam.com
Articles, blog & corrections: blog@prachinam.com
Partnerships & CSR: sahayoga@prachinam.com
Support schemes: daana@prachinam.com
Credits, permissions & takedown: credits@prachinam.com
Send a note
Help 85 branches of living knowledge stay lit
Support is organised as numbered schemes rather than fixed amounts. Each scheme states what it underwrites; the contribution attaching to it is settled in conversation with the office and confirmed in writing, once the entity's registrations (12A, 80G and CSR-1) are in place. Write to daana@prachinam.com for the current scheme note.
Choose a scheme
Select a scheme and leave your details. The office will send the scheme note, the current contribution bands and the receipting position under 12A/80G. No amount is collected on this page and no payment is triggered.
A licensed payment gateway will be connected once the entity's registration and merchant account are complete. Until then this panel records interest only and routes it to daana@prachinam.com. Corporate CSR contributions cannot be received at all until Form CSR-1 is filed.
Disclaimer
- Credit by link. Wherever this site draws on the work, publication, catalogue or webpage of an institution, scholar, lineage or publisher, credit is given through the link itself. The link is the acknowledgement. If a link is missing, wrong, or if any rights-holder wishes an item removed or differently attributed, write to credits@prachinam.com and it will be corrected or taken down promptly.
- Public-domain inheritance. All other matter on this site — the Vedic, Agamic, Sastraic, Tamil and Prakrit corpora, the calendrical and computational traditions, the names, terms and practices described — is material that has been held in common, transmitted, taught, recited and used freely across centuries. It is treated here as the public inheritance it is, and no proprietary claim is made over it by this programme.
- No claim over institutional names or marks. Institutions, peethams, adheenams, temples, universities and research centres are named on this site as seats of authority and points of contact only. Naming them does not imply their endorsement, affiliation, participation or approval, and their names and marks remain their own.
- Contact details are unverified unless marked. Links marked ✓ were verified against the institution's own published pages. All other entries open a search rather than a direct link, precisely so that no incorrect address, number or attribution circulates in the programme's name. Verification at source is a named task of mobilisation.
- Nothing here is professional advice. Material on Ayurveda, Siddha, and allied disciplines is presented as history, scholarship and cultural practice. It is not medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, and nothing on this site should be used in place of a qualified practitioner. Health camps run under the programme are conducted only by practitioners registered with the relevant AYUSH council, with documented consent and a written referral pathway to allopathic care.
- Jyotisha sessions are methodological. Astronomical and calendrical sessions treat computation, history and text. No individual predictions are offered from the platform or on the premises, and no consultations are solicited.
- Contested subjects. Certain subjects on the curriculum carry live legal, social or medical sensitivities. These are programmed as historical and comparative scholarship on plural panels, never as prescription or denunciation, under a protocol adopted as a standing resolution of the governing body.
- Draft status. This site presents a programme under mobilisation. Dates, venues, entity name, appointments and scheme terms are indicative and subject to confirmation. Tithi-based dates in particular shift each year and must be checked against the season's published panchanga.
- The assistant. Vidyaprakash answers from this site's own curated notes and otherwise hands the question to a web search. Answers are short and introductory by design, may be incomplete, and should be checked against the linked sources before being relied on or quoted.