Union Minister Nirmala Sitharaman addresses the Foundation for Indian Historical & Cultural Research's (FIHCR) Annual History Prize Awards Ceremony and the Dr SL Bhyrappa Memorial Lecture, in New Delhi on Saturday, September 5, 2026.
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ANI
With intellectual freedom gaining strength, India is today “self-assured and quite unapologetic” and has stopped waiting for anyone else’s permission to study its own heritage, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said on Saturday.
“In 1991, we had our economic independence; it is only now that intellectual freedom is gaining strength…intellectual freedom has to give us the right to know ourselves,” she said while addressing the annual history prize awards ceremony organised by the Foundation for Indian Historical and Cultural Research here.
She also pitched for the inclusion of thinkers from all perspectives to engage in debate, allowing a clash of ideas before a discerning public that is trusted to weigh the evidence for themselves.
“India today is self-assured and quite unapologetic about it, and we have stopped waiting for anybody else’s permission to study our own heritage,” she said.
“We are reading our inscriptions again, working out our maritime trade, going back to our mathematics and telling these stories with real pleasure, as well as real precision. This, I think, is what decolonisation ought to mean. It cannot simply be a matter of swapping one prescribed textbook for another,” she said.
“It has to mean a wider archive, more languages, harder questions, and a much larger circle of scholars who actually get read. Above all, it should mean no establishment gets to decide beforehand what evidence is allowed to see,” she said.
On the occasion, the Finance Minister also delivered the SL Bhyrappa Memorial Lecture.
Bhyrappa never sought to mobilise an army of followers; he sought to refine how human beings perceive truth, Sitharaman said.
The finest tribute we can pay to our teachers and thinkers on September 5th is to keep both wings of India’s intellectual stage brightly lit, she said.
“Let the churning continue and let evidence, rigour and conscience have the final word. And together, let us carry India forward into its golden era of intellectual swaraj,” she said.
SL Bhyrappa was a noted novelist, philosopher and screenwriter who wrote in Kannada and died in 2025 at the age of 94.
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