Vice President Hamid Ansari today said study of the past should be critical rather than adulatory and devoid of imagined glory.
Ansari also stressed on the need to rethink modernity by criticising it from within thereby enriching it.
Addressing the gathering on the occasion of inauguration of an international conference on the relevance of traditional cultures for the present and the future here, he noted that tradition and modernity are not antipodes.
"Neither is static, consistent, homogeneous, mutually exclusive or in perennial conflict. The endeavour of locating what is of value in the past and adapting it into the framework of modernity has to be inductive rather than deductive," he added.
"The examination of the past therefore has to be critical rather than adulatory. It has to steer clear of imagined glory and must not be an incentive for chauvinism," he said.
He said that globalisation is making people multicultural and poly-ethnic.
"It is further asserted that contemporary migratory flow of people are introducing greater complexity and heterogeneity to societies that leads them to becoming progressively multicultural and poly-ethnic," he said.
"Both need to be encapsulated in our approach. Perhaps we need to rethink modernity by criticising it from within, in its own terms, and thereby enriching it," Ansari added.
