Namaste,
Some associations do not end with the passing of a Guru. They become a responsibility to remember, to carry forward, and, in whatever small way one can, to serve what the Guru stood for.
For INDICA, the Pujya Swami Dayananda Saraswati Memorial Lecture has been one such offering.
We instituted the series in 2019 in reverence for Pujya Swamiji’s extraordinary contribution as a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, a teacher who created other teachers, an institution builder, and a compelling voice for Dharma in the contemporary world. His intellectual rigour was inseparable from his commitment to seva, and his rootedness in tradition never prevented him from engaging courageously with the questions of his time.
Our first Memorial Lecture was held in person in Coimbatore on 23 September 2019. Shri Ram Madhav, speaking on Transcending Dualities: In Search of Oneness, remembered Pujya Swamiji as a Rashtra Rishi and reflected on the civilizational principle of unity that accommodates plurality.
The series subsequently moved online, allowing the remembrance to reach a much wider community. Shri S. Gurumurthy delivered the second lecture, followed by Prof. K. Ramasubramanian for the third. After a hiatus, we resumed the series in 2025 with Prof. Vishwa Adluri, whose lecture, Outlines of Hindu Theology, explored the Nārāyaṇīya of the Mahābhārata and the philosophical coherence underlying the diversity of Hindu traditions.
Each speaker has approached Pujya Swamiji’s legacy from a different vantage point. Together, these lectures have allowed us to remember not merely the person, but the range of concerns to which he devoted his life: Vedanta, Dharma, civilizational confidence, intellectual clarity, service, plurality, and the transmission of knowledge.
It gives me particular pleasure to invite you now to the Fifth Pujya Swami Dayananda Saraswati Memorial Lecture.
Shri Rajiv Malhotra
Author, Researcher & Founder, Infinity Foundation
Swami Dayananda Saraswati: My Favourite Intellectual Kshatriya
Saturday, 26 September 2026
5:30 PM to 7:30 PM IST
Online
This fifth lecture will be different in character.
Shri Rajiv Malhotra will draw upon his own association and conversations with Pujya Swamiji to offer a personal remembrance of the man he calls his “favourite intellectual Kshatriya.” Through these recollections, he will reflect on Pujya Swamiji’s clarity of thought, his courage in confronting difficult intellectual questions, and his insistence that Dharma be understood and represented on its own terms.
There is something especially fitting about this conversation. For more than three decades, Shri Rajiv Malhotra’s own work has been concerned with many of the questions that animated Pujya Swamiji: how Indian traditions understand themselves, how Dharma is represented in contemporary intellectual discourse, and how a civilization can engage the world without surrendering its own categories of knowledge.
The Memorial Lecture series began as our expression of gratitude. Seven years later, as we gather for its fifth edition, I continue to see it as an offering of Guru Dakshina, a way of keeping alive not simply the memory of a remarkable Guru, but the questions, commitments and intellectual courage that he entrusted to those who came after him.
I warmly invite you to join us.
With reverence and gratitude,
Hari Vadlamani
Founder - INDICA | NICE | CoHari
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