Praghna Centre for Research and Department of Defence and Strategic Studies, University of Madras are happy to announce the successful completion of the internship of 14 students of MA (DSS) 2023-25 Batch.

These 14 students joined Praghna for their summer internship program in Apr 2024.

Instead of individual research work, a project to study 60 verses from Tirukkural pertaining to war and strategy was undertaken.

The objective was to study the Verses, identify the principles and concepts, and write an explanation on each of them.

Thereafter, adopting a campaign studies approach, take battles from Sino-Indian war 1962 and Indo-Pak War 1972 to analyse whether the principles from Tirukkural are relevant to contemporary warfare and strategy.

The project was completed over five months in hybrid mode.

On 25th March 2025, this batch of interns presented the summary of their work at the Department. A 275 page report was presented to the HoD along with a short summary of the principles. Each of the students received a Certificate on the occasion from Praghna Centre for Research.

I am grateful to Professor KJ Utham and other staff of the Dept for their encouragement and support for successful completion of this project. I am also grateful to Brig R Kannan for gracing the valedictory function.

Sri. Santosh Namby Chandran, IG IRPFS and Col Sandeep Singh of the same Batch assisted as Project Coordinators, guiding the students in their work.

Like every teacher, I feel happy to have guided and mentored this batch of interns through this project. Each of them deserves appreciation.

I hope the substantial work and analysis done by them into one of India's greatest scholarly literature, Tirukkural, attracts further research into Indian Knowledge System. It should also serve as a guide for similar studies into other Indian heritage.