In one sense, the title of the piece captures the nature of the tasks facing the contemporary generation, whether in India or in the Diaspora. This generation, unlike many from mine, is confident and self-assured; perhaps, it is proud too about the strength of its culture and traditions. Rightly so. However, personal convictions about the value of our traditions and culture do not automatically guarantee the truth of such convictions. Not only that. It is also the case that the history of India, and that of the entire humankind, requires of us that we are able to say and show what is valuable and what is not in our traditions. This history is the history of colonialism, subservience, and is further weighed down by the scientific, technological, economic and the military weight of the western culture. Today, we need more than a mere practice and a further continuation of our traditions; we need also to examine them honestly and critically in order that we may transmit what we found valuable in them.
Of all the characters in the epic mutiny of 1857; after 150 years later there is one name which stands tall over all others and yet ironically was one who was neither the initiator of the mutiny; neither among the leaders until the last stage and who had claims to nothing more than a small town?Yet, in many ways she was alone in her magnificence, a singular figure among a gallery of heroes. [1] She was Lakshmi Bai; and that small town immortalized forever is Jhansi.
Jhansi is a small town in the province of Uttar Pradesh, part of the region itself known as Bundelkhand. The town still feels that it owes its fame to that young Rani; who ruled for a mere 4 and a half years. It keeps alive the memory of its beloved Rani with her image on horseback imprinted all over; at crossroads; on hoardings; in parks her ubiquity conforming what people believe.
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Namaste and Swaagat
It is taken as largely axiomatic in the study of the History of the Indic peoples1, that the civilization that remains extant has been brought into the area by migrating races such as the Aryans , and in fact some would argue, that such a statement holds also for the so called Dravidians of India. According to such a narrative everything that was worth preserving has been handed down to us over the centuries by migrations, within the last 3 1/2 millennia, into the subcontinent, from somewhere else. It is also true that the history that is taught the children of India today is vastly at variance with the puranic accounts handed down to us over several millennia. It is to state it without any embellishments, a revised history that is completely at odds with the traditional history of India. Even so great an effort as the History and Culture of the Indian people edited by RC Majumdar, the most famous of Indian historians at the time of Independence accepts the basic framework, the steel frame, of the History of India as revised by the British colonialists. Fifty years after independence the narrative has not changed and the banner of the colonial version of history is now borne by the Indian left including the Communists and the rump of the Congress party left behind after successive defections from its fold and whose only common ideology is the adulation of the Nehru Gandhi dynasty ....
Abstract: The recent articles by Subhash Kak and N.S. Rajaram in Sulekha and many other media will raise some fundamental questions related to the psychology of human race and the limitations of the human mind to undertake objective investigation of historical and anthropological phenomena. This article will take a superficial overview of areas of miseducation that have plagued human race and the human world-view for several centuries. The article will examine the root cause of such confusion in the liberal arts or Humanities mainly, but also in the scientific literature, from ancient Indian philosophical viewpoint. Some psychoanalytic and neurobiological concepts may also be relevant. These concepts may be parallel to the ancient Indian concepts.
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Mleccha, Meluhha (Language, dictionary, writing)
The two pdf documents (listed above for download) link two related, significant events in cultural history: bronze age trade and writing system as necessary inventions about 5000 years ago in Sarasvati civilization area.
This is an excercise in cryptography and leads to an understanding of the evolution of bharatiya languages as a family of (indic) languages -- what may be called a linguistic area of circa 3500 BCE related to Proto-Vedic Continuity Theory of Bharatiya Languages. http://protovedic.blogspot.com ....
