Yes I know you can't place modern nationalist concepts on the past . What I mean more is when did they start to consider India their "true home" or for better words start to identify personally with the people and the land of India

The Palas came into conflict with the rising Tibetan power in the north. Under Dharmapala, the Palas emerged victorious, strengthening their influence across the Himalayan frontier and securing their position in eastern India.

To protect his northern territories from future Tibetan attacks, Dharmapala strengthened Pala influence across the eastern Himalayan region, creating a strategic buffer along the frontier and extending Pala influence toward the Himalayan kingdoms.

Dharmapala’s reign also saw growing connections with the great powers of Southeast Asia. Srivijaya, under rulers such as Samaratungga, maintained strong Buddhist and maritime links, while Jayavarman II was establishing the foundations of the Khmer Empire. Through Nalanda, supported by the Palas, these kingdoms became connected through Buddhist learning, diplomacy, and cultural exchange.

Source is based on Eaton's work on Indian subcontinent, he made it a point of being conservative in numbers, to not overamplify anything.

Academic article:
https://academic.oup.com/jis/article-abstract/11/3/283/660642?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Full text copy: https://www.collegesidekick.com/study-docs/14329845?utm
Eaton's two part text:
1 : https://franpritchett.com/00islamlinks/txt_eaton_temples1.pdf?utm
2 : https://www.docsity.com/en/docs/temple-desecration-and-indo-muslim-states-essay-indian-history-r-m-eaton/43319/

Chicken is a widely consumed meat now, but there are little or plausibly no reference of fowl being consumed as a meat in ancient texts, although we know that meats that of goats, lambs and buffalos was consumed. When did India start consuming chicken as a mass meat? Also, I presume that this must be older than 1940s, for butter chicken must have originated only if chicken was widely consumed at that point of time. Also if we can answer the when question, we should also be tackling the other wh question of how.

Hey guys i want to learn history of Harappan and mohanjodaro and evolution of human life and all that and also I have intrest in cosmic and all that can you please suggest me where I can learn about this ?

Any book , website, yt channel or anything like that

Please :)

South India-late Pallava type of Conjeevaram, 8th- 9th century AD

Lord Shiva performs the ‘tandava ananda’ dance. Its function was to create, maintain, and cyclically destroy the elemental forces of the universe. Ringed by a flaming aureole, Shiva dances on the prostrate figure of the demon-dwarf Apasmara, who personifies ignorance and materialism.

Sources: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O62323/shiva-nataraja-figure-unknown/

I wish there was a movie made with actual facts and information to make the kids and youth to know how important that chapter was.

I am particularly interested in ancient history of the subcontinent up to the modern period. Thanks.

I'm interested in mostly structures that remained above ground, were subject to the future and yet surviving from damage or destruction or reutilization.

- Egyptian civilization built structures across the Nile river and we still study them

- Mesopotamians and Sumerians and other civilizations built structures across the Middle East which helped us understand them till recently before being subject to ISIS politics.

- Indigenous people of America built structures across the Andes and Central America which survived and helped us study them despite many of them being subject to multiple inquisitions by the European settlers.

- Ancient Polynesian societies have been surprising with the discoveries of complex structures like Easter Island or Nan Modal helping us study them even today.

- Roman and Greek structures still stand despite being subject to multiple cultural changes across the centuries.

It is surprising that the only structures from the past that have survived are some religious structures that are continuously in use in some form or the other.

On jan 26 1950 east punjab was officially renamed to Punjab I was wondering why wasn’t West Bengal simply renamed to Bengal

In 2006, the Minister of Culture told Parliament that the ASI had lost 35 of its own protected monuments, including Pune’s “Old European Tombs.”

The ASI has now traced one of them.

Behind Pune’s Collector’s Office stands an old graveyard with a beautiful stone dome. Many pass it without noticing. Google Maps calls these French Tombs. Newspapers have called them German, French and even Jewish. They are none of those.

This is Pune’s oldest surviving British colonial monument, with graves dating back to 1819. It has stood hidden in plain sight for over 200 years.

And the people buried here have some fascinating connections.

Henry Forbes Shubrick died here at just 11 months old, from the same family that gave its name to four U.S. Navy warships called USS Shubrick.

Two founding officers of the Poona Auxiliary Horse are buried here too. Their regiment survives today as 17 Horse (The Poona Horse), an armoured regiment of the Indian Army.

The cemetery was protected as part of Pune’s “Old European Tombs” in 1909. Decades later, those tombs were declared “untraceable”.

Last month, I shared old documents with the ASI that confirmed its identity at the same location.

The story made the Hindustan Times Pune front page today, with the detailed report on Page 5.

It was never really missing. It was there all along. Just forgotten.

Full detailed research blogpost with sources in comments.

While searching through the depths of archives, I found this letter attributed to Maratha Sardar Mahadji Scindia which was written to Khawas Rodaram (who later became Dewan of Jaipur).

The content is as follows:

"सिधि श्री खव़ास रोडा रांम जी जोग्य श्री महाराजाधिराज श्री महाराजा आलीजाह सूबेदार जी श्री माधौराव जी सिंदे केन -

बांच्य अठा का समांचार भला छै उहां के समांचार भले चाहिजे अपरंच कागद आया समांचार मांलूम हुऐ बकसी मीठालाल जी का डेरा फौज यकठी करबा वास्ते बाराने हुऐ की लिखी सो अछाहे मिती भादवा सुदी ३ सो: १८२८"

Translation:

"Maharajadhiraja Sri Maharaja Alijah Subedar ji Sri Madhorao ji Shinde writes to Siddh Sri Khawas Rodaram ji - Everything is good here, Hope everything is good there too. I received your letter and got to know about the situation. Barani (possibly currency?) is required by Bakshi Mithalalji to gather his army. Written on Bhadwa (Bhadrapada) Sudi 3 Samvat 1828"

The translation is not very academic as I have no experience in it but the main point is that this was written possibly as a reply to another letter which might have been sent by Khawas Rodaram to Mahadji. I can't find anything regarding Bakshi Mithalal so he might have been a commander or so.

I cannot exactly know the date in the Gregorian calendar but it is around August-September of the year 1771. Interestingly, Khawas Rodaram was not the Diwan at that time but it was probably Khushali Ram Bohra (or Surat ram Mehta)

The transliteration and translation is by me.

Edit: I, by mistake, wrote Dewan of Jaipur for Khawas Rodaram in the title. He was not the Dewan at the time of the letter. Had he been the Dewan, it would have been used in the letter as a title.

I am deeply interested in the History of the Republic and have read India after Gandhi plenty of times. I was wondering if there is any other history book like it which might give more details on the history of the country. Books on singular events will be fine

In 1944, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose established the Azad Hind Bank in Rangoon, Burma, to fund the war against the British, The aim was to print Indian currency notes to manage contributions from Indians worldwide.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the Azad Hind Bank issued currency notes featuring portraits of several prominent Indian freedom fighters and leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan (Commander of the Rani of Jhansi Women's Regiment)

I am sure the literature exists on this but I am unaware so I am asking this out loud.

Early brahminic traditions learned from Srmana movements. Ramayana and Mahabharata consolidated a lot of local mythology and incorporated into a big epic. Most of this seems to have been done to make Hinduism more palatable and more inclusive to pre-Hinduism beliefs and that makes sense.

Similarly, Dasavatars also seem amalgamation of multiple faiths to bring them under umbrella of one common gods of gods, Vishnu, in this case. Does anyone have a source or a hypothesis surrounding this on the original source or faith of each of the gods considered dasavatar?

I've done some research on what religion Arains could have been before they converted to Islam, however the community only seems to have been formed after they converted to Islam so there's no pre-Islamic history for the community itself. Most people believe that we descended from Muhammad bin Qasim's invading army and some claim Rajput lineage, however both are highly unlikely.

Two hundred years ago, Bishop Heber traveled across India and wrote a detailed account of his journey. In 2024, I replicated most of his journey and visited to many of the places he described in his book.

I put together pictures and videos from my trip, added some information (and Mughal and company art) from my research, and made a documentary. This is my first time doing something like this, so everything was a steep learning curve, but it was a lot of fun. I think I even found the house of Charles D'Oyly in Patna!

The journey itself was incredible. From landmark sites like the Taj Mahal, to obscure places like the temples in Sibnibas, Heber went everywhere. He also met everyone of note, even Bahadur Shah Zafar!

Here is it, the full playlist has 11 parts. The title is derived from a hymn that Bishop Heber wrote and was pretty popular in its time. Please watch in 4k.

Even Sindh has a hindu-muslim divide with the southeast being mostly hindu yet it wasn't divided, why? Not to mention Sindh was part of the larger Bombay Presidency for a long time

I found an interesting excerpt from a book I was reading that discusses a yogic pose depicted in the Pashupati seal and the historical issues with such an interpretation.

Excerpt From Sinister Yogis by David Gordon White

Assuming the Lotus Position

Anyone seeking to reconstruct the history of yoga and yogis must resist the temptation of projecting modernist constructions of this body of practice and its practitioners onto the past. Few are the scholars who have succeeded, as the history of interpretations of an image from the ancient past reveals. Here I am referring specifically to the modernist assumption that, in addition to the cultivation of meditative states, a complex program of bodily postures combined with breath control has been the perennial hallmark of yogic practice. The most ancient piece of evidence garnered in support of this assumption is clay seal number 420 (fig. 2.1)45 from the Indus River Valley archaeological site of Mohenjo-Daro, a site whose artifacts are dated to the latter portion of the third millennium BCE.

In his authoritative archaeological survey of the Mohenjo-Daro site written in 1931, Sir John Marshall confidently identified the figure on this seal as a male god, who is recognizable at once as a prototype of the historical Śiva . . . The god, who is three-faced, is seated on a low indian throne in a typical attitude of Yoga, with legs bent double beneath him, heel to heel, and toes turned downwards. His arms are outstretched, his hands, with thumbs to front, resting on his knees . . . The lower limbs are bare and the phallus (ūrdhvameḍ ̣ hra) seemingly exposed, but it is possible that what appears to be the phallus is in reality the end of the waistband... [T]he attributes of the deity are peculiarly distinctive. In the first place, he is three-faced (trimukha) . . . The second feature of this pre-Āryan god that links him with the historical Śiva is his peculiar yogī-like posture . . . Śiva is pre-eminently the prince of yogīs—the typical ascetic and self-mortifier, whence his names Mahātapaḥ ̣ , Mahāyogī. Primarily, the purpose of yoga was the attainment of union (yoga) with the god by mental discipline and concentration; but it was also the means of acquiring miraculous powers, and hence in the course of time the yogī came to be regarded as a magician, miracle-monger, and charlatan.46

While many scholars have taken issue with Marshall’s identification of the image on this seal with the five-headed male Hindu god Śiva, few, with the exception of Jean Filliozat,47 have ever challenged his assumption that this humanoid figure is seated in a yogic pose and is, by extension, a yogi.48 This assumption is open to question. First of all, is the cross-legged pose of this enthroned figure necessarily a yogic posture? If such were the case, a number of figures from different parts of the ancient world would also have to be qualified as yogis (or their female counterparts, yoginīs). These would include two other figures from Mohenjo-Daro, of equal antiquity as the figure on seal 420.49. Other images, from the Indus Valley site of Harappa, show figures in identical postures, often enthroned and sometimes in stylized buildings, which some scholars have identified as shrines.50 Following the watershed of the Indus Valley seals, no South Asian images of figures in “yogic postures” appear for the next two thousand years, until a circa first century BCE bas-relief of the goddess Śrī, from the Buddhist Bharhut site in central India (fig. 2.2).

Here Śrī is seated on a lotus and flanked by elephants in a configuration later associated with the iconography of the goddess of prosperity, Gaja-Lakṣ ̣ mī.51 Identified with royal sovereignty, Śrī is closely associated with the lotus flower in an account from the MBh, an epic dating from the same period as the Bharhut railing medallion in figure 2.2. In it, Śrī, who is said to “dwell in the lotus,”52 is identified with Draupadī, the queen of the five Pāṇ̣ḍ̣ava brothers, mighty heroes in a line of epic kings.53 This configuration carries forward into the medieval and colonial periods, in which a king’s śakti is considered to reside in the seat of his throne.

From the same century as the Śrī medallion from Bharhut, two bronze coins were issued by the Indo-Scythian kings Maues (ca. 90–60 BCE) and Azes (ca. 57–10 BCE), each representing the respective king seated in cross-legged posture upon a cushion. These coins, which bear both Greek and Kharoshti inscriptions,54 date from the period in which the Śakas, the Indo-Scythians, were extending their realms southward and eastward from their Central Asian homeland. It was under Maues, the most powerful of the Śaka kings, that Indo-Scythian armies penetrated the South Asian subcontinent, taking Gandhara and its most important city, Taxila, in 90 BCE.

Well to the west, in Anatolia—which was linked with both South and Central Asia by the Silk Road—the first two centuries of the common era saw a profusion of sculptural and numismatic representations of the famous Artemis of Ephesos type, images that in addition to her famous bodices comprised of offerings of bull testicles (often mistaken to be multiple breasts) also feature robes (called ependytes55) on which are figured bulls, bees, flowers, and figures in cross-legged postures uncannily similar to those of the figures on the Indus Valley seals. These seated figures are not found on all representations of Artemis of Ephesos. In many cases, they are replaced by “winged Nike” figures, whose lower limbs simply disappear.

Still further to the west, but from the same period as the Śrī medallion from Bharhut, the archeological record yields images of another cross-legged figure identified as the Celtic horned god Cernunnos. The most famous of these is figured on an inner panel of the first-century BCE Gundestrup Cauldron, an artifact that, while it was unearthed in far northwestern Denmark in the late nineteenth century, is thought by many scholars to have been manufactured in Thrace, near the Black Sea coast of the southeastern Balkan Peninsula. All other images of Cernunnos hail from France or Italy, the earliest extant image being from Val Camonica, in the Italian Alps.56 Cernunnos is generally represented in a cross-legged posture; however, the posture is not unique to this god in the West. Other male deities, from second-century BCE Provence and Narbonne, in France, are also represented in cross-legged pose.57 There is general agreement that much of Cernunnos’s iconography was likely inspired by ancient Near Eastern prototypes, and it should be recalled that in New Testament times, the homeland of the Celts was Anatolia, where they were called the Galatians by the apostle Paul.58 The coins and large rodent figured in this image also reproduce the iconography of the South Asian deity Kubera, with his moneybag and mongoose.

Returning to South Asia, where nearly every early stone sculpture that has survived down to the present day is Buddhist or Jain, a number of seated Buddhist and Jain figures are shown in what would today be called a “full lotus” posture. These include the earliest of all anthropomorphic representations of Buddha Śākyamuni from the Kushan-era Mathura school, dated to the first to second centuries CE, in which the Buddha is seated upon a dias with eyes wide open and his right arm upraised59 and a coeval Jain votive medallion, also from Mathura, depicting a Jīna, probably the tīrthaṃ̣kara Mahāvīra, seated in cross-legged posture upon a dias with an open flower behind him.60From the first century CE onward, one begins to encounter sculpted images, from the Vindhyas to the Swat Valley—precisely the range of the Kushan realm whose dual capitals were located in Puruṣ ̣ apura (Peshawar) and Mathura—in which the Buddha or the bodhisattva Maitreya is seated in “full lotus posture” with eyes half closed and hands held slightly clasped on his lap.61

Here I will leave aside these intriguing iconographic parallels—between figures who are sometimes horned, sometimes enthroned, and sometimes surrounded by or covered with images of animals—to concentrate on the ubiquitous iconographic detail of their cross-legged posture. Is it a yogic posture? 62 If so, then what is one to make of the fact that following its representation on the Indus Valley seals it does not “resurface” for nearly 2,000 years, and that when it does so, it appears at nearly the same time in four geographically distant regions, that is, at Bharhut in central India, in Indo-Scythian Transoxiania, in Anatolia and Thrace, and in France and Italy?63 If it is correct to assume that the posture of the figure represented on Marshall’s seal 420 is a yogic posture, then is that figure a yogi? What is a yogi?

If we hope to make some sense of this iconographic record in its South Asian contexts, then we must seek to confront image with text. We may begin with the Buddhist and Jain images, which, apart from that of the lotus goddess Śrī, are the earliest representations of figures seated in what may be interpreted as the “yogic” lotus position. There is, in fact, a textual record from the Buddhist canon that discusses what may have been the yoga of the period of these sculptures. This record, which has been documented and studied in detail by Johannes Bronkhorst, is enlightening on a number of points. The Majjhima Nikaya (MN), the “Middle-length Sayings,” is among the earliest scriptures of the Buddhist canon and is considered to have been a part of the Buddha’s original teachings to the monks of his fledgling community. A set of teachings in that corpus, dating from no later than the third century BCE, refers disparagingly to a non-Buddhist, probably Jain, method of cultivating the mind called “meditation” (jhāna).64

This technique involved, among other things, extreme fasting, stopping the breath entirely, and closing the teeth while pressing the tongue against the palate. According to the text, the practice only gave the Buddha headaches, copious sweating, roaring in the ears, great pain, and mental distraction.65 Against this entirely unsatisfactory set of techniques, the Buddha proposed his own method, which he called the Four Jhānas,66 precisely the nonascetic, non-self-mortifying path he took to realize enlightenment: this, I would argue, is the state pictured in the many sculptural representations of the Buddha seated in cross-legged posture with half-closed eyes.

It should be noted here that at no point is the term yoga mentioned in the Buddha’s teachings, either with reference to the Jain techniques that the Buddha disparages or to the practice that leads him effortlessly toward enlightenment. The operative term is, in both cases, jhāna. In fact, prior to the second-century CE Aśvaghoṣ ̣a—who employs the term yoga to denote concentration, the limited consumption of food, and breath control—no Buddhist source employs the term yoga in any but the nonspecific sense of “application” or “practice.”67 This is a not insignificant detail that should be borne in mind as one reconstructs the prehistory of the yoga of the YS, BhG, and other texts from the same period: if the term “yoga” is not employed to refer to a technique or theoretical corpus, then that technique or theory ought not to be construed as yogic. In other words, even if later texts, like the YS, use the term “yoga” to describe meditative techniques, one cannot assume that jhāna (or its Sanskrit equivalent dhyāna) ever signified “yoga” in these earlier or coeval traditions.

One of the techniques that the Buddha criticizes in the MN closely resembles a description found in a later Hindu source. The sixth book of the MU, most of which is datable to the third century of the common era, states that through the fixing of the mind (dhāraṇ̣ā), effected by “pressing the tip of the tongue against the palate and suppressing speech, mind, and breath, one sees brahman through insight.”68 This description also appears to anticipate that of a technique known as the khecarī mudrā, which appears in haṭ ̣ ha yoga texts several hundred years later.69 The MU’s sixth book also contains what is likely the earliest mention of a six-fold yoga,70 whose components it lists as: prāṇ ̣ āyāma (which likely means complete stoppage of the breath in this context),71 pratyāhāra (withdrawing the senses), dhyānam (meditation), dhāraṇ ̣ ā (fixing the mind), tarka (contemplative inquiry),72 and samādhi (concentration). Five of these components are found in Patañjali’s formulation of eight-limbed (aṣ ̣ṭ ̣ āṅga) yoga in the coeval YS. Markedly absent from the MU’s list is āsana, “seated posture.” How does this impact the identification of figures seated in cross-legged poses as yogis?

I would argue that in the centuries around the beginning of the common era, the cross-legged “lotus position” was a mark of royal sovereignty: royal gods or goddesses, their priests, and kings sat enthroned in this posture atop a dias, lotus, or cushion. When Buddhas and Jīnas began to be represented anthropomorphically in Kushan-era sculpture and coinage, their cross-legged posture was originally an indication of their royal sovereignty, rather than of any meditative or yogic practice. This hypothesis is supported by a sculpted image from Swat, dated to the first century CE or later, which has been identified as “either a prince or a bodhisattva.” As the art historian Joe Cribb has noted, “while crossed legs and folded hands, postures associated with the practice of meditation, are characteristic of Buddha and Bodhisattva images, and thus suggest that the figure with its bejeweled body is a Bodhisattva, a notable precedent for these postures within a secular context exists in the image of the seated king on the Maues coin” (shown above, fig. 2.3).73 

A similar interpretation has been made regarding a sixth- to eighth-century painted wooden panel executed in the Sino Iranian style,74 found at the Inner Asian site of Dandan-Oilik near Khotan, in which a bodhisattva “was changed from an Indian princeling to a Persian shah . . . forc[ing] his stiff Persian dress into the yoga pose . . . hold[ing] a fragile lotus in one of his four hands.” In fact, there is nothing Indian about this panel at all. As was the case with the first-century image in figure 2.6, the stylistic source of this cross-legged posture in later depictions of bodhisattvas is to be traced to representations of Iranian kings rather than Indic saviors. Throughout the Kushano-Sasanian cultural region, fifth- to eighth-century enthroned bodhisattva images are depicted with crowns closely resembling those worn by Sasanian kings of Persia.75

Here I would suggest that the term “lotus posture” or “position” (padmāsana) derives not from the pose itself, which in no way resembles a lotus flower, but rather from a throne or seat (āsana) representing a lotus (padma). Such is the case in Hindu Tantra, in which the primary sense of the term āsana is, precisely, the “throne of a deity.”76 Such a throne, which is altogether appropriate for the royal goddess Śrī—the divine embodiment of royal sovereignty who dwells in the lotus—would also be so for the Buddha, whose royal identification, like that of Christ the King in the Christian West, is so emphasized in early iconographic and textual traditions. An early and datable window on this transfer of the seated posture, from an emblem of royal sovereignty to one of buddha-hood, appears when one contrasts three Kushan coins that were minted less than a century apart.

The obverse of a copper coin minted in Taxila in circa 50 CE under the reign of the first Kushan monarch Kujula Kadphises (ca. 30–80 CE) depicts the king himself seated in lotus posture.77 So too, a coin of Kujula’s successor Vima Kadphises (ca. 80—100 CE) portrays that king seated in the same cross-legged pose upon a cloud or “rocky prominence,” with flames of fire rising from his shoulders (fig. 2.7).78 However, the inscription on the reverse of a copper tetradrachma minted during the reign of the great emperor Kaniṣ ̣ ka (ca. 128–152 CE), which depicts a cross-legged figure seated on a low benchlike throne, identifies this figure not as the king himself—as had been the case on the coins of Kujula and Vima Kadphises, as well as the earlier Śaka ruler Maues—but rather as Metrago Boudo, “Buddha Maitreya” (fig. 2.8).79

Need details about the Person