Indian Mathematics For the Ego
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How Vagdevi Merged Into Saraswati
The goddess we call Saraswati today begins as Vagdevi, the Goddess of Speech, identified primarily with the Vedic deity Vac. Her earliest stories foreground the immense power, and sometimes the…
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Historical Reality of Pre-colonial Learning in India
Dharampal’s book, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983), is a groundbreaking historical work that used official British colonial archives to challenge the narrative that pre-colonial…
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How Southeast Asia Adapted Indian Ideas to Local Needs
Across Southeast Asia, from the Mekong Delta (in present-day Vietnam and Cambodia) to Java island of Indonesia, major archaeological sites reveal how Indian ideas travelled not through conquest but through…
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Upanishads As Against Dharma-shastra
In the Upanishads, the word brahmin is about inner realisation. In Dharma-shastra, the word brahmin is about birth status and purity.
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Upanishads As Against Dharma-shastra
In the Upanishads, the word brahmin is about inner realisation. In Dharma-shastra, the word brahmin is about birth status and purity. The early Upanishads were composed between 600 BC and…
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Sanatan Dharma: A Hinduism That Defines Itself Through Food ‘Purity’
Notably, the term “satvik” food does not appear in Ayurveda, yet it has become central to the Sanatan Dharma movement. North Indian temples now demand that no meat-serving establishments operate…
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Imagining Hinduism Without Caste
For centuries, what we now call Hinduism was never a single religion. It was a civilisation organised through caste. Each caste had its own gods, rituals, food rules, taboos, and…
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Did Missionaries Construct the Buddha We Know?
The Buddha had drifted through European writing for centuries before scholarship took hold of him, and the early portraits were wildly varied.
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Beyond Karma: Subaltern Tales of Caste Origin
When the missionaries came to India, they argued that Hindus accept social hierarchy because they believe their birth is the result of past actions. Karma promoted fatalism. This interpretation led…
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Of Jains And Jews
The comparison between Jains in India and Jews in Europe reveals two remarkably similar minority communities with profoundly different historical destinies. Both occupied economically influential positions disproportionate to their demographic…
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India Between Empires: A Reality Check
India has always been sandwiched between East Asia and West Asia. From the West, came horses. From the East came gold. India itself was the land of cotton – it…
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Tantra of the Wheel of Time
Compiled in the early eleventh century as Muslim armies pressed into northwest India, the Kalacakratantra — the Wheel of Time Tantra — is one of the clearest cases in religious…
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A Tamil Reimagining of the Ramayana
Kambaramayanam is one of the most celebrated works of Tamil literature. Composed by the poet Kamban around the ninth century in Tamil Nadu, in the time of Chola kings, it…
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Yama’s Journey from Vedic King to Cosmic Accountant
Yama is the Hindu god of death, accountability, and the afterlife. Often ignored, his history is long and complex, reaching back to Vedic, Indo-Iranian, and Indo-European mythological traditions.
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How India and Persia Shaped Each Other
Connections between India and Persia stretched back to prehistoric movements of people, long before written history. Genetic and archaeological evidence suggests that populations linked to ancient Iranian farmers moved eastward…
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How Bravery, Devotion Soften Caste Boundaries In Folk Stories
Not all ballads and epics are written by Brahmins or in Sanskrit. Across India, folk stories about gods, heroes, and ancestors did not only entertain. They carried arguments about rank,…