UPSC
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Did Women Compose Vedic Hymns?
The Rig Veda certainly contains women. Women speak. Goddesses speak. Wives speak to husbands. Women express desire, anger, jealousy and sorrow. But a woman speaking in a poem does not necessarily mean that a woman composed the poem.
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How Buddhism Became Navayana
When Dr BR Ambedkar converted to Buddhism on 14 October 1956 in Nagpur, he was not simply changing his religion. He was making a powerful social and political statement. However, the Buddhism he adopted was not exactly the same as…
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How Irrigation Made Rice Foundation of Indian Civilisation
Rice did not become India’s dominant grain overnight. Its rise took thousands of years of migration, farming innovation, and above all, irrigation. The history of rice is the history of how people learned to control water.
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The Surgery of Shushurta
Ancient India really did make important contributions to medicine. These achievements are well documented and respected by historians. But the story also has another side.
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Indian Roots of Pythagorean Theorem
This geometric truth was discovered independently by several ancient civilizations, each arriving at the same insight through their own practical needs. India’s contribution, recorded in a set of ancient texts called the Sulvasutras, is genuine and impressive. But it was…
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Who Invented Zero?
Ask any Indian schoolchild who invented zero, and the answer will usually be: India did. This is one of the most common beliefs taught in schools and repeated in public discussions.
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Southward Spread of Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism
Traditionally, Arya-varta or the land of the Aryan people was triangulated by the Himalayas, the Ganga and the Yamuna. We know this from the early Dharma-shastra texts, composed around the time of Ashoka.
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Did Greeks Influence Indian Theatre?
The history of theatre is often told through two great classical traditions: the theatre of ancient Greece and the theatre of ancient India. Both developed sophisticated ideas about storytelling, performance, music, and human emotions.
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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 India was uneducated.
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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 trade, pilgrimage, and court patronage between 500 AD and 1500…
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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 into the subcontinent around 10,000 years ago, interacting with older…
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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, dignity, and who belonged where.
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Did the Mughals invent Hindi?
Hindi is often described as a language born in Mughal barracks, as if it were simply the speech of imperial camps. This is an attractive phrase, but it is historically incomplete. The story of Hindi is much older, far wider,…
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Comparing Poems from Tantra and Bhakti
A tiny fragment of the Indian population was literate in medieval times. But a large portion knew poetry, composed poetry and transmitted poetry. These poems are thus major cultural outputs.
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How the British shaped India’s education system
Education in India underwent a major transformation in the nineteenth century during British rule, particularly after the intervention of Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1835.
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How Mangal Kavyas reinvented Hinduism in Bengal
Stories shape culture. The Mangal Kavyas is one such example. They are folk narratives that emerged in Bengal between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.