Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
Flying Mountains Do Not Lie
Published on 29th May, 2022, in Mid-day. Nationalists want to believe that Hinduism existed homogeneously across the Indian subcontinent (Akhand Bharat) since time immemorial. However, everyone who studies history knows this is not true. Harappan civilisation thrived 4,000 years ago only in Northwest India. Vedic civilisation emerged 3,000 years ago only in Gangetic plains after…
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Articles
Full-and-Final Settlement Before God
Published on 28th May, 2022, in Economic Times. We often forget that the word cash is derived from the Sanskrit word “Karshapana”. Indians invented the idea of money long ago. Irregularly-shaped copper coins were used by merchants for banking 2500 years ago, about the time coins began being used in ancient Greece and China. Even…
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Articles
Kashmir Before Islam
Published on 21st May, 2022, in Times of India. The Muslims say that Suleiman (Solomon) came to Kashmir on a flying throne (takht), sat on a hill in Srinagar, and got his djinns to clear the lake, get rid of barbarians and create a land of the true faith. But Islam actually emerged in Arabia…
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Articles
Lion Atop an Elephant
Published on 8th May, 2022, in Mid-day. A very common motif found in Indian art is the lion standing on top of the elephant, defeating it. These images are called the Gaja-Simha images, Gaja meaning the elephant and Simha meaning the lion. Some Orientalist scholars have tried to explain this image as the triumph of…
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Articles
The Jogi As Seasonal Hermit
Published on 23rd April, 2022, in The Hindu. In North India, especially in the Gangetic plains, in what is now Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, we find songs known as Baramasa. It is a 12-month cycle in poetry, expressing the loneliness and longing of a woman in a village, for a husband who is travelling…
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Articles
What Genghis Khan Can Teach Us About Secular Values
Published on 23rd April, 2022, in the Times of India. China today has a very problematic relationship with two provinces on its west. To the Northwest is Xinjiang, home of Uighur Muslims. To its Southwest is Tibet, home of Vajrayana Buddhism. In both these provinces, there are beliefs in forces that are greater than the…
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Articles
Modern Management Is Essentially Violent As It Is Based on Consumption
Published on 16th April, 2022, in Economic Times. Consumption is violence. Bhoga (food) demands bali (sacrifice). Something has to be destroyed to produce the food that you consume. This is natural law. So the elements are consumed by trees. Trees are consumed by animals. Animals are consumed by animals. Nature is designed around consumption that…
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Articles
Female Voice in Rig Veda
Published on 10th April, 2022, in Mid-day. The Rig Vedic hymns were composed over 3,000 years ago, most probably by children of men who migrated into India with horses from Central Asia, and married local women. The hymns mostly reveal the valours of the fathers, but occasionally the longings of the mother. The marriage hymn…
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Articles
An Eclipsing of History That Frightens Many Hindus
Published on 26th March, 2022, in Times of India. People forget. If you go to Northwest Pakistan today, the region on either side of the Khyber pass, few will remember that in the Bronze Age, 4000 years ago, it connected Harappan cities to settlements in North Afghanistan, which was the source of the much traded…
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Articles
The Jain Monk and His Saka Saviours
Published on 25th March, 2022, in The Hindu About two thousand years ago incidents took place which involved the Jain community that inspired an epic ballad that was put down in writing a thousand years later in Prakrit and local languages. This was the Kalak Acharya Katha that became the standard appendix of the main…
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Articles
How Trade Blossomed an Exchange of Ideas Between India and Arabia.
Published on 26th February, 2022, in Times of India. Indians had been trading with Arabs for a long time. About 4000 years ago, trade happened with Harappans by ships that travelled along the sea-coast. Birds were used to identify the direction of the shore if the ship went too far into the sea and lost…
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Articles
When Horses First Came to India
Published on 19th December, 2021, in Mid-day. The horse is not native to the Indian subcontinent. It has been the most prized import from the northwestern regions, from Arabia, Central Asia and from Eurasia. This is why the kings who live in the Northwest part of India, in Gandhara and Madra were referred to as…
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Articles
How Did Tantra Spread from India to Tibet?
Published on 14th August, 2021, in Times of India. Tibetan Buddhism is called Vajrayana Buddhism, which is sometimes also called Tantrik Buddhism. Here, women play an important role, which is why the symbols of Vajrayana Buddhism are a double-sided dagger (vajra) and the bell (ghanta), representing male and female principles, which in turn represent the…
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Articles
‘Thali’, ‘handi’, ‘paniki’
‘Thali’, ‘handi’, ‘paniki’: Unique Inventions of the Indian Kitchen by Women Who Remain Nameless Published on 26th June, 2021, in Economic Times. An Indian kitchen is a sacred place. Many people do not take footwear into the kitchen. They insist on taking a bath before commencing the activity of cooking. This reminds us that a…
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Articles
View: How Rigveda Speaks of Aspiration and Collaboration
Published on 19th March, 2021, in the Economic Times. The Veda is not a single book. It is a corpus of knowledge, layers over layers of thought, expressed in hymn, melody, ritual and ideas, produced over forty generations, as the Aryas kept moving facing east (pranamukha) and turning clockwise (pradakshina), for a thousand years, from…
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Articles
View: The Beginning and End of Using Religion
Published on 6th February, 2021, in The Economic Times. When the Romans went about conquering, they did not destroy local temples or reject local gods. They simply demanded that those conquered owed libations to the Roman emperor, while carrying on with their own religious practices, to show their allegiance to Rome. They even tolerated the…