Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
The Selective Sanctity of the Ganga
In Ayodhya Kanda, verse 52.89, Sita stands before the Ganga before crossing into exile and makes a vow. The Sanskrit is unambiguous. “Sura-ghata-sahasrena”: a thousand pots of wine. “Mamsa-bhuta-odanena”: cooked rice mixed with meat (the original Vedic biryani?). …
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Articles
How the Bhagavad Gita Invented Sattvic Food
The Vedas gave us Purusha. Tantra and Yoga gave us Prakriti and the gunas. Only the Bhagavad Gita welded these to food and caste, creating the “sattvic” framework popularly invoked today…
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Articles
Did Proto-Naxals fight the East India Company?
Today, the word Naxal is used casually by politicians and businessmen to demonise anyone protesting against exploitation as anti-national. This does not bode well for a country where a large proportion of the youth are unemployed and risk a bleak future with the rise of AI…
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Articles
The Chandala in the Vedas
The term Chandala, referring to the “lowest of the low” in Brahmin lore, appears a few times in the Vedic literature itself. It is essentially absent from the Rigveda Samhita and emerges only in the later strata of the corpus — the later Samhitas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads. …
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Articles
Who Is Baal?
The name Baal has been appearing a lot lately, especially in Western media, in the context of war between Iran and Israel. Known as a false god in the Bible, his images are being burnt in public. Western capitalists are being accused of worshipping him secretly as part of a demon cult. Conspiracy theories aside,…
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Articles
The Convenient Politics of “Later Additions” in the Ramayana
When Sita is banished to the forest while pregnant, on the basis of nothing more than public gossip, modern readers recoil. Many quickly reach for a comforting explanation: this episode, they say, is a ‘later addition’, an interpolation, not really part of the original Ramayana…
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Articles
Secrets of Bihar’s Mirrored Caves
One of the most striking experiences near Rajgir in Bihar lies inside the Barabar Caves. The walls are polished to such perfection that they are like mirrors. These surfaces were carved and finished over 2,300 years ago, yet they still reflect light with startling clarity, as if time has barely touched them. This sheen, often…
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Articles
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 deceptive nature, of the spoken word. These are found in ritual Vedic texts known as the Brahmanas…
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Articles
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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Articles
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 AD. These sites show a layered interaction of Buddhism and Hinduism, reshaped by local ecology,…
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Articles
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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Articles
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 200 BC, while the early Dharma-shastra were composed between 200 BC and 500 AD. The former is more spiritual. The latter is more legal. …
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Articles
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 within 15 km of their premises. This dietary politics points to the real character of the movement: Sanatan Dharma is essentially a vegetarian Hinduism, promoted…
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Articles
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 ideas of the sacred. Diversity was not accidental; it was structural. To imagine a caste-free Hinduism is therefore to imagine uniformity. Who defines it then?…
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Articles
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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Articles
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 many anti-caste reformers to reject karma itself. The Jataka tales describe the many previous births of the Buddha, showing how good deeds over lifetimes led…