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http://www.hindu.com/2009/06/08/stories/...450100.htm

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->TIRUCHI: A rare Tamil inscription of the merchant community of the Chola period, dating back to 11th century AD, has been found at Malampatti village near Thuvarankurichi, about 60 km from here. The inscription on a slab that was worshipped as ‘Natta Kallu Ayyanar’ by the locals was found by M.Nalini, Reader, Seethalakshmi Ramaswami College, and research scholar of the Dr.M.Rajamanikkanar Centre for Historical Research, Tiruchi, during a field study conducted in and around Thuvarankurichi recently.

The slab, about four-and-a-half feet in height, was found in a bushy terrain. Smeared in ash (thiruneeru) and vermilion (kumkum), the slab has inscriptions on all four sides with deep cut letters.

Since it was worshipped by the villagers, the inscription had been well preserved, according to R.Kalaikkovan, Centre Director.

The 88-line inscription has been created by two merchant sub-groups, ‘Kodumbalur Veerapattnam’ and ‘Madurai Adikittanam,’ from the ‘Thisai Ayirattu Ainurruvar,’ a distinguished mercantile community of the period. It was to honour the bravery exhibited by private guards owned by traders to protect themselves from robbers.

The inscription records guards killing two persons, who were probably causing trouble to the trading community. One of the two, Viran Nadalvan, was killed by eight guards. The other, Agappinji, was killed by 14 guards.

The inscription records the names of all the 22 men who were engaged in the fight.

Some of these private guards had the names of Chola Kings such as Rajaraja and Rajendra as prefix to their names. Suffixes such as ‘Kandali,’ ‘Kavarai,’ ‘Velaikkaran,’ ‘Singam,’ ‘Valangai,’ and ‘Chetti,’ reveal the titles of the sub-divisions that existed in the cavalry.

Though inscriptions recording activities of such cavalry forces of merchant communities have been found elsewhere, this inscription is important, as it mentions the names of the guards involved.

Further research could throw light on the socio-economic activities of the merchant sub-groups, Dr.Kalaikkovan said. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

bNataraja and Rajaraja depictions in the Chola Murals of Brihadisvara temple, Tanjavur

P.S.Sriraman
Archaeological Survey of India

http://www.muralpaintingtraditionsinindia....%20SRIRAMAN.htm

Great post by Bodhi in another group:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><<<When you were faced with Muslim invasion, the word "ideological attack" makes
no sense because people's minds were not the targets of the enemy.>>>


It just shows how shallow your understanding of Hindu History is!!!



The fundamental, and the ONLY root cause of the invasion of ISLAM and
CHRISTIANISM against India is ideology, and nothing but ideology, and the target
was, and is, nothing but the PEOPLE's MINDS -- war and conquest being only the
means to reach there!



Repeat -- in the Islamic wordview, military conquest is only a means for the
spread of Islam, not an end in itself!



Do read Sir Syed Ahmed Khan as well as Mawlana Abul Kalam Azad -- many of their
writings are available freely over Internet -- just read to understand how a
moslem thinks, and behind the Islamic wars was and remains nothing but the need
to conquer the kAfir and converts. -- THE MINDS.



Let me just cite the example of Shambhaji, when he was captured and tortured to
death by awrangzib. The moghal tyrant made a simple proposal -- convert and I
shall return the entire deccan, along with not only marahaTTA domain, but the
whole of Ahmednagar and Bijapur and Golkonda! Just convert. My war is not with
you, but your religion. (Of course Shambhaji died after bravely suffering the
torchures for two weeks -- but gave birth to the even mightier hindu nation
after him!)



And you say "ideological attack" makes no sense!!



It does not make sense to you because your grasp on history is as shallow as you
show in the above statement!!



It does not make sense to you because you have not made an attempt to learn
about Islam, its history and its philosophy, like the ancestors of yours and
mine did not.



Please read some books, and leave aside for now all those purANa-s. Start with
Jadunath Sarkar and Sardesai.



"ideological attack" makes no sense to you? Consider this:



Al-Biruni, the companion of Mahmood Gaznavi in 11th century wrote one whole book
about the Hindus, and covered besides other things, a very detailed
understanding on Hindus religion, culture and philosophy.



Moraccan Moslem Ibn-batuta in the mid 1300s produced Rihla, in which too he gave
prominent coverage to the religion and ideology of the Hindus.



Amir Khusrow the sUfI, in the same period, produced several persian works in
which he produced detailed understanding on Hindus.



Abul Fazl in the 16th century, dedicates one whole A'in in in A'in-i-Akbari, one
of the Longest A'in too, in detailing out nine schools of philosophy of the
Hindus -- 6 for the ShaDdarshana, plus jaina, bauddha, and chArvAkan lokAyata
school. (He considers the last 3 nastikas as part of Hindus) -- a very detailed
study he made of the religion of Hindus.



Quasim Hindushah Ferishta, living in deccan in early 17th century, wrote
tArIkh-i-ferishtA wherein he too detailed out besides other things, a rather
good account on what he understood to be the religion of the Hindus, especially
the thought process of the brAhmaNa-s, and Veda-s etc.



Persian Chronicle Dabistan-i-Mazahab written at the same time detailes out every
single nuance about Hinduism.



Now you tell me how many Hindus tried to figure out what Islam was all about???



They did not!! Period.



And in it is their failure.



Indeed in the period when Al-Biruni was learning about Hindus, and post
push-back of Gaznavi by bhojadeva and the chandella-s, there was a peaceful
period of over a century for the Hindus, but did the brAhmaNa-s care to produce
ANY understanding on Islam (besides the 12th chapter in bhaviShya purANa where a
minister of bhojadeva the pramAra slays mohammed by means of tantra
deployment!!)



All those who defend this moronic attitude are also of the same class, living in
the imaginary world awaiting satayuga, ignoring the imminent danger. If you
want to immitate your forefathers, you will fare no better than they did.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Bodhi- while we are generally in agreement on the issue I must mention that it was not that the heathen Indians remained entirely blind to the ideology of the invasive Abrahamism. We must take note of the bauddha kAlachakra tantra for example. This tantra was among the last great pieces of *brAhminical* scholarship in the the bauddha realm written chaste saMskR^ita, unlike some of the earlier apabhramsha sprinkled works of the tradition. This work not only recognizes the homology of the Abrahamisms but it clearly seems to see through the great ideological danger they pose to the heathens. That is why today modern Christians take effort to attack the bauddha-s by using this tantra. It clearly names the unmatta-s (prophets) till Mohammed and describes their evils. Then of course in usual hindu style it states that their end will come with the coming of chakravartin kalkin at the end of the yuga when a great battle would be fought in which the followers of Isa and Mohammed will be pitted against the deva-s. The deva-s issuing forth from kailAsa are said to destroy these to restore dharma. While someone might be inclined to deride the yearning for kalkin the said tantra does understand the problem. Again I must say that at least a couple of bauddha paNDita-s produced a suitable ideological critique of Islam. I need to check up Lama tAranAtha for all the names but one of the lIlAvajra is particularly clearly.

I suspect that both the shaiva-s and the vajrayAna bauddha-s of the age were not entirely as naive as we would think for there is clear evidence that they were for raising senA-s for the defense of dharma against the Moslems. I think the struggle of the chandrAtreya-s (chAndella-s) the brahminical rAjpUt clan against the Moslems was impressive to the end, including the final heroic struggle of rAnI durgAvatI. This struggle was not without an ideological understanding of Islam, though it came on late, under the shaiva saiddhAntika guru-s. You might ask me where is the evidence -- I think it is there and have seen it in many sources mainly inscriptions pertaining to shaiva guru-s. It needs to be collated from various sources and will try to do so if I ever get the chance.

^ Did not mean to eclipse HH's more important/relevant post above with my spam.


<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Now you tell me how many Hindus tried to figure out what Islam was all about???

They did not!! Period.

And in it is their failure.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->While I agree with other points made, am in disagreement with the myopic view on 'Indians/Hindus alone' here. To be fair, if true, the blindness occurs not just with the Hindus.
The same is a problem of all Dharmic religions - within and without India - in fact all Natural Traditions. You can see the same fundamental inability to recognise the ideology of <i>christianism</i> itself behind all the terrorism, among Native Americans, Africans, other Asians (minus the Japanese somewhat, but they too seem to have <i>generally</i> dubbed all of christianism as little more than 'alien/western imperialism').
Each mounted a cultural/civilisational 'defence' against the outward symptoms of christianism, but never christianism itself. Even if nearing the end they were able to trace some of it to christianism, like the Native Americans at one point - going by what I think I recall having read.

Every one of them was unable to see that christianism's war is with paganism alone (and more crucially, with the most pagan elements of paganism: that which cannot be assimilated. E.g. philosophy at least can always get separated/extracted from the main body of religio-tradition and assimilated, even if christianism needs to kill the philosophers themselves to do it).

I make an exception for the (Greco)Romans because they *knew* ideological subterfuge, ideological warfare really well. Even then, they recognised it too late in the christian phenomenon,
1. since the masquerade was too different. It made itself look like religion and yet it was not. It made itself look like one of their own familiar traditions and yet it was not (even though they saw it appropriating from their religion in front of their very eyes). This facade is what threw the Romans.

But more than that, Rome's failure was because:
2. The intolerant ideology meme is something that Natural Traditionalist societies have never really encountered and hence they have no appreciation for the full impact of what it means to their lives. Natural Traditionalists <i>simply do not get it</i>. (It is a different matter that today it has become a way of life in the world.) It takes time to see through it, and frequently requires pattern recognition - and patterns require more data than one's own context.

The same is true for Hindus of the older age as they faced Islam over centuries: Dharmic Bharatam was a virgin to the experience of the intolerant meme. And even when they faced off against it in physical combat, they may never have understood what drove it because of (1) again: the masquerade of 'religion' (it is in fact a general Natural Traditionalist maxim that takes for granted that all 'religions' are religions, even 'equal' religions - you see this among older Daoists as well).

This is a problem with Natural Traditions: believing in some fundamental goodness and similarity with all other 'religions' of the world. So they take no interest in learning <i>why</i> the terrorist meme does what it does. Why the ruthlessness, why the genocide, why going out of the way to convert-or-kill people in some distant land who are minding their own business.
To the terrorist memes, territorial, monetary and other proprietary gains were always secondary. It is ideology - the drive of their non-existent gawd to deliver him the unsaved kaffirs - that is the sole cause, as Bodhi has stated. But ideology is invisible, only the symptoms (genocide) is visible and it is easy to not look beyond the horrific, eye-catching sordidness of christoislamism's actual effects.

Note that converts have even more powerful blinkers on: e.g. christian African Americans, christian Philipinos, christian S Americans. Where these finally recognise being oppressed and shortchanged by "imperialism" or "European christians", all still excuse christianism completely.

Among Natural Traditionalists, the naivete accompanying their shallow understanding of other religions is followed by christianism's PR. Then the Natural Traditionalists are christoconditioned so that christianism itself is beyond their touch (invisible) OR they even start doing christian apologetics themselves:
All modern Indian excuses such as "jesus himself was good, it is christians that have given him/christianism a bad name", "pauline christianism is where things went wrong", Radha Rajan's "church (is the problem)", blablalala - it's all the same manifestation of christianism's inbuilt protectionism. This protectionism also includes the foolish "people should not hurt minority sentiments". AKA secularism. Christianism's use of brainwashing into secularism is as nigh as old as christianism in Rome. And at least as lethal today.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Al-Biruni, the companion of Mahmood Gaznavi in 11th century wrote one whole book
about the Hindus, and covered besides other things, a very detailed
understanding on Hindus religion, culture and philosophy.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Their study of the heathen is nothing new. It is an essential operating practice of the intolerant illegitimate ideologies that they would microscopically study the natural traditions. Christianism does this all the time: in every soil where it wants to plant the cross, it first studies the native traditions, the traditional societal structure, the languages (for translation, for meddling, for appropriating). Everything is examined in detail but with christo-conditioning, to understand how it works, to understand its weaknesses, etcetera. And <i>why</i> they do it is also obvious: for replacement. Replacement theology. They learn all about the enemy in order to eradicate and replace it in the easiest and most complete manner. That is what, for example, inculturation is all about as well.


IMO, there is one man (actually his whole band) that Hindus must emulate. He understood christianism very well, and to this day Hindus do not understand the full extent of christianism - let alone the complex satellite problems it raises - the way he did. (In fact, until reading about his views on certain matters, I never even thought about these spin-offs of the terrorist memetic family of mindviruses. No Indian intellectual has ever mentioned them, nor even western intellectuals for that matter, even where they were documenting his views.)
People should *really* read up on Julian's stance on christianism. It is very hard to track all his views, because he expressly dissembled on this in public: he was absolutely dead set against christianism, but was careful not to show it in public - not by recognisable discrimination or disfavour, let alone persecution. He did not reveal the full scope of his intentions or the means by which he sought to achieve them (all the steps to checkmate). Even his works exposing christianism were only half his hand - the rest of the mindset behind it when writing or commissioning such works can only be deduced from what's set down in his works by retracing backwards from the ideas he wanted to instill in the empire's populace. This dissembling he employed is actually *christianism's* way in a pagan country of course: the pretence that it is secular while systematically destroying the local tradition. He learnt the subterfuge to apply against christianism from christianism itself: christianism had employed it before it was sufficiently in power, same as it is doing now in Bharatam.

Forget the (non)example of others. When it comes to christianism, neither Kelsos' arguments nor those of Porphyrius will help (on their own) because they are insufficient. The jeebus myth is here. To fight it, one needs to move even beyond their arguments and means.


<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->If you want to immitate your forefathers, you will fare no better than they did.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Am a bit confused. What religion did this other person's forefathers belong to (assuming they're not the same as Bodhi's)?

Bodhi is missing that practically all the forefathers of all pagans were equally clueless. And IMO studying Indian history (or the islamic/christian study of Hindus) is not enough. The problem to our continued non-comprehension is that, just as our religions do not compute with christoislamism, neither do theirs compute with ours.
The intolerant meme is alien to our understanding: even mere studying does not help, it takes concentration and a wallowing in the meme's mental filth to understand its workings, its motivations and to pinpoint its driving forces. (The retrovirus' strands are full of self-preservatory obfuscation "junk" sequences that throw people off the scent.)
Even then there's little hope of a full understanding among heathens. In fact, it is no longer a wonder that Hindus still have not learnt much/all of it. It takes a whole retraining of thought to be able to understand the terrorist christoclass mindvirus (its objectives, its drive and its manifestations) let alone to recognise (that it is christianism behind) its symptoms - forget coming up with a counter, which is even further beyond us.
Our understanding must come from people like Ishwar Sharan who can do the translation from what christianism believes into a manner that hopefully we may be able to digest.


If Hindus want to win, they should study in detail the level of comprehension of christianism, motives and methods of those 'pagans' that understood christianism and tried to formulate a proper response to it. To this day, Julianus' mode of counter-warfare stands uncontested (of course I mean the <i>historical</i> Julian, obviously not the trivialised and trite fiction from Gore Vidal's book of the same name). The man cannot be out-thought on this (though he credits his Helios for the brilliance, and perseverance he showed, and for his drive).
The church knew this only too well. Thought I wrote this before, but it bears repeating: the church <i>shrieked</i> (still shrieks inwardly, where it does not hide it behind strenuously pretended disinterest) on encountering the memory of Julian. IIRC, one can also read about this christian response to him at christianism.com. (I'll try to see if I can confirm this on their pages, but I'd frequently come across the same view in various places, and it is borne out by observation of Julian's efforts as well: one cannot fail to notice it for oneself.)

<i>Ideological</i> warfare with islamism is several orders of magnitude easier than the one with christianism. When Hindus devise and implement a proper solution vis-a-vis christianism, the same can be modified to attack islamism at the core. Of course there is the physical component as well, which in the case of islam certainly (and christianism probably) might not be entirely avoided.


An example of the extreme <i>extent</i> of christianism which Hindus to this day will fail to recognise (out of disbelief). In fact, it's not actually any 'extreme' of christianism that is being described here, it is its centre of gravity:

excerpt taken from christianism.com -
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->from: The Papacy and Fascism, F.A. Ridley [1897 -], Martin Secker Warburg, <b>1937</b> (AMS Press reprint 1973).

[for the tip to F.A. Ridley and Fascism, I thank Fred Whitehead (347)].

[for F.A. Ridley, see: 100 Years of Freethought, David Tribe, 1967, 165-168].

Excursus: from: Vision and Realism, A hundred years of the Freethinker, Jim Herrick, 1982.

'Ridley was an established writer by the time he became editor of the Freethinker, having published books such as The Papacy and Fascism (1937), The Evolution of the Papacy (published by the Pioneer Press, an imprint of G.W. Foote & Co.), and Revolutionary Tradition in England. He was political and scholarly, having been expelled from the Trotskyites by Trotsky himself, and being a familiar figure in the British Museum Reading Room. His short period as editor [(after Chapman Cohen [editor 1915 -1951]) 1951-1954] and President was due to his temperamental preference for writing and research to administration and organisation.

Ridley brought to his Freethinker writing a belief that the Roman Catholic Church was the most powerful enemy of progress and reason, and that freethought should not lose sight of its essentially radical tradition. He also brought a global perspective, writing about Islam, Eastern Europe and Africa. (He was a personal friend of Jomo Kenyatta.)....

After writing of the "drift towards an atomic holocaust", he turned to the Roman Catholic Church:

<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>At the Vatican, they take long views. One must not confound temporary tactics of accommodation with their long term fundamental strategy. Beyond all its manoeuvres dictated by circumstances of an age of rapid change, the papacy pursues a single and constant aim with a single-minded and ruthless zeal</b>: the destruction of modern secular civilisation and the re-introduction of medieval ways of life. <b>In the new Dark Age, in which science would have committed suicide, Rome would once again reign as of old over a medieval theocracy, and heretics and Atheists would have but the choice, which was theirs for a thousand years, to obey or die.</b>
    (1 January, 1950.)' [102-103].<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->Exactly. Hindus will like to linger in disbelief. Doesn't it all seem so unreal, so unlikely. (Really, and what would Hindus know?)
But similar conclusions are presented by others who know the holy monopoly church the most intimately: such as former Franciscan monk Joseph McCabe, Italian Roman Catholic Avro Manhattan (who said something like: 'the Vatican thinks and moves in centuries. She can wait.' I believe he wrote this in an introduction to a piece on the catholic church vs orthodoxy)


"Vatican Imperialism in the 20th Century" (1965), Avro Manhattan - a (former) Roman Catholic himself:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Vatican against the Orthodox Church</b>

GIANTS ACT like giants, hence their undertakings are on a gigantic scale. Years are reckoned by decades, decades by centuries. Geographical areas are made to embrace nations or even continents, while the histories of institutions and of races are seen in perspectives not easily comprehended. Because of this, their actions, being in harmony with their extraordinary magnitude, will escape the notice of individuals unable to size up the vast historical panoramas which, although clearly scrutinizable by retinas of gigantic forms, yet are partly blurred and often wholly invisible to others.

<b>The Catholic Church, the greatest surviving giant in the world, is a colossus with no peer in antiquity, experience and above all, in her determination to dominate the human race.</b> To reach such a goal, she will suffer no rivals, tolerate no competitors, put up with no enemies.

Giants who, like her, were found roaming in the deep valley of history, she fought with bloody claws and a ruthlessness to shame the Attillas, the Genghis Khans and all the other scourgers of civilization. Many she led to their destruction; others she subjugated for good; some were annihilated, but some resisted and escaped all her guiles. More than one survived, and even fought relentless battles that echoed with sanguinary echoes in the corridors of the centuries and that are still being fought as ferociously as in olden times, now, in the very midst of the twentieth century.

Vatican diplomacy is the oldest diplomacy in the world. Most of those it fought were either shrunk to nothing by time or blotted out by history, and to modern ears all its multifarious intrigues would sound as hollow and as unreal as they have become strangely unrelated to the ever-bewildering events of our day.

Yet not all the ancient foes of the Vatican have been reduced to mere landmarks of the past. Some have bridged bygone centuries to the present, and one of them, the most formidable of all, the Orthodox Church, a peer to Catholicism in antiquity, is as much a reality in our time as is the Vatican itself.
[...]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Yes none of our thinkers reached the genius of Julian in this regard. I do agree with the diagnosis of the general failure of the Hindus, especially the brAhmaNa-s. But I was just trying to say that it was also not as if they were completely unaware. I think the situation was very much like <b>today</b>. Most heathens are unaware and only a few really understand what is going on. Even if you think Koenraad Elst is some kind of covert Christian subversionist, he has been highlighting this repeatedly. The main problem is that people in India are so ignorant of this that they have been electing anti-Hindu govts. I think what happened was that the the experience of the North and south was quite different. In the north Islam's sword and the dhimmitude took so heavy a toll that most Hindus retreated into a cocoon of ignorance. In the South the rise of Vijayanagara shielded most Hindus from a close experience of Islam and they forgot about it, comparing it to the occasional famine or drought. It was in mahArAShTra that at the time of the rise of the marATha's some ideological understanding developed. This can be seen in Shivaji and Shambhaji's eagerness to reconvert Hindus and place an emphasis on the ban on conversions by both Moslems and Christians. Shambhaji before being executed gave Awrangzeb an earful on the maniac and his cult.

HH: thanks for the elucidation. I agree that scholars were not altogether blind but the painful question was whether the Hindu scholar ever came up to the mark in making the intellectual investment needed to comprehensively take on the islamic demon? Whether he ever considered the subject of enough priority vis-a-vis the others? In all fairness, the Islamic invasions came like sudden waves of shock leaving the Hindu kiMkartavyavimUDha, but the more urgent question is, did he ever recover from it? And my point was not about brAhmaNa-s alone, who of course carry the bigger burden of this guilt, but the overall intellectual poverty shown by the whole hindu society in general, all across the educated sections. As I had posted in an earlier e-mail on the group -- what had prevented the vaishya-s and sArthavAha-s who were always visiting and in touch with the markets of bukhArA and baghdAd? Did they register any assessment of Islam before it was knocking at their door like ghosts? What about the learned kAyastha? Of course very early he had adopted to reality and learnt persian, some times also arabic and turkic. Why did he never produce anything about Islam at all, while creating manuals of how to become good accountants and munshis? And again like you said, the important question is whether this is history or the blindness is still going on??? I beleive it goes on and the Hindu did not wake up except for the brief periods when he just turned to the other side and went to sleep again. Worse yet -- the voices that trouble its half-dead-like sleep: he hates them!! Be it V S Naipaul's or K Elst's.

kahA kahUM ratiyA kI kathA batiyA kahi Avata hai na kacHU rI
Ayi gopAla liyo bhari a~Nka kiyo mana bhAya piyo rasa kU rI
tAhI dinA soM gaDI aMkhiyAM rasakhAni mere a~Nga a~Nga me pUrI
pai na dikhA.i parai aba bAvari dai ke biyoga bithA kI majUrI
(prema-vATikA.114)

{How do I describe that night dear, for words are escaping my tongue;
gopAla came, took me in his embrace, did what he liked, and we tasted the nectar;
And since that day, as if every pore of rasakhAn’s body has become an eye waiting for him;
But I have not seen him since, left with this gift of his, this madness, this pain, this agony...}

The recent discussions on homosexuality brought to our mind that great poet of braja-bhAShA, Syed Ibrahim Piyani turned vaiShNava sAdhu rasakhAna, for whom his homosexuality itself had become the vehicle to reach kR^iShNa-devotion.

There are of course many unknown things about rasakhAna, including his parentage and early life, and we have no intentions to go into much of those details, in brief what stands almost certain from internal evidence of his own writings is that he was a homosexual, was a paThAna, used to live in dillI, and most scholars of Hindi history consider him a contemporary of Akbar. We however feel that he was an old man by the time of Akbar, and must have rather seen those times when himU had suppressed the last of Afghans and was crowned in dillI. (We have seen some hints of its mention in a couple of his lines, but that will require more analysis.)

The vaiShNava hagiography by gokuladAsa called ‘dosaibAvana vaiShNavan kI vArtA’ (Discussion on 252 vaiShNava-s) recounts the life of rasakhAna, and provides some details about rasakhAna’s homosexual beginning and how through it he turned to devotion. Reproduced below is the relevant part of the prose (#218):

“so vA dillI me eka sAhUkAra rahato hato | so vA sAhUkAra ko beTo baDo sundara hato vA cHoro so rasakhAna ko mana laga gayo | vAhI ke pIcHe phiryA karai vAko jhUTo khAve ATha pahara vAhI kI naukarI karai |... eka dina chAra vaishnava milaki bhagvadvArtA karate hate | karate karate aisI bAta nikasI jo prabhu me aisa lagAvanA jaise chitta sAhUkAra ke beta me lagyo hai...”

In summary, he used to live in dillI and been in homosexual relationship with a certain vaishya’s son, with whom he used to spend day and night and the story of their scandalous affaire was well known in the town. Once he was passing by a group of vaishnava sAdhu-s and got curious overhearing their discussion. (One sAdhu said that one must develop love for the Lord like this paThAna loves that vaishya boy). His curiosity drew him to them and when he asked he was shown a picture of kR^iShNa in shrI-nAtha form (some other descriptions mention it in muralI-manohara form, although little difference it makes). The image was so attractive that rasakhAna’s heart was immediately struck by its beauty, and he fell in love, as rasakhAna himself says in one of the dohA-s recorded in prema-vATikA: ‘prema-deva kI cHabi lakhi, bhaye miyA rasakhAna’ – one glance at the image of the Lord of Love, and miyA became rasakhAna.

He then visited vR^indAvana, and started roaming around in the company of vaiShNava vairAgI-s, eventually taking dIkShA in puShTi mata from the son of famous vallabhAchArya, composing and singing love songs for his new love, and eventually becoming the famous rasakhAna. His poems are mostly in the savaiyyA meter, and present an entirely unique strain of devotion. Above all, one can find such expressions in his work that would easily remind one of his homosexual beginnings.

It seems Moslems did not take kindly to his conversion, and some complained against him with the emperor (Akbar?), although there is no mention of any persecution of rasakhAna except for this line that he wrote: “kahA karai rasakhAna ko ko.U chugala-labAra | jo pai rAkhana-hAra hai mAkhana-chAkhana-hAra” (What harm can these petitioners bring to rasakhAna, for his protector is now none lesser than kR^iShNa himself.)

According to janaShRuti, towards the end of his life he once heard a recitation of rAma-charita-mAnasa (which must have been composed just recently by young tulasIdAsa), and took to its reading and hearing very lovingly.

His immortal, famous last-wish:

mAnusa hauM tau vahI rasakhAna basauM mili gokula gaoM ke gvArana
jo pasu hauM tau kahA basu mero charauM nita nanda kI dhenu majhArana
pAhana hauM tau vahI giri kau jo dharyo kara cHatra purandara kArana
jo khaga hauM tau basero karauM mili kAlindI kUla kadamba kI DArana

(If reborn as a human, then wish to be reborn as rasakhAna, living among those shepherds of gokula;
And if I have to be reborn as an animal, for what control do I have in it, then wish to be born as a cow that would graze together with the cows of nanda;
And if I be sent as a stone, then let me be on that hill, which my Lord picked up due to the wrath of purandara;
And if I become a bird, then I wish I shall make home on the branches of those kadamba trees that grow on the banks of holy yamunA)

bhAratendu records about rasakhAna in his uttara-bhaktamAla, and counting him among other moslem-turned-Hindu devotees, he ecstatically concludes: “ina musalmAna harijanan pai koTina hinduna vAriye”: (the gain of such hari-jana musalmAns makes cheaper to me the loss of a million Hindus.)

<!--QuoteBegin-"brihaspati"+-->QUOTE("brihaspati")<!--QuoteEBegin-->
It is not true that marriages between Hindus and mUslims did not take place. But the Islamic regimes, including most "enlightened ones" viciously intervened and forbade marriage of Muslim women to Hindu men. They demanded, abducted, and forced Hindu women to get married to Muslim men. In fact the famous "Sufi" founder of Azmeer Sharif actually married because he had dream that chastised hime fro being without a wife, and he simply married the abducted daughter of a local Hindu rajah who was captured on a night attack by a Muslim army commander (an indication that the oh-so-peaceful Sufi success could have been closely relaed to proximity of Islamic armies).

There was one brief period in Kashmir, when a Muslim sultan gave his daughters in marriage to Kashmiri Hindu nobles of his court, although it is not vey clear that there were no hidden conditions of conversion. However, the reaction in edicts and firmans of Jehangir and ShaJahan indicate that conversion was not included in the condition, and they were outraged at this.

The Islamic regimes enforced this one way traffic of women from the Hindu into the Muslim. Why is it so difficult to  unerstand that the Hindu might have simply internalized the effects of the trauma the Islamic rulers visited upon the family and community if a Hindu man dared to marry a Muslim woman without converting first - that they closed themselves off to marital interaction?

Ibn Battuta gives eye-witness accounts of the Sultan’s arranging marriages of enslaved girls with Muslims on a large scale on the two Ids – “First of all, daughters of Kafir (Hindu) Rajas captured during the course of the year, come, sing and dance. Thereafter they are bestowed upon Amirs and important foreigners. After this the daughters of other Kafirs dance and sing and the Sultan gives them to his brothers, relatives sons of Maliks etc. On the sixth day male and female slaves are married.” Ibn Battuta writes: “At (one) time there arrived in Delhi some female infidel captives, ten of whom the Wazir sent to me. I gave one of them to the man who had brought them to me, but he was not satisfied. My companion took three young girls, and I do not know what happened to the rest.”

In medieval India, beautiful women captives of Muslim warfare were kept mainly as sex-slaves called kanchanis, kanizes and concubines. Muslim nobles exchanged them widely and frequently and Hindu nobles shared in this practice of “taking” Muslim women. In the Delhi Sultanate, according to Nizamuddin Ahmad, “Musalman” women were taken by the Rajputs and sometimes taught the art of dancing and singing and were made to join the “akharas”. Muslim women from the palace of Malwa Sultan entered, between 1512-1518, the household of his nayak or captain Medini Rai. Sultan Mahmud Sharqi (1436-58 ) was accused of handing over Muslim women to his “kafir” captains. Similarly, the Muslim ruler of Kalpi and Chanderi, shortly after 1443, had made over Muslim women to some of his Hindu captains. Malwa was not an exception. In Kashmir, according to Jonraj, Shah Mir had gone to the extent of marrying his daughters to his Brahman chiefs.

Muslim military power being more effective, Islamic rulers in general discouraged Hindus from taking Muslim women. Sher Shah, represented by modern Hindu historians to be a “liberal”, broke his treaty with Puran Mal of Raisen because of the latter’s “gravest of all offences against Islam” in keeping some Muslim women in his harem. The Mughals demanded and freely married Hindu princesses (The liberal Jahangir writes this openly in his autobiography), but there is not a single instance of a Mughal princess being married to a Rajput prince. Akbar discouraged all types of inter-communal marriages. When Jahangir learnt that the Hindus and Muslims intermarried freely in Kashmir, and both give and take girls, (he ordered that) “taking them is good but giving them, God forbid”. And any violation of this order was to be visited with capital punishment. Shahjahan ordered that the Hindus in Kashmir could keep their Muslim wives only if they converted to Islam. Therefore, under him, 4,000 to 5,000 Hindus converted in Bhadnor alone. (there are similar references in Gujarat and Punjab)

Hindus sometimes rescued Hindu girls forcibly married to Muslims. Many Hindu Rajas and elite kept Muslim women in their seraglios, sometimes as a symbol of revenge and continued to capture Muslim women wherever they felt strong. Khafi Khan and Manucci both affirm that the Marathas used to capture Muslim women because, according to them, “the Mahomedans had interfered with Hindu women in (their) territories”.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<!--emo&:argue--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/argue.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='argue.gif' /><!--endemo--> Ram Jethmalani has raised a valid issue
- by Naim Naqvi 24 Nov 2009
This story has been read 743 times. Category: Technology
Topic: Others
About Wahabiyat Ram Jethmalani was more than correct this time.
The ebullient barrister has raised very valid issue and the time is ripe to talk in detail about this menace of Wahabbism. There are slew of issues like the human rights, demolishing the religious places, abuse of natural resources and treatment of minorities which could cause pinpricks to Saudis and they can just walk out to save the face.
http://content.msn.co.in/msncontribute/sto...77-7e7ce4d99987
http://content.msn.co.in/msncontribute/sto...bc-4b2c2f665707
p.s. pl move it to appropriate section if it does not belong here. thanks.

Dalrymple the Muslim apoligist takes offence with Naipaul





Trapped in the Ruins

Quote:Trapped in the ruins



VS Naipaul caused controversy in Delhi recently when he apparently endorsed the ruling Hindu nationalist party. While his credentials as a writer are unchallenged, argues William Dalrymple, his historical grasp is less sure, marred by a grave failure to recognise Islam's contribution to India



William Dalrymple The Guardian, Saturday 20 March 2004





There was some surprise last month when Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul turned up at the office of India's ruling Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and gave what many in the Indian press took to be a pre-election endorsement not just of the party but of the entire far right-wing Hindu revivalist programme. India was indeed surging forward under the BJP, the Nobel Laureate was quoted as saying, and, yes, he was quite happy being "appropriated" by the party.



More striking still was the quote attributed to Naipaul about the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Babur's mosque, in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, a decade ago: "Ayodhya is a sort of passion," he said. "Any passion is to be encouraged. Passion leads to creativity." For a man whose work contains many eloquent warnings of the dangers of misplaced political passions - the Islamic Revolution in Iran to take just one example - this might appear to be a surprising volte face, especially when one considers the horrific anti-Muslim pogroms that followed Ayodhya, when BJP mobs went on the rampage across India and Muslims were hunted down by armed thugs, burned alive in their homes, scalded by acid bombs or knifed in the streets. By the time the army was brought in, at least 1,400 people had been slaughtered in Bombay alone.



It might seem unlikely that a Nobel Laureate would put himself in a position of apparently endorsing an act that spawned mass murder - or commend a party that has often been seen as virulently anti-intellectual. Indeed, one commentator in the Times of India wondered if Naipaul had not been misunderstood. The paper pointed out that Naipaul told his hosts at the BJP in Delhi: "You cannot carry the past with you or you will not progress. Leave this behind in history books and move on."



Yet Naipaul's earlier statements, especially his remarks that the first Mughal emperor Babur's invasion of India "left a deep wound", are consistent with ideas Naipaul has been airing for many years now. In 1998, for example, he told the Hindu newspaper: "I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the 10th century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions ... The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed." Such attitudes form a consistent line of thought in Naipaul's writing from An Area of Darkness in 1964 through to the present.



Few would dispute Naipaul's status as probably the greatest living writer of Indian origin; indeed some would go further and argue that he is the greatest living writer of English prose. For good reason his views are taken very seriously. He is a writer whose fiction and non-fiction written over half a century forms a body of work of great brilliance, something the Nobel committee recognised in 2001 when it awarded him literature's highest honour, and singled out his analysis of the Islamic world in his prize citation .



Naipaul's credentials as a historian are, however, less secure.



There is a celebrated opening sequence to Naipaul's masterpiece, India: A Wounded Civilization. It is 1975 - a full quarter century before he won the Nobel - and Naipaul is surveying the shattered ruins of the great medieval Hindu capital of Vijayanagar, the City of Victory.



Naipaul leads the reader through the remains of the once mighty city, its 24 miles of walls winding through the "brown plateau of rock and gigantic boulders". These days, he explains, this part of south India is just "a peasant wilderness", but look carefully and you can see scattered everywhere the crumbling wreck age of former greatness: "Palaces and stables, a royal bath ... the leaning granite pillars of what must have been a bridge across the river." Over the bridge, there is more: "A long and very wide avenue, with a great statue of the bull of Shiva at one end, and at the other end a miracle: a temple that for some reason was spared destruction, and is still used for worship."



Naipaul goes on to lament the fall of this "great centre of Hindu civilisation", "then one of the greatest [cities] in the world". It was pillaged in 1565 "by an alliance of Muslim principalities - and the work of destruction took five months; some people say a year." It fell, according to Naipaul, because already the Hindu world it embodied had become backward looking and stagnant: it had failed to develop, and in particular had failed to develop the military means to challenge the aggressive Muslim sultanates that surrounded it. Instead, Vijayanagar was "committed from the start to the preservation of a Hinduism that had already been violated, and culturally and artistically it [only] preserved and repeated; it hardly innovated ... The Hinduism Vijayanagar proclaimed had already reached a dead end."



For Naipaul, the fall of Vijayanagar is a paradigmatic wound on the psyche of India, part of a long series of failures that he believes still bruises the country's self-confidence. The wound was created by a fatal combination of Islamic aggression and Hindu weakness - the tendency to "retreat", to withdraw in the face of defeat.



Naipaul first developed the theme in An Area of Darkness. The great Hindu ruins of the south, he writes there, represent "the continuity and flow of Hindu India, ever shrinking". But the ruins of the north - the monuments of the Great Mughals - only "speak of waste and failure". Even the Taj and the magnificent garden tombs of the Mughal emperors are to Naipaul symbols of oppression: "Europe has its monuments of sun kings, its Louvres and Versailles. But they are part of the development of the country's spirit; they express the refining of a nation's sensibility." In contrast, the monuments of the Mughals speak only of "personal plunder, and a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered". In a recent interview, Naipaul maintained that "the Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people."



Not many other observers have seen the Taj Mahal - built by the emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his wife, and usually perceived as the world's greatest monument to love ("a tear on the face of eternity", according to Tagore, an earlier Indian Nobel Laureate) - in quite such jaundiced terms. Nevertheless, Naipaul's entirely negative understanding of India's Islamic history has its roots firmly in the mainstream imperial historiography of Victorian Britain.



The Muslim invasions of India tended to be seen by historians of the Raj as a long, brutal sequence of pillage, in stark contrast - so 19th-century British historians liked to believe - to the law and order selflessly brought by their own "civilising mission". In this context, the fall of Vijayanagar was written up in elegiac terms by Robert Sewell, whose 1900 book Vijayanagar: A Forgotten Empire , first characterised the kingdom as "a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquests", a single brave but doomed attempt at resistance to Islamic aggression. This idea was eagerly elaborated by Hindu nationalists, who wrote of Vijayanagar as a Hindu state dedicated to the preservation of the traditional, peaceful and "pure" Hindu culture of southern India.



It is a simple and seductive vision, and one that at first sight looks plausible. The problem is that such ideas rest on a set of mistaken and Islamophobic assumptions that recent scholarship has done much to undermine.



A brilliant essay published in 1996 by the respected American Sanskrit scholar, Philip B Wagoner, was an important landmark in this process. Entitled "A Sultan Among Hindu Kings" - a reference to the title by which the kings of Vijayanagar referred to themselves - pointed out the degree to which the elite culture of Vijayanagar was heavily Islamicised by the 16th century, its civilisation "deeply transformed through nearly two centuries of intense and creative interaction with the Islamic world".



By this period, for example, the Hindu kings of Vijayanagar appeared in public audience, not bare-chested, as had been the tradition in Hindu India, but dressed in quasi-Islamic court costume - the Islamic inspired kabayi, a long-sleeved tunic derived from the Arabic qaba, symbolic, according to Wagoner, of "their participation in the more universal culture of Islam". {What BS!}



Far from being the stagnant, backward-looking bastion of Hindu resistance imagined by Naipaul, Vijayanagar had in fact developed in all sorts of unexpected ways, adapting many of the administrative, tax collecting and military methods of the Muslim sultanates that surrounded it - notably stirrups, horse-shoes, horse armour and a new type of saddle, all of which allowed Vijayanagar to put into the field an army of horse archers who could hold at bay the Delhi Sultanate, then the most powerful force in India.



A comprehensive survey of Vijayanagar's monuments and archaeology by George Michell over the past 20 years has come to the same conclusion as Wagoner. The survey has emphasised the degree to which the buildings of 16th-century Vijayanagar were inspired by the architecture of the nearby Muslim sultanates, mixing the traditional trabeate architecture of the Hindu south with the arch and dome of the Islamicate north. Indeed some of the most famous buildings at Vijayanagar, such as the gorgeous 15th-century Lotus Mahal, are almost entirely Islamic in style.



Moreover, this fruitful interaction between Hindu - and Muslim-ruled states was very much a two-way process. Just as Hindu Vijayanagar was absorbing Islamic influences, so a similar process of hybridity was transforming the nominally Islamic Sultanate of Bijapur. This was a city dominated by an atmosphere of heterodox inquiry, whose libraries swelled with esoteric texts produced on the philosophical frontier between Islam and Hinduism. One Bijapuri production of the period, for example, was the Bangab Nama , or the Book of the Pot Smoker: written by Mahmud Bahri - a sort of medieval Indian Allen Ginsberg - it is a long panegyric to the joys of cannabis:



"Smoke your pot and be happy -

Be a dervish and put your heart at peace.

Lose your life imbibing this exhilaration."



In the course of this book, Bahri writes: "God's knowledge has no limit ... and there is not just one path to him. Anyone from any community can find him." This certainly seems to have been the view of Bijapur's ruler, Ibrahim Adil Shahi II. Early in his reign Ibrahim gave up wearing jewels and adopted instead the rudraksha rosary of the sadhu. In his songs he used highly Sanskritised language to shower equal praise upon Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of learning, the Prophet Muhammed, and the Sufi saint Gesudaraz.



Perhaps the most surprising passage occurs in the 56th song where the Sultan more or less describes himself as a Hindu god: "He is robed in saffron dress, his teeth are black, the nails are red ... and he loves all. Ibrahim, whose father is Ganesh, whose mother is Sarasvati, has a rosary of crystal round his neck ... and an elephant as his vehicle." According to the art historian Mark Zebrowski: "It is hard to label Ibrahim either a Muslim or a Hindu; rather he had an aesthete's admiration for the beauty of both cultures." The same spirit also animates Bijapuri art, whose nominally Islamic miniature portraits show "girls as voluptuous as the nudes of south Indian sculpture".



This creative coexistence finally fell victim, not to a concerted communal campaign by Muslim states intent on eradicating Hinduism, but to the shifting alliances of Deccani diplomacy. In 1558, only seven years before the Deccani sultanates turned on Vijayanagar, the empire had been a prominent part of an alliance of mainly Muslim armies that had sacked the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar. That year, Vijayanagar's armies stabled their horses in the mosques of the plundered city. It was only in 1562, when Rama Raya plundered and seized not just districts belonging to Ahmadnagar and its ally Golconda, but also those belonging to his own ally Bijapur, that the different sultanates finally united against their unruly neighbour.



The fall of Vijayanagar is a subject Naipaul keeps returning to: in an interview shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001, he talked about how the destruction of the city meant an end to its traditions: "When Vijayanagar was laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current has been broken."



Yet there is considerable documentary and artistic evidence that the very opposite was true, and that while some of the city's craftsmen went on to to work at the Meenakshi temple of Madurai, others transferred to the patronage of the sultans of Bijapur where the result was a significant artistic renaissance.



The remarkable fusion of styles that resulted from this rebirth can still be seen in the tomb of Ibrahim II, completed in 1626. From afar it looks uncompromisingly Islamic; yet for all its domes and arches, the closer you draw the more you realise that few Muslim buildings are so Hindu in spirit. The usually austere walls of Islamic architecture in the Deccan here give way to a petrified scrollwork indistinguishable from Vijayanagaran decoration, the bleak black volcanic granite of Bijapur manipulated as if it were as soft as plaster, as delicate as a lace ruff. All around minars suddenly bud into bloom, walls dissolve into bundles of pillars; fantastically sculptural lotus-bud domes and cupola drums are almost suffocated by great starbursts of Indic deco ration which curl down from the pendetives like pepper vines.



This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity, of Indo-Islamic intellectual and artistic fecundity, is important, for it comes in such stark contrast to the Naipaulian or BJP view of Indian medieval history as one long tale of defeat and destruction. Today most serious historians tend instead to emphasise the perhaps surprising degree to which Hinduism and Islam creatively intermingled and "chutnified" (to use Salman Rushdie's nice term); and an important book has been published that goes a long way to develop these ideas.



Anyone wishing to understand the complexities and fusions of medieval India would be well advised to look at Beyond Turk and Hindu, edited by David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence, (University Press of Florida, 2000). A collection of articles by all the leading international scholars of the period, it shows the degree to which the extraordinary richness of medieval Indian civilisation was the direct result of its multi-ethnic, multi-religious character, and the inspired interplay and cross-fertilisation of Hindu and Islamic civilisations that thereby took place. {JLN's syncretism!}



The historians do not see the two religions as in any way irreconcilable; instead they tend to take the view that "the actual history of religious exchange suggests that there have never been clearly fixed groups, one labelled 'Hindu' and the other - both its opposite and rival - labelled 'Muslim'."<img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' /> Indeed, as one author points out, there is not a single medieval Sanskrit inscription that identifies "Indo-Muslim invaders in terms of their religion, as Muslims", but instead they refer more generally in terms of "linguistic affiliation, most typically as Turk, 'Turushka'". The import of this is clear: the political groupings we today identify as "Muslim" were then "construed as but one ethnic community in India amidst many others".



{The failure to name enemies has been a failing for a long time.}



Of course this approach is not entirely new. From the early 1960s until only a few years ago, Indian history textbooks emphasised the creation in medieval India of what was referred to as the "composite culture".



This cultural synthesis took many forms. In Urdu and Hindi were born languages of great beauty that to different extents mixed Persian and Arabic words with the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of north India. Similarly, just as the cuisine of north India combined the vegetarian dal and rice of India with the kebab and roti of central Asia, so in music the long-necked Persian lute was combined with the Indian vina to form the sitar, now the Indian instrument most widely known in the west. In architecture there was a similar process of hybridity as the great monuments of the Mughals reconciled the styles of the Hin dus with those of Islam, to produce a fusion more beautiful than either.



These Nehruvian-era textbooks were the work of left-leaning but nonetheless internationally regarded scholars such as professors Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra and Nurul Hasan - of whom Naipaul does not appear to think much. In the same 1993 Times of India interview in which he defended the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque, he remarked that "Romila Thapar's book on Indian history is a Marxist attitude to history, which in substance says: there is a higher truth behind the invasions, feudalism and all that. The correct truth is the way the invaders looked at their actions. They were conquering, they were subjugating." The new set of far right-wing history textbooks recently commissioned by India's National Council of Educational Research and Training at the behest of the BJP government - such as that on medieval India with its picture of the period as one long Muslim-led orgy of mass-murder and temple destruction - are no doubt more to Naipaul's taste.



Thanks partly to the influence of the earlier textbooks on generations of students, there is still a widespread awareness in India of the positive aspects of medieval Islam - aspects noticeable by their absence in Naipaul's oeuvre. It is widely known, for example, that Islam in India was spread much less by the sword than by the Sufis. After all, Sufism, with its holy men, visions and miracles, and its emphasis on the individual's search for union with God, has always borne remarkable similarities to the mystical side of Hinduism. Under Sufi influence it was particularly at the level of village folk worship that the two religions fused into one, with many ordinary Hindus visiting the graves of Sufi pirs - some of whom are still considered to be incarnations of Hindu deities - while Muslim villagers would leave offerings at temples to ensure the birth of children and good harvests. To this day, Sufi dargahs still attract as many Hindu, Sikh and Christian pilgrims as they do Muslims.



Yet Sufism, clearly central to any discussion of medieval India, barely makes an appearance in Naipaul's work. "Islam is a religion of fixed laws," he told Outlook magazine. "There can be no reconciliation [with other religions]". In this one sentence he dismissed Indian Islam's rich 800-year history of syncretism, intellectual heterodoxy and pluralism. The history of Indian Sufism in particular abounds with attempts by mystics to overcome the gap between the two great religions and to seek God not through sectarian rituals but through the wider gateway of the human heart. These attempts were championed by some of south Asia's most popular mystics, such as Bulleh Shah of Lahore:



Neither Hindu nor Muslim

I sit with all on a whim

Having no caste, sect or creed,

I am different indeed.

I am not a sinner or saint,

Knowing no sin nor restraint.

Bulleh tries hard to shirk

The exclusive embrace

of either Hindu or Turk.



In Beyond Belief (1998) Naipaul writes of Indian Muslims as slaves to an imported religion, looking abroad to Arabia for the focus of their devotions, which they are forced to practise in a foreign language - Arabic - they rarely understand. He seems to be unaware of the existence of such hugely popular Indian pilgrimage shrines such as Nizamuddin or Ajmer Sharif, the centrality of such shrines to the faith of Indian Muslims or the vast body of vernacular devotional literature in Indian Islam, much of it dedicated to the mystical cults of indigenous saints.



Also notably absent in Naipaul's work is any mention of the remarkable religious tolerance of the Mughals: neither Akbar nor Dara Shukoh makes any sort of appearance in Naipaul's writing, and his readers will learn nothing of the former's enthusiastic patronage of Hindu temples or the latter's work translating the Gita into Persian, or writing The Mingling of Two Oceans, a study of Hinduism and Islam which emphasises the compatibility of the two faiths and speculates that the Upanishads were the source of monotheism. Such views were far from exceptional and most Mughal writers show similar syncretic tendencies: the greatest of Urdu poets, Ghalib, for example, wrote praising Benares as the Mecca of India, saying that he sometimes wished he could "renounce the faith, take the Hindu rosary in hand, and tie a sacred thread round my waist".



Yet Naipaul continues to envisage medieval India solely in terms of Islamic vandalism. Likewise, he continues to talk of Mughal architecture as entirely "foreign ... a carry-over from the architecture of Isfahan", ignoring all the fused Hindu elements that do so much to define its profound Indianness: the jalis, chajjas and chattris, quite apart from the fabulous Gujerati-Hindu decorative sculpture that is most spectacularly seen at Akbar's capital, Fatehpur Sikri. Yet while architectural historians see a remarkable fusing of civilisations in Mughal buildings, Naipaul thinks "only of everything that was flattened to enable them to come up".



That destruction of Hindu monuments did take place is undeniable; but in what circumstances, and on what scale, is a matter of intense scholarly debate. Perhaps the single most important essay in Beyond Turk and Hindu is Richard Eaton's fascinating account of temple destruction. It is of course a central nostrum of the Hindu far right that between the 13th and 18th centuries, Indo-Muslim states, driven by a combination of greed, intolerance and a fanatical iconoclasm, desecrated as many as 60,000 Hindu temples. This claim is examined in detail by Eaton, who concludes that "such a picture [simply] cannot be sustained by evidence from original sources".



Eaton writes that he can find evidence for around only 80 desecrations "whose historicity appears reasonably certain", and that these demolitions tended to take place in very particular circumstances: that is, in the context of outright military defeats of Hindu rulers by one of the Indian sultanates, or when "Hindu patrons of prominent temples committed acts of disloyalty to the Indo-Muslim states they served. Otherwise, temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign domains, viewed as protected state property, were left unmolested." <img src='http://www.india-forum.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' />{i]{And this Eaton guy is going to testiffy to the magnanimity of the ISlamic invaders who even after five six generatiosn still ocnsidered themselves alien!}[/i]



Indeed Indo-Islamic states involved themselves directly in the running of their Hindu temples, so that, for example, "between 1590 and 1735, Mughal officials oversaw the renewal of Orissa's state cult, that of Jagannath in Puri. By sitting on a canopied chariot while accompanying the cult's annual festival, Shah Jehan's officials ritually demonstrated that it was the Mughal emperor who was the temple's - and hence the god's - ultimate protector."



None of this should be read in any way as challenging Naipaul's importance as a writer: his non-fiction about India is arguably the most brilliant body of writing about the region in modern times, and it is precisely because of this that it is important to challenge his errors.



In the current climate, after the pogroms of Gujerat and the inaccurate rewriting of textbooks, Naipaul's misleading take on medieval Indian history must not go uncorrected. To quote Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, writing recently about the new BJP history textbooks: "When history is mobilised for specific political projects and sectarian conflicts; when political and community sentiments of the present begin to define how the past has to be represented; when history is fabricated to constitute a communal sensibility, and a politics of hatred and violence, then we [historians] need to sit up and protest. If we do not then the long night of Gujerat will never end. Its history will reappear again and again, not just as nightmare but as relived experience, re-enacted in endless cycles of retribution and revenge, in gory spectacles of blood and death."



· William Dalrymple's White Mughals (Harper Perennial) recently won the Wolfson Prize for History

This guy is white muslim and uses his English origins to propogate lies in the Takiya manner.

[url="http://www.flonnet.com/stories/20100423270806400.htm"]South Indians in Roman Egypt?[/url]

Quote:



One way to understand the implications of the archaeological discoveries at Pattanam is to delve into the amazing wealth of data from the excavations at the lost Ptolemic-Roman port city of Berenike, on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. During the Ptolemic-Roman period (third century B.C. to sixth century A.D), Berenike served as a key transit port between ancient Egypt and Rome on one side and the Red Sea-Indian Ocean regions, including South Arabia, East Africa, India and Sri Lanka, on the other.



This ancient port city was well-connected by roads from the Nile that passed through the Eastern Desert of Egypt and also by sea routes from the Indian Ocean regions. Cargoes unloaded at Berenike and other Egyptian Red Sea ports (such as Myos Hormos, now lost) used to be taken along the desert roads to the Nile and from there through the river to the Mediterranean Sea and across, to the Roman trade centres.



Exotic goods from Rome and Egypt flowed into Berenike along the same desert road before being loaded into large ships bound for the Indian Ocean.



By the end of the second century B.C., the Egyptians and the Romans finally learnt the skill of sailing with the monsoon winds across the Indian Ocean (“from the Arabs and other Easterners”). Voyages from Berenike for the riches of the Malabar coast therefore became “faster, cheaper, but not less dangerous”.



According to most accounts, one of the major centres in India that ships from Berenike travelled to, along with the monsoon winds, was the emporium of Muziris, on the Malabar coast.



However, as the silting of the harbour, among other uncertain reasons, caused Berenike’s eventual abandonment before the middle of the sixth century A.D., Muziris, too, disappeared mysteriously from the itinerary of the later voyagers to the Malabar coast. For a long time since then, both these centres remained forgotten.



But while archaeological evidence about Muziris or the Indian Ocean trade remained elusive in the Malabar coast, it was Berenike that eventually offered invaluable proof of its links with the Yavanas.



In wide-ranging and ongoing excavations at Berenike launched from 1994 (and at many other places on the Eastern Desert), a team of dedicated archaeologists from the University of Delaware (United States) led by Prof. Steven E. Sidebotham, along with partners from several other institutions, has documented evidence of the cargo from the Malabar coast and people from South India being at the last outpost of the Roman Empire and of Indians on the Berenike-Nile road.



Among the unexpected discoveries at Berenike were a range of ancient Indian goods, including the largest single concentration (7.55 kg) of black peppercorns ever recovered in the classical Mediterranean world (“imported from southern India” and found inside a large vessel made of Nile silt in a temple courtyard); substantial quantities of Indian-made fine ware and kitchen cooking ware and Indian style pottery; Indian-made sail cloth, basketry, matting, etc. from trash dumps; a large quantity of teak wood, black pepper, coconuts, beads made of precious and semi-precious stones, cameo blanks; “a Tamil Brahmi graffito mentioning Korra, a South Indian chieftain”; evidence that “inhabitants from Tamil South India (which then included most of Kerala) were living in Berenike, at least in the early Roman period”; evidence that the Tamil population implied the probable presence of Buddhist worshippers; evidence of Indians at another Roman port 300 km north of Berenike; Indian-made ceramics on the Nile road; a rock inscription mentioning an Indian passing through en route; “abundant evidence for the use of ships built and rigged in India”; and proof “that teak wood (endemic to South India), found in buildings in Berenike, had clearly been reused”(from dismantled ships).



R. Krishnakumar

Is there an electronic version of "Kanhade Prabandh" or "Padmanabha" about Kanhad Dev Songara of Jalore?

I'timaduddaulah's Rauza



I'timad al-Daula (Emperor's Pillar) was the title bestowed upon Mirza Ghiyas Beg by Emperor Jehangir. Of Persian descent, Mirza Ghiyas Beg became the first treasurer and then the prime minister (wazir) under Emperor Jehangir. His daughter, Nur Jahan, later married the Emperor and commissioned the mausoleum to honor the memory of her father upon his death in 1622.

From: Archnet http://archnet.org/library/sites/one-sit...te_id=7544



The mausoleum of Mirza Ghiyas Beg is said to have been commissioned by his daughter, empress Nur Jahan, in almost every standard work. With this mausoleum the mansion with garden is meant.



There is one big problem, if there was already a mansion with garden in that location during his lifetime, which afterward was cosmetically changed into a mausoleum? The part played by Nur Jahan then is one of turning a residential mansion during lifetime into a tomb after the death of her father. (a policy behind many more important Mughal time buildings)



This problem has come to the limelight through a contemporary eye-witness! Which is totally overlooked by historians.

This eye-witness is Pelsaert, the Dutch employer of a Dutch factory in Agra. His writings include the Kroniek and the Remonstrantie. Both works were completed roughly in 1626/7. The Flemish author named De Laet wrote his De Imperia Magni Mogolis (The Empire of the Great Mogols), based upon Pelsaert's works and the additional notes of his chief, Van den Broecke. This work was published around 1632. J.S. Hoyland's rendering in English, ignores to highlight this above-mentioned problem.

Hoyland doesn't give a good Dutch rendering into english of some more important passages or quotes.



Introduction: Ghiyas Beg (I'timaduddaulah) was put into prison under Diyanat Khan for stealing 0,5 lakh rupias, a vast amount of money. Some of his 'Khurasani' family (actually Irani), including his oldest son, were executed for conspiracy against the emperor and he was about to be executed too. But Jahangir, who never failed to keep a keen eye of desire on his daughter, Mehrunnisa, had different plans.

Akbar, when alive, didn't like his son's desire to marry her. Her Turki husband Sher Afghan was murdered in far off Bihar. She was put under humiliating circumstances into prison. Jahangir ordered to bring Mehrunnisa in his Mahal or women's residence (harem) under custody of his aunt in 1607. She was known then as Nur Mahal or Light of the Harem. At that time her niece Arjumand Bano must have been in that or another Mahal too, getting the nickname Mumtaz Mahal or the Exalted of the Harem. Prince Khurram had already then an eye on here and was permitted to wed her in 1612. A year after his father's marriage to Nur Mahal. (a fact which he didn't mention in his Tuzuk-i Jahangiri)

To stay alive, Mirza Ghiyas Beg had to pay 2 lakhs for his theft, and was still under custody of Diyanat Khan with his family (wife and children, thus including Abul Hasan, the later Asaf Khan, and his granddaughter Arjumand Bano). After ordering Mehrunnisa to come in his Mahal or harem, he gave Ghiyas Beg the thief a responsible job.

Not much later in 1616 her name was changed into the more respectable Nur Jahan. (both the names Nur and Jahan hint towards the name of Nur-uddin Jahan-gir).



From 1616 on immense intrigues and troubles started with this 'Khurasani' Irani influence in the Mughal court and empire. Already in 1607 they were involved with a conspiracy to kill Jahangir and put the captured prince Khushrau on the throne.

The Nur Jahan faction (around Jahangir) versus her brother Asaf Khan's faction (around the later rebellious prince Khurram, the future emperor).



a. The Remonstrantie on I'timaduddaulah's garden palace

page 248, describing Agra city and all the palaces of nobles on the banks of the Yamuna river, north of the castle area: “... ; Assoffs Chan sijn uyttermaten schoon ende costelijck hoff, heer van 8.000 peerden; Ethemam Daulatt, heer van 5.000 peerden; ...”.

“... ; Asaf Khan's extremely beautiful and costly garden palace, lord of 8.000 horses; (the garden palace of ) I'timaduddaulah, lord of 5.000 horses; ...”



The Dutch words 'hoff' and 'huys/huis': the first are Havelis with a pleasure garden. The second word refers only to the mansion.

“ … hebben uyttermaten veel schoone hoven, die niet alleen playserich van geboomte, maer niettemin van gebousel sijn, ...”.

“ … have lots of extremely beautiful garden palaces, who not only contain charming trees, but also buildings, ...”.

NOTE: hoven is the plural of hof(f).



This situation with the powerful position of Asaf Khan must have been well before the rebellion of prince Khurram, the son-in-law of him. Or at least before Asaf Khan's capture by imperial forces in the northwest.



b. Kroniek on I'timaduddaulah's garden palace

page 134: “.... ende ginck alle avonden te water met een schuyt in huis van Ethemadaulatt om haerent wille, blijvende daer den heelen nacht ende des morgens quam wederom te water int casteel om alle voorvallende saecken te regelen.” ( this was around Nau Roz 1020 AH = march 21st 1611)

“... and he went every evening by boat to the house/palace of I'timaduddaulah because of her, staying the whole night and he came back to the castle (Red Fort) in the morning to make the preparations (for a marriage).



We now get a picture of an already existing mansion of I'timaduddaulah at the banks of the Yamuna river, on the opposite site of the castle, and reached by boat. It was situated to the north of the castle, as the mansions of these nobles were enumerated first.



But, has his garden mansion on the other side of the river during his lifetime also become his mausoleum after death? To get this anwer, Pelsaert gives these two important clues:



1. The Kroniek on his mansion-cum-mausoleum

page 157: “In welck jaer Ethemadaulatt den oppersten whasier des coningx overleden is ende in sijnen hoff, die aen de overkant van de rivier staet, begraven.”

“In which year I'timaduddaulah, the supreme vazir of the king, has died and has been buried in his garden palace on the other side of the river.



An even more explicit clue is given in the second.



2. The Remonstrantie on his mansion-cum-mausoleum

“ … hebben uyttermaten veel schoone hoven, die niet alleen playserich van geboomte, maer niettemin van gebousel sijn, als den hoff van Solthan Perwes, den hoff van Nour Ziahan Begem, den hoff van Ethemaddaulatt, vader van Asoff Chan ende de coninginne geweest, waar ook in begraven ligt; ...”.

“ … have lots of extremely beautiful garden palaces, who not only contain charming trees, but also buildings, like the garden mansion of Sultan Parwez, the garden mansion of Nur Jahan Begam, the garden mansion of I'timaduddaulah, who was the father of Asaf Khan and the queen, in which he is also buried; ...”.



The same page gives the costs of turning his garden mansion into a garden mausoleum, which already costed 3,5 lakh rupias in that time, and which will exceed upto 10 lakh in the end.



And finally, the same page gives this important clue about buildings in which Muslims used to live and what happened to them after death.



3. The Remonstrantie on Muslim mansion-becoming-mausoleum

page 250: “ (hoven) …, want verstrect haer in hun leven tot vermaeck ende, doodt sijnde, tot begraeffenisse, ....”

“ (garden mansions) …, when being a pleasure ground during lifetime, after death, they became tombs ...”





It is clear from these quotes from a contemporary source, that Nur Jahan didn't build the garden mansion. She only cosmetically changed the place of pleasure in one of grief. Most of the Muslim buildings (of nobles and saints) were changed in a similar fashion.



An important question to be raised then: Who commissioned the building of the garden palace, which I'timaduddaulah got from roughly 1611 on? Only the most important imperial nobles were granted a riverside mansion. There is no reliable (Mughal) source, as far as I know, which can claim that the mansion becoming a mausoleum was built after 1622.



So, the so-called 'Baby Taj' is older than the 1622 date, and if thus the claim that Nur Jahan had commissioned its building is also false, we may doubt many more Mughal claims about building projects.



I know for sure that there are more lies about Agra city in the standard books, one of which is also given in Pelsaerts account: the eastern bank of Agra city above the side of I'timaduddaulah's tomb upto the Mehtab Bagh opposite the Taj was a well built en well populated city (!) with many garden retreats and some palaces, called Sikandra (spelled by Pelsaert as Tsekandra and even Tschandra elsewhere. The last gives possibly a faint name Chandra.)! This is clearly the royal (twin)city side where the Lodis had their capital and palace. While the western bank with the castle city was defended by Ibrahim's Kotwal named Vikramaditya Tomara, the eastern bank with the Afghan capital city was naturally defended from the west by the river.

The Mughals did make the eastern side less important (destroyed buildings and ramparts?), while the other bank got importance through Akbar. But if he destroyed the 'old' fort of (=occupied by) the Afghans, whose capital lay on the eastern bank, what then is true about Akbar and the Red Fort?



Another lie is about Agra being a small place, getting importance during the Lodis and becoming a metropolis from Akbar on. But it is the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri or autobiography by Jahangir which clearly states in the opening pages that Agra was a great and populous city even before the Afghans: “Before the rule of the Lodī Afghans, Agra was a great and populous place, and had a castle described by Mas‘ūd b. Sa‘d b. Salmān in the ode (qaṣīda) which he wrote in praise of Maḥmūd, son of Sultan Ibrähīm, son of Mas‘ūd, son of Sultan Maḥmūd of Ghaznī, on the capture of the castle—

“The fort of Agra appeared in the midst of the dust

Like a mountain, and its battlements like peaks.” “

What about the Eastern Ganga Dynasty?The Eastern Ganga Dynasty ruled over the parts of Orissa,Chhattisgarh,Andhra Pradesh,West Bengal

and Jharkhand from the 11th century to the 15th century and was one of the most powerful kingdoms

of Medieval India.We should also not forget the Bundela Rajputs who ruled over some parts of Madhya Pradesh from 11th-16th century.

Ishwa can you blog the piece so more can see it? And please formulate the post in article format for you raise very important questions on Mughal architecture.

^ Request for Ishwa





[quote name='Ishwa' date='11 July 2010 - 05:10 AM' timestamp='1278804738' post='107396']

The eye-witness is Pelsaert, the Dutch/Flemish employer of the Dutch factory in Agra.

[...]

I know for sure that there are more lies about Agra city in the standard books, one of which is also given in Pelsaerts account: the eastern bank of Agra city above the side of I'timaduddaulah's tomb upto the Mehtab Bagh opposite the Taj was a well built en well populated city (!) with many garden retreats and some palaces, called Sikandra (spelled by Pelsaert as Tsekandra and even Tschandra elsewhere. The last gives possibly a faint name Chandra.)!

[/quote]Chandra is definitely a possibility. Not faint at all.



There is no "Ch" sound in Dutch (I mean the let's call it 'English' ch sound - which is also there in Samskritam. What's written as "ch" in Dutch is a different sound). In Dutch, when it encounters the 'English 'ch' sound - it being alien - it can be either



1. approximated in attempts to phonetically convey this foreign/unDutch ch sound - with techniques like "tsch" as above

(will happen only when they want to preserve the sound in the original language)



OR



2. the 'ch' sound is entirely replaced - as is done in pronunciation - with the subconscious, non-existent-in-official-Dutch, approximate* "sh" sound. (I think the pronunciation of ch as sh is a French-derived behaviour, but sh is otherwise not Dutch either.)

E.g. in Dutch, the starting sound of the foreign names Chantal, Charlotte are pronounced some sort of sh. (In such cases, the English also say the (real) sh for these non-English names, rather than pronounce the ch that's used in their spelling. It's again French-derived behaviour.) The Dutch also make their approximated sh sound for China, as the French do. (Meanwhile the English pronounce China with the usual English pronunciation for ch. But Dutch and French are consistent: what's written ch is pronounced as sh - well, as close as an avg Dutch person will get to sh.)



About 1:

Actually, the closest sound that Dutch people naturally make to what English means with Ch is written "Tj", like in the utterance Tja in Dutch. They never use this spelling for imported Ch sounds (i.e China is pronounced Shiena not Tjiena <- I mean the Latin J as it is in Dutch - which is the Y; there is no 'English' J sound in Dutch; the French 'J' sound is different from both). But, Tj is still not the same as Ch across every Dutch person's pronunciation (most pronounce Tja - where the ch sound is formed briefly in passing - as tchya, some as chya, a few as tcha, a very few as bordering cha), whereas English-speaking people who say Ch for China sound consistent in their Ch.

I think the reason for the range of sounds for this is because 'Tj' is an unofficial combine, hence no consensus. Just like sh is an undocumented 'sound' in Dutch. That's also why Chantal is not consistently pronounced Shantal in Dutch, since even the Sh is approximated by some - which sometimes really is a combine of sh+y rather than plain sh (hence the Flemish used to write the imported word shampoo phonetically as sjampoo <- obviously they don't write shy in Dutch phonetics precisely because the sh combination doesn't exist in Dutch). I.e. "Chantal" is pronounced Shyantal by some Dutch people and as Shantal by others. The way some Japanese say "L" consistently for every R/L encountered, while other Japanese say "R" consistently and some pronounce an intermediate sound to approximate an English R or L. Actually the Japanese case is more intriguing still, because another alternative that also frequently occurs is that certain Japanese people will say *either* R or L for one and the same word at different times (so it's not that these individuals are incapable of pronouncing either), *without* knowing they have pronounced two different letters each time: because, what sounds like an L and what sounds like an R to us is one and the same sound to them. Fascinating.



Anyway:

But I don't know that I've ever come across the Dutch thinking to approximate English "ch" with the impromptu/unofficial Dutch combine "tj" (as in Tja) - curious - a phonetic approximation which is arguably closer to ch than "sh/shy" is.

"Tsch", however, is something they would conceivably think of to write when they wish to approximate the *actual* ch sound as we know it (i.e. ch in English). Tsch doesn't sound remotely like a ch when pronounced in a Dutch way (Dutch sch is not the German sch, not even on ending -sch(e) when pronunciation changes in Dutch). But then, in English itself, "ch" is best approximated with "tsh" <- which doesn't work in Dutch because the Dutch don't officially/really have a "sh" sound. (See the problem? Ch is a nightmare to indicate in Dutch.)



So yes, when a Dutch person is trying to approximate a Bharatiya word with the Roman letters "Tschandra", it is quite possible that the original word was Chandra (if this were to be rendered in English).





[color="#0000FF"]ADDED:[/color]

Quote:even Tschandra elsewhere. The last gives possibly a faint name Chandra.)!

Actually, it's even possible that back in the early 17th century, sch in Dutch - like say in Belgium - was pronounced closer to the German variant (where sh does exist in the form of sch). So if that holds, then Tsch could be pronounced Tsh and that is exactly the closest English phonetic approximation to ch.

Of course, as I said, this depends on what Dutch sounded like then.

Dear Ramana,



I am working on it and I will repost this a.s.a.p. as an article here.



[quote name='Husky' date='14 July 2010 - 07:37 PM' timestamp='1279115967' post='107458']

^ Request for Ishwa



Chandra is definitely a possibility. Not faint at all.



So yes, when a Dutch person is trying to approximate a Bharatiya word with the Roman letters "Tschandra", it is quite possible that the original word was Chandra (if this were to be rendered in English).



[color="#0000FF"]ADDED:[/color]

Actually, it's even possible that back in the early 17th century, sch in Dutch - like say in Belgium - was pronounced closer to the German variant (where sh does exist in the form of sch). So if that holds, then Tsch could be pronounced Tsh and that is exactly the closest English phonetic approximation to ch.

Of course, as I said, this depends on what Dutch sounded like then.

[/quote]



Dear Husky,



You are absolutely right. It must be a clear Chandra, nothing else.



A point of attention is this: Pelsaert's pecular style is to prefix a dead -t- before sibilants, which gives names as T-sickerij for Sikri, T-sekandra for Sikandra, etc. So the prefix -t- must be ignored for the pronunciation of these particular original placenames.



The special case of Tschandra: either it stands for T-schandra with a dead -t-. Or this -t- forms a supportive cluster with -sch- to give a palatal cha-kAra.



T-schandra => a Pelsaert spelling chandra would have been enough to give a sound like shandra, see for instance Pelsaert's Cha for Shah. The preceding -s- must particularly have been used to render an original cha-kAra sound.



That a sibilant can be equaled with a palatal by Pelsaert, can be witnessed with the name Tsiouwhan for Chauhan. One can say that the -si- spelling followed by another vowel stands for a ca-kAra as in this case or a ja-kAra as in Siahan for Jahan.



This -sch- for a palatal original is used by Pelsaert as a variant rendering of his -si-. Both variants may have been enforced by the prefixed -t-



In either case, the original name of the city was Chandra or perhaps Chandrapura. The Moon (cult) must have played a particular important role in both cities on either bank of the Yamuna. We have a Mehtab Bagh opposite the Taj Mahal. Perhaps in place of an older chandra(pura) vATikA?

The Moon (cult) may also be related to that particular Rajput dynasty responsible for a part of the history of the city, especially keeping in mind that Agra was a great city even before the Afghans. In this case, a Moon cult with a Chandravamshi background, we may exclude the Kachhvahas .....



This city seems to have been changed in Sikandra by the Afghan Lodis. It is here that we have to look for the Lodi capital, safer from attacks from the west. And a perfect connection with the important trade lines with the Purab, where Afghans were also ruling.

[quote name='Husky' date='14 July 2010 - 07:37 PM' timestamp='1279115967' post='107458']

But I don't know that I've ever come across the Dutch thinking to approximate English "ch" with the impromptu/unofficial Dutch combine "tj" (as in Tja) - curious - a phonetic approximation which is arguably closer to ch than "sh/shy" is.

"Tsch", however, is something they would conceivably think of to write when they wish to approximate the *actual* ch sound as we know it (i.e. ch in English). Tsch doesn't sound remotely like a ch when pronounced in a Dutch way (Dutch sch is not the German sch, not even on ending -sch(e) when pronunciation changes in Dutch). But then, in English itself, "ch" is best approximated with "tsh" <- which doesn't work in Dutch because the Dutch don't officially/really have a "sh" sound. (See the problem? Ch is a nightmare to indicate in Dutch.)



So yes, when a Dutch person is trying to approximate a Bharatiya word with the Roman letters "Tschandra", it is quite possible that the original word was Chandra (if this were to be rendered in English).[/quote]Ishwa, don't want to bore you into a permanent state of slumber, but something I thought of more recently that's sort of related to this para above.



"Tsjechoslowakije" is the Dutch spelling for the foreign country (hence foreign name), the erstwhile "Czechoslovakia" (as it is spelled in English).

In other cases, I'd have guessed that Tsj is the Dutch approximation for Tsh, which is the English approximation for Ch.

However, in the case of "Tsjechoslowakije":



1. I can't work out whether the Tsj is approximating the Ch sound, since the English are using Cz and (yet) pronounce it as a Z ("Zekk republic" for Czech), whereas I'd have thought the English would have simply used Ch if the start of the country's actual name was a Ch sound. But then the Dutch pronounce "Tsjechië" (Czech Republic) as "Tch(y)egië" for the same (g is the Dutch throaty g), and specifically not with a Z, despite Z sounding the same in English and Dutch. So, if it was supposed to be pronounced Z then why didn't the Dutch use Z itself. :head hurts:

So the question is: what is the Czech pronunciation of, well, "Czech" and hence of names like František. I.e. what actual sound is everyone else trying to approximate here?

Do they pronounce Cz the way Czar is supposed to be pronounced and which is therefore spelled Ts too (as in Tsar), and which would then explain why English and Dutch don't look like they're talking about the same sound? But then the Dutch write Tsaar IIRC, not Tsjaar - so, again, why Tsjechië....



2. If the Czechs did pronounce it as "check", then it's still very possible that Pelsaert was trying to approximate Ch with Tsch, since he doesn't seem to be some official language expert charged with the task of determining and establishing the best official Dutch presentation of foreign sounds. He could have merely approximated to the best of his ability in both (a) discerning a different sound, as much of it as he could make out distinctly and (b.) rendering it for Dutch readers in a way they could understand what he had heard. And so the result of Tsch for Ch would still be typically Dutch.



3. Regardless as to whatever sound Tsj's application in "Tsjechië" may be referring to, I don't know when the Dutch consciously came up with the Tsj spelling combination for a foreign sound, which I personally think is a very good Dutch approximation for ch. Therefore, don't know whether such a transliteration was already commonly used in Pelsaert's time and hence familiar and available to him. That he must have tried for close enough renderings is indicated in #158's statement:

Quote:That a sibilant can be equaled with a palatal by Pelsaert, can be witnessed with the name Tsiouwhan for Chauhan.

Since an i is close enough to the Dutch j (i.e. the "y" in English), it makes Tsi similar in effect to Tsj. But I'd not be surprised that those working semi-informally would be coming up with several approximations all for the same sound. Post #154:

Quote:spelled by Pelsaert as Tsekandra and even Tschandra elsewhere.

Conveying foreign sounds (sounds that don't occur in your language) in writing, using the character set that your language uses and which is customised to your language, is very hard. Dictionaries introduce all kinds of special characters to "explain" how to pronounce a word.





About this:

Quote:One can say that the -si- spelling followed by another vowel stands for a ca-kAra as in this case or a ja-kAra as in Siahan for Jahan.

Yes, that sounds like the sort of approximations the Dutch would make for a J.



To get the best sort of transliterations of sounds into Dutch, one needs people who

(a) understand the sounds in a foreign language and

(b.) know enough of Dutch to know how to get Dutch people to make the same (sort of) sounds upon reading their (Dutch) use of the Latin alphabet.



So it is one often sees that migrants to NL who learn to understand Dutch/Dutch sounds are in a good position to make very good Dutch approximations for foreign sounds. For instance, there was a foreign lady who specifically re-spelled her son's original name Julio (and which, by her choice of conferral was pronounced with English J) as "Djulio", precisely so that most Dutch readers would get it largely right automatically upon reading it, and not say "Yulio" as they would have done had the original spelling been left unchanged. And so Dutch people did get it mostly right: when they pronounce his name, they say (English spelling) "Dj(y)ulio", which - although it makes the D sound - also makes the English J sound in passing, which you otherwise don't generally get the Dutch to consciously say (at least, when they're reading the Latin character set as representing the Dutch language. If they knew beforehand that the letters they were reading were representing, say, English instead, English-enabled Dutch people would say the English J. It's not that they can't pronounce the "English" J - it's *other* sounds such as the uniquely English "th" that non-English people find difficult to pronounce - it's that the English J sound doesn't exist in their language and hence their way of using the Latin character set for their Dutch language doesn't have it.)

Ramana => The article is in progress. Especially as I want to include some more but brief information, for instance about constructing with white marble or marble stucco, which is certainly, contracry to standard pro-Mughal standard works, an old Hindu practice (of particularly Shaiva, Jaina and hybrid building traditions) much older than the Muslim presence in India! And there is a Muslim source too, outside the sphere of influence of Mughal influenced court writers, to substantiate this.



Husky => Very interesting reading on Dutch phonology. Fortunately I can read and understand Dutch. Obviously and gladly, you can too.



Some more interesting details about the two Sikandras and its spelling in Pelsaert's work:



In the Kroniek and Remonstrantie we have two clusters of spellings of Sikandra:

1. without a -t-: Secandra (2 occurrences)

2. with a -t-: a. Tsekandra (1 occurrence)

b. Tschandra (1 occurrence)



What is interesting, is that the spelling without a -t- is the one reserved for Sikandra Bihishtabad, or the place where the tomb of Akbar is.

The other ones with a -t- are exclusively used for the twincity of Agra (Akbarabad) on the eastern bank. This ìs a clear hint towards the twincity having a name originally spelled as Chandra (garh or pur?) before the Afghans, which changed into Sikandra after having been annexed by Sikandar Lodi and made into his capital city.

That the other riverbank had a fort, is hinted at by Keene in his handbook:



"We shall conduct the visitor next to the Ram Bagh. Whether this name was indicative of a dedication to the Hindu demi-god Rama, or whether the name is a corruption from a Persian word Aram Bag (the garden of repose), is a disputed point among local antiquaries.

The first notice that we have of it is as the temporary resting-place of the body of Emperor Babar, the founder of the Moghul dynasty (so called), who were in reality a mixed Turkish race descended from Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane. As it is believed that Babar lived in an old fort on the same side of the river opposite the Taj, it is extremely probable that the jovial hero, we are told, when he had a mind to be merry, was wont to fill a fountain with wine and join gaily in open-air revels with companions of both sexes. We may imagine this garden having been the scene of some of these Tartar picnics."

(from Keene's: A Handbook for Visitors to Agra and Its Neighbourhood, page 38)



This old fort on the eastern bank may have been one which was usurped by Sikandar Lodi when he made Chandra(garh?) > renamed as Sikandra his new capital. The name of the city on the western bank may have been Badalgarh.

Which old brick fort Akbar did 'destroy' is a matter of new discussion, as Abul Fazl doesn't mention the city Chandra/Sikandra, nor its (old) fort. Some local traditions attribute the construction (read: repairs) of Badalgarh fort to the Sikarwar Raja named Badal Singh in ca. 1478, hardly a century earlier. This Badal Singh may have been the maternal uncle of Man Singh Tomara. The Tomaras had also an intimate connection with Agra: both Gwalior and Agra have their Badalgarh forts, both cities have their white stucco buildings, both cities have their Man Singh's palaces. (Man Singh Kachhwaha only obtained (t)his Haveli, after becoming one of the most entrusted generals and "farzand = son" of Akbar.)

And Vikramaditya became the Kotwal of Agra after his defeat. This Kotwal's family and household had his residence in one of the grand Havelis to the south of the fort, as was customary (the Haveli of Jahangir's kotwal was also to the south).



For us, Hindus and Indians, it is a must to read (at least translations of) originals and contemporary works in order to judge what really the achievements of the Muslim dynasties were and what was certainly not theirs.



W.r.t. archaeology, the general consensus is that Hindu did build temples only in a fixed Shastrika way, according to classical works. What the standard authors do forget, is that Hindus didn't build temples only according to the fixed rules which did survive. They also built varied and that too hybrid temple structures, besides many styles of palatial buildings and also non-royal and non-religious residential structures. The Shastras do mention so many varieties of temple, palatial and common buildings that one wonders where the disappeared.



If the standard consensus is that all the Mughal period architecture has to be termed Mughal, all the Rajput structures automatically will be named as Mughal. I would rather suggest that the buildings should be termed as Mughal period structures, instead of calling it Mughal architecture. For instance the Mewar and Orccha architecture has nothing to do with Mughal 'architecture'. The Rajput architecture has many main regional schools of architecture with local varieties with also hybrid influences from the main and regional schools of other regions.

A point also ignored, is that Hindu architects and masons didn't have to wait for foreigners to include foreign concepts into their buildings. One such influence may have been for instance the Persian Iwan and Pishtaq from Sasanian kings through Gujarat. But also the Bauddha, Shaiva, etc. architectural influences from abroad (Afghanistan, E-Persia and Central-Asia) Or the Persian influences through Muslim rulers from Afghanistan, Multan and Mansura before the rise of Mahmud Ghaznavi.

India had and has a recognized international reputation for constructing buildings. They had the know how, the Shastras, the Acharyas and the Shilpins. Something every Muslim invader recognized, especially from the Turko-Afghan raids and invasions on.



Muslim invaders, whether Turki, Turko-Afghan or Afghan, especially in the initial years were military men and conquerors, not builders. They didn't have the skills or masons to erect palaces. The easiest way of claiming buildings was to clear Hindu temples and palaces from icons and images, fix the Qibla, shout from the roof (original practice of muezzin), and the job was done. The buildings which were too difficult to convert into a Muslim appreciated structure were really destroyed, the rest were converted. The standard formulation is always something like destroying the temples and erecting mosques on the same spot. Which has to be understood properly: the temples were desacrated, stripped off their Hindu identity (idols, images, etc.) and thus ready to get a mosque identity. And thus was born 'Muslim architecture' in history books, started with Fergusson, with his idiotic Pathan architecture and Saracenic architecture. (rightly criticised by Havell and others)



The Timurid kings especially may have started with claiming architectural skills and have started building many structures. The aim was always to be the greatest amongst (Muslim) rulers, not only as a conqueror, but also as a builder. But, starting from Timur on, they couldn't do without Indian masons, which is clear from Timur's autobiography:

I ordered that all the artisans and clever mechanics, who were masters of their respective crafts, should be picked out from among the prisoners and set aside, and accordingly some thou­sands of craftsmen were selected to await my command. All these I distributed among the princes and amírs who were present, or who were engaged officially in other parts of my dominions. I had determined to build a Masjid-i jámi' in Samarkand, the seat of my empire, which should be without a rival in any country; so I ordered that all builders and stone­masons should be set apart for my own especial service.

NOTE: The sentence "I had determined to build a Masjid-i jámi' in Samarkand, the seat of my empire, which should be without a rival in any country" became with superlative forms the standard formulation of especially Mughal kings.

See what the Ain-i Akbari says about Akbar's achievement: "His Majesty has built a fort of red stone, the like of which travellers have never recorded." The greatness as political power of a Timurid king had to be equal to his greatness as (religious) 'architect'.



An important point to remember is that the whole historical and archaeological description of the Delhi kingdom and Mughal period is principally and substantially built around testimonies of Muslim chronicles. A look in their chronicles will certainly reveal their biased approach and some clear lies. The Packhum site of translated Persian works of Muslim times gives a good starting point for further research.



What Hindus do know, but some apologist authors of India and abroad: The Hindus of all Panthas or any non-Muslim had to suffer humiliation and execution, abduction of their children (especially daughters) and female members, etc. Hindus for whom religion was acentral part of their lifes, couldn't go to their places of worship.

If any apologisy should doubt this, he should remember 'farmans'like this of 'protection' through Zar-i Zimmiya and Jizya taxes:

FUTUHÁT-I FÍROZ SHÁHÍ OF SULTÁN FÍROZ SHÁH: 11. The Hindus and idol-worshipers had agreed to pay the money for toleration (zar-i zimmiya), and had consented to the poll tax (jizya), in return for which they and their families en­joyed security. These people now erected new idol temples in the city and the environs in opposition to the Law of the Prophet which declares that such temples are not to be tolerated. Under Divine guidance I destroyed these edifices, and I killed those leaders of infidelity who seduced others into error, and the lower orders I subjected to stripes and chastisement, until this abuse was entirely abolished.

Even then a Hindu was a victim of harassments.



But, the (inter)national Muslim lobby in academic circles is very strong, with powerful funding organizations (Agha Khan, etc.). Thus, it will be hard to get a proper description of India when the Islam got hold ob the subcontinent. Not only architecture etc. are kidnapped, but it is a huge task to call a spade a spade: Muslim atrocity and lies in the past and present are ignored in the name of communalism etc. Hindu's are sacrificed because of this apoligist mentality. I haven't seen any Indian movie or documentary really depicting the Muslim horrors.



We have to start from 'scratch' to unravel the achievements during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal periods.