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Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 02-14-2004
When the British left us in 1947 who did they transfer power to ?
Where we officially a country at that point or where we a collection of princely states... what did we call our selves.
Before India became a republic in 1950 , what was it's legal status, who was our head of the state ?
what was it called ? i see the term "independant india" a lot ....
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 02-15-2004
bump
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 02-16-2004
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->When the British left us in 1947 who did they transfer power to ?<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Trust Gandhi and Nehru has pretty much sealed the deal. Remember Nehrus speech at mid-night about the tryst with destiny. I believe it has always been India ssince that night on Aug 15th '47.
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 02-16-2004
<b>Some info here - check page 2</b>
BBC -<b>Flashback to Indian partition</b>
<b>Astrologers could not decide on an auspicious day for the independence of India so it fell at midnight between 14 and 15 August 1947</b>.
The British colony was divided along religious lines and two nations were born - the secular but Hindu-dominated India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Pandit Nehru campaigned with Gandhi to achieve Indian independence
But even as the celebrations were getting under way it was questioned whether partition could lead to peace among the subcontinent's different groups.
Some observers say it has fuelled regional animosities and argue that it established a sinister precedent.
Since partition, India and Pakistan have waged three wars against each other - two of them over the unresolved issue of Kashmir.
Peace declaration
The first ceremonies to symbolise the transfer of power from Britain to one of the new dominions took place in Karachi on the morning of 14 of August.
At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will wake up to life and freedom
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru
British Viceroy Louis Mountbatten and Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who at midnight was to become governor general of Pakistan, addressed the Constituent Assembly.
Lord Mountbatten read a message from King George VI pledging the support of the British Commonwealth to Pakistan. Mr Jinnah assured the world that Pakistan would work to preserve peace.
The next day, Mr Jinnah addressed the nation during the inauguration of the Pakistan Broadcasting Service.
"The creation of the new state has placed a tremendous responsibility on the citizens of Pakistan," he said. "It gives them an opportunity to demonstrate to the world how a nation containing many elements can live in peace and amity and work for the betterment of all its citizens irrespective of caste or creed.
"Our object should be peace within, and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial friendly relations with our immediate neighbours and with the world at large."
Free India
After the ceremony in Pakistan, Lord and Lady Mountbatten flew to Delhi, where special events to mark the transfer of power took place. He was to stay on as Governor General of India, while Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru became the country's first prime minister.
That night people were very expectant, very hopeful of things to come
Saeed Suhrawardy
<b>The special ceremony began at 11pm in the State Council building.
"At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will wake up to life and freedom," Nehru said.
As the last chimes of midnight died, an assembly member blew a conch shell and a great cheer rose in the hall.
Tens of thousands of people celebrated outside the building - many more did so in cities around India.
Mahatma Gandhi, regarded as the father of Indian independence, did not attend the celebrations. Instead, Gandhi - who strived for a united India - spent the day with Indian Muslims in Calcutta. </b>
Exodus
Journalist Saeed Suhrawardy, an Indian Muslim from the town of Mirzapur, was 17 at the time and remembers the night clearly.
"I think the whole town was awake," he said. "There was no television at that time and few radios. So radio shops were very crowded with people waiting for the speech of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. It was like a festival, at least in my place there was no tension.
"That night people were very expectant, very hopeful of things to come."
But Saeed Suhrawardy recalls that there were also fears that night.
Lord Mountbatten is said to have found the situation very dangerous
"Reports coming from other places made the minorities fearful for events to come.
"In our town we did not have any record of communal violence. But there were stories of violence, riots, attacks on trains and bloodstained trains arriving with dead bodies."
Saeed Suhrawardy did not think of migrating after partition. Many others did.
As soon as the new borders were known some 10 million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs fled from their homes on one side of the newly demarcated borders to the other side.
About one million people were killed during the exodus, and to this day many families are separated by the border.
Religious rivalry
The origin of partition is still a matter of debate.
The name Pakistan - or "Land of the Pure" - did not come into existence until 1933, when it was coined by Rahmatullah Chowdhry, a Cambridge student.
Three years earlier, the poet Alama Iqbal had advocated the establishment of a separate Muslim state at a Muslim League conference. But it was not until 1940 that his two-nation theory was adopted by the League.
The 1930s saw a growing mistrust between the Muslim League and the All India Congress.
The League's leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah - until 1940 reluctant to advocate the creation of two nations - is said to have feared that the country's Muslim minority would be subjugated by the Hindu majority.
Deadline
During World War II Britain's mobilisation of the Indian economy and military forces was opposed by Congress.
Fearing the movement's ability to sabotage the war effort, Britain is said to have exploited the Hindu-Muslim rivalry in an effort to curtail the Congress.
Millions fled as the new borders were demarcated
After the war, Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee came to power in Britain.
In 1946, he sent a Cabinet Mission to India that put forward a plan for Hindus and Muslims to work together.
This was initially accepted by both sides, but within week the plan had collapsed. Some say it was Nehru who changed his mind, others say it was Jinnah.
Jinnah called for Direct Action on 16 August 1946 to protest against Congress and the British.
In Calcutta this led to three days of Hindu-Muslim violence - the bloodiest in nearly a century - and thousands of deaths.
A year later, Lord Mountbatten was sent to India to replace Lord Wavell as viceroy, with plans to transfer power no later than June 1948.
Demarcation
The new viceroy is said to have found the situation too dangerous to wait even that brief period, and to have become convinced that partition was unavoidable.
Gandhi was against partition
On 3 June 1947, he presented his plan to Nehru and Jinnah. They both accepted it.
A month later, the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, ordering the demarcation of the dominions of India and Pakistan by midnight 14-15 August.
Two boundary commissions worked against the clock to partition the states of Bengal and Punjab in such a way as to leave a majority of Muslims to the west of the new Punjab border (what is currently Pakistan) and to the east of the new Bengal border (East Pakistan, which in 1971 would become Bangladesh).
Under the partition plan, Kashmir was free to accede to India or Pakistan.
Sharp reminder
Three days before partition, the Hindu ruler of Muslim-majority Kashmir, Maharajah Hari Singh, said that he wanted to remain independent.
However, in a series of events which are still the subject of controversy to this day, a Pathan tribal force entered Kashmir with Pakistani backing. The Maharajah decided to acede to India, allowing Indian troops to be airlifted to the state.
Pakistani and Indian forces ended up at the point now known as the Line of Control, splitting the territory unevenly.
Nearly 55 years and two wars later, the status of Kashmir remains unresolved - one of the many reminders of a partition that has left thousands of families separated by the line which divides India and Pakistan.
Partition timeline
1930: Alama Iqbal advocates the two-nation theory
1933: The name Pakistan is coined
1940: Jinnah calls for a separate Muslim state
May/June 1946: Both parties accept Cabinet Mission Plan
July: Plan collapses
Aug: Hindu-Muslim violence kills thousands
June 1947: Mountbatten plan for partition approved
July: India Independence Act passed in Britain
Aug: Separate states of Pakistan and India are born
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 02-23-2004
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I think the date was decided on Mountbattens idea.....the day japan surrendered ?
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Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 02-29-2004
IIRC he chose August 15, because the Japanese surrendered to the Allies on this date in 1945.....Aug 15 is V.J day..isn't it?
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-08-2004
Mapping the Heavens, Curing Dandruff
LOST DISCOVERIES
The Ancient Roots of Modern Science -- From the Babylonians to the Maya.
By Dick Teresi.
453 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $27.
In the early 1990's Dick Teresi went to Portland, Ore., where the county school board had started a politically correct and ill-starred program dedicated to ''multicultural science.'' Among the curriculum tools it devised, he notes in ''Lost Discoveries,'' was a series of essays explaining how the ancient Egyptians used sophisticated gliders for travel and recreation, how the Incas floated above the Nasca plain in hot-air balloons and how the Egyptians had also mastered advanced skills in precognition and psychokinesis. Teresi was promptly dispatched by a magazine to debunk these claims, which he did with relish. As he writes in his book, ''One can only wonder why this ancient civilization, with airplanes and telekinesis at its disposal, bothered with swords and spears to fight its battles.''
It was wise of Teresi, a science writer and former editor of Omni magazine, to establish his bona fides as a skeptic at the outset. He calls ''Lost Discoveries'' a book of ''unkempt historical details,'' but in surveying the non-Western roots of science he has created a very neat chronicle -- and a timely reminder -- of how much of the foundation of modern scientific thought and technological development was built by the mostly overlooked contributions of Arabs, Indians, Chinese, Polynesians and Mesoamericans. How timely? A dozen pages into the text, I found myself wondering how many publishers would have been courageous enough, after Sept. 11, 2001, to take on a book that documents, among other things, the superiority of Arab intellect and Muslim science in ancient and medieval times.
The ''standard model'' of the history of science locates its birth around 600 B.C. in ancient Greece, where the dramatis personae typically include Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Aristotle and other sages, who laid the modern foundation for math and the sciences. It was this foundation, buried during the Middle Ages, that was rediscovered during the Renaissance. What were the peoples of India, Egypt, Mesopotamia, sub-Saharan Africa, China and the Americas doing all this time? ''They discovered fire, then called it quits,'' Teresi observes sarcastically. He admits starting this exercise ''with the purpose of showing that the pursuit of evidence of nonwhite science is a fruitless endeavor. . . . Six years later, I was still finding examples of ancient and medieval non-Western science that equaled and often surpassed ancient Greek learning.''
This catalog of achievement, while not exactly news, is breathtaking in the sheer sweep of human ingenuity. The Babylonians developed the Pythagorean theorem at least 1,500 years before Pythagoras was born. Indian mathematicians performed multiplication and algebra, and even ventured toward calculus, a millennium before Europeans. An Arab astronomer, Ibn al-Shatir, spelled out the theory of planetary motion 150 years before Copernicus. The ''Mercator projection'' was used by Chinese cartographers centuries before the birth of Mercator. In the third century B.C., physicists in China pretty neatly summarized Newton's first law of motion.
Centuries before Gutenberg, the Chinese used movable type; by A.D. 868 block printing was so widespread that government authorities issued edicts to curtail the proliferation of printed astrological calendars. In order to play their famous ball games, the Aztecs invented vulcanized rubber centuries before Goodyear, and the Chinese were manufacturing ''Bessemer steel'' nearly 2,000 years before Sir Henry Bessemer ''invented'' the process. Francis Bacon once commented on the ''obscure and inglorious origins'' of the magnetic compass, gunpowder, and paper and printmaking, three inventions that he claimed transformed civilization. ''They all came from China,'' Teresi writes, and were invented centuries before the West became aware of them.
''Lost Discoveries'' is derivative and popular, in the best sense of both words. Anyone who has read Teresi's previous work -- including, most recently, ''The God Particle,'' which he wrote with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman -- knows that he is a knowledgeable and witty writer, with enough irreverence to ventilate what could easily become a self-righteous enterprise. He has sifted through an enormous scholarly literature, and the book owes a great deal to experts like Joseph Needham, George Gheverghese Joseph, Anthony Aveni, Alfred Crosby and other academics who have been the intellectual archaeologists, uncovering this rich story of discovery. Some of the material has made an appearance in other popular treatments, like Jared Diamond's ''Guns, Germs, and Steel.'' But the breadth of Teresi's survey -- and the judiciousness and wit with which he lays out his evidence -- not only amounts to a marvelous job of repackaging but also, by sheer accretion of detail, rises as its own monument of rediscovery.
Teresi examines the roots of mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, chemistry and technology (one of my quibbles with this syllabus is that it fails to tackle biology or medicine head on, although some of the life sciences and pharmacology are glancingly discussed). The sections on mathematics, astronomy and geology are particularly strong. ''If we are to say that non-European cultures had science long before the Europeans exported it to them,'' Teresi says, ''we must prove they had math.'' His evidence is overwhelming. The Egyptians first mastered fractions, and Babylonian mathematics essentially created a B.C. version of the calculator, with its tables of reciprocals, squares, cubes, square roots and cube roots. A science historian quoted here says the Babylonian creation of a ''place-value notation system'' -- a way of writing numbers, for example, with a place for ones, tens, hundreds, and so on -- was similar in impact to invention of the alphabet. The Maya and the Indians of Asia independently created the number zero in the early centuries after the death of Christ. In discovering algebra, the ancients invented a language of science that wouldn't be appreciated for several millenniums. ''A modern scientist, measuring lengths in angstrom units and time in femtoseconds, might find himself more comfortable in third-millennium B.C. Egypt than in third-century B.C. Greece or even in 17th-century A.D. Italy,'' Teresi writes.
Similar advances were recorded in astronomy. Teresi notes that ''the ancient Indians, long before Copernicus, knew that the earth revolved around the sun and, a thousand years before Kepler, knew that the orbits of the planets were elliptical; the Arabs invented the observatory and named most of our popular stars; the Chinese mapped the sky; and the Amerindians noted important events with daggers of light or optical snakes that thrill us to this day.'' An annotated bone fragment dating back 3,500 years demonstrates that the Chinese had by then measured the length of the year to be 365 1/4 days; NASA scientists recently used these ''oracle bones'' to help determine how much the earth's rotation is slowing down. Humankind's ancient skills in hydrology, metallurgy, mining and steel making, to mention a few areas of practical endeavor, inspire awe and, in the author, a little irony too, about the sometimes lethal nature of multicultural technology transfer: ''The Crusaders encountered the sharp end of Saracen weapons, which were made of steel mined in Africa, forged in southwestern India and fashioned in Persia and the Middle East.''
The sections on cosmology and, surprisingly, physics, don't rise to quite the same level. Here Teresi has a couple of axes to grind -- not bad axes, but distracting ones nonetheless. Cosmology occupies itself with the origin and history of the universe; our primal hunger for creation stories, whether told by shamans or astrophysicists, makes this a universal area of human fascination. But in dwelling upon shortcomings in what he calls the ''putative'' Big Bang theory, Teresi is distracted by a modern controversy that skews his discussion of ancient cosmologies. Similarly, in his treatment of physics, he harps on the modern ''disconnect'' between theory and experiment. In both instances it's not the substance of the arguments but rather the way they afflict the tone and deflect the trajectory of the narrative that is the problem.
A different, and more interesting, problem is advertised by the tentative vocabulary of the following line, a syntax of uncertainty that is echoed throughout the book: ''Many ancient cultures had inklings of quantum theory.'' Teresi's narrative is thick with inklings, hints, suggestions and similarly ''vague parallels'' between ancient ideas and accepted modern knowledge. Sometimes these parallels feel like a stretch -- when, for example, Teresi likens the Buddhist concept of maya, or nonbeing, to the Higgs boson, an elusive elementary particle yet to be discovered by modern physicists. To his credit, Teresi is usually the first to acknowledge the stretch marks in his arguments, and is quick to cite expert opinion aligned in opposition.
As in horseshoes, hints don't count in science; you have to ''get it'' entirely to use the knowledge either practically or intellectually. In that sense, one of the most stimulating and provocative passages in the entire book comes when the mathematicians Robert Kaplan and George Gheverghese Joseph go toe to toe in a long footnote, arguing whether the ancient Egyptians truly ''understood'' irrational numbers. Their disagreement gets at the philosophical dilemma that ''Lost Discoveries'' attempts to reconcile. At what point does knowledge become true understanding -- true in the sense that it is reproducible, predictive and can be adapted to useful human endeavors? In other words, when does it qualify as science? As the book makes clear, the origins of science mingle with a cultural devotion to superstition, religion, alchemy and astrology. Hence Vedic Indians mastered the use of square roots to build sacrificial altars in proper proportions.
You needn't buy every inkling or hint to enjoy browsing Teresi's little cabinet of curiosities. There is the Chinese geologist Chang Heng, who in A.D. 132 invented an early seismograph that not only detected earthquakes but indicated the direction in which the primary shock wave originated. We meet the mathematician al-Khwarizmi, one of the early directors of Baghdad's ''House of Wisdom'' in the ninth century, whose name survives in the term we use for any special method of solving a problem (algorithm). The caliph al-Mamun built an observatory in A.D. 829 with a quadrant 20 feet in radius, dwarfing the celebrated instrument of Tycho Brahe seven centuries later. For those of a more pragmatic bent, the ancient Harappan culture, which flourished from about 3000 to 1500 B.C. in what is now Pakistan and western India, is credited with developing wood-covered sit-down lavatories, built into the outer walls of houses and connected to a sophisticated network of municipal drainage. We even learn that the ancient Egyptians concocted potions using hippopotamus fat to control dandruff.
The larger question underlying ''Lost Discoveries'' is why this astonishing record of human achievement has been ignored or dismissed for so long. Part of our reluctance to acknowledge it may stem, understandably, from cultural pride, although this has sometimes expressed itself in ungenerous ways. Teresi notes that Morris Kline, a prominent American historian of mathematics, once dismissed the mathematical achievements of the Egyptians and Babylonians as ''the scrawling of children just learning how to write,'' and the British historian of science G. R. Kaye is quoted here exhorting his colleagues to search for and celebrate ''traces of Greek influence'' in the history of knowledge. ''Our pop science historians -- Bronowski, Daniel Boorstin, Carl Sagan, et al. -- have certainly been faithful to that directive,'' Teresi writes. But that is hardly the only reason. ''Of the thousands of texts in which the Maya recorded their findings,'' he also notes, ''only four survived the Spanish book burnings.'' A sad subtext of the entire book is just how precious, and perishable, even fundamental knowledge can be.
At the same time, ''Lost Discoveries'' makes for thrilling reading. By the time we encounter the Arab scholar al-Biruni, active around A.D. 1000, who brilliantly analyzes the geology of India as a vast alluvial plain while contemporaries in Europe still interpret the earth through the prism of the biblical flood, we emerge with a tremendous respect for cultures that have had the courage to confront their own belief systems by the logical, systematic and rigorous collection of factual evidence, which is why science has always been considered such a threatening enterprise by defenders of hierarchies and orthodoxies. ''Lost Discoveries'' is probably a little too detailed and overwhelming for high school students, but it might make terrific companion reading in undergraduate college courses on the Western canon or, perhaps even better, the core text for a course in intellectual history called Humility 101. <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='rolleyes.gif' /><!--endemo--> Stephen S. Hall is working on a book about the history of regenerative medicine and the prospects for ''practical immortality.''
Published: 12 - 01 - 2002 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 13
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-08-2004
hello everyone,
i was wondering if anyone could provide me with information on any indian princesses in history who have committed suicide, possibly because they were forced into marriage. The reason for this question is of a personal nature, so excuse me for not elaborating further. <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Sunder - 06-08-2004
<!--QuoteBegin-sirona86+Jun 8 2004, 10:54 PM-->QUOTE(sirona86 @ Jun 8 2004, 10:54 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin--> hello everyone,
i was wondering if anyone could provide me with information on any indian princesses in history who have committed suicide, possibly because they were forced into marriage. The reason for this question is of a personal nature, so excuse me for not elaborating further. <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo--> <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->Not sure, but there are quite a few who had committed suicide fearing rape from islamic barbarians like Rani Padmini who chose a glorious death than face Aladin Khalji.
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-08-2004
sirona86 better change your username.
Read about Padmini
-----------
In January, 1303, Ala-ud-Din Khilji again marched south and stormed the citadel with renewed vengeance, the siege lasting another six months. The fort's food supplies finally ran out. Finally realising further resistance would be futile, Padmini led all of the fort's women and children-a thousand or so-to Kumbha's Palace. There, as the legend goes, they entered an underground chamber, the door was sealed behind them, and a large bonfire was lit. Bravely, they committed the ultimate sacrifice of jauhar, the grisly ritual of suicide by fire, rather than suffer disgrace at the hands of the enemy.
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-09-2004
thank you for the info sudhir and sunder. <!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->sirona86 better change your username.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
why so?
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-09-2004
<!--QuoteBegin-sirona86+Jun 8 2004, 10:31 PM-->QUOTE(sirona86 @ Jun 8 2004, 10:31 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin--> thank you for the info sudhir and sunder. <!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->sirona86 better change your username.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
why so? <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Forum guidelines (link on top of every page) <b>forbid </b>numerics in user handle. Email admin at india-forum dot com a userhandle of your choice
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Hauma Hamiddha - 06-09-2004
I would consider Mirabai the rajput princess as being a classic example of suicide due to forced marriage.
The original postor of this querry is asked to change the user ID right away.
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-09-2004
change of nickname in the works.
i dont find anything about Mirabai committing suicide, rather i find stuff about her devotion to Krishna and that she is said to have "disappeared into the statue of Krishna leaving her sari wrapped around it"
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-09-2004
There is the tale of Hindu-Muslim love story that Indi secularvadi janta relish between Pathan Bahadur and Rupmati, and the latter killed herself when some Mughal wanted her (at least this is the romantic story I was told).
I was told another parallel story involving only Hindu from Kalhana when I was a kid, but I forget the details of the characters (could look up later). There was another similar Gujarati one.
About Meera it depends on whether you are a Vaishnava bhakta or a rational observer. The merging in to Krishna could be an euphemism for suicide to the latter. Many times moksh and death are interchangeably used <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-09-2004
thanks rajita, it would be great it you could look it up!
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Bhootnath - 06-09-2004
>>> any indian princesses in history who have committed suicide, possibly because they were forced into marriage.
Now .. that seems like Himalaya and the SEX connection , type reuest ( Check the RISA list to see what I mean..)
Though RR and HH have been honest with their efforts to answer the query.
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-21-2004
I am not sure if this should be in this thread, but folks note how the christain missonaries used our own folklore traditions to propagate and convert the local populations. We need a clutural troop under BJP to go to grass roots to inspire nationalism, patriotism and the glory of Hinduism.
( remember how the Naxals use popular folks lore and improvised road side shows to indoctrinate the country folks into armed resistance, example "gaddar troupe in AP)
****************************************************
read here
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->CHAVITTU NATAKAM
Stamp of devotion
Kerala: The musical drama was designed to propagate Christianity
By Vinu Abraham
Maneek Manackal, 68, has an important task on his daily schedule. The Chavittu Natakam maestro, whom Jawaharlal Nehru complimented in 1962 for a Republic day performance, is writing down his kalasams, the unique steps for certain scenes in the musical drama. Different exponents have different kalasams and with the death of each master, these unwritten kalasams disappear for ever. But, even as Maneek tries to preserve his kalasams, he is painfully aware that the art form itself is fading fast.
HEROES OF THE PAST: A scene from
Karalman Charitham (above)
Chavittu Natakam is a form of Christian theatre founded by Chinna Thampi Annavi, a Tamil Christian missionary, in the 17th century. Once frequently performed in the coastal areas of Ernakulam and Alappuzha districts, it has ebbed to four performances a year now. A full-scale show, which costs tens of thousands of rupees to stage, was sponsored by the Latin Catholic Church earlier. Now there are hardly any sponsors or, for that matter, viewers.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-21-2004
Spinster,
Give money to charity e.g. Eklya Vidylaya or IDRF.
Miscellaneous Topics on Indian History - Guest - 06-24-2004
I have been hearing of the Chola dynasty for some time....
Was the Sri Lankan throne offered to Raja Raja Chola[then Arul Mozhi Varman] by the Buddhist Sangam in Anuradhapura ?
A few claim that AMV was a great patron of the buddhism and that he reconstructed the buddhist monastries in Anuradhapura...while a few claim that they were destroyed by the invading Chola army and looted...Also did Raja Raja Chola[then Arul Mozhi] personally lead the armies..? <!--emo&:cool--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/specool.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='specool.gif' /><!--endemo-->
We come to know that Rajendra Chola was a great conqueror and that he had conquered and sacked quite a number of cities in those days Sri Vijaya kingdom.....this being true with what authenticity can we claim that Indians never went out to conquer ?perhaps that is correct after rajendras reign...? perhaps we were not in a position to conquer but were being conquered ?
I say why take pride in saying that for xx years we never conquered... <!--emo&:thumbdown--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='thumbsdownsmileyanim.gif' /><!--endemo-->