International Conference On Indian History

[Hauma Hamiddha]

Thanks for posting the sena paper. It is a useful piece and I would like to study it more carefully. There is little doubt that the sena rAjan had their origin in the karnATa country. I was however of the opinion that vijayasena did come as a part of vikrama chAlukya-choLa's move to conquer parts of North India. He seems to have fallen apart from his compatriot nAnyadeva after the latter made himself the lord of tirAbhukti. The inscription of vijayasena suggest that he was a recent general from the karNATa, and the only karNATa expedition was that of vikrama to conquer the north. I had written something on this sometime back:
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Sometimes an exploration of the evolution of the mantra-shAstra leads to a historical digression. So it was when we were trying to trace the history of the navadurgA class of texts in north-eastern India. We were urged to record a note in regard to the activities of the chAlukya revival that spread out of Kalyani. After the fall of the original chAlukya empire, which had carved a place for itself in history with the activities of pulakeshin-II, it was revived again under taila-II. From then on, till the beginning of their decline due to the crushing defeats at the hands of the kAkatIya chiefs of the Telugu country, the chAlukya-s where one of the greatest powers of India. Sadly, due to geography and possibly confused thinking of Hindu rulers the might of the chAlukya-s was rarely directed against Moslem threat that was beginning to make its presence felt. Rather, the chAlukya-s waged spectacular wars against other powerful Hindu rulers and advanced their might. Right from their revival the chAlukya-s started expanding in both north and south. taila-II beginning around 975 CE invade the seized territories from the choLa uttama in the Tamil country, in the West took the Konkans from the shilahara-s and in the north invaded Gujarat, Malwa and Chedi seizing territories from them, and killed the paramAra king mu~nja. His successor satyAshraya defeated the great rAjarAja of the Tamil country in the battles of Kurnool and Guntur. His son jayasiMha-II defeated the combined attack of two of the greatest Indian kings, rAja bhojadeva paramAra and rAjendra choLa, from North and South. His elder sister akkadevI was one of the few female warriors who actually led the chAlukya armies in battle on the southern front. Then came the great chAlukya-choLa struggle in which the choLa brothers rAjAdhirAja and rAjendradeva ground the chAlukya-s to dust (though the former was killed on the field). rAjendradeva’s son vIrarAjendra also smashed the chAlukya-s repeatedly and almost destroyed their kingdom when he ironically gave them a second life. He married his daughter to vikramAditya-VI, one of the young sons of his chAlukya enemy someshvara-deva-I. vikramAditya-VI with his father-in-law’s help took over the chAlukya throne after defeating his elder brother who occupied the throne (1076-1126 CE). There he ruled for 50 years studded with numerous campaigns in an attempt to unify the whole of India under the karnATa empire. He sent his armies to invade Gujarat, Rajasthan, Sindh, the Moslem occupied territories of the Punjab, Vidarbha, Bihar, Bengal and Nepal. He also sent a navy to invade Shrilanka. Several of inscriptions describe him as conquering these regions, and ever since till the end of these chAlukya-s we notice the kings mentioning such a list. However, modern historians have doubted these as bombastic claims.

Nevertheless, I realized that the solitary but long reign of chAlukya vikramAditya-VI was indeed the last attempt at the unification of the whole of greater India by a Hindu ruler before the Islamic interlude (his son was someshvara-deva-III of mAnasollAsa fame). There are several points in support of this contention:
1) bilhaNa, the Kashmirian poet joined the court of vikrama, and describes him as the foremost Hindu ruler of the era. His coming from Kashmir to the South Indian court at this time was largely due to the opportunities being available rather than invasions of the Mohammedans as in later times. He composed the biographical vikramA~nka-charita on vikrama.
2) We see an interlude in the eloquence of the historians of the Islamic jihad and a surprising loss of the Islamic foothold in certain regions of the Southwestern Punjab. We speculate this and the delay in any further Islamic incursions into India corresponds to the chAlukyan offensive on the turuShka-s recorded in their inscriptions.
3) The sena dynasty in Bengal and the karnATa dynasty in Tirabhukti and Nepal were founded by kShatriya commanders from Karnataka.
4) There is a coeval rise of navadurga worship in the karnATa and Nepal regions in this period and a sudden influence of chAlukyan Hindu iconography in Mithila, Nepal and Bengal.
5) The widespread popularity of mitAkShara as a system of Hindu law – it was composed by vij~nAneshvara in vikrama’s court.

In the early 1090s chAlukya vikramAditya-VI appears to have dispatched a large army under his young general nAnyadeva to invade the North East. Upon reaching Bihar the brilliant karnATa general conquered Tirabhukti and made it is his administrative and military outpost. From there he launched a remarkable campaign in Nepal, first taking Patan, then Katmandu and Bhatgaon and unified the whole of Nepal under his control in 1094 CE. With the conquest of Nepal, nAnyadeva expunged once and for all any kind political control that Tibet attempted to exercise over Nepal and brought it firmly within the Hindu sphere. nAnyadeva was a scholar on Hindu theatrics and composed a commentary on the nATyashAstra known as the bharata-bhAShya. It contains one of the only surviving records of some of the older rAga-s before divergence of Northern and Southern classical styles in Indian music and musical compositions known as pANikA. nAnyadeva’s successors who eventually went on to rule a separate kingdom in Tirabhukti where also maternal ancestors of the malla kings who eventually came to be the main rulers of Nepal in the medieval period.

Another karnATa army under a general of the sena family invaded Bengal from the north and planted themselves firmly in modern W.Bengal. One of their young warriors, vijayasena, then conquered Bengal to found the sena dynasty there. Thus, the generals of vikarmAditya-VI were founders of future dynasties of northern India. The possible role of the unification under vikramAditya-VI in transmitting the paippalAda shAkha of AV to these regions needs to be considered. This is especially so in light of the comment in the prapa~ncha-hR^idaya that the paippalAda shAkha was found in southern India.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-Hauma Hamiddha+Jan 21 2009, 03:45 AM-->QUOTE(Hauma Hamiddha @ Jan 21 2009, 03:45 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->1) bilhaNa, the Kashmirian poet joined the court of vikrama, and describes him as the foremost Hindu ruler of the era. His coming from Kashmir to the South Indian court at this time was largely due to the opportunities being available rather than invasions of the Mohammedans as in later times. He composed the biographical vikramA~nka-charita on vikrama.


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In my study and research I came across several instances where even authorities like KV Kamath has expressed their doubts on the identity of Bilhana and Kalhana who is extensively associated with " Rajatarangini ".This also gives vivid description of the Chalukya conquest and is contemporary to both the above two names (assuming that they are two different individuals).

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Bilhana, in his description of Pravarapura {Srinagar}, while in Deccan, mentions Sharda tirath shrine {Not temple} and ascribes excellence of learning of the people to Sharda {Bilhana ; Born 1041 AD at Khonmukh {Khonmoh}; fellow-poet of Kalhan. Bilhana left Kashmir in 1066 AD during the reign of King Kalsa {1063 to 1089 AD} to become Chief Pandit of Karnata {Present Day Mysore}. Unheard of after 1088 AD, wrote VikramankaDevaCaritam, a historical compendum of poems narrating the expedition of King Vikramaditya VI of Kalyan {1076 A.D. to 1127 AD}{Verse 937 Book VII Rajtarangini}. In 1877 AD an old palm-leaf edition of VikramankaDevaCaritam was found in Jaisalmer {Rajasthan}.

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My question

1) has it been clarified that these are two different people and not the same entities ?. Is there any more links on the extent of the achievements of the Chalukyas of Vatapi - Aihole/ Pattadakal Untill the reign of Kirtivarman after which all references of the Chalukya dynasty is in mist after the conflcit with Danti Durga of the Rashtrakutas in the 8th century untill they resurfaced as the chalukyas of kalyani.

2)Is there any numismatic information on their coins .I have some collection of the coins of the Chalukyas and I have checked with the RBI collection on their site but they are only mentioning the information of gold coins only.

3)Is there any mention of Kolar (near bangalore) gold mines that has been found in the mauryans and Ashoka inscriptions . Are there any further references of the KGM in any of your source.

4)According to the Aihole-Meguti Inscription mentions that there was great conflcit between the Harshavadhana of Kanuj - thaneshwar and Pu-lo-ki-sha (Pulakeshi II) which has been dated in AD 634 .

Both sides claim tremendous victory and Yuan Chwang the Chinese historian makes a vague references tot his battle .Bana his court poet also doesnt give any details in his works nor does Harsha himself in his works " Priyadarshika ", "Ratnavalli" and "Nagananda". Do you ahve any references that throws a more contemporary information that is accurate.?

It has very high significance as after this battle there is no mention of any other southern conquest by Harsha.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Anjani, can you kindly upload the paper by Dr. Gunatilake?<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

I don't have, but will try to get it.

Meanwhile, Organiser's latest issue has covered the conference.

http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.p...pid=274&page=36

[Hauma Hamiddha]

bilhaNa and kalhaNa were definitely different individuals. The only common factor was that they were both kashimirian brAhmaNa-s. One lived all his life in Kashmir the other lived the last part of his adult productive life in karNATa -- bilhaNa. In his biography given at the end of the chalukya kavya he mentions coming from Kashmir and settling in karNATa. In the 18 chapter of the vikramA~Nkadeva you will find a description of kAshmir by bilhaNa and his origin. There is not much doubt this work is of single Kashmirian author different from kalhaNA and living in the south.

Coins of these chAlukya-s of bronze-like alloy have been found in Tamil Nad close to a site where they found an epic battle with the Chola emperor (The last battle in the charita).

Some links for bilHaNa's works
http://www.textetc.com/workshop/wt-bilhana-1.html
Search DLI for a free online copy of vikramA~Nka charita

[Bodhi]

Even in rAjatara~NgiNI itself, kalhaNa mentions bilhaNa in the seventh tara~Nga describing his migration from kashmIra to karNATa and taking up the post of vidyApati in the court of king paramANDi:

kashmIrebhyo viniryAntaM rAjye kalasha bhUpate
vidyApatiM yaM karNATashvakre parmANDibhUpatiH
...
tyAginaM harshadevaM sa shrutvA sukavibAndhavaM
<b>bilhaNo</b> va~nchanAM mene vibhUtiM tAvatImapi 937

[Guest]

scribd version of B B Lal's presentation

Anyone, any updates on YouTube links?

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-Viren+Jan 24 2009, 05:17 AM-->QUOTE(Viren @ Jan 24 2009, 05:17 AM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->scribd version of B B Lal's presentation

Anyone, any updates on YouTube links?
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Viren, I need help on uploading the videos. I have a program called Studio by Pinnacle which will permit me to splice and dice the videos. But it is a time consuming affair. In the meanatime i am posting several papers in scribd .
http://lh3.ggpht.com/_M0uFGP8EATQ/SZktLRBI...0S.%20Blunt.jpg

In the meantime i have discovered something about Wilfred Skawen Blunt He made the following comments about England . I might note that when he was brought to my attention by Acharya i had a particular aversion to him for suggesting the formation of a Sunni Islamic state in the subcontinent, without so much as a perfunctory bow to the strong sentiments of the majority of the population. But it turns out that my suspicions that he was a complex character and a far more multi dimensional man, then such an egregious viewpoint would indicate.Still any friend of such an evil man as Lord Lytton cannot be regarded as a decent human being .



This quote is from the pen of William Durant in The case for india" in which he makes an impassioned plea to the rest of the world for Britain to grant self rule to India
"In his book, “Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt” (p. 47), Wilfrid Scawen Blunt gives some strong and important testimony regarding British rule in India as seen close at hand and under the most favorable light. He was an intimate personal friend of Lord Lytton (Lord Lytton barely qualifes as a member of the human race, because under his watch several millions of Indians died ) , who at that time was the Viceroy of India. Mr. Blunt went there to make a study of the condition of things there. He found that British rule in India, instead of being a blessing, was working India’s ruin. Of the British Imperial system in general he writes:

"India's famines have been severer and more frequent , its agricultural poverty hasdeepened. The rural population has become more hopelessly in debt abnd their despair was desperate.The system of constantly enhancing the land values (i,e, thereby raising the valuation and assessment) has not been altered. The salt tax still rubs the very poor. What was bad twenty five years ago was worse today. At any rate there is the same drain of Indian food to alien mouths. Endemic famines and endemic plagues are facts which no official statistics can explain away
“It is one of the evils of the English Imperial system that it cannot meddle anywhere among free people, even with quite innocent intentions, without in the end doing evil. Of India he writes: “I am disappointed with India, which seems just as ill governed as the rest of Asia, only with good intentions instead of bad ones or none at all. There is just the same heavy taxation, government by foreign officials, and waste of money, that one sees in Turkey"


. The result is the same, and I don’t see much difference between making the starving Hindoo pay for a cathedral at Calcutta and taxing Bulgarians for a palace on the Bosphorus….In India the ‘natives’ as they call them, are a race of slaves, frightened, unhappy, terribly thin. Though myself a good Conservative and member of the London Carlton Club, I own to being shocked at the bondage in which they are held, and my faith in British institutions and blessings of English rule has received a severe blow……if we go on developing the country at the present rate, the inhabitants will have, sooner or later, to resort to cannibalism, for there will be nothing but each other left to eat.”

[acharya]

A delicate history of current indelicacies

By Farrukh Dhondy

Feb 28 : "I made love to remember,

She made love to forget…"

From The Regrets

of Bachchoo

A few years ago, on a trip to India, Vidia Naipaul asked me to postpone going to Mumbai from Delhi for a day so that I could accompany him to a meeting of the BJP cultural forum. I made some feeble joke about that being a rampant oxymoron and was, perhaps for that very reason, persuaded to stay.

I had to ask why he wanted me there.

"I want a neutral witness. I know what some of the Indian press is like and they’ll lie!"

I went to the meeting and took my place in the audience. Vidia said he hadn’t come to say anything but indeed to ask some questions about the cultural, economic and political policies which the party should be formulating as a blueprint for the progress of the country. A great deal of hot air rose into the unevenly plastered ceiling. There was no red-in-tooth-and-claw minority-baiting, no allusion to Hindutva, caste or any mention of the Bajrang Dal and associated organisations or indeed much discussion of "history". Vidia did ask one question about the revision of text books and why it was done and some writers and revisers of such texts gave some unmemorable innocuous reply about telling the truth. One academic historian said she had been villified and characterised as a bigot and a charlatan even though she could prove that her work was accurate but politically inconvenient. Vidia didn’t ask for details and was given none.

Then a member of the audience asked Vidia what he thought of the Babri Masjid episode and of the political controversy surrounding the march to it. Very many of the audience and the person chairing the meeting asked the questioner to shut up. Vidia said he’d say something. He said he didn’t have any opinion about the politics surrounding the demolition demand but added that he thought that if the Emperor Babur had demolished a temple and built a mosque on the site, it was an act of extreme hubris.

I don’t know if the main body of the BJP’s cultural wing understood the Greek tragedians’ concept of "hubris’" but that was all that may conceivably have been considered controversial in what Naipaul said that day.

Yet he has, through the lame meanderings of Indian "literary criticism" and lazy and illiterate and posturing journalism, acquired a reputation for being virulently anti-this-or-that and worse. When he emerged from the building, newspaper and TV reporters, who had been excluded from the gathering, were waiting in the compound. They thronged, crowded and shouted, as robust as a bear-baiting audience. "Did you support the murder of Muslims in Gujarat?" was the tenor of the questioning. Nadira Naipaul, who accompanied Vidia, became very angry, shouting back at them that she was a Muslim and that he had never ever said any such thing and had variously made very open statements condemning the killing of innocent people. The reporters asked why he didn’t attend a Congress party cultural occasion and Vidia replied that he would if he was invited.

The next days’ and weeks’ reports made it very plain that this controversy and the press attention wasn’t about who invites V.S. Naipaul to a tea and a discussion. It’s about a historical delicacy, a veil of silence and sycophancy covering our knowledge of and exposure to Indian history. Most newspapers concentrated on the fact that V.S. had accepted such an invitation. An English writer, writing in an Indian journal, gave the game away. He began by saying that "he had heard" that V.S. had attended a meeting at which he endorsed the programme of the Sangh Parivar. I know from asking that Vidia wouldn’t know a Sangh Parivar from a Sans Culotte.

The writer went on to say that poor ignorant V.S. Naipaul may write crisp and stylish prose, but didn’t know much about Indian history. The quotations and expose that followed seemed to say that the Muslim invasions of India had been of great benefit to the natives, even in their time, as these invasions had added to the gaiety of the nation by bringing to it forms of long-shirted dress and kebabs. The writer was serious.

Events this week in Argentina and Europe make one wonder about the great truths of history because one Bishop Richard Wiilliamson, an English convert to Catholicism has been widely pilloried in the press for "Holocaust denial". Williamson was thrown out last week of the radical order of Catholicism to which he belonged in Argentina and has come back to Britain. This order of St. Pius X of which he is a consecrated Bishop, was itself expelled from the Catholic Church by the last Pope John Paul II for denying a papal ordinance called Nostra Aetate, which says that the Christian accusation against Jews of "deicide" is lifted and must no longer be held as Christian belief.

Williamson was excommunicated from the Roman church when the St. Pius X sect appointed him a bishop. Last month, the present German Pope lifted the excommunication despite the fact that Bishop Williamson has been exposed since as a "Holocaust denier" who has publicly stated that his historical understanding indicates that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis — this is a Jewish lie and an exaggeration and that it was nearer a figure of 300,000 who were murdered in the camps.

When dealing with numbers above two digits, I don’t suppose the quantum of cruelty, barbarism or genocide is in question, but today Austria and Germany have laws prohibiting the public denial of the Holocaust and the six million-figure. Austria jails those, such as British "historian" David Irving, who persist in airing this denial.

Williamson landed this week in his native Britain and was taken under the wing of self-confessed anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers such as Michele Renouf a former beauty queen and now a society hostess who was appointed to an "international fact-finding committee" by the 2006 Iranian Holocaust Denial conference.

It is very rare in our modern democracies to have a historical denial characterised as a crime against the State. Heresy as a punishable crime is, for Christian and secular states, a matter of the past. There do exist regimes and countries in which one can’t voice particular religious or political beliefs without being locked up or beheaded. In India it is not the Holocaust deniers who are the victims of smart opinion.

Now if you came to Austria and said that the Nazis’ purpose in the Holocaust was to bring new cuisine to the concentration camps and introduce striped pyjamas to the Jews, you would be locked up and forced to reconsider. In India, of course, genocide-deniers are safe.

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http://203.197.197.71/presentation/leftnav...delicacies.aspx