Author: Ramaprasad ChandaPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aryans
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
The Indo-Aryan Races
Author: Ramaprasad ChandaPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aryans
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
The Roots of Hinduism
Author: Asko ParpolaPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190226919
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.
The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia
Author: George ErdosyPublisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110816431
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Book Description
The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture
Author: Edwin BryantPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195169476
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 400
Book Description
This work studies how Indian scholars have rejected the idea of an external origin of the Indo-Aryans, by questioning the logic assumptions and methods upon which the theory is based.
The Aryan Race
Author: Charles MorrisPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Indo-Aryans
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
The Luwians
Author: Craig MelchertPublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047402146
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440
Book Description
The Luwians played at least as important a role as the Hittites in the history of the Ancient Near East during the second and first millennia BCE, but for various reasons they have been overshadowed by and even confused with their more famous relatives and neighbours. Redressing this imbalance, the present volume by an international team of scholars offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art appraisal of the Luwians, the first of its kind in English. A brief introduction sets the context and confronts the problem of defining 'the Luwians'. Following chapters describe their prehistory, history, writing and language, religion, and material culture.
Aryans and British India
Author: Thomas R. TrautmannPublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917928
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.
Orientalism and Literature
Author: Geoffrey P. NashPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108585566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 674
Book Description
Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.
Hitler And India
Author: Vaibhav PurandarePublisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9356293163
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 149
Book Description
Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf, is a perennial bestseller in India, with even street-side bookstalls prominently displaying stacks of it. The name 'Hitler' -- anathema almost everywhere else in the world -- is tossed about casually in the Indian subcontinent, not infrequently invoked in praise. Many Indians still harbour the notion that the Fuhrer was a friend of the Indian people and had extended wholehearted support to their freedom struggle. To journalist Vaibhav Purandare, this clearly suggested that Indians continued to be largely unaware of the German dictator's views on India, in spite of the fact that they are unambiguously expressed in his own writings. This lacuna spurred him on to delve into the archives -- in Germany, India and elsewhere. The result of Purandare's research is this comprehensive and painstaking portrait and analysis of Hitler's outlook on India and its people, his opinion of their struggle against the British Raj, and his take on Indian history, culture and civilisation. Also within these pages are surprising details of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's entanglement with the Reich, the experience of other Indians living in Nazi Germany, the mission that Hitler sent to the Himalayas in search of 'pure-blood Aryans', and a number of other little-known historical nuggets. Accessible and rich in detail, Hitler and India is the very first examination of what India meant to a figure who, perplexingly, remains quite alive in the country.
The South African Gandhi
Author: Ashwin DesaiPublisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804797226
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442
Book Description
A biography detailing Gandhi’s twenty-year stay in South Africa and his attitudes and behavior in the nation’s political context. In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. “India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma,” goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi’s first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually supported the British Empire. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed unveil a man who, throughout his stay on African soil, stayed true to Empire while showing a disdain for Africans. For Gandhi, whites and Indians were bonded by an Aryan bloodline that had no place for the African. Gandhi’s racism was matched by his class prejudice towards the Indian indentured. He persistently claimed that they were ignorant and needed his leadership, and he wrote their resistances and compromises in surviving a brutal labor regime out of history. The South African Gandhi writes the indentured and working class back into history. The authors show that Gandhi never missed an opportunity to show his loyalty to Empire, with a particular penchant for war as a means to do so. He served as an Empire stretcher-bearer in the Boer War while the British occupied South Africa, he demanded guns in the aftermath of the Bhambatha Rebellion, and he toured the villages of India during the First World War as recruiter for the Imperial army. This meticulously researched book punctures the dominant narrative of Gandhi and uncovers an ambiguous figure whose time on African soil was marked by a desire to seek the integration of Indians, minus many basic rights, into the white body politic while simultaneously excluding Africans from his moral compass and political ideals. Praise for The South African Gandhi “In this impressively researched study, two South African scholars of Indian background bravely challenge political myth-making on both sides of the Indian Ocean that has sought to canonize Gandhi as a founding father of the struggle for equality there. They show that the Mahatma-to-be carefully refrained from calling on his followers to throw in their lot with the black majority. The mass struggle he finally led remained an Indian struggle.” —Joseph Lelyveld, author of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India “This is a wonderful demonstration of meticulously researched, evocative, clear-eyed and fearless history writing. It uncovers a story, some might even call it a scandal, that has remained hidden in plain sight for far too long. The South African Gandhi is a big book. It is a serious challenge to the way we have been taught to think about Gandhi.” —Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things