I am happy to announce a new blog, The Palm Leaf, devoted to Indian History, hosted here at varnam.org. From now, the regular blog will cover current issues whereas time travel will be done in the history blog. This new blog has been initialized with all the history posts from the original blog.
The word, Palm Leaf, was chosen as it was a popular medium of writing in India for almost two thousand years. Letters were written on a dried, smoothed, smoke treated leaves of palm trees using a stylus. These were then blackened with vegetable juice and lamp black. This site hopes to be the electronic version of those palm leaves.
Even though the tagline says, A look at India’s Past, I don’t plan to cover each and every topic related to our history. So you will not see much mythology or discussions of various religious texts. Instead there will be archaeological news, coverage of development of language, and information on people, places and monuments. There will be more posts about the Mauryan empire, Saraswathi-Sindu civilization and Kerala due to my current interest in those areas.
On the technical side, the new blog runs Movable Type 3.2 with dynamic publishing. This means that only the main page has a physical existence. Rest of the pages are created on the fly based on the request. The style of the new blog is the same as the old one, but it will be changed soon.
A new history blog
Published
The Palm Leaf
JK, the blogger at Varnam is the unofficial historian of the desiblogosphere. He has started a separate blog devoted to Indian History – The Palm Leaf.
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JK,
Great. This blog promises to be very interesting indeed. All the very best.
Looking forward to regular blasts into the pasts now.
Thanks for creating an interesting tributary!!
One suggestion. A more original and appropriate name might have been Narayam or Thaliyola (or its Sanskrit equivalent if any).
You may also like to keep a pointer for this blog on your “Varnam” blog for the uninitiated.
Quick update: Thaliyola is Talapatra in sanskrit; Tala-patta in Pali.
P@L, I wanted an Indian name but thought Thaliyola is bit difficult to speak (for a non-mallu). If it is a sanskrit based word, then most Indians can say it with ease.
I will switch to either the sanskrit or pali one, when I do the redesign of this site, in the next few weeks.
At that time, I also plan to link the two blogs, using the MultiBlog plugin, so that contents of one blog are available on the sidebar of the other.
The idea for creating this new blog was very impulsive and was done over the weekend. Did not have much time to think things through. But then that’s what readers are for 🙂
can anyone send me a photo of thaliyola?