Indian History
There are lot of accusations against her for which the answer has been silence and she has lot of explaining to do before she becomes another Zail Singh. One thing though, please don’t accuse her of getting her history incorrect.
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About 60 elephants, all belonging to Lord Sri Krishna of Guruvayoor, live in Punnathur Kotta located about 3 KM away from the temple. The 10 acre compound is open to public and you can watch them being fed and bathed. The elephants were donated by various devotees including Jayalalitha (The joke is that the elephant asked Jayalalitha, why me, why not you?).
The compound also has a naalu kettu, a traditional rectangular home with a central courtyard, which belonged to the Punnathur Raja which as the two photos below show, remain in very poor condition.
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While it was a pleasant surprise to see a full page Jet Airways advertisement in last Sunday’s New York Times, it was baffling why they would want to spend so much money to announce to people in United States that they fly daily from Mumbai to Brussels. Hopefully Jet Airways will fly from various cities in United States to India and capture that lucrative market.
Update: Due to attention deficit disorder, I did not notice that they were flying from New York to Mumbai and Brussels (Thanks Vivek)
The discovery of the Gospel of Judas has not only given as an insight into the formation of present day Christianity, but has also exposed the non-spiritual techniques the Church Fathers have used to promote the Gospels they favoured.
Why do these conclusions continue to be drawn by biblical scholars, as if the canonical gospels are any more accurate (or “peerless”) theologies and histories than the non-canonical gospels? All these texts are theologies, and whether or not they are “peerless” depends upon where you are standing. None of our texts are histories, let alone accurate histories. And how much historical information we can actually reap out of any of them, and the procedures for doing so, are questions more problematic than not.
As for the accuracy of the Church Fathers’ descriptions. Their accuracy is not how I frame any discussion of a normative debate. The Church Fathers passed on false information, ill-informed interpretations, and fabricated stories in their struggle against those forms of Christianity that they hated. As the old saying goes, “All is fair in love and war.”
As scholars, it is our job to stop buying into the normative rhetoric, and figure out what was really going on on the ground. The Gospel of Judas helps us tremendously in this venture. We can see that it was not connected with Cain or the Cainites as some of the Church Father testimony suggests. It is written by Sethians, for whom Cain was an evil Archon! The evidence from the Gospel of Judas leads me to conclude that the Cainites were a fantasy of the Church Fathers, a result of their war to become the dominant form of Christianity.[Short Article on Gospel of Judas]
While Biblical scholars claim that the Bible is not history, the more Catholic than the Pope types like Max Muller have used the Bible to produce imaginary dates for the composition of the Vedas based on the creation of the world sometime in 4000 BC. Unfortunately those imaginary dates are still taken seriously.
Adrianus Melkert, a Dutch politician who is also an associate administrator at United Nations Development Program has threatened to retaliate against the United States if it tries to get to the bottom of what UNDP was doing in North Korea. The UN Board of Auditors found that the UNDP violated many rules by hiring staffers selected by the North Koreans, paying their salary directly to Pyongyang, and inspecting only a few projects. UNDP had no idea for what purpose the North Koreans were using the money for and Melkert did not like the American enquiries into the gory details of what his organization was doing and hence the anti-American stand.
When it comes to human rights activism, the United Nations would give the Booker prize winning verbal terrorist a run for her money. The UN’s new Human Rights Council, formed last year to replace the much discredited UN Human Rights Commission, has decided to halt all investigation into Cuba and Belarus while continuing investigations of Israel. In fact Israel is the only country mentioned by name by the council.
The very notion that Israel, a vibrant democracy surrounded by fanatical religious dictatorships seeking to hurl it into the sea and the only nation ever formally censored by the HRC, is a bigger threat to human rights than the totalitarian dictatorships in Cuba and Belarus is a crude slur on the intelligence of every person whose tax dollars fund the United Nations. How can the UN possibly claim any moral legitimacy to address human rights issues if it proceeds in this manner? The saddest thing of all is that this salaciously fraudulent enterprise is actually a replacement of another UN group that was so corrupt it had to be abolished.[Annals of HRC Fraud at the UN]
Isn’t it time the UN is moved from New York to Pyongyang or Havana?
It was the failure of Jawaharlal Nehru and V K Krishna Menon and those in India’s ministry of external affairs who were their advisers to understand the Chinese mindset, which led to the national humiliation in the Sino-Indian war of 1962.
Repeated warnings from the Intelligence Bureau about the large-scale Chinese intrusions into the Aksai Chin area of Ladakh and their construction of a road there were not only ignored, but these disturbing developments were kept away from the knowledge of the public and Parliament. They fondly believed that they would be able to make the Chinese see reason and withdraw from this region by observing a policy of silence and not articulating our concerns in public. Their fond hopes were belied.
It was not the Indian intelligence and security forces which were responsible for the 1962 debacle. It was the political leadership, which was living in an illusory world of its own creation [Tawang: Some Indian plain-speaking at last!]
Not much has changed from the days of Nehru in terms of preparedness, but now it is hard to hide such information from the public and Parliament and that in turn forces the Ministers to make hard hitting public statements.
Talking to journalists in Shillong on June 16, Mukherjee said ‘he had made it clear to his new Chinese counterpart that any elected Government of India is not permitted by the provisions of the Constitution to part with any part of our land that sends representatives to the Indian Parliament.’
The minister added: ‘The days of Hitler are over. After the Second World War, no country captures land of another country in the present global context. That is why there is a civilised mechanism of discussions and dialogue to sort out border disputes. We sit around the table and discuss disputes to resolve them.’
Antony told journalists in New Delhi on June 18, ‘China has been building infrastructure (near the Line of Actual Control). We are also building infrastructure. Nobody can prevent both sides. There is nothing wrong in that. They have the right to build infrastructure on their territory. We have the right to do that on ours. We are also trying to hasten the development of our infrastructure. They have their perception (about Arunachal Pradesh). On our part, we are very categorical that Arunachal Pradesh is part of India.’ [Tawang: Some Indian plain-speaking at last!]
I wish they tried some of our suggestions as well.
When members of the Royal Navy were captured by the Iranians in March, the Iranians made sure that the British were decently humiliated. The sailors had to apologize for straying into Iranian waters and later thank president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for magnanimously releasing them. The entire nation could do nothing, but watch this public humiliation in silence. Now displaying something called spine, the British have knighted Salman Rushdie providing employment opportunities for suicide bombers. The Iranians are upset and made the usual remarks.
There is a lesson from this for us. Now that China is making noise about Arunachal Pradesh (in the spirit of Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bade Bhai) we can follow the British model and cause some discomfort to the Chinese. One great way would be to ask the Prime Minister of India to give the keynote on the first ‘Conference for an Independent Tibet‘ organized by Friends of Tibet from June 23-24, 2007 in Delhi. Later in the day we could organize a discussion on the teachings of Falun Gong and compare their spiritual practices with Indian spiritual techniques.
Yes, it is juvenile, but sometimes it is the best way to get the message across.
Though called Pandava Rathas, these monolithic temples cut from a huge rock by the innovative Narasimhavarman I (AD 630 – 668) have nothing to do with the Mahabharata. Besides the six rathas (Pandavas + Draupadi), there are sculptures of an elephant and lion.
Pratibha Patil, the virtual unknown, whom Sonia Gandhi picked up as the candidate for the President of India just to shut up Prakash Karat has established an albatross-neck relationship with the Congress Party. Her blame on the origins of the purdah system on Mughal invaders has created a new job position in the party for a Shane Warne level spin master. This statement by a candidate of a party which has been trying to white wash Indian history for the past half a century has upset all the secular fundamentalists.
The ultimate secular cuss word was used – pro-RSS. Her views were found to be similar to those of Hindu fanatics. Clueless newspapers like Deepika (Malayalam) said that Ms. Patil should not have made irresponsible statements (statements which affect vote bank) and provided the convincing argument that even the Congress spokesman disagreed with her, while in fact the Congress spokesman Param Navdeep said that it was an established fact that women were a target of aggression during the Mughal rule.
Eminent historians were immediately called into action by beaming the bat signal into the night sky.
Nandita Prasad Sahai, who teaches a course on the gender history of medieval India in JNU, says that there is
no consensus amongst historians about the precise period when purdah originated in Indian society.“Historian Kegan Paul traces the practice of the custom back to the Vedic period. And anthropologist Patricia Jeffrey says that seclusion and veiling of women was not unknown before the Muslim invasion. It appears that a social ideal recommending women to remain in seclusion to mark their complete loyalty towards their husband already existed,” she says.
“Most historians consider the Muslim invasion as a watershed when purdah is said to have become more widespread as a defensive reaction in troubled times among the Rajput royalty trying to protect their women. In fact, the case is unproven in the absence of statistical material that could establish a change in the extent of the practice of purdah . It seems plausible, however, that the practice became more widespread amongst the Rajput royalty in trying to imitate the custom of the new ruling classes,” says Sahai. [Experts lift veil off purdah origin]
Trying to push it back to the Vedic period is a nice JNU trick, but then facts disagree.
Some months ago, I recall a North Indian lady talking about the cultural differences she experienced when in South India. Visiting relatives posted in Kerala, she made a pilgrimage to the famed Shri Krishna shrine in Guruvayur. Upon entering the temple she devoutly covered her head — only to be sternly reprimanded by a priest who told her that this was against Hindu conventions.
The temple guardians at Guruvayur were quite right. I don’t know how many readers would have stepped into the National Museum in Delhi (sadly ignored by most visitors to the capital). The wealth of treasures in the museum is so great that it has actually spilled out into the lobby. One of the first pieces of sculpture you can see — before coming even to the ticket office — is a marvellous statue of the goddess Saraswati, from the Chauhan period as I recall.
The goddess of wisdom is portrayed without any covering on her head. So are depictions from thousands of years of Indian history, from the dawn of civilisation on the banks of the Sindhu through the Mauryas, the Guptas, and other dynasties. But as time passes — and you enter the galleries showing Rajput miniatures from later periods — the veil makes its appearance, until even Adishakti Parvati has her face partly covered.[The debate over Muslim separatism in the US]
While the Mughal era started in the 16th century, the Muslim invasion started much earlier with the invasion by Mahmud of Ghazni against the Rajput kingdoms and rich Hindu temples like Somnath, Varanasi and Dwaraka in the late 9th century. In the last quarter of the 12th century, Muhammad of Ghor established the Delhi Sultanate and sometimes the word Mughal rule is used incorrectly in a broader sense to include the Turkish and Afghan rulers as well.
One more attempt was made to push the date of the purdah system to pre-Muslim era by Vasha Joshi of Institute of Rajasthan Studies who suggested that the veil was prevalent in Rajasthan during the 11th century, much before the Delhi Sultanate. This remark was based on the existence of separate quarters for women called the jenani deorhi in medieval Chittorgarh fort which in no way implies the existence of the purdah system.
The Gandhara sculptures show women with band like head gear, but even that cannot be called the veil. Face covering was completely absent in India till the 11 -12th century and they are not present in the Ajanta paintings. Slowly the head covering starts appearing with the arrival of Muslims with a 1250-1275 book in Jaisalmer showing a woman covering the back of the head using the sari.
Pratibha Patil did nothing wrong, but stated a historical truth. Her only mistake was that she picked the wrong community to blame. Instead, if she had blamed the caste system or denounced Brahmins, it would have been accepted without debate that she was the person with the perfect secular credentials to be the President of India.
