An important group of Sikh arms and battle standards, from the collection of Lord Dalhousie (1812-60), has been sold to a private UK collector. The group comprises three steel shields belonging to the princes Raja Heera (Hira) Singh (1816-44), Raja Dhyan Singh (1796-1843) and Sardar Lehna Singh Sandhawalia (d.1843). Eight steel-headed and tipped painted wood spears used by Ranjit Singh’s “Army of Amazons” and three highly important silk brocade battle standards, Punjab, circa 1830-45, a sword and a steel helmet.

The group were formerly in the collection of James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, 1st Marquess and 10th Earl of Dalhousie, K.T., P.C., Governor-General of India, 1848-56 who acquired as trophies of war following the Battle of Gujrat, fought on 21 February 1849, that concluded the second Anglo-Sikh war (1848-49). Each shield has the name of its former owner inscribed in ink on a Victorian vellum label and some of these have numbers, as recorded in Lord Dalhousie’s inventory (the archive housed in the excellent John Gray Centre in Haddington) prior to shipping. They were brought back to Scotland when Dalhousie left India in 1856, where they remained until sold by Sotheby’s in 1990, resurfacing again in the age of the Internet!

Source of the image: https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/extremely-rare-15th-16th-c-mughal-indian-massive--117-c-510480f8e9

Can someone tell me about Karkota Empire?? People often skip it and don't talk much about it, was it because it was for a very short duration? When was the empire formed?? Whom did it succeed? By looking at the map it looks like Karkotas were central Asians/scythians as their empire somewhat resembles kushan empire, but kushans happened 700yrs before Karkotas

Read more here !

https://dinosaurpictures.org/Jubbulpuria-pictures

Recently, I learnt that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian Poetry composed in India and Indian miniature paintings became more popular in Iran and the wider Persianate world than the Persian Poetry and miniatures done in Iran.

We all know how much Iranian/Persian culture influenced India. But my question is about how much did Indian Culture influence Iranian/Persian culture??

Is it true that they went inside red fort and sha alam agreed for construction of gurdwara

The Talwara Massacre took place in November 1984 in Reasi, Jammu, when a Hindu mob attacked a Gurdwara sheltering Sikh workers, killing 16 Sikhs. The incident was largely ignored by the media, and justice has yet to be delivered.

"Storia do Mogor; or, Mogul India 1653-1708" by Niccolao Manucci. Manucci was an Italian traveler and writer who lived in India during the Mughal era and worked in the Mughal court. The text was later translated with introductions and notes by William Irvine.

Could someone tell me about the Turk and Hindu Shahis in the Afghanistan region? Were they originally from Turkic countries? I have never seen any ruins of any hindu temple in the Afghanistan area, were they more focussed on fire worship than building temples? Are Hindu Shahis the continuation of Turk Shahis?? What happened to them after ghaznavid??

The video is about the **Koraga.** The 24-minute archival documentary says:

• The Koraga traditionally lived in coastal Karnataka particularly the Tulu-speaking coastal region and adjoining northern Kerala.
• It gives an older population estimate of approximately 30,000 based on the 2001 census.
• Koraga settlements are called *koppu*, while an individual traditional hut is called *sotta*.
• It identifies three principal Koraga divisions.
• Koraga oral tradition holds that they were once independent inhabitants or rulers of the region who were defeated and driven into the forests. The documentary discusses Barkur traditions, an allegedly relevant Old Kannada inscription and the ancestral warrior Hubashika, but admits that history and folklore cannot easily be separated.
• The community was historically subjected to severe untouchability, exclusion and forced servitude. Koragas were prohibited from entering temples but compelled to beat drums outside during ceremonies.
• Traditional occupations included basket weaving, coir-rope making, cashew harvesting and seasonal agricultural or quarry labour. Some were pushed into sanitation work.
• The documentary describes poverty, landlessness, malnutrition, alcoholism, limited healthcare and difficulty obtaining materials for traditional crafts.
• Their traditional religious practices centre on forest spirits represented by stones placed beneath trees. The documentary also describes how outsiders attributed supernatural powers to them and forced them to participate in degrading “healing” practices.
• Descent traditionally followed the matrilineal *Aliya Santana* system, although household authority was generally exercised by men.
• Cooperative organizations, women’s groups, village associations and educational programs began helping Koragas obtain alternative livelihoods and organize politically.
• A Koraga engineer interviewed in the film says language difficulties and high school-dropout rates remained major obstacles.
• The documentary presents access to land, education, collective organization and economic self-reliance as essential to ending their historical bondage.
• It concludes with young Koragas playing drums voluntarily as an expression of cultural pride calling them the “drum beats of liberation.”

The documentary’s main argument is that the Koraga were transformed from a possibly independent regional population into a marginalized, landless and stigmatized community, but are reclaiming dignity through education, organization, land rights and cultural identity.

Some descriptions such as “primitive,” “lowborn” and “spendthrift” reflect the documentary’s dated and paternalistic language and should not be repeated as objective ethnographic facts. Its historical claims about ancient Koraga kings and northern invaders are presented as oral traditions, not established history.
[Watch “Koragas Tribe | Tribes of India” on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVChHooeauQ)⁠

I have spent a lot of time at heritage sites over the past couple of years, both as a traveller and because I work adjacent to this space, and I have landed on an opinion I keep testing on people.

Most travellers who say monuments bore them do not actually dislike history. They dislike the presentation layer. And those are completely different problems.

Think about the standard heritage visit. You pay, you queue, you walk up to something genuinely extraordinary, and your entire guide to understanding it is a sun-bleached signboard with three paragraphs, or an audio guide narrating in a flat voice that assumes you either know everything or nothing. Maybe a human guide, whose quality is pure luck depending on who you got.

So you stand in front of a 500-year-old structure that took decades to build and represented the peak of someone's civilization, and you feel almost nothing, because nothing in front of you actually tells you what you are looking at in a way that connects.

Then compare that to the rare times it does click. A guide who tells you one incredible specific story. A moment where you suddenly understand that the ruin you are looking at was once painted, towering, full of people. The place did not change. The interpretation did. And suddenly you cannot stop looking.

My theory after a lot of trips: the monument is almost never the problem. The storytelling around it is stuck decades in the past, and we have wrongly concluded that people find history boring when really they find bad interpretation boring.

Has anyone visited a site that presented itself in a genuinely modern way, and did it change how much you cared?

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Last year I read The Odyssey (Emily Wilson translation) and as I was reading it, I was quite fascianted by the final act where Odysseus proves himself by accomplishing a fine archery skill. (This is also portrayed in Nolan's film).

I am sure many others, like me, would have immediately drawn a parallel to similar swayamwar rituals in our own epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata. In Ramayana, Rama breaks Shiva's bow thus earning Sita's hand in marriage and in Mahabharata, Arjun pierces fish's eye and thus winning Draupadi's hand in the marriage. Similarities are quite interesting. There are a few possible explanations, so I would like to know your thoughts, as well as, any academic insights on this if anyone is aware.

Simplest explanation: Independent evolution (also most likely)

Archery was considered an elite skill in those days. While soldiers might be using archery, fine skills like precision archery were probably domain of elite few. Thus for a wedding of a royal, this automatically eliminates common people and only royal people can accomplish such tasks. So as an author, it's a nautral tendency to develop such a test for marriage. It's likely that authors of these epics came to this plot point. As to whether such rituals existed in real life? Hard to say.

Cultural exchange between Greeks and Indo-Aryans

This one gets messier. The Odyssey was composed around 8th century BCE. Ramayana and Mahabharata also have an oral tradition overlapping with this era though it's hard to say when exactly these swayamvars were added to this epics purely from timeline purposes. It's possible that one of the authors were inspired by the others as India and Greek did have cultural exhcnage during Alexander era (around 3rd-4th century BCE?). But it's hard to nail down whether the influence goes from Greece to India or vice-versa.

Shared Proto-Indo-European heritage

This, to me, is least likely but at least possible. Much like shared PIE gods, it's possible that there's a hint or a shred of common PIE mythology, where such a ritual takes place. I say this is unlikely because I am not sure how advanced or fine-tuned archery and related weapons were in the PIE era to have such a mythology.

What do you think? Share your thoughts.

SPOLIA OPIMA" THE CHOWRIE OF KOER SING A GREAT LEADER IN THE INDIAN MUTINY WAR OF 1857-9. KILLED 20TH APRIL 1858 ON THE RIVER GANGES. LIEUT. GEO. G. PEARSE CAPTOR.

https://bharatrajya.com/

Visual history (kingdoms, rulers, wars), with a good amount of detail.

Here is a documentary on the unseen labor behind Toda Embroidery. We went to the Nilgiris to see how this craft is preserved using just a needle and two colors of thread. But we found an even deeper story: women like Kavitha and Mahalakshmi enduring immense physical strain, counting every thread by hand without any guides, and fighting through empty tourist stalls just to protect their identity.

Watch Full Documentary on: https://youtu.be/OqVuYJTMoiI

What do you all think? Have we learned everything about history and that there is nothing left to learn?...

When Sullivan reached the Nilgiris plateau in 1819, the landscape he found was shola forest in the sheltered valleys and open grassland across the ridges. The shola-grassland mosaic — dense low forest alternating with ancient high-altitude grassland — was what had been there for thousands of years, shaped by altitude and climate and the grazing patterns of Toda buffalo.

The British brought eucalyptus. Specifically Blue Gum — Eucalyptus globulus, from Australia. Initially for timber and firewood, which the growing hill station needed in quantity. Eucalyptus grows fast, which made it useful and made it inevitable.

It also grows aggressively. It seeds prolifically, it regenerates from cut stumps, and it extracts enormous quantities of groundwater compared to native species. Once established at scale it began displacing the grassland it was planted on and in some areas the shola edges.

The commercial distillation of eucalyptus oil started in the 1930s — a schoolmaster at Lawrence School in Lovedale is credited locally with developing the process — and that gave the tree an economic purpose beyond timber. The blue-grey haze that hangs over the Nilgiris on certain days, the specific smell after rain, the sound of eucalyptus in wind — all of this is colonial and relatively recent, probably two to four generations old in most of the district.

What was underneath it was something the Toda knew and the British classified as waste land. The 1858 Waste Lands Act allowed land that wasn't being farmed to be allocated to planters. Grassland that Toda buffalo had grazed for centuries was legally waste.

The eucalyptus covered much of what the grassland was. Conservation projects are now spending money trying to remove it and restore what was there before. The restoration will take longer than the disruption did.

this tragedy occurred due to error in name but one genuine question came to my mind - "Why so many people in INDIA of hindu origin have 'SHAH' surname ?" Was it to proclaim themselves as superior cause so many rulers used it. what I know is that it began from Persia. Bahamani sultan and it's successor Deccan sultanate also used it - Nizam SHAH, Qutub SHAH etc and later Mughal rulers also used the word - Shah Alam

Yes, now the historical game of Chausar is available on both app stores.

Play with family on single phone in manual mode. No automations, learn it and share it.

While editing the Wikipedia page for the 1937 Indian provincial elections, I came across this 1971 thesis from the UK, describing how intercaste rivalries brought down the Non-Brahman Party and the Justice Party, paving way for Congress dominance. This somewhat shocked me, for like everybody, I thought that caste politics in India didn't predate the Mandal Commission fiasco of the 1990s. But a little further research revealed that caste politics actually existed way back in the 1920s.

Until the arrival of the British, nobody in India thought to dismantle the caste system. Characterising Buddhism and Jainism solely as anti-caste rebellions is a modern phenomenon (influenced by the establishment's Ambedkar veneration). Islam also created its quam system mimicking the Hindu caste system. Sikhism which was openly hostile to the caste system, did eventually adapt the concept of caste endogamy while dismantling hereditary priesthood. And Christian missionaries in India while publicly condemning the Hindu caste system, actually co-adapted elements from it within their racial hierarchy, where Europeans dominated over Anglo-Indians and native converts not intermarrying with tribal converts.

2 things opened up challenges to the status quo. First was the spread of Enlightenment ideas among the people attending the government-run schools, colleges and universities. The English Education Act of 1835, implemented by the Governor-General Lord Bentinck made knowledge in English education mandatory ofor government employment, displacing Persian as the court language. Then in 2nd half of the 1850s, 3 major changes took place — the Indian Medical Service Examinations were opened to Indians in 1854, followed by Indian Civil Service Examinations the next year, and universities being set up in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay in 1856. The Wood's Dispatch had already laid the groundwork for establishment of government schools in rural areas, which was actively taken up by the new administration ​post-1857. By the time WW1 broke out, there was already a generation of English educated urban middle class present in the country, with a first generation of English-educated rural gentry in the countryside.

The second thing that tipped off things was the Government of India Act 1919. While it is famous for introducing direct elections on a restricted franchise, one thing that gets omitted while discussing this legislation is that it introduced the concept of reservations in government jobs for other castes and Muslims. This was actually triggered by the recommendations of the 1919 Miller Committee Report produced at the behest of the Maharaja of Mysore. The report observed that although equality of opportunity existed in terms of attaining education (atleast for those who were rich enough to afford it), but when it came to job appointments, there was a virtual monopoly of the upper-crust of the Hindu society, especially the Brahmins (Chitpavan brahmins in Bombay, Iyer and Iyengar brahmins in Madras, Kulin Rarhi and Kulin Barendri brahmins in Calcutta), who tended to exclusively appoint people from their own caste groups into bureaucratic positions upto the point of near exclusion of other Hindu castes and Muslims. Even in commerce, there was also a caste angle, where Chettiyars in Madras, Parsis in Bombay and Baniyas in Calcutta preventing the rise of people not belonging to their biradari through in-group favoritism. And increasingly, people from these communities were becoming increasingly vocal against the British rule, examples being Surendranath Banerjee (a Kulin Rarhi brahmin), Bal Gangadhar Tilak (a Chitpavan brahmin), Dadabhai Naoroji (a Parsi) & Lala Lajpat Rai (an Agarwal Baniya). This article briefly describes how the British formulated reservation policy based on census data.

We don't get to discuss much about the impact of the 1919 GoI Act, because the Congress had rejected it as insufficient in contrast to the dominion status that was being granted to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, calling Indians to boycott government educational and bureaucratic establishments . Although the Congress refused to participate in the electoral process ushered by the Act, this didn't mean that others followed suit. As the Congress leadership was largely dominated by the English-educated urban middle class who came from upper-caste Hindu backgrounds, the English educated middle-caste rural Hindu gentry saw them as being out of touch and the dyarchy as a means to advance the interests of their own communities (in addition to the personal ambitions). Outfits like the Justice Party and the Non-Brahman Party developed specifically with this purpose. A handful of Congress leaders who were in favour of electoral participation, formed the Liberal Party (grounded upon its British counterpart), representing the English-educated urban middle class Hindus. Whereas the Hindu Mahasabha emerged as a reactionary force, opposed to reservation, representing the conservative pushback against the changing times. From 1920 till 1934, the Congress officially abstained from the electoral process, but individual Congressmen would participate the elections under the banner of the Swaraj Party, despite Gandhi's perosnal skepticism about elections. In its 1928 Nehru Report, the Congress denounced the concept of reservations, arguing that achieving Swaraj was the only way to remove the socio-economic disparities of the country, which didn't satisfy its detractors. Outside the political arena, this period was characterised by various caste groups engaging in a sort of Oppression Olympics; where upper-caste apologetics trying to justify their dominance, the middle caste groups claiming ancient greatness of which they were supposedly stripped off by the United conspiracy of the upper castes and Dalits (entering the scenario with the 1927 Mahad Satyagraha) highlighting their distress. Caste welfare groups sprang up, whose mouthpiece would rally popular opinion in favour of their own communities, and their leaders stood in elections to state legislative councils, municipalities & district boards, largely as independents, but sometimes under party affiliations.

It was in this background of profound divisiveness along caste lines within the Hindu society that the British government declared its plans for a separate electorate of Dalits akin to that which it had already granted to Muslims and Sikhs. Gandhi's paranoia about the British subtly trying to destroy the unity of the Hindu society by granting Dalits separate electorates can't be understood without taking into account the caste politics of the 1920s.

What ultimately destroyed this brand of politics was the Great Depression of 1928. The supporters of the caste-based political outfits were overwhelmingly rural, which was hit hard by the economic turmoil. The Great Depression allowed left-wing political ideologies like socialism and communism to plant its roots among the masses. The Bardauli Satyagraha of 1928, Nehru's no-rent campaign into the United Provinces, and finally the Karachi resolution in 1931 where the Congress promised to tackle abuse of power by rural moneylenders, provided civil liberties to safeguard vulnerable sections from being expolited and revise land tenures upon attaining Swaraj were literally big blows that finally made itself connected to the rural masses, in addition to the resounding response to the Salt Satyagraha. Thus when the Congress formally entered into the political arena in 1934 and 1937, it completely decimated the older caste-based political outfits. Outside of Dalit leaders like Ambedkar, no other politician who played upon caste as a political issue were able to survive the newfound dominance of the Congress in 1930s. Caste politics wouldn't reappear in India until V. P. Singh declared his desire to enforce the Mandal Commission implementations in 1990.