Ravi the blogger

The Pathans 550 B.C.- A.D. 1947 is a magisterial work of anthropology and history by Olaf Caroe (1892-1981) who served as the colonial administrator of North West Frontier Province shortly before India's independence and Partition in 1947. Having served in the Frontier for about three decades, Caroe had immense knowledge of these lands and the people who inhabited them. * According to legend, the Afghans traced their ancestry to one Malik Afghana, a Jew who lived in the Levant. This Malik Afghana supposedly migrated to Afghanistan in 550 BC. So they were among "the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel". During the time of the Prophet, the leader of the Afghans, Qais Abdul Rashid travelled to Arabia where he embraced Islam and returned to convert his people. However, Caroe is dismissive of these legends as chronicles of history. * The Pathan tongue, Pashto is an Indo-Iranian language, halfway, Caroe says, between Persian and Scythian. * Though Pashto is an Indo-Aryan language, the A...

  Indo-European language families are broadly classified into two groups - centum and satem languages. Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Italic, Celtic and Germanic belonged to the "centum" group while Indo-Iranian, Baltic and Slavic belong to the "satem" group. Proto-Indo-European, of which Greek is the closest living relative, is believed to have been a "centum" language. So, a process of palatisation of the initial velar *c (pronounced "k") must've taken place in "satem" languages turning it into a *ch and eventually to a sibilant *s. Now, it is possible to observe such changes in languages of non-Indo-European language families, too. The intial *c in Tamil, for example, must've undergone a change in the reverse direction into the Kannada *k, as in *cevi (ear) to "kivi" and *cedalu (termite) to "geddalu". Now, the linguist David Mcalpin who has championed the theory of Elamo-Dravidian family of languages propos...

  Egypt might be the only civilization with a continuous recorded history stretching back to the 4 th millenium BC. And when we come across Egyptologists reeling off third millennium BC dates with ease and with an assured familiarity, it makes us gape with awe. But does this mean that other civilizations did not count for as much as the Egyptians. Until recently, we too might have felt so but of late, discoveries have proved that there are other civilizations that might approach the Egyptians in continuity and they and the Mesapotamians in antiquity and that we had known far less about these old civilizations than the Egyptians only because archaeologists were less interested in them than Ancient Egypt or Mesapotamia. The reason for this neglect lies in our religious affiliations. Over thirty percent of the world’s population is Christian and universities with the best archaeology departments are situated in the Christian world. In fact, archaeology as a discipline originated th...

  Apart from being storehouses of wealth, power and spirituality as well, Tanjore’s temples were also rich in history and historical records. And though Tanjore did not leave much to be unearthed , the past had not yet been understood though it was available to everyone, everywhere - inscribed on the walls, floors and pillars of temples. It required the genius of men who could read old scripts – people like Eugen Hultzsch and V. Venkayya, to decipher the inscriptions of Tanjore’s temples, most importantly, the Big Temple or Brihadeeswarar Temple and publish them in hardbound volumes sponsored by the Archaeological Survey of India.   While Kumbakonam’s temples had been embroiled in politics, Tanjore’s were comparatively free of their influence. The Brihadeeswarar Temple, the only temple of note in the city, was still administered by the charities of the erstwhile Mahratta royal family and archaeologists like Hulztsch had ready access to it. The first to use the Brihadeeswarar...

  There were many distinguished writers from the period between the World Wars but from amongst them, two names stand out for the extremely passionate, almost filial affection for the river Cauvery that pervades their writings. They were Kalki and Venkataramani. As writers, they were in fact, poles apart. One wrote mostly in Tamil; the other, in Tamil as well as English but more frequently in English. The former is universally hailed as the ‘father of Tamil historical fiction’ and rarely did he venture to take on a contemporary subject though his successful Sahitya Academy award winner Alai Osai   (1948) and the novel Thyagabhoomi   that was made into a blockbuster movie (1939)   proved that he could comfortably handle other genres, too; the other wrote English novels on Indian village life and at the head of the plot he usually placed a Gandhian protagonist who preached temperance and enlisted support for the freedom movement and even while writing on a subject that...

  ·          The first suggestions to start a museum for Madras were made by the Secretary of the Madras Literary Society in 1843. Since 1828, the Madras Literary Society had been accumulating a collection of geological specimens. In a letter to the Chief Secretary of the Madras government on November 10, 1843, the Secretary of the Madras Literary Society suggested that the government start a museum for economic geology. ·         In a letter to the Chief Secretary of Madras dated December 5, 1843, Major-General W. W. Cullen, the British Resident at Travancore,   also suggested the opening of a central museum at Madras city with branches in all the districts, if possible, at the district collectorates. ·         The next year viz 1844, Henry Chamiers, a member of the Governor’s executive council discussed the two letters and recommended the setting up of a museum...