Ravi the blogger

Portrait of Henry Yule from the 1903 edition of The Book of Ser Marco Polo, edited by Henri Cordier The Hobson-Jobson was a dictionary of Indoisms compiled at the end of the 19 th century. It probably anticipated the curry invasion and the social acceptance of strange, foreign accented creoles in the United Kingdom by about a century. Back then, however, scarcely any Indian who wasn’t of the well-bred princely sort or couldn’t speak impeccable English made it to the United Kingdom and the prime carriers of such Indian-infused creole were either   Eurasian   (Anglo-Indian) or Britons who had spent their careers and possibly their lifetimes in the subcontinent   and now sought out a quiet retirement   in a blighty they had not seen for decades.      The authors of the Hobson-Jobson were two very interesting gentlemen – Sir Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell. Yule is well known for his translation of Marco Polo’s travels that became a bestselle...

In an article titled “India’s Parthian Colony” published in The Iranian on May 14, 2003 , Dr. Samar Abbas wrote that the Pallavas of South India had descended from   the Pahlavas of Iran   and attributed   their persistent conflicts with their neighbours the   Chalukyas to an obscure, far-fetched theory that the Chalukyas   were descendants of the Seleucids, whom the Pahlavas overthrew to capture power in Iran. Though Abbas’   unscientific   paper deserves little more than cursory mention, the theory itself cannot be brushed aside as a farce simply because it had also been suggested by the famous South Indian epigraphist and Pallava expert V. Venkayya   who had worked with Hultzsch in deciphering the Mamallapuram inscriptions.   Who were the Pahlavas! According to sources that date from the time of the Achaemenids, like the Turks and Mongols who came later, the Pahlavas or Parthians were a tribe of horsemen who inhabited the wild cou...