[cyborg]

ping for the history buffs

The "saffronisation" of history, critics of the last government say, depicted India's Muslim rulers as barbarous invaders and the medieval period as a dark age of Islamic colonial rule that snuffed out the glories of the Hindu empire that preceded...

***From what I read of past muslim invasions, I'd say they were barbarous but what invading force from anywhere wasn't barbarous?

[sc2_ct]

Great, so India, who has somehow managed to survive their Islamic neighbors, conquorers and warlords, is finally going to be done in by the intellectual elite "for the children". Touching.

[isrul]

Attention all Hindus: Mohammedan prayer rugs now on special in aisle five. Get ready to abandon you culture or your life.

[Cicero]

It would be good if they could eliminate the most egregious propaganda while avoiding the introduction of more propaganda of a different kind.

Sure, there were problems with Hinduism, including the Untouchable problem. The Caste system was much worse than any western Class system. But the Muslims were bloody invaders, who only managed to form a civilization insofar as they absorbed some of the ideas of the civilizations they invaded.

Muslim art, for instance. There is a lot of great Indian Muslim art. But it's not drawn from their Islamic heritage, which is rigidly iconoclastic.

[valkyrieanne]

The "saffronisation" of history, critics of the last government say, depicted India's Muslim rulers as barbarous invaders and the medieval period as a dark age of Islamic colonial rule that snuffed out the glories of the Hindu empire that preceded it.

And this is untrue because ...?

Actually, people upset by outsourcing should welcome these developments. (Neutrino: that's why I pinged you.) India is in the midst of an educational "revolution" right now, similar to what we went through in the 1960s, when our own educational system got radically dumbed down. Not only do the Indians want to censor their own history (just like liberals replaced US history with feely-good "social studies"), they want to redesign their whole educational system to make it more "sensitive," more "caring," more "culturally aware," and less focused on "drill" and "memorization."

IMO we should encourage them, because enough of that touchy-feely, "let's be sensitive" horse manure & their people won't be worth outsourcing to - even at bargain-basement rates.

[SunkenCiv]

Most controversial was the book History of India, by the country's foremost historian, Romila Thapar. This concluded that the "Aryans", venerated by the Hindu right as indigenous geniuses who created the Indus Valley civilisation, were nomadic tribes who spread from the Middle East.

The current view, which I regard as pure poison (and generally I support Hindu movements because Islam is the common threat to all) is that the Aryans didn't enter India from elsewhere, that they were indigenous. That's just nationalistic, jingoistic, horse dung.

Parpula's two volumes of photographs covering the collections of India and Pakistan, which appeared in 1987 and 1991... and his 1994 sign list, containing 386 signs (as against Mahadevan's 419 signs), are generally recognized as fine achievements, not least by Mahadevan... This is a significant figure. It is too high for a syllabary like Linear B... and too low for a highly logographic script like Chinese. the nearest comparison... are probably the Hittite hieroglyphs with about 500 signs and Sumerian cuneiform with perhaps 600+ signs... Most scholars therefore agree that the Indus script is likely to be a logosyllabic script like its west Asian contemporaries. [pp 281-284]

These Dravidian speakers are presumably remnants of a once-widespread Dravidian culture submerged by encroaching Indo-Aryans in the 2nd millennium BC... The Indo-Aryan hymns, the Vedas... recount tales of conquest of the forts of the dark-skinned Dasa or Dasyu... the Vedas repeatedly mention the horse in their descriptions of warfare and sacrifice, and this animal was clearly a vital part of Indo-Aryan society... But there is not horse imagery at all in the Indus Valley civilization and virtually no horse remains have been found by archaeologists. Hence the Indus civilizations is unlikely to have been Indo-Aryan. [pp 290-291]

Robinson mentions "a substantial inscription found at Dholavira near the coast of Kutch in 1990, which appears to have been a kind of sign board for the city." [p 295]

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Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson

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Uncracked Ancient Codes
(Lost Languages reviewed)
by William C. West

Sanskrit and early Dravidian, the ancient languages of India, seem to be the keys to deciphering the highly challenging script of the Indus Valley civilization of the third millennium b.c. in what is now Pakistan and northwest India. As with other languages, a photographic corpus of drawings, a sign list and a concordance must be compiled before decipherment will be possible. Work has proceeded along these lines for inscriptions on some 3,700 objects from the Indus Valley, most of them seal stones with very brief inscriptions (the longest has only 26 characters)... Robinson's descriptions of such analysis, and his accounts of both successful and unsuccessful decoding attempts, are clear, provocative and stimulating.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

[expatguy]

Another victory for Islam.