Indian History Discussions - III

[Umrao]

CE stands for "Common Era." It is a new term that is eventually expected to replace AD. The latter is an acronym for "Anno Domini" in Latin or "the year of the Lord" in English. The latter refers to the approximate birth year of Yeshua ben Nazareth (a.k.a. Jesus Christ). CE and AD have the same definition and value. 2000 CE = 2000 AD.

BCE stands for "Before the common era." It is expected to replace BC, which means "Before Christ." BC and BCE are also identical in value. Most theologians and religious historians believe that the approximate birth date of Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus) was in the fall, sometime between 4 and 7 BCE.

The term "common" simply means that this is the most frequently used calendar system: the Gregorian Calendar. There are many religious calendars in existence, but each of these are normally in use in only a small geographic area of the world -- typically by followers of a single religion.
***
Also

What Do the Terms BC and AD Mean?
BC is an abbreviation of the words "before Christ" and is used in reference to the time before the birth of Jesus. AD is an abbreviation of anno Domini, a Latin term meaning "in the year of the Lord." AD generally applies to the time since Christ's birth.

Christ's birth is commonly used as the central point from which the years are counted. Starting with AD 1, we count forward until we reach the present year. Years BC, starting with 1 BC, are counted backward in time. For example, 100 BC refers to the time 100 years before the birth of Jesus.

Actually, due to a chronological mistake by Archbishop James Ushur, an Anglican theologian (AD 1581-1656) who essentially established the BC/AD system by calculating the date of Jesus' birth (Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, published in 1650-54), this reckoning is flawed. Jesus was born earlier than the starting point of this system by approximately three years—in the year 4 BC—a fact that was not understood until more modern times.

The Jews count time from 3761/3760 BC. The Hebrew Calendar, which sets the holy days, is based upon this date. Recently, historians and archeologists have begun to reject the "Christian" BC/AD terms and adopted the acronyms BCE ("Before the Common Era") and CE ("Common Era"). However, the dates themselves remain the same.

[AkshayM]

Thanks Jumrao, I had general idea about it and your info confirms it...

[Kaushal]

AD - anno domini , used by the catholic church to signify the birth of christ. same as CE (Common era)

BC - Before christ , same as Before the Common era (BCE).

BCE and CE are widely used today to divorce the reference to Christ.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini

"Anno Domini, commonly abbreviated "A.D.", refers to the conventional numbering of years in the Gregorian calendar. It uses an epoch based on the traditionally reckoned year of the birth of Jesus Christ. The A.D. era is the only system in everyday use in the Western hemisphere and Europe, and is also the common system in regular commercial use in the rest of the world. Timewise it is equivalent to Common Era.

Anno Domini means "[in the] year of [Our] Lord" in Latin. The name comes from Jesus Christ being referred to as "Lord" in Christianity. A.D. is not an abbreviation for "After Death."

The Anno Domini nomenclature for the chronological era in which we live is somewhat controversial. The alternative Common Era (abbreviated C.E.) is often suggested."

[Narendhar]

King Charles II marries Portuguese Princess
Receives Bombay as dowry

Now we have conclusive evidence on the root of India's dowry problem - it may be the British again!

Mischief mongers of the first order! Create the caste system, create the Dravidians and the Aryans, destroyed the one-of-a-kind universal education system open to all castes, classes and creeds that was around for eons...now, proof that they may have been responsible for our dowry problem too!

I am glad they were driven out of India.

If only we could have driven out Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen we could have eliminated poverty!

[Vijnan]

Originally posted by Narendhar:
If only we could have driven out Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen we could have eliminated poverty!

Amartya Sen visits India a only few times during the year , he has driven himself out ... one of the evil NRI's who dictate what India should do while sitting in AC cabins .

[Guest]

What did Satyajit Ray do?

Sudarshan

[Vijnan]

Originally posted by Sudarshan:
What did Satyajit Ray do?

Sudarshan

Some believe that Satyajit Ray's movies showed too much poverty.

[Guest]

Originally posted by vijnan_anand:

Originally posted by Sudarshan:
What did Satyajit Ray do?

Sudarshan

Some believe that Satyajit Ray's movies showed too much poverty.

Showing poverty doesn't seem so bad to me, after all it was/is a reality. Agreed it puts India in a bad light internationally, and he could have been more positive in some of his movies, rather than wallowing in despair, but at least he didn't beat his breast and bewail the fact that that's the way India is, and it will never be better, like some others I know. I thought 'Do Aankhen Baara Haath' was great (that was by him, right?). Just look at any Dickens novel- they're filled with scenes of poverty, though he does show how his protagonists overcome it.

Sudarshan

[Abhijit]

'Do Aankhen Baara Haath' was great (that was by him, right?).

'Do Aankhen Baara Haath' was directed by V. Shantaram - he also played the main part in it.

[Sai]

Originally posted by Narendhar:


If only we could have driven out Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen we could have eliminated poverty!

No, we could have driven out Nehru & family, as also all the marxists and hardcore socialists, and stopped public loot by preventing, along with the proliferation of public sector, the existence of marxist pocketboroughs/jobshops like JNU history dept.

[Guest]

Originally posted by Abhijit_ST:

'Do Aankhen Baara Haath' was great (that was by him, right?).

'Do Aankhen Baara Haath' was directed by V. Shantaram - he also played the main part in it.

Sorry, my mistake.

Sudarshan

[O Vijay]

IMO, the "current era" aka, CE is a misnomer and does injustice to civilizations such as the Chinese and Indian which can trace their past well into antiquity.

I would suggest using following terms.

12003 CCE = 2003 AD where CCE = "Current Civilization Era" if one wants to refer to any events in the last 12,000 years.

For example, the Vela supernova exploded about 12000 years ago about the same time as when the last ice age ended abruptly. Some scientists believe these two events gave impetus for the surviving pockets of human civilization to expand into the previously inaccesible places.

112003 CHE = 2003 AD where CHE = "Current Human Era" if one wants to refer to any events in the last 112,000 years.

[S Bajwa]

'Do Aankhen Baara Haath' was directed by V. Shantaram - he also played the main part in it.

Only Hindi/Urdu movie ever directed by Satyajit Ray was "Shatranj ke Khilar" and excellent movie and a lifetime performance by Sanjeev Kumar and Saeed Jaafri., Amjad Khan also excelled as Nawab Wajid ali Shah.

Satyajit Ray was THE BEST INDIAN MOVIE DIRECTOR.... My favourite are Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt and Mehboob Khan.

[ramana]

OK Lets get back to the topic. Thanks for the diversion! ramana

[R Vaidya]

Unfortunately there is no separate thread on issues of Culture and NRI's.
There is an interesting Debate in UK--Is Navratri festival is cultural or religious. If it is later no funding by Govt. So some Gujarathis are arguing that it is only Cultural and not religious. Can we say that? or is the outdoor Garba Dance is purely Cultural?
It was always thought that it is part of Hindu Religious festivals.
Any suggestions / comments
________________--------

U.K. Newsquest Regional Press

LONDON, ENGLAND, May 23, 2003: This year's Navaratri Festival may
receive no funding because of council guidelines not to support events
which have the primary purpose of promoting religion. The Sarvoday
Hindu Association has sent the grant appeal back to the committee which
rejected it in hopes of changing the decision. The contention was
whether the event was primarily religious or not. More than 60 members
of the Gujarati community argued it was a cultural event with people
from all religions as well as nonreligious Gujaratis attending. They
said the only religious part of the festival is a 15-minute prayer said
each night which is as much a part of their culture as the dance, dress
and food associated with the event. Navaratri is a nine-day festival
associated with the worship of the Goddess in the form of the Universal
Mother, but many younger residents spoke about the relative
insignificance of the religion and the importance of the event socially
and culturally with people from all walks of life attending. Speaking
after Tuesday's meeting, grants and awards chairman councilor Rolson
Davies said, "I can understand and appreciate the argument being put
forward by the representatives of the community as to why they felt it
was a cultural event. The allocation of a grant depends on whether the
panel decides the cultural element outweighs the religious element."
HPI[HINDU PRESS INTERNATIONAL] adds: It is unfortunate that the Gujarati community made such a
declaration, that one of the most holy festivals of Hinduism is a mere
"cultural event." Perhaps it has been reduced to such in England, but
in India the religious aspect of it remains intact. If the city council
were to have accepted their request, the council would also have to
fund Christmas, which, with the decline of belief in Christianity, has
become as much or more a social observance than a religious one.

[Rudra]

Lot of details that explain why Krishna and the
Mahabharata characters were for real

http://www.the-week.com/23jun01/cover.htm

---
which means everytime someone speaks of 'indian
mythical heroes krishna, bheema and arjuna' make
sure to land a kick on their behind.

A thousand yagnas & homas will be burnt someday
to chase away the asuric hordes gathered on the
frontier.

Time to reclaim our long abused heritage. like
the gateway to Gondor, two 300m tall statues of
Bheema and Arjuna in full battle-gear should be
erected at the borders.

Let people be very afraid.

[Kaushal]

I agree with Vijay. starting the current era from the birth of christ is artificial. The Indian calendar is more logical

[Guest]

Originally posted by Rudra Singha:
Lot of details that explain why Krishna and the
Mahabharata characters were for real

http://www.the-week.com/23jun01/cover.htm

I posted a link in the earlier History thread about the historical Krishna, which I can't find now (I mean, neither the link nor the earlier thread). It
had a picture of a Harappan seal which had an image of Krishna on it. In this link, Navaratna Rajaram talks about names of characters from the Mahabharata which he deciphered from Harappan seals.

Interestingly, he says the Chandoggya Upanishad has a reference to Devaki Putr Krishna (the translation is his own).

Sudarshan

[VKumar]

Posted in full because link is unavailable.

Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate
>
>
> by Øyvind Tønnesson
> Nobel e-Museum Peace Editor, 1998-2000
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> (Embedded image moved to file: pic06523.jpg)
>
>
>
> Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) has become the strongest symbol of non-violence in
> the 20th century. It is widely held ? in retrospect ? that the Indian national
> leader should have been the very man to be selected for the Nobel Peace Prize.
> He was nominated several times, but was never awarded the prize. Why?
>
>
> These questions have been asked frequently: Was the horizon of the Norwegian
> Nobel Committee too narrow? Were the committee members unable to appreciate the
> struggle for freedom among non-European peoples?" Or were the Norwegian
> committee members perhaps afraid to make a prize award which might be
> detrimental to the relationship between their own country and Great Britain?
>
>
>
>
>
>
> (Embedded image moved to file: pic14070.jpg)
> When still alive, Mohandas Gandhi had many admirers, both in India and abroad.
> But his martyrdom in 1948 made him an even greater symbol of peace. Twenty-one
> years later, he was commemorated on this double-sized United Kingdom postage
> stamp.
> © Scanpix
>
>
>
> Gandhi was nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and, finally, a few days before
> he was murdered in January 1948. The omission has been publicly regretted by
> later members of the Nobel Committee; when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace
> Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a
> tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi". However, the committee has never
> commented on the speculations as to why Gandhi was not awarded the prize, and
> until recently the sources which might shed some light on the matter were
> unavailable.
>
>
>
> Mahatma Gandhi ? Who was He?
>
>
> Mohandas Karamchand ? known as Mahatma or "Great-Souled" ? Gandhi was born in
> Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in what is today the state of
> Gujarat in Western India, where his father was prime minister. His mother was a
> profoundly religious Hindu. She and the rest of the Gandhi family belonged to a
> branch of Hinduism in which non-violence and tolerance between religious groups
> were considered very important. His family background has later been seen as a
> very important explanation of why Mohandas Gandhi was able to achieve the
> position he held in Indian society. In the second half of the 1880s, Mohandas
> went to London where he studied law. After having finished his studies, he
> first went back to India to work as a barrister, and then, in 1893, to Natal in
> South Africa, where he was employed by an Indian trading company.
>
>
> In South Africa Gandhi worked to improve living conditions for the Indian
> minority. This work, which was especially directed against increasingly racist
> legislation, made him develop a strong Indian and religious commitment, and a
> will to self-sacrifice. With a great deal of success he introduced a method of
> non-violence in the Indian struggle for basic human rights. The method,
> satyagraha ? "truth force" ? was highly idealistic; without rejecting the rule
> of law as a principle, the Indians should break those laws which were
> unreasonable or suppressive. Each individual would have to accept punishment
> for having violated the law. However, he should, calmly, yet with
> determination, reject the legitimacy of the law in question. This would,
> hopefully, make the adversaries ? first the South African authorities, later
> the British in India ? recognise the unlawfulness of their legislation.
>
>
> When Gandhi came back to India in 1915, news of his achievements in South
> Africa had already spread to his home country. In only a few years, during the
> First World War, he became a leading figure in the Indian National Congress.
> Through the interwar period he initiated a series of non-violent campaigns
> against the British authorities. At the same time he made strong efforts to
> unite the Indian Hindus, Moslems and Christians, and struggled for the
> emancipation of the 'untouchables' in Hindu society. While many of his fellow
> Indian nationalists preferred the use of non-violent methods against the
> British primarily for tactical reasons, Gandhi's non-violence was a matter of
> principle. His firmness on that point made people respect him regardless of
> their attitude towards Indian nationalism or religion. Even the British judges
> who sentenced him to imprisonment recognised Gandhi as an exceptional
> personality.
>
>
>
> The First Nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize
>
>
> Among those who strongly admired Gandhi were the members of a network of
> pro-Gandhi "Friends of India" associations which had been established in Europe
> and the USA in the early 1930s. The Friends of India represented different
> lines of thought. The religious among them admired Gandhi for his piety.
> Others, anti-militarists and political radicals, were sympathetic to his
> philosophy of non-violence and supported him as an opponent of imperialism.
>
>
> In 1937 a member of the Norwegian Storting (Parliament), Ole Colbjørnsen
> (Labour Party), nominated Gandhi for that year's Nobel Peace Prize, and he was
> duly selected as one of thirteen candidates on the Norwegian Nobel Committee's
> short list. Colbjørnsen did not himself write the motivation for Gandhi's
> nomination; it was written by leading women of the Norwegian branch of "Friends
> of India", and its wording was of course as positive as could be expected.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> (Embedded image moved to file: pic25387.jpg)
> An ordinary politician or a Christ? In this photo Gandhi listens to Moslems
> during the height of the warfare which followed the partition of India in 1947.
> © Scanpix
>
>
>
> The committee's adviser, professor Jacob Worm-Müller, who wrote a report on
> Gandhi, was much more critical. On the one hand, he fully understood the
> general admiration for Gandhi as a person: "He is, undoubtedly, a good, noble
> and ascetic person ? a prominent man who is deservedly honoured and loved by
> the masses of India." On the other hand, when considering Gandhi as a political
> leader, the Norwegian professor's description was less favourable. There are,
> he wrote, "sharp turns in his policies, which can hardly be satisfactorily
> explained by his followers. (...) He is a freedom fighter and a dictator, an
> idealist and a nationalist. He is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an
> ordinary politician."
>
>
> Gandhi had many critics in the international peace movement. The Nobel
> Committee adviser referred to these critics in maintaining that he was not
> consistently pacifist, that he should have known that some of his non-violent
> campaigns towards the British would degenerate into violence and terror. This
> was something that had happened during the first Non-Cooperation Campaign in
> 1920-1921, e.g. when a crowd in Chauri Chaura, the United Provinces, attacked a
> police station, killed many of the policemen and then set fire to the police
> station.
>
>
> A frequent criticism from non-Indians was also that Gandhi was too much of an
> Indian nationalist. In his report, Professor Worm-Müller expressed his own
> doubts as to whether Gandhi's ideals were meant to be universal or primarily
> Indian: "One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in
> South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose
> living conditions were even worse."
>
>
> The name of the 1937 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was to be Lord Cecil of
> Chelwood. We do not know whether the Norwegian Nobel Committee seriously
> considered awarding the Peace Prize to Gandhi that year, but it seems rather
> unlikely. Ole Colbjørnsen renominated him both in 1938 and in 1939, but ten
> years were to pass before Gandhi made the committee's short list again.
>
>
>
> 1947: Victory and Defeat
>
>
> In 1947 the nominations of Gandhi came by telegram from India, via the
> Norwegian Foreign Office. The nominators were B.G. Kher, Prime Minister of
> Bombay, Govindh Bhallabh Panth, Premier of United Provinces, and Mavalankar,
> the President of the Indian Legislative Assembly. Their arguments in support of
> his candidacy were written in telegram style, like the one from Govind Bhallabh
> Panth: "Recommend for this year Nobel Prize Mahatma Gandhi architect of the
> Indian nation the greatest living exponent of the moral order and the most
> effective champion of world peace today." There were to be six names on the
> Nobel Committee's short list, Mohandas Gandhi was one of them.
>
>
> The Nobel Committee's adviser, the historian Jens Arup Seip, wrote a new report
> which is primarily an account of Gandhi's role in Indian political history
> after 1937. "The following ten years," Seip wrote, "from 1937 up to 1947, led
> to the event which for Gandhi and his movement was at the same time the
> greatest victory and the worst defeat ? India's independence and India's
> partition." The report describes how Gandhi acted in the three different, but
> mutually related conflicts which the Indian National Congress had to handle in
> the last decade before independence: the struggle between the Indians and the
> British; the question of India's participation in the Second World War; and,
> finally, the conflict between Hindu and Moslem communities. In all these
> matters, Gandhi had consistently followed his own principles of non-violence.
>
>
> The Seip report was not critical towards Gandhi in the same way as the report
> written by Worm-Müller ten years earlier. It was rather favourable, yet not
> explicitly supportive. Seip also wrote briefly on the ongoing separation of
> India and the new Moslem state, Pakistan, and concluded ? rather prematurely it
> would seem today: "It is generally considered, as expressed for example in The
> Times of 15 August 1947, that if 'the gigantic surgical operation' constituted
> by the partition of India, has not led to bloodshed of much larger dimensions,
> Gandhi's teachings, the efforts of his followers and his own presence, should
> get a substantial part of the credit."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> (Embedded image moved to file: pic28108.jpg)
> The partition of India in 1947 led to a process which we today probably would
> describe as "ethnic cleansing". Hundreds of thousands of people were massacred
> and millions had to move; Moslems from India to Pakistan, Hindus in the
> opposite direction. Photo shows part of the crowds of refugees which poured
> into the city of New Delhi.
> © Scanpix
>
>
>
> Having read the report, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee must have
> felt rather updated on the last phase of the Indian struggle for independence.
> However, the Nobel Peace Prize had never been awarded for that sort of
> struggle. The committee members also had to consider the following issues:
> Should Gandhi be selected for being a symbol of non-violence, and what
> political effects could be expected if the Peace Prize was awarded to the most
> prominent Indian leader ? relations between India and Pakistan were far from
> developing peacefully during the autumn of 1947?
>
>
> From the diary of committee chairman Gunnar Jahn, we now know that when the
> members were to make their decision on October 30, 1947, two acting committee
> members, the Christian conservative Herman Smitt Ingebretsen and the Christian
> liberal Christian Oftedal spoke in favour of Gandhi. One year earlier, they had
> strongly favoured John Mott, the YMCA leader. It seems that they generally
> preferred candidates who could serve as moral and religious symbols in a world
> threatened by social and ideological conflicts. However, in 1947 they were not
> able to convince the three other members. The Labour politician Martin Tranmæl
> was very reluctant to award the Prize to Gandhi in the midst of the
> Indian-Pakistani conflict, and former Foreign Minister Birger Braadland agreed
> with Tranmæl. Gandhi was, they thought, too strongly committed to one of the
> belligerents. In addition both Tranmæl and Jahn had learnt that, one month
> earlier, at a prayer-meeting, Gandhi had made a statement which indicated that
> he had given up his consistent rejection of war. Based on a telegram from
> Reuters, The Times, on September 27, 1947, under the headline "Mr. Gandhi on
> 'war' with Pakistan" reported:
>
> "Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed
> all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if
> Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimise
> it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. No one
> wanted war, but he could never advise anyone to put up with injustice. If all
> Hindus were annihilated for a just cause he would not mind. If there was war,
> the Hindus in Pakistan could not be fifth columnists. If their loyalty lay not
> with Pakistan they should leave it. Similarly Muslims whose loyalty was with
> Pakistan should not stay in the Indian Union."
>
>
>
>
>
>
> (Embedded image moved to file: pic02202.jpg)
> Gandhi saw "no place for him in a new order where they wanted an army, a navy,
> an air force and what not". In the picture, Gandhi's spiritual heir, Prime
> Minister Pandit Nehru, Defense Minister Sardar Baldev Singh, and the
> Commanders-in-Chief of the three Services, are inspecting a Guard of Honour at
> the Red Fort, Delhi, in August, 1948. Fifty years later, both India and
> Pakistan had developed and tested their own nuclear weapons.
> © Scanpix
>
>
>
> Gandhi had immediately stated that the report was correct, but incomplete. At
> the meeting he had added that he himself had not changed his mind and that "he
> had no place in a new order where they wanted an army, a navy, an air force and
> what not".
>
>
> Both Jahn and Tranmæl knew that the first report had not been complete, but
> they had become very doubtful. Jahn in his diary quoted himself as saying:
> "While it is true that he (Gandhi) is the greatest personality among the
> nominees ? plenty of good things could be said about him ? we should remember
> that he is not only an apostle for peace; he is first and foremost a patriot.
> (...) Moreover, we have to bear in mind that Gandhi is not naive. He is an
> excellent jurist and a lawyer." It seems that the Committee Chairman suspected
> Gandhi's statement one month earlier to be a deliberate step to deter Pakistani
> aggression. Three of five members thus being against awarding the 1947 Prize to
> Gandhi, the Committee unanimously decided to award it to the Quakers.
>
>
>
> 1948: A Posthumous Award Considered
>
>
> Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948, two days before the closing
> date for that year's Nobel Peace Prize nominations. The Committee received six
> letters of nomination naming Gandhi; among the nominators were the Quakers and
> Emily Greene Balch, former Laureates. For the third time Gandhi came on the
> Committee's short list ? this time the list only included three names ? and
> Committee adviser Seip wrote a report on Gandhi's activities during the last
> five months of his life. He concluded that Gandhi, through his course of life,
> had put his profound mark on an ethical and political attitude which would
> prevail as a norm for a large number of people both inside and outside India:
> "In this respect Gandhi can only be compared to the founders of religions."
>
>
> Nobody had ever been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. But according
> to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation in force at that time, the Nobel Prizes
> could, under certain circumstances, be awarded posthumously. Thus it was
> possible to give Gandhi the prize. However, Gandhi did not belong to an
> organisation, he left no property behind and no will; who should receive the
> Prize money? The Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, August Schou, asked
> another of the Committee's advisers, lawyer Ole Torleif Røed, to consider the
> practical consequences if the Committee were to award the Prize posthumously.
> Røed suggested a number of possible solutions for general application.
> Subsequently, he asked the Swedish prize-awarding institutions for their
> opinion. The answers were negative; posthumous awards, they thought, should not
> take place unless the laureate died after the Committee's decision had been
> made.
>
>
> On November 18, 1948, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to make no award
> that year on the grounds that "there was no suitable living candidate".
> Chairman Gunnar Jahn wrote in his diary: "To me it seems beyond doubt that a
> posthumous award would be contrary to the intentions of the testator."
> According to the chairman, three of his colleagues agreed in the end, only Mr.
> Oftedal was in favour of a posthumous award to Gandhi.
>
>
> Later, there have been speculations that the committee members could have had
> another deceased peace worker than Gandhi in mind when they declared that there
> was "no suitable living candidate", namely the Swedish UN envoy to Palestine,
> Count Bernadotte, who was murdered in September 1948. Today, this can be ruled
> out; Bernadotte had not been nominated in 1948. Thus it seems reasonable to
> assume that Gandhi would have been invited to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace
> Prize had he been alive one more year.
>
>
>
> Why Was Gandhi Never Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
>
>
> Up to 1960, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded almost exclusively to Europeans
> and Americans. In retrospect, the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee may
> seem too narrow. Gandhi was very different from earlier Laureates. He was no
> real politician or proponent of international law, not primarily a humanitarian
> relief worker and not an organiser of international peace congresses. He would
> have belonged to a new breed of Laureates.
>
> There is no hint in the archives that the Norwegian Nobel Committee ever took
> into consideration the possibility of an adverse British reaction to an award
> to Gandhi. Thus it seems that the hypothesis that the Committee's omission of
> Gandhi was due to its members' not wanting to provoke British authorities, may
> be rejected.
>
> In 1947 the conflict between India and Pakistan and Gandhi's prayer-meeting
> statement, which made people wonder whether he was about to abandon his
> consistent pacifism, seem to have been the primary reasons why he was not
> selected by the committee's majority. Unlike the situation today, there was no
> tradition for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to try to use the Peace Prize as a
> stimulus for peaceful settlement of regional conflicts.
>
> During the last months of his life, Gandhi worked hard to end the violence
> between Hindus and Moslems which followed the partition of India. We know
> little about the Norwegian Nobel Committee's discussions on Gandhi's
> candidature in 1948 ? other than the above quoted entry of November 18 in
> Gunnar Jahn's diary ? but it seems clear that they seriously considered a
> posthumous award. When the committee, for formal reasons, ended up not making
> such an award, they decided to reserve the prize, and then, one year later, not
> to spend the prize money for 1948 at all. What many thought should have been
> Mahatma Gandhi's place on the list of Laureates was silently but respectfully
> left open.
>

[fanne]

Giving Noble peace prize to Gandhi is like giving Pope John Paul award to Jesus Christ. I guess it would be more an honour of Nobel Peace prize than Gandhi. 500 Years from now, people wont be saying that Gandhi, who got (or did not get) the Noble prize BUT they would be saying - Hey do you know something called Noble prize, it was awarded to Gandhi...

rgds,
fanne

[member_4901]

Dr. N. S. Rajaram to Lecture on History and Archeology of the Mahabharata

Source - happiness@doctors.org.uk

LONDON, ENGLAND, May 29, 2003: NHSF King's College London is hosting a lecture by respected academician and scientist, Dr. N.S. Rajaram, on the history and archeology of the Mahabharata. This free lecture is scheduled for Saturday, May 31, at 3:00 p.m. The venue is King's College London, Waterloo Campus, Stamford Lecture Theater, Franklin-Wilkins Building, 150 Stamford Street, London SE1 9NN. Dr. Rajaram has worked in U.S. academia and the high technology industry for over twenty years. Since 1992, he has been an independent researcher and writer working on the history and science of ancient civilizations. He is the author of ten books including the widely known Vedic Aryans and The Origins of Civilization with Dr. David Frawley and The Deciphered Indus Script with N. Jha, and Search for the Historical Krishna.
Kindly contact "source" above for further information regarding the lecture.

[Guest]

Hey guys,
I suggest all you history blokes out there read this month's National Geographic magazine. It raises some serious questions on the ethics of Hinduism with regard to untouchability. I was disgusted after reading it. Will be glad if anyone here can shed some more light on whether or not caste system is a "hindu" thing. Thanks in advance.

[AshishN]

Rahul:
You are a week or so late! Done in DDM thread, I think.

[Sanjay Joshi]

These foreign dorks need to understand that caste is not a bad thing, its misuse and discrimination based on caste is.

To explain this to a thick skulled CNN-watcher, compare this to race. Race is not a bad thing, but racism and and discrimination based on race is.

Originally posted by rahul r:
Hey guys,
I suggest all you history blokes out there read this month's National Geographic magazine. It raises some serious questions on the ethics of Hinduism with regard to untouchability. I was disgusted after reading it. Will be glad if anyone here can shed some more light on whether or not caste system is a "hindu" thing. Thanks in advance.

[ramana]

Rahul r, its part of cultre wars. Yes caste is its worst aspects is definitely bad. But what that NG report is not to inform but to inflame and is thus part of culture wars.

[Guest]

But what that NG report is not to inform but to inflame and is thus part of culture wars.

Yes, the was my initial hunch as well, but the way they lashed out hinduism was totally uncalled for. They squarely blamed "religion" for the subhuman treatment of "untouchables," and that really pi$$ed me off.

[Kaushal]

When have they ever said anything good about Hinduism ?

[Kaushal]

Crossposted from IC yahoogroups

Aryan invasion/migration of Europe??




*The basques of spain dont speak an indo-european language
*The Celts of Ireland, Uk etc speak an indo-european language
*The Celts and basque are genetically identical
*hence the Celts got their indo-european language from a small elite of
invaders / migrators

New York Times Service
>
> History books favour stories of conquest, not of continuity, so it is
> perhaps not surprising that many Englishmen grow up believing they are
> a fighting mixture of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and
> Normans who invaded Britain.
>
> The defeated Celts, by this reckoning, left their legacy only in the
> hinterlands of Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
>
> A new genetic survey of Y chromosomes throughout the British Isles has
> revealed a very different story. The Celtic inhabitants of Britain
> were real survivors. Nowhere were they entirely replaced by the
> invaders and they survive in high proportions, often 50 per cent or
> more, throughout the British Isles, according to a study by Dr
> Cristian Capelli, Dr David B. Goldstein and others at University
> College, London.
>
> The study, reported on Tuesday in Current Biology, was based on
> comparing Y chromosomes sampled throughout the British Isles with the
> invaders? Y chromosomes, as represented by the present-day descendants
> of the Danes, Vikings (in Norway) and Anglo-Saxons (in
> Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany).
>
> The survey began as a request from the BBC to look for genetic
> signatures of the Vikings in England, later broadened to include the
> Danes and Anglo-Saxons. Dr Goldstein said that not enough money was
> available to study two other invaders, the Romans and the Normans, but
> that he felt that their demographic contribution had probably been
> small.
>
> He assumed the original inhabitants of Britain could be represented by
> men living in Castlerea, in central Ireland, a region not reached by
> any foreign invader. In a study two years ago Dr Goldstein and
> colleagues established that Y chromosomes of Celtic populations were
> almost identical with those of the Basques.
>
> The Basques live in a mountainous refuge on the French-Spanish border
> and speak a language wholly unrelated to the Indo-European tongues
> that swept into Europe some 8,000 years ago, bringing the agricultural
> revolution of the Neolithic period. Hence they have long been regarded
> as likely remnants of the first modern humans to reach Europe some
> 30,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic era.
>
> By this chain of reasoning, the Celtic-speaking men, since genetically
> very close to the Basques, must also be drawn from the original
> Paleolithic inhabitants of Europe, and probably represent the first
> modern human inhabitants of Britain who settled the islands some
> 10,000 years ago, Dr Goldstein said. These original Britons must later
> have adopted from Europe both the Celtic culture, evidence of which
> appears from some 3,000 years ago, and the Celtic language, which is a
> branch of the Indo-European language family.
>
> Having identified Y chromosomes assumed typical of the original
> Britons, Dr Goldstein and his team could assess the demographic impact
> of the invaders. They found that the Vikings left a heavy genetic
> imprint in the Orkneys, the islands off the northeast coast of
> Scotland, which were a centre of Viking operations between AD 800 and
> 1200. Many men in York and east England carry Danish Y chromosomes.
> But surprisingly, there is little sign of Anglo-Saxon heritage in
> southern England.
>
> "One tends to think of England as Anglo-Saxon," Dr Goldstein said.
> "But we show quite clearly there was not complete replacement of
> existing populations by either Anglo-Saxons or Danes. It looks like
> the Celts did hold out."
>
> The Y chromosome only measures the activities of men. In a survey
> reported two years ago, Dr Goldstein and colleagues examined British
> mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element inherited through the mother.
> Surprisingly, the British maternal heritage turned out to be more like
> that of northern Europeans than British Y chromosomes are.
>
> To explain that finding, it is not necessary to assume Britain was
> invaded by an army of Amazons, Dr Goldstein said, or that the Celts
> had suddenly decided to replace their Celtic wives with women from
> West Asia. More probably, since Celts in Britain remained in contact
> with those in Europe, there were continual exchanges that included
> women. As in many cultures, the Celtic men stayed put while women
> moved to their husbands? villages.
>
> So over time, Britain?s female population would gradually have become
> more like that of Northern Europe, Dr Goldstein suggested.
>
> British historians have generally stressed the Roman and Anglo-Saxon
> contributions to English culture at the expense of the Celtic. A
> recent history of Britain, The Isles by Norman Davies, attempted to
> redress the balance. The Celts were ignored, he noted, in part because
> no documentary histories remain, the Celts having regarded writing as
> a threat to their oral traditions. Generations of historians saw
> British history as beginning with Roman invasions of the first century
> AD and indeed identified with the Romans rather than the defeated
> Celts.
>
> "So long as classical education and classical prejudices prevailed,
> educated Englishmen inevitably saw ancient Britain as an alien land,"
> Davies writes. The new survey indicates that the genetic contribution
> of the Celts has been as much underestimated as their historical
> legacy.
>
> Davies said in an interview that "traditionally, historians thought in
> terms of invasions: the Celts took over the islands, then the Romans,
> then the Anglo-Saxons."
>
> "It now seems much more likely that the resident population doesn?t
> change as much as thought," he continued. "The people stay put but are
> reculturalised by some new dominant culture."
>
> The Y chromosome is a useful way of tracking men because it is passed
> unchanged from father to son, escaping the genetic shuffle between
> generations that affects the rest of the genome. Also, all men carry
> the same Y chromosome, a surprising situation derived from the fact
> that in the ancestral human population some men had no children or
> only daughters, so that in each generation some Y chromosomes
> disappeared until only one was left.
>
> This one and only Y has the same sequence of DNA units in every man
> alive except for the occasional mutation that has cropped up every
> thousand years so and is then inherited by all that individuals?
> descendants. Geneticists can draw up family trees based on these
> mutations as branching points and then assign specific lineages to
> historic events or locations, like the entry of Neolithic farmers into
> Europe.

[Gudakesa]

rahul r,
incidentally, caste in India is not present solely among hindus, it is present in India's muslim and christian communities as well. Some of the backward castes among them repeatedly ask for reservations.

[Agnimitra]

Hauma,
This is in continuation of what started on the "India & China: Shaping Reality" thread:

Agreed that Indians, when they did project power, didn't follow it up with demographic invasion. Could that be because Indians themselves were a multi-racial society from very very ancient times?

More specifically, were the Sindhu-Saraswati peoples multi-racial?

Could that be a reason why Indians didn't define themselves racially, but culturally (if that's true)? I do recall that during Buddhist times, the Chinese were included among "Arya" peoples, signifying a feeling of being related.

Lastly, does racial commonalty (or 'consolidating' by demographic invasion) always translate to long-term cultural imperial advantage?

[Arvind]

Some of Amir Khusroo's florid prose describing the deeds of his patron Alla-ad-din of vile memory from khazain-ul-futuh . To be more precise his commander Maliq Naib Barbeq (from the Hindustani translation using E&D of course as a template):

"The tongue of the sword of the Khalifa of the time, which is the tongue of the flame of Islam, has imparted light to the entire darkness of Hindustan by the illumination of its guidance. And on one side an iron wall of royal swords has been raised before the infidel Magog-like Mongols, so that entire Allah-deserted people drew their feet within their skirts amongst the hills of Ghazni, and even their frontline-arrows did not have strength enough to reach into Sind. On the other hand so much dust arose from the battered temple of Somnath that even the sea was not able to lay it, and on the right hand and on the left hand the army of the most exhalted Alla-ad-din Khalji has conquered from sea to sea, and several capitals of the gods of the Hindus, in which the worship of Shaitan has prevailed since the time of the Djinns, have been demolished. All these impurities of the Kaffrs have been cleansed by the exhalted Sultan's destruction of idols and temples, beginning with his first jihad against Devagiri, so that the flames of the light of the Shariat illumine all these filthy Kaffr lands, and places for the callers of Namaz are exalted on high, and prayers are read in Masjids. Allah be praised!"

Points to note:
-The Mongols were as Kaffr as the Hindus
-Amir Khusroo imagines a great favor being done to India by the Islamists in cleaning the land of Shaitanism. This exactly what Mohammed Habib, whose clansmen are adored by some, was trying to state. The Islamists were curing India of its satanic practices and replacing it with the much welcome brotherhood and peace.
-The "flames of Shariat illuminating the land": This is exactly what the Maulana in the madrassa sees as an ideal- not the Indian constitution.

Another excerpt on Maliq Kafar's sack of rAmeshvaraM in TN.

"The canopy was covered with gems and it was the holy place of the Hindus, which the Maliq dug up completely from its foundations, and the heads of the Brahmins and Kaffrs danced from their necks and met the ground at their feet, and blood flowed in rivers. The stone idols called Linga Mahadeva, that been established at that place at for a long time were copulating sex organs of kaffrs. There were 12 of these, up to this time, which the kick of the horse of Islam had not yet broken. The Momins destroyed all the Lingas, and the Hindu king Deva Narayana was struck down. The other gods who had fixed their seats were thrown so far that they reached the fort of Lanka. So much was the terror that idols of sex organs themselves would have fled had they had any legs to stand on. Much gold and valuable jewels fell into the hands of the Musalmans, who returned to the royal canopy, after executing their holy Jihad (April, 1311 A.D.)"

Point to note: The trivilization of Hindu Iconography is not recent phenomenon of the missionaries but was also carried out by the Islamist. We all know what the origin of the Linga symbol is, but note how the Islamist delights in specifically vulgarizing it.

[O Vijay]

Kaushalgaru, check out following web site.

http://www.racearchives.com/calc/haplo_profiles.asp?dbname=aluInsertions&popid=23

Notice how Brahmins are closely related to Madiga and Mala whereas the Vysya are more closely related to the Northern Europeans.

http://www.racearchives.com/calc/haplo_profiles.asp?dbname=aluInsertions&popid=33

At the same website, there are other charts which show that Vizag Brahmins are more closely related to the tribals than to other so-called forward castes. The critical point is that this data is based on Y-chromosomes not mitochondria.

I guess this data pretty well nails the twin lies spread by Westerners and some Indian Marxists about Brahmins keeping themselves racially pure and being descendents of "Aryans". Our genes tells us that a lot of mixing was happening in our history but intolerance and rigidness crept in recently ... perhaps over the last thousand years.

In conclusion, I can say with conviction:

We are all tribals. That is good.

[svinayak]

Another falsehood
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1051390406873&p=1012571727169

A troubling empire
By Edward Luce
Published: May 30 2003 17:28 | Last Updated: May 30 2003 17:28

The Mughal Throne: The Saga of India's Great Emperors B Abraham Eraly Weidenfeld £20, 544 pages

One of the most striking aspects of modern India is that almost all its major cities were founded either by Islamic or European imperialists. Nationalists of various stripes are acutely sensitive to this and have renamed Bombay as Mumbai, Madras as Chennai and Calcutta as Kolkata. Even so, no amount of nominal revisionism can alter the fact that many of India's most visible monuments were bequeathed by imperial invaders. Of these, perhaps the grandest architectural legacy is that of the Mughal dynasty.

A group of Hindu youth activists recently graffitied the Taj Mahal, the most impressive of Mughal buildings, and there have been many such disturbing incidents. Abraham Eraly is one of the many who are deeply concerned that historical revisionism shows no signs of abating in India. From this, he correctly concludes that India's identity as a nation state is still in the process of being settled.

"In every other major civilisation the past has died so that the future could be born," he writes. "But India seems to be killing the future so that the past can live on." The central Hindu nationalist thesis is this: India flowered under a golden age of Hindu civilisation that was systematically destroyed, first by the various Islamic invasions between the 11th and 17th centuries, and then by the British colonial period that lasted until 1947. Finally, after more than 50 years of independence, India has a Hindu nationalist government that can correct the distortions of history. Or, if you take Eraly's view, a standpoint which is "snared in self-delusions, fighting quixotic battles with the spectres of the past".

The project is far from academic. If India's Islamic heritage is deemed alien to the country's true civilisation, then the security of the country's 140 million Muslims - and of a nation-state that was founded on the basis of religious pluralism - are profoundly threatened.

It is thus with high expectations that one turns to Eraly's account of the Mughal era. Founded in 1528 by an obscure Turko-Mongol line that had been virtually ejected from its central Asian fiefdom, the Mughals gradually evolved into the grandest and most formalistic of India's Islamic dynasties. This process - whereby the nomadic rusticity of Babur, the first Mughal ruler, was converted within half a century into the Indo-Persian high culture of his grandson, Akbar, is a critical phase in the history of what the Mughals called "Hindustan". The stagnation that culminated another half century later in the destructive Islamic purism of Aurangzeb, who ruled for 50 years, is equally critical.

In what way was the sub-continent changed by two centuries of Mughal rule? Unfortunately many of the significant questions are barely asked, let alone addressed, and the effect of the Mughals on India's heterodox millions is dispatched in two very inadequate pages in the epilogue.

Instead, Eraly treats us to what another partisan school of history would describe as an "Orientalist" narrative of the kings and concubines of Mughaldom. For those seeking thrills in the emperor's harem or horror in the fratricidal and parricidal battles of succession, such material is abundant. There are endless accounts of battlefield victories and defeats with the attendant elephant charges and last-minute changes of loyalty. Eunuchs and dancing girls conspire and carouse throughout.

It is always fun to glimpse history's grandest personalities though the keyhole of their bedchambers or the crack in the canvas of their battlefield headquarters. But it is not serious history, although Eraly's well-argued preface gives the impression that it will be.

Certainly the book avoids making concessions to the retrospective nation-builders who dominate many of India's history faculties, in which a disturbingly large number of academics - both from the Marxist left and the Hindu nationalist right - place the objectives of scholarship a poor second to their immediate political objectives. Unfortunately, though, Eraly does little to advertise the merits of detached scholarship.

It would be a tragedy if in today's India the more extreme Hindu nationalists were allowed - as is their professed aim - to raze some of the hundreds of mosques the Mughals built on the sites of Hindu temples they destroyed.

Many of those sites also contain traces of earlier Hindu temples and Buddhist structures that were levelled by Hindu dynasties. Romila Thapar's masterful recent book, Early India, ends before the Islamic era, but it makes it plain that the destruction of temples - a highly combustible issue in today's India - was also the normal thing for incoming Hindu dynasties to do: temples that were patronised by outgoing royal lineages had to be destroyed because they were symbols of dynastic legitimacy. Well before Islam appears in India, Hindu dynasties had erased almost all the Buddhist and Jainist temples of earlier dynasties.

Surely political legitimacy in India has outgrown such acts? In an era when history remains potentially lethal, historians have a duty to place history in its proper context.

Edward Luce is the FT's South Asia correspondent

[Arvind]

Could that be because Indians themselves were a multi-racial society from very very ancient times?

Well I would say that the Indians are quite mixed from fairly ancient times.But I wonder if this alone has something to do with the Indian patterns of conquest. Certainly we were quite tolerant to diversity for a long time and were able to accomodate diversity as long as it came from pagan societies.

Lastly, does racial commonalty (or 'consolidating' by demographic invasion) always translate to long-term cultural imperial advantage?

My belief is yes thought it may not necessarily mean race as commonly understood: The British empire unravelled due to this very problem. The China empire has bounced back by the persistant use of Han waves. Dar-ul-Islam spreads principally through demographic warfare though the racial aspect is more complex there.

[Kaushal]

We are all tribals. That is good.

The difference (if any) beween tribes - jati, has always been known to be minimal. Even the percentage genetic differences are less than a fraction of a percent. The nature vs. nurture (genetics vs. environment) argument as we all know by now is decisively tilted towards environmental factors (access to a good education, electricity, clean water, nutritious diet). Above all is the inculcation, at an early age, of sturdy values and a character that stands up to adversity.

But i agree that the Y chromosome (passed on only by the male) should tell a lot about the prevalence of endogamous relationships, and dispel some prevalent myths.

[Arvind]

I guess this data pretty well nails the twin lies of Brahmins keeping themselves racially pure and being descendents of "Aryans". Our genes tells us that a lot of mixing was happening in our history but intolerance and rigidness crept in recently ... perhaps over the last thousand years.

Primarily could you provide evidence that these are twin lies of the Brahmins. How did you indict the Brahmins of lying even before seeing the data. Secondly, the data need not be releavant to resolving the issue of brahminical origins if you understood the Indo-European problem well enough. You have simply fallen to an age old trap of internalized propaganda. See K's article posted earlier.

[Arvind]

Originally posted by acharya:
Another falsehood
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com /StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1051390406873&p=1012571727169

Absolutely, India is free only in name, not in reality because those very Mogol monuments stand atop the true structures of the Indian people. That is why the destruction of that eye-sore, the Babri Masjid was a real sign of national awakening.

[Champs]

HH

Machiavelli in his celebrated work "The Prince" emphasizes that the most effective strategy of maintaining an empire is to "colonise" the conquered areas, i.e., by encouraging a part of the loyal citizenry of the state to settle in the newly conquered areas. These kind of settlements culminating in demographic dominance of the "core" civilization is the surest guarantee of the stability and resilience of the empire. Han Chinese cleverly followed this approach. And this is how China will eventually be able to quell any dissidence in Tibet/Xinjiang, i.e., by encouraging mainland Chinese to settle in Tibet and ultimately integrate it with the rest of the country. I wish India had done the same in the valley of Kashmir and some areas of North East.

[O Vijay]

HH, I meant to say "twin lies about Brahmins" not "twin lies of Brahmins". I know there is a big difference between the two sentences, so I going to edit my earlier post. Thanks for pointing it out. I think Kaushal understood what I meant to say.

Vijay

[Kumar]

Vijay,

Your conclusions are tenuous IMHO. Look at some other combinations on that website. For example look at the distance measure from European average to Indians (Brahmins and Vaishyas).