Indian History

In 1406 one of the many battles between the Vijayanagar kingdom and the Bahmani sultanate took place. If the medieval Persian historian Ferishta is to believed, the casus belli of the fight was a fascination of Vijayanagar ruler Deva Raya I for a goldsmith’s beautiful daughter living in Mudgal in the Raichur Doab , the region between the Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers. Thanks to its being a fertile land, Raichur Doab was a bone of contention between the rulers of the Vijayanagar and the Bahmanis as none of them wanted to forsake their claim on the region.  Since the girl in question was averse to the idea of marrying Deva Raya I, this infuriated the latter who laid waste some villages in the neighbourhood of Mudgal. This antagonized the Bahmani Sultan Firuz Shah who considered the aggression as an encroachment on the Bahmani territory. In retaliation, he attacked Vijayanagar. Though the war initially went well for Vijayanagar, in the end Deva Raya I was forced to make peace with the Ba

The Tarikh-i-Alfi (History of a Thousand Years) is a historical work chronicling the first thousand years of Islamic world history. Commissioned by Mughal emperor Akbar, the chronicle was written by a board of compilers headed by a Shia theologian Mulla Ahmad of Thatta. Mulla Ahmad had written a large part of the text.  Due to the animosity between Shias and Sunnis, Mulla Ahmad was murdered in 1588 in the street of Lahore by a Sunni nobleman, Mirza Fawlad, who lured him out of his house on the pretext that the Emperor had asked for his presence in the court. Later his body was exhumed by the Sunnis and burnt by them. After the death of Mulla Ahmad, Asaf Khan Jafar Beg completed the rest of the work around 1592.   Badauni was selected by Akbar to revise the manuscript and compare it with other histories.    

Pagal Panthi was a socio-religious sect whose members were mainly drawn from the Garo and Hajong tribes living in the Mymensingh and Sherpur districts of Bangladesh. The sect started as a resistance against local zamindars and with the passage of time established itself as bulwark against the British colonial rule.  Pagal Panthi was founded by Karim Shah, a darvesh or mendicant. After his death in 1813 the reins of the movement passed on to his son Tipu Shah or Tipu Pagal who in 1825 led a band of armed followers in plundering the houses of the zamindars of Sherpur. He organized peasant rebellions. After Tipu Shah's death in 1852, though the movement lingered on, it began to lose momentum and was finally put down by the British.

Close on the heels of Telangana's 13th-century Ramappa Temple receiving the title of World Heritage Site during the ongoing 44th session of the UNESCO's World Heritage Committee in Fuzhou in China, now the Harappan city of Dholavira in the Bhachau taluka of Kutch district in Gujarat has been inscribed on the list.   Dholavira is the  first Indus Valley Civilisation site in India  to be bestowed  the coveted title by UNESCO.  The archeological site of Dholavira is one of the two largest Harappan settlements in India. Rakhigarhi in Haryana is the other larger Indus Valley Civilization (also known as Harappan civilisation) site.  Locally known as Kotada timba, meaning a large fort, Dholavira was first explored by ASI’s J P Joshi in 1968. However, it was excavated extensively by RS Bisht in the 1990s.  Dholavira is one of the most well-preserved urban settlements from ca. 3000-1500 BCE. The site comprises a cemetery and  a fortified city .  Dholavira  had a  sophisticated water m

Telangana's 13th-century Rudreswara temple, more famously known as Ramappa Temple, has been bestowed the much-coveted title of World Heritage Site by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee.  Ramappa Temple is a glowing specimen of the exquisite architecture patronized by Kakatiya kings who ruled over an area corresponding to the modern day Andhra Pradesh, Telangana,  eastern Karnataka  and parts of southern Odisha from the late 12th to early 14th centuries AD.     Built in 1213 AD during the reign of the greatest Kakatiya ruler Ganapati Deva (ruled 1199–1262) by his general Recharla Rudra, the Ramappa Temple is located in a valley at the village of Palampet, approximately 77 km away from Warangal and 200km north-east of Hyderabad.  Mandapa inside Ramappa temple  /  Copyright:  © ASI Venetian traveller Marco Polo, who visited this Kakatiya temple during the reign of his successor Rudrama Devi, had described the temple as the "brightest star in the galaxy of medieval temples of

                                                         Bal Gangadhar Tilak / Image credit Today India is celebrating the 165th birth anniversary of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a leading light of Indian freedom struggle.  Of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Edwin Samuel Montagu, British Secretary of State for India between 1917 and 1922, said, "Tilak is at the moment probably the most powerful man in India". One of the famous triumvirate called “Lal-Bal-Pal”, Bal Gangadhar Tilak was born on July 23, 1856 in Ratnagiri district in the Konkan region of Maharashtra.  Bal Gangadhar Tilak was educated in Poona where had co-founded Fergusson College, a landmark educational institution in Maharashtra. A scholar in mathematics, law and Sanskrit, Tilak was one of the founders of the Deccan Education Society in 1884, with Gopal Ganesh Agarkar,   Madhavrao Namjoshi  and  Vishnushastri Chipalunkar   being the other members.  During Home Rule movement which he started in 1914 Bal Gangadhar was given the ep

                             Buddha's disciple Mahākāśyapa meets an Ājīvika / Wikimedia Commons  Ajivikas were a religious sect founded in the 5th century BC by Goshala Maskariputra, a contemporary of the Buddha and Mahavir . The doctrines of the Ajivikas have come to us only from Buddhist and Jain texts which are highly critical of this sect. Naturally enough, they were the chief rivals of Buddhists and Jains. The cardinal point of the doctrines of the Ajivikas was a belief in the rule of the principle of order, Niyati or fate. Hence, there was no room for human volition. The Ajivika sect enjoyed its heydays during the Mauryan rule under Ashoka and his successor Dasharatha. Two of the Barabar caves in Gaya in Bihar were dedicated by Ashoka to the monks of Ajivika sect. Dasharatha is also credited with the dedication of three caves in the Nagarjuni Hills, near Barabar, to them.  This strictly deterministic sect survived until fourteenth century in South India where the  Ajivika mo