Sikri's new past - It didn't start with Akbar, after all...

Excavation at Akbar's fort at Fatehpur Sikri reveals flourishing Jain and Hindu habitation 

If you thought the story of Akbar's fort at Sikri (that of Fatehpur fame) began with the emperor's visit to the sufi saint Salim Chishti you may have to think again. For right under the shadow of the walls of this World Heritage Site history is being revealed all over again.

It's a balmy spring morning and Ramesh Mulimani from Karnataka is busy consulting surveyor R.K. Tiwari about the topography of the spot. Kamei Athoilu Kabui from Manipur is 10 feet down in a freshly dug pit, scraping dust off a hearth which still shows black soot some 10 centuries after the fire was put out. Their boss, Superintending Archaeologist Dharamvir Sharma, looks pleased.

After all his hunch has paid off in an unbelievably short time. Within months of taking over as superintending archaeologist, Agra circle, in August 1999, Sharma managed to start a fresh dig in the vicinity of Akbar's abandoned capital. Two weeks later he and his team claimed that they had excavated enough evidence to push back the antiquity of the site by several hundred years.

They had barely opened a 400-sq m mound near the village of Nagari, some half a kilometre from the ramparts of the 16th century fort, when they found a sandstone chamber filled with decapitated and broken idols of Jain Tirthankaras. Many of these displayed clearly legible inscriptions giving the dates of their consecration as being around the 11th century AD. 

     

Then came even older finds - a red sandstone Ambika in the style of the Kushan sculptures found in Mathura's Kankali Tila going back to the 2nd century AD, some pieces of Gupta period pottery with typical mica dust and design (4th to 5th century AD). And there was more: a fabulous Saraswati (dated 1010 AD), a fragment of an inscription in Brahmi, numerous beads, fragments of terracotta toys and utensils.

By the first week of January 2000 the local newspapers were hotly discussing the story. And soon even the director general of the Archaeological Survey of India was claiming in Delhi that "never since the time of John Marshall has such an important find been unearthed".

Sharma offers a fascinating hypothesis. According to him an area of about 10 sq km around Sikri (called Saikarikya in Sanskrit inscriptions) has enough evidence to show that not only was there a flourishing and sophisticated habitation long before to the arrival of the Mughals, but in fact at places like Hadarani Baradari ochre-coloured pottery going back to 1200 BC have been found.

"Besides these, there are several prehistoric rock shelters in the vicinity similar to the ones near Bhopal," says Sharma. He asserts, "There must have been a nucleus of temple culture here as we have found many Hindu and Jain idols and also references to a Jain monastery."

BEAUTY UNEARTHED: 11th century statue
of Saraswati and other finds

Taking the cue from him, the local Jain Samaj chief and BJP treasurer Ashok Jain is now campaigning for the site to be given over to the Jain community for "restoration and conservation". Some 500 Jain sadhus and sadhvis are expected to converge on the spot on February 27 to make the same demand.

REMAINS OF ANOTHER DAY:
Decapitated idols of Tirthankaras recovered from the site

They have also invited the Uttar Pradesh chief minister to attend their rally. Already, there are ! those who have suggested that the desecration of the Jain-Hindu site at Sikri was the doing of Muslim conquerors. But there are just too many unexplained gaps in that theory. Sharma, on his part, maintains that "historical research is an ongoing process and no one can claim to have the last word."

One can only ' hope that history does not repeat its follies too often either.

Original Report: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/excavation-at-akbars-fort-at-fatehpur-sikri-reveals-flourishing-jain-and-hindu-habitation/1/243578.html

Dharm and religion..

..One concern from which everything in Indian thought flowed, and on which every movement of life ultimately depended was the idea of Dharma, order, which was not any positive order but the order taht was inherent in all life. Derived from the Sanskrit root word dhr, 'to sustain' dharma means That, whereby, whatever lives, is supported, upheld and sustained. The least that is involved in any realistic conception of Dharm/order is the condition that there be room in it for every expression of individual development based on his temperament, capacity and circumstances, provided the general flow of social life was not disrupted either by anarchy of ideas, or by the anarchy of individual desires.


In such a Dharmic society, idea of gods is just a secondary means, primary being Dharma, to sustain freedom and life in the SanAtan/eternal tradition of the east.

Dharma in fact cuts across the very polarity, religious-secular, which had affected the history of the modern West so deeply, and affects it even today. This polarity, of late, is imported in various societies along with the modern democracy and in absence of a proper understanding of the concept of "secularism" and "religion"...

Restoring India’s Calculus Crown (an Interview with George Joseph)

Restoring India’s calculus crown

Ananthakrishnan G.



A digital image of Madhava drawn up by the Madhava Ganitha Kendram, a voluntary association working to revive his works, with inputs provided by descendants of the mathematician-astronomer

George Gheverghese Joseph

 
Thiruvananthapuram, Feb. 24: George Gheverghese Joseph is on a mission to reclaim India’s pride of place in the world of mathematics. An emeritus professor at Manchester University in the UK, his book, The Crest of the Peacock; Non-European roots of Mathematics, has challenged the status quo and persuaded the West to acknowledge that a 15th century Kerala mathematician-astronomer named Madhava (Madhavan, in local dialect) had worked on the fundamentals of calculus — a vital tool for measuring time, making almanacs and finding directions at sea — almost two centuries before Sir Isaac Newton and his German counterpart Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were credited as its founders.

Kerala-born Joseph has some reasons to conclude that the southern Indian state may have served as a conduit for the transmission of Indian mathematics to Europe through Jesuit priests, though the evidence available is more circumstantial.
Joseph played an important role in purging the South African mathematics curriculum of its racial overtones post-apartheid but rues that the “colonial mindset” that “denigrated native contributions” and “politics” had clouded India’s efforts to honour its heritage.
The Telegraph caught up with Joseph at his holiday home near the Kovalam beach resort here. 

Excerpts from the interview:

Question: How did the West react to the conclusions in your first book, The Crest of the Peacock; Non-European roots of Mathematics?

Joseph: The perception of the West was a very pleasant surprise. I did not expect so many people to be so receptive to ideas. I think the reason they had not touched upon it earlier is because they did not have the information. The book received over hundred reviews by all sorts of groups. Not just maths educators, even activists reviewed it. What particularly moved me was the extent to which African Americans and Blacks took up some of the things in it after they realised they had a very rich history. For instance, the earliest mathematical artefact is available right in the middle of Africa, but nobody knows. It’s called the Ishango bone which is a type of lunar calendar and dates back to 22,000 BC, much earlier than anything of that sort found anywhere in the world.

There were a few critics, but nobody took me on on the maths in it. It was mostly the interpretation. There was criticism that I was devaluing Newton, Leibniz and the Greeks. But all I was saying was that there is that part of history which has been ignored and we need to reflect on. And also, how some of the ideas travelled to the West to, in fact, create the scientific revolution.

People who disappointed me were the Indians. Part of colonisation involves a form of brainwashing where you end up defending something because you think you have invested time and emotion in it. I was awarded a Royal Society Visiting Fellowship to deliver a series of lectures in Indian universities. But a number of those I met didn’t either want to know or were very critical. Subsequently, I also noticed that academics has been highly politicised in the country. So I suddenly find my views and conclusions either being approved by the Right who say, look here is a book that shows India is great, or being criticised by the Left, who claim that the book panders to the other side and contains not much of material analysis.

Q: What spurred your interest in Madhava?

Joseph: I always felt that from the little I knew, the mathematical tradition outside the European tradition was neglected. Even in Africa where I taught for a long time, children would ask me if there was any African link to the evolution of the subject and all I could point out to them were some Egyptian connections. But then the children would say Egypt is not Africa.

Later, when I became interested in the work of the legendary Srinivas Ramanujan and had gone to Cambridge in this connection, I met an eminent Newton scholar, Tom Whiteside. He asked me if I had come across the Kerala school of mathematics. I said no. He then referred me to a footnote by him of an earlier Indian researcher who had with his collaborators written extensively on the work done in Kerala on the infinite series. Whiteside suggested that I explore it further and that’s how I discovered the work of Madhava and his disciples.

Q: What exactly was Madhava’s contribution to mathematics?

Joseph: His works laid the foundations of the Kerala school of mathematics which flourished between AD 1,300 and 1,700. But he was only part of the wider Indian school founded by Aryabhata who wrote the masterpiece Aryabhateeyam in AD 499. There are still differences over Aryabhata’s birthplace, whether it was in the north or the south of the country. Madhava’s contribution was his work on the infinite series. Though Newton and Leibniz are credited with the discovery of calculus, the fact is one of its critical strands had been developed in Kerala more than two centuries before that. The West has now recognised this and accordingly renamed certain results relating to the trigonometric series, previously known as the Newton, Gregory and Leibniz series, as the Madhava-Newton, Madhava-Gregory and the Madhava-Leibniz series, respectively.

The irony is that we still don’t know much about Madhava, the man himself. An eminent mathematician from Oxford, Marcus Du Sautoy, recently made a series of television programmes on the history of mathematics. I was consulted on those programmes relating to the history of Indian mathematics, including the remarkable work in Kerala. He was particularly interested in finding the physical location of Madhava and his main disciples to add some footage of film. When he asked me I was clueless and somewhat embarrassed. But now I’m told that he hailed from Sangamagrama, a medieval town in present-day Irinjalakuda in Thrissur district. It is a shame that there is no memorial plaque at the place which would certainly attract maths tourists.

Q: How do you suggest the knowledge from Indian shores reached Europe?

Joseph: That was the subject of my third book, A passage to infinity — Medieval Indian Mathematics from Kerala and its Impact. I had undertaken a project on the topic and what I concluded was that a lot of the knowledge may have reached Europe through the Jesuit priests. We looked at a lot of archives in Rome and Lisbon, mostly Europe. There was no direct documentary evidence to prove this, but this may be because the documents may have been destroyed. A lot of Jesuit papers were destroyed by the Catholic Church at one stage and also there was an earthquake in Lisbon. However, there is strong circumstantial evidence as these priests were sent out with the brief that they should find new ideas on stellar astronomy, how to use the stars for calculations, how they would be of use for navigation. And India, as we know, was at that time much advanced in these areas through works of people like Aryabhata and Bhaskara. These priests used to move around in the court circles in Kochi whose royal family too boasted of astronomers like Sankararaman.

Q: Has India been fair to its mathematicians?

Joseph: The question to ask is if India would have recognised the work of Ramanujan, a failed college student from a relatively poor background, if he had remained in India.

Q: How did you get involved with the curriculum revision committee in Africa?

Joseph: Our family had moved to Kenya from Kerala when I was nine years old and I had my schooling there before we shifted to the UK. In Africa, I realised that the curriculum was much affected by racial bias. For instance, Black students were not expected to learn calculus because the apartheid government felt it was too abstract for them. Just before Nelson Mandela became President, a group of us were invited, including me, to help in the reform of the school and university curriculum.

Q: What ails maths education in India?

Joseph: Firstly, there is too much stress on examinations, that the exam becomes the end in itself and knowing the subject is not so important. Secondly, there is limited opportunity for people to do a PhD in maths (and, even worse, history of mathematics) which is why even the best minds opt for an MBA or move to the IT field. Thirdly, there is not much of an inspiration coming from the teachers because they are dealing with large classes and, in a number of cases, engaged in tutorial work after work. Also, the system of teaching is too didactic — that there is only one right answer and only one right way of doing a problem.

Source: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140225/jsp/nation/story_18018921.jsp

Media Corrective Required...Urgently!

Another immaculate 'Read' by Sankrant Sanu . This one goes out specially for my friends who label the BjP as the ' Right Wing ' party …. and also for those who think differently .

IS "RIGHT-WING HINDU-NATIONALIST" BALANCED AND FAIR REPORTING?

When we allow this flavour of reporting to go unchallenged we unwittingly weaken India’s ability to negotiate with the world on our own terms. SANKRANT SANU asks why avowedly Christian leaders in the UK and US are not similarly tagged.

As a new government is taking charge in India, it is time to reflect on the terminology used about India in the Western press and also by English-language Indian journalists writing in India and abroad.

Western news outlets routinely describe Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP as “right-wing Hindu-nationalist” in practically every news report. This is problematic for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it is not clear that the label “right” and “left” so easily apply to Indian politics and do not map clearly to Western political categories. Certainly no economically right-wing politician in the West would declare in their first major address after being elected that the “the new government is completely dedicated to the poor” as Modi did in his first meeting of the BJP parliamentary committee.

Nor is the label “Hindu-nationalist” entirely accurate, particularly since it is used pejoratively. British Prime Minister David Cameron, recently wrote in The Church Times, the leading Anglican newspaper, “I believe we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country, more ambitious about expanding the role of faith-based organisations, and, frankly, more evangelical about a faith that compels us to get out there and make a difference to people's lives.”

Now, it is worth remembering that Britian is not officially secular. It has a state religion and an official Church, the Church of England. Their head of state, the Queen, is also head of the Church. Despite Prime Minister Cameron’s clear espousal of Christianity, and its centrality, both legally and restated by him, in the conception of their nation, the Conservative party is not routinely called a Christian-nationalist party. To make this contrast even clearer, let us imagine that Prime Minister Modi made the statement:

“I believe we should be more confident about our status as a Hindu rashtra, more ambitious about expanding the role of Hindu organisations, and, frankly, more evangelical about spreading Hinduism to make a difference to people's lives.”

All hell would break loose in India if Modi were to say this. However, this is just a restatement of Prime Minister Cameron’s statement about Christianity and Britain. But for some reason, Prime Minister Modi apparently has to be tagged as a “Hindu nationalist” in every press report while Cameron is not tagged as a “Christian nationalist”.

An even clearer example is George Bush Jr., who made no bones about his faith as a born-again Christian. Bush explicitly loosened the purse strings so that federal money could flow to “faith-based” organizations. But he was not routinely described as an evangelical Christian in every news report. There is a misconception, however, that Bush was somewhat unique in modern American presidents. Every US president, Republican or Democrat, publically avows his Christian faith. Bill Clinton was Southern Baptist, a conservative Christian denomination and attended church every week till he went to college. He could “quote scripture with the best of them.” Jimmy Carter was a self-described evangelical born-again Christian. Obama also avowed “I am a Christian. I have a deep faith.”

Despite affirmation of (Christian) faith being practically a pre-requisite to be President of the United States, presidents are not tagged by their religion in every press report. We must start to question when Prime Minister Modi continues to be tagged as such.

This is not only the question of a level playing field. It also leads to a mis-understanding of India and its pluralistic nature. The BJP is not a Hindu party that will impose Manusmriti on everyone. People in Pakistan are very surprised to learn that the BJP has a Muslim general secretary and Christian MLA’s and MP’s. An improper equivalence is created, fanned by Indian writers in Pakistani newspapers, that the BJP is somehow the equivalent of its Jamaat-e-Islami, which is fighting to have Sharia law in Pakistan.

Now the odds of the Jamaat having a Hindu or Christian general secretary are, to put it mildly, quite low. But this incorrect equivalence causes Pakistanis to make statements like “unlike India, we have never had the religious right win an election.” This misunderstanding can become an obstacle to peace and also provide further impetus for atrocities on Pakistan’s vanishing Hindu minority. If you actually examined the parties’ official positions and religious affirmations you will find the BJP left of the leftmost mainstream political party in Pakistan. The BJP affirms its commitment to secularism, even if it derides its opponents’ flavour of it. A Pakistani party can only affirm its commitment to the Islamic state.

While we are on the subject of Pakistan, practically every Western news agency finds it necessary to use the phrase “nuclear-armed neighbours” in any article about the two. Perhaps it is time we start repaying that reminder when talking about “nuclear-armed neighbours UK and France” or in the case of the United States, the “only country to have deployed a nuclear weapon in war”, in every foreign policy report about these countries. Nor does every report dealing with US-China relations state they have nuclear warheads pointed at each other. We need to start recognising the messaging when “nuclear-armed neighbours” is repeated in every report, just as “right-wing Hindu nationalist” is. It is the Western gaze on the natives that they do not apply to themselves.

When we allow this flavor of reporting to go unchallenged we unwittingly weaken India’s ability to negotiate with the world on our own terms.

Sankrant Sanu is an author and entrepreneur based in Seattle and Gurgaon. He is a graduate of IIT Kanpur and the University of Texas and holds six technology patents. Follow on Twitter @sankrant

Landmark moment in Indian Media...

Not that the independent Journalism died with this takeover. But it has died slowly everyday and this is just the swelling of the body after death. I don't expect perfection, but media has lost its glory and dignity and it was seen clearly by the way they covered the whole 2014 elections. The topics they chose to debate and to exclude showed much.

In my opinion the main reason of this rot being the urge to be politically correct (which denies justice) and to seek permanence in high positions (withers new talent) and self-seeking behaviour (merit is ignored). People, just like politicians, just dont want to live life ahead. They want to retain the honey, money and position till the grave. There was a huge disconnect with the larger India and none of that seems to be going to change with the takeover. But, yes, it seems one thing will change- earlier one party and person who was made to be a demon may be looked from a different light...

For journalism, things have changed but yet remained same and will remain so until 1. some of the czars become truly professional and ethical2. media is delinked from corporate and,3. a wider debate on the correctness of profit-targets of media houses is held and resolved.4. A self-regulating working mechanism is implemented with some external inputs too.

Read more on the news here: 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/meghabahree/2014/05/30/reliance-takes-over-network18-is-this-the-death-of-media-independence/
Reliance Takes Over Network18: Is This The Death Of Media Independence?
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In two words? Quite likely.

India’s largest company Reliance Industries Ltd., which is owned by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, announced Thursday that it was taking over one of India’s largest media companies–Network 18 Media and Investments Ltd.

Network18 owns TV channels (including CNBC TV18, CNN-IBN, CNN Awaz), websites (firstpost.com, moneycontrol.com), magazines (including the license for Forbes India), entertainment channel (Colors, MTV and Homeshop Entertainment) among other businesses. RIL said it’s board approved funding of 4,000 crore rupees (or roughly $730 million) to Independent Media Trust (IMT), of which RIL is the sole beneficiary” for taking over Network18. (You can read the financial details of the deal here.)

Network18′s CEO, CFO and COO quit in the days preceding Thursday’s announcement. Earlier today the company’s founder and managing director Raghav Bahl and his wife, a director at the company, announced their exit as well, while there are strong rumors doing the rounds that the news division’s top editorial team too is on its way out. Indian newspaper Mint cited a few employees who described the situation as a “hostile” takeover.

Anger, panic and pandemonium aside, the takeover is a strategic move for RIL which is expected to launch its 4G network later this year and can use the wide range of content produced by Network18 to feed its telecom play. In its press release RIL said: “The acquisition will differentiate Reliance’s 4G business by providing a unique amalgamation at the intersection of telecom, web and digital commerce via a suite of premier digital properties.

This takeover, once combined with RIL’s telecom business, makes the combined group likely bigger than media baron Rupert Murdoch’s empire in India and bigger than any other media group in India. And that should raise some serous questions about it.

“If India’s biggest corporate conglomerate is also India’s biggest media company, what does it do to diversity of opinion, plurality of opinion, what it does do to unfavorable news coverage?” asks Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, an independent journalist and teacher who was a member of the Press Council of India where he co-authored a piece on “Paid News: How corruption in the Indian media undermines democracy.”

To be sure, India has several thousand newspapers and about 900 tv channels and a thriving social media. Despite that, there are only a handful of media companies that dominate the market and mainstream media still has a significant role in setting the agenda.

“What happens when big business interests get into the media business?” says Thakurta. “They influence what comes out into the public, what is heard and read…. [Suddenly] You have your large business groups, conglomerates determining what people read, hear, watch. It does raise concerns and questions about what happens to the voices of not just those who are contrary to RIL, but the marginalized?”

While the Network18 deal may be the biggest media deal in India, it is a very tiny part of the giant that is RIL. But the deal is important for other reasons, points out P. Sainath, an independent, award-winning journalist.

“It has the power to reach into every drawing room; the power to tell you what to read, see and think,” he says. “How will they [the Network18 journalists] have any chance of doing a decent story on the KG gas deal [where RIL has the rights to dig for gas and is in dispute with the government], the Radia tapes [taped telephone conversations between publicist Nira Radia and a former telecom minister and senior journalists where she's lobbying on behalf of several big corporate clients], how will they cover any damn thing? The greater the monopolization and corporatization of media, the less the space for smaller voices, differing voices, dissenting voices.”

RIL made its first investment in Network18 in January 2012 with a minority stake in the company via IMT. At the time it said it was merely an investor, recalls Thakurta.

“Now that Chinese wall has come crashing down,” says Thakurta. “Earlier the people who were investors are now the people who call the shots.”

Critics of the deal have also raised concerns about how this will impact the media’s coverage of India’s newly elected government. India’s corporate sector endorsed–and donated to–Narendra Modi and the BJP’s election campaign. So what are the chances that media companies–owned by some of those same corporate houses–will encourage independent reporting of its favored Prime Minister and government?

“Once upon a time the media took its role to question people in power very seriously,” says Sainath. “Media was the adversary. It would take on those in positions of power, whether in government or the corporate sector. Time alone will tell how that adversarial role will exist under these sort of corporate deals.”