April 2021
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Koneswaran, Tenavaram Temples and God Upulvan
Starting from a reader’s visit to two Sri Lankan temples, the author traces Sinhala place-names such as Gokkana and Devundara and the history of the god Upulvan, a Buddhist guardian…
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Open Thread – 4/17/2021
What’s going on brownz?
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Fringe Harbingers of Enlightenment – Literary Experiment of Ibn Tufayl
A new contributor introduces Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, a twelfth-century philosophical tale of an isolated autodidact, as a forerunner of Robinson Crusoe and a showcase for the Andalusian polymath’s…
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To the victors go the glory!
Introducing his steppe series, the author argues the subcontinent was stamped by the steppe: Indo-Aryans (about 15 per cent of ancestry), possibly Iron Age pastoralists, and the Muslims, who had…
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Open Thread – 04/10/2021 – Brown Pundits
What’s going on?
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Beards, Bigotry and Burqas
Recalling the jovial Sardar caricature of 1990s Indian entertainment, the author contrasts it with the bearded-Muslim imagery he grew up with, including a local mural, and reflects on how such…
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Monkeys and the Indo-Europeans – Revised & Enlarged
A revised and enlarged post on monkeys and the Indo-Europeans, prompted by a reader’s comment; nearly all of the text, which appears to be in Devanagari, is lost in conversion,…
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Monkey see – Monkey Do ?
A self-described layman’s rant a year into India’s lockdown, asking how different the global Covid response would have been without China’s example and puzzling over why Indian spikes came in…
