April 2022
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Episode 9: South India from 500-1100 AD
Shrikanth and Mukunda join Maneesh in the History of India series to cover South India from 500 to 1100 AD: the Chalukyas, Pallavas, Rashtrakutas and Cholas, their political and cultural…
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Book Review: Shrayana Bhattacharya’s Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh-India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence.
Maneesh Taneja reviews Shrayana Bhattacharya’s Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, which uses the film star’s fandom to tell the stories of lonely young Indian women with limited income and agency. He…
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Open Thread – 4/22/2022 – Brown Pundits
What’s going on? Some Twitter controversy around Aurangzeb.
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Episode 8: The Guptas and Classical Age of India
Gaurav Lele and Jay Vardhan, moderated by Maneesh Taneja, discuss the age of the Guptas in the History of India series: Samudragupta’s military record, the emergence of classical Hinduism, and…
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Legacy of the Gupta Age
Nachiketa argues that the Gupta age deserves recognition as a period of immense consequence even though ‘Golden Age’ claims are often retrospective, and compares its decline under Hun invasions with…
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A video on the Sintashta Culture
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The truth still matters
Razib Khan disputes a claim that vegetarianism was a Brahmin invention, arguing the standard account is that Sramanic movements such as Jainism and Buddhism drove the shift and Brahmin ritualism…
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Happy Rama Navami!
Razib Khan marks Rama Navami with a joke that he has read only two-thirds of an English Mahabharata and knows nothing of Rama beyond his presumed Y haplogroup.
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Against blood quantum as a measure of indigeneity
Razib Khan sets out the three ancestry streams behind modern South Asians (Steppe Indo-Aryan, Ancient Ancestral South Indian and an Iranian-farmer-related component) and argues that blood quantum is a poor…
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So what’s wrong with being kaala?
Razib Khan, prompted by a comment thread, asks why South Asians recoil from the word ‘kaala’ (dark) even when well-off and Westernised. He treats it as learned conditioning that should…
