I won't be making a habit of regurgitating current events, but this time I had to because I was very annoyed that no media outlet I found could do the extremely simply task of simply compiling a list of all the reactions of world leaders to Castro's death without chopping up the quotes or excluding anyone.
Post on Deshbondhu based on his Gaya speech. Yeah, I'm not going along with the insane standard Bengali transliteration of "Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das". Anyway its too bad that he died and Gandhi lived instead.
Just put up the last installation of the Covert Lokayata series on poetry, drama, and modern secularism.
I had a suspicion that body horror in Japanese comics had some connection to Buddhism. Turns out I was correct about this.
Here is my take on the election, its relation to Modi's election, and the active role which Hindu Americans took in helping Donald Trump.
Did India have an Ancient Constitution? What does that even mean? See what Subhash Chandra Bose, Edmund Burke, Ram Mohan Roy and Dadabhai Naoroji had to say on the subject.
Nearing the end of this series. This is probably the section I personally find the most interesting, as if its true it means that the question of what happened to Lokayata actually matters in a practical sense.
Don't be fooled by the "Oriental Despotism" meme! Ancient India was filled with aristocratic warrior republics.
Just some short passages from Lysander Spooner. Really I just put this up to include the final block quote. It should be a satisfying read for anyone who is irritated by the British Empire.
Continuing in the Covert Lokayata series, a look at Samkhya, Vaisheshika, and a little bit of Vedanta.
I scoured the internet, (and some print materials) to find a whole bunch of beautiful pieces of artwork from Central Asia which directly draw from Hindu mythology either in subject matter or iconographical style or both. Very pretty stuff!
If you are interested in the history of Indian painting at the dawn of colonialism, check this out.
Hegel was an old German from the 1800s, so of course his statements about India and Hinduism come across to us as a bit bizarre and archaic today. But if you are willing to put that aside, his chapter on India is a fascinating and surprisingly insightful read.
I reread Richard Eaton's book on the Islamization of Bengal, and wrote some reflections on the subject. Really though, it is a post about religious spread in Bengal in general, of which Islam is the most recent wave. At least according to Eaton's framing of the issue.
In which I detail the method which Rammohan Roy used to enter Classical Liberal discourse, which at the time consisted of an intellectual community which presumed him to be a superstitious barbarian by virtue of his Hindu religion and his (Bengali) Indian race.
Lots of interesting anti-caste, heterodox, pro-female autonomy stuff in Hinduism. Its a shame that people often think that Manu Smriti, or a certain Brahminical outlook is the "standard" or the "official" Hindu position on something. The tradition is more anarchic than that.
Can you believe that nobody had made a map showing the Pandava and Kaurava alliances before? Well, now there is one. And some additional commentary on the significance of Kurukshetra in the broad sweep of Indian history. But mostly the map.
In which I ague that most modern variants of Hinduism are strongly influenced by the influence of British colonialism, both in the importing of British ideas, and also in the strengthening of the Brahminical elements of Hinduism, both of which have eroded the place of of folk, traditional, and particularly Tantric elements in Hinduism.
