Category: History
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Indians | Ep 4: The Ikshvakus of Andhra Pradesh | A Brief History of a Civilization
Archaeological sites like Keeladi have pushed back the rise of complex societies in south India to at least the 6th century BCE. In the late first millennium BCE, a ‘cultural package’ from Aryavarta began moving south. It would radically reshape the religions, languages, and social norms of south India. It brought religions like Brahminism and Buddhism, new ideas of caste endogamy and patriarchy, and cremation of the dead. A major channel for this northern cultural package was the Satavahana Empire, and a successor state, the Ikshvaku Kingdom. Their elites, from the tribe of Andhras, had earlier become culturally Aryanized.
The Ikshvaku Kingdom thrived from c. 220–320 CE. The sprawling remains of its capital city, Vijayapuri, and its monuments, were discovered only in 1920. This kingdom supported multiple religions, traded with Rome, and built the only amphitheatre found in ancient India. It hosted Nagarjuna, also known as ‘the second Buddha’, and founder of Madhyamaka, or the influential Middle Path school of Mahayana Buddhism. Curiously, Vijayapuri’s elite religiosity had a gendered bias—its kings mostly patronized Brahminism and sold themselves as descendants of Rama, while its queens and other wealthy women mostly patronized Buddhism and actively shaped its evolution. In this episode, I’ll also examine the changing religious landscape of India and the strategies used by Brahminism and Buddhism to win new patrons and followers.
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Indians | Ep 3: The Mauryans and Megasthenes | A Brief History of a Civilization
In 327 BCE, the Greek warrior Alexander of Macedon invaded the Punjab. He was forced to turn back after his army suffered heavy losses in fighting Porus. Soon after, the Greek-ruled Seleucid Empire arose west of the Punjab, and the Mauryan Empire to its east, with its capital in Pataliputra. This produced a freer flow of ideas between India and Greece, as in science, art, and philosophy—and a fascinating account of India by Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court. Megasthenes described the huge city of Pataliputra, its wooden homes, walls, and watchtowers; its bureaucracy, taxation and laws; its giant army; urban lifestyles, elite fashions and social norms. He noticed the emergence of endogamy and early castes in the Aryanized groups around him, and he saw Brahminism as more patriarchal than Buddhism.
Two generations later came Ashoka who presided over an expanding agricultural state, often at the expense of the forest peoples. Still, his public embrace of non-violence in midlife was significant and likely unique among the world’s emperors. He converted to Buddhism and sent missions to spread it far and wide. His public edicts can be seen as the earliest expressions of Indian secularism, in which the state attempts to fairly patronize all major religions. From the Mauryan period, we get monumental stone art and stunning sculpture, such as of Sanchi and Bharhut stupas, some with clear continuities with pre-Aryan forms and aesthetics.
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Indians | Ep 2: The Aryans and the Vedic Age | A Brief History of a Civilization
After the decline of the Harappan Civilization, waves of Aryan migrants arrived from Central Asia between 2000–1500 BCE. A nomadic-pastoralist people of lighter skin, the Aryans were culturally different from the Subcontinent’s settled farmers and forest tribes of darker skin. They brought along an early Sanskrit, proto-Vedas, Vedic gods, a priestly class fond of fire rituals and oral chants, new social and gender hierarchies, the horse and the chariot. Mixing with the locals forged a lighter-skinned elite that spoke Indo-European languages, or Prakrits. In the centuries ahead, larger political units led by tribal chiefs emerged in north India. War among Aryanized tribes like the Bharatas and Purus became common. From this substrate and its social conflicts came the early stories of the Mahabharata, c. 1000 BCE. Indo-Aryan culture and languages became dominant in Aryavarta, whose cultural and material qualities I’ll explore in this episode.
More than a thousand years after the Harappans, the next cities arose in the Gangetic Plain in mid-first millennium BCE. New states with money economies even flirted with democratic ideas. New hybrid cultures arose from the mixing of Indo-Aryans, post-Harappans, and ethnic groups whose ancestors had come to India much earlier. They forged new trades, lifestyles, and a thriving marketplace of spiritual and religious ideas. This prolific age—of the early Upanishads, the Buddha, Mahavira, Carvaka, Panini—would profoundly shape later Indians.
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Indians | Ep 1: The Harappans | A Brief History of a Civilization
The ruins of the Harappan (aka Indus Valley) Civilization were unearthed a mere hundred years ago. And what a discovery it was! It greatly expanded India’s civilizational past. The Harappans built the first cities in the Indian Subcontinent and a material culture that included advanced urban design, city-wide sanitation, and the first indoor toilets in the world. In this episode, I’ll explore its mature period, 2600–1900 BCE, at sites across western India and Pakistan. I’ll compare it with other Bronze Age civilizations, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and consider what distinguishes the Harappans from others—such as a much flatter social class hierarchy, and no clear evidence of temples, priests, big statues, palaces, weapons of war, or standing armies.
I’ll look at Harappan lifestyles and the stories that emerge from surviving artifacts: pottery, seals, figurines, toys, jewellery, sartorial fashions, social organization, dietary norms. I’ll discuss their metallurgy, tools, textiles, ships, trade, and burial customs. Their monumental work was the city itself, a marvel of engineering. In the excavated city of Dholavira in Gujarat, I’ll wander its streets and homes laid out on a grid-like plan. I’ll look at their achievements in water harvesting, storage, and drainage systems, as well as what may be the first stadium anywhere in the world! I’ll consider the languages the Harappans likely spoke, their undeciphered script, theories about their demise, and how their legacy still shapes us today.
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Deception All the Way Down
A review of a ‘documentary’ film on Doordarshan about India’s heritage. First published in The Wire (PDF).
A nation is an ‘imagined community’, wrote Benedict Anderson in his influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). A nation is imagined, he argued, because its members feel a sense of solidarity with one another, even though the vast majority of them are strangers. Nations are not natural or pre-existing entities, but are modern social constructs. They are forged by the dominant classes in each society, who emphasize certain cultural, social, and political ideas that ‘glue’ people into a sense of shared identity and belonging.For every nation, the past plays a pivotal role in creating the ‘imagined community’. Stories about a nation’s past, including stories about its origins, shape its members’ collective memory and identity, creating a ‘national consciousness’. Certain historical moments, figures, and symbols are elevated to a position of great importance within the imagined community. These help fortify the ideas, beliefs, and values that are said to underpin a ‘national identity’. This is also why nations fixate on history curriculums so much.
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Zoomorphising Humanity
[This essay appeared in “What Have Animals Ever Done for Us?”, an anthology put together by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in celebration of their bicentennial year. All essays, including ones by Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, also appear on the RSPCA website.]
India is known for its cows wandering the streets, but no less common are its feral dogs. On a December night in Goa, as I walked towards my hotel, one such mutt dozed next to the footpath. Lean, yellow, frizzy-haired. She glanced warily at me, while I stopped to empty my ‘doggie bag’ from dinner onto the pavement near her. After I stepped away, she ate every bite. The following night, she was there again, this time seated in the middle of the path, alert, between two of her friends. I was tickled when she approached me, dancing with merriment, glad I’d arrived as expected. Her friends, meanwhile, kept their distance, their heads low, their tails wagging as they circled round us. They weren’t begging for food; they were checking me out.Even though I’d only given a paltry gift the previous night, this happy dog had bragged about it to her friends. This wasn’t the first time I’d befriended a feral dog who then brought her friends to meet me. It wasn’t the last time I’ve felt a stray was trying to tell me about his social world or had communicated something about me to his fellows. Even in my casual observations of street dogs in my Delhi neighbourhood, I’ve noticed that those who claim human friends are sometimes granted a degree of special regard within their cohort, as if their pals think they’re cool. Sometimes this also provokes jealousies.
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What We Talk About When We Talk About the Future
[The 19th (and final) part in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
No, it’s not your imagination, this feeling that we are entering a time of escalating crises brought by Nature: more frequent and severe storms, floods, and forest fires; more debilitating heat-waves; mounting crop losses and failures; rising water stress, hunger, and related conflicts; unrelenting pest and disease threats for us, our “livestock,” and our crops. Our planet is moving beyond the stability of the Holocene—the narrow climatic range that enabled our modern civilization—to enter a much harsher climate regime, and its effects are starting to engulf us. Today, these effects are being felt much more by some than others, with weather related disasters primarily responsible for having forcibly displaced more than one percent of humanity from their homes by the middle of 2021—already an unprecedented human calamity. Ten times that number—eight-hundred and eighty million people—now lack sufficient food to eat, an increase of over a hundred-million hungry souls compared to two years ago. And if you worry that it might get worse, the answer is a hard yes: under the best-case scenarios, it will get much worse—and at a faster rate. This is according to the most comprehensive assessment of climate-change impacts compiled to date, part two of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report by Working Group II, released in March 2022. The report projects, for instance, that in Africa alone half the population—seven-hundred million people—may be displaced due to water stress by 2030. Earlier forecasts cited by UN agencies that a billion people could be desperately displaced by 2050 do not seem improbable.
Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Politics, Science, Video -
This Is Not the Zombie Apocalypse
[The 18th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
Early in the story of The Walking Dead—the enormously popular, post-apocalyptic, television series—sharpshooting everyman, Rick Grimes, finds himself cast as leader to a group of beleaguered survivors, who must navigate the malignant chaos of a world suddenly overtaken by zombies. Every comfort, convenience, and civic structure of modern American life has collapsed. The threat of death lurks beyond every hillock or behind any tree. Ordinary people are left to fend for themselves against overwhelming forces, with nothing but guns (and the odd pickaxe or crossbow) for aid. And sentimental attachments to other people only leave individuals more vulnerable to attack. In this world that has slipped the grip of civilization, Grimes works to keep a strain of justice and mercy aloft within his desperate band.But torn away from the cogency of his ordinary, 21st-century life, and cast into unrelenting danger and uncertainty, even Grimes’s kinder impulses are slowly ground away by his unabating experiences of horror and loss. His moral compass spins erratically. By the fifth season of The Walking Dead, the line separating Grimes from the threats he’s fought for years to hold at bay has worn distressingly thin. In fact, much before this, the show’s storylines and characters have already notably shifted their attention from the horrors of the zombies to the horrors of relying upon one’s fellow dislocated human beings for refuge and assistance in an ongoing crisis. Confronting the atrocities committed by the living profoundly changes Grimes and every member of his crew, as they also become more adept killers. Yet, uncannily, the social world they inhabit together doesn’t change much at all.1 New narratives or mythologies grasping for new understandings of their changed environment, moral quandaries, or identities have not begun to emerge. None among them bothers much about making a reliable living or teaching the children or searching for meaning. Oddly, they remain wholly fixated upon their enemies and armaments. Seemingly lacking in dreams, imaginative hunger, or pragmatic creativity, they don’t begin to re-conceive society in ways that take shape in collaboration with whomever and whatever is left. They remain, throughout, an eternally ragtag cadre of survivalists hoping or despairing for the world only as it was, rather than as they might make it.
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Stories of Collapse
[The 17th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
The peopling of Polynesia was an epic chapter in world exploration. Stirred by adventure and hungry for land, intrepid pioneers sailed for days or weeks beyond their known horizons to discover landscapes and living things never before seen by human eyes. Survival was never easy or assured, yet they managed to find and colonize nearly every spot of land across the entire southern Pacific Ocean. On each island, they forged new societies based on familiar Polynesian models of ranked patrilineages, family bonds and obligations, social care and cohesion, cooperation and duty. Each culture that arose was unique and changeable, as islanders continually adjusted to altered conditions, new information, and shifting political tides. Through trial and hardship, most of these civilizations—even on some of the tiniest islands, like Anuta and Tikopia, discussed in the preceding essay—persisted for centuries or millennia, up to the present day. But others faltered, failing to thrive or even to maintain continuity.Most Polynesian societies that met the tragic fate of famine and disintegration were on remote islands measuring but a few square miles. But size alone was not the decisive factor. In fact, the most famous case occurred on a substantially larger island of about sixty square miles, called Rapa Nui1, widely known as Easter Island. Despite its relatively generous size, Rapa Nui suffered certain drawbacks. Owing to its more southerly latitude, outside the tropics, it was cooler, drier, and windier than most Polynesian islands—suboptimal conditions for some of their primary crops. Freshwater sources were also few, relative to the island’s size, and sometimes difficult to access. And the cooler surrounding ocean didn’t support the shallow reefs more common to tropical seas, making the islanders’ survival dependent on deep-sea fishing.
Category: 3QD, Animals, Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Religion -
Stories of Continuity
[The sixteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
Was it inevitable, this ongoing anthropogenic, global mass-extinction? Do mass destruction, carelessness, and hubris characterize the only way human societies know how to be in the world? It may seem true today but we know that it wasn’t always so. Early human societies in Africa—and many later ones around the world—lived without destroying their environments for long millennia. We tend to write off the vast period before modern humans left Africa as a time when “nothing much was happening” in the human story. But a great deal was actually happening: people explored, discovered, invented, and made decisions about how to live, what to eat, how to relate to each other; they observed and learned from the intricate and changing life around them. From this they fashioned sense and meaning, creative mythologies, art and humor, social institutions and traditions, tools and systems of knowledge. Yet it’s almost as though, if people aren’t busily depleting or destroying their local environments, we regard them as doing nothing.Of course, it is a normal dynamic of evolution that one species occasionally will outcompete another and drive it toward extinction. But for most of their time on Earth, human beings were not having an outsized, annihilating effect on the life around them, rather than co-evolving with it. That evolution was at least as much cultural as it was a matter of flesh. What people consumed, how they obtained it, and how quickly they used it up has always played a role in the stability and evolution of any ecosystem of which humans were a part. How fast human populations grew, how they sheltered, what they trampled and destroyed or nourished and promoted—all of this affected their environment. Naturally, their interactions with the environment were always driven by what they wanted. And what people want is intimately driven by what they believe, as in the stories they tell themselves. One thing we can safely presume: those who understood their own social continuity as contingent upon that of their environment weren’t telling the same stories we tell today.
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What a Way To Go
[The fifteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
I began writing this series eighteen months ago to explore the human experience and human potential in the face of climate change, through the stories we tell. It’s been a remarkable journey for me as I followed trails of questions through new fields of ideas along entirely unexpected paths of enquiry. New vistas revealed themselves, sometimes perilous, always compelling. And so I went. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve come to realize that our present environmental predicament is actually far worse off—that is to say, more threatening to near-term human wellbeing and civilizational integrity—than most of us recognize. This journey is changing me. So when I now look at contemporary works of fiction about climate change—so-called cli-fi, which I’d hoped might provide fresh insights—so much of it strikes me as somewhat underwhelming before the task: narrow, shallow, tepid, unimaginative, or even dishonest.At the same time, a few conclusions have begun to coalesce in my mind. Some of these may seem controversial, largely because they run contrary to the common narratives that anchor our dominant understanding of how the world works—our stories of human exceptionalism, technological magic, and the tenets of capitalist faith. Indeed, many of my own assumptions and worldviews have been challenged, altered, or broken. In their stead, new ways of thinking have taken root, as I began seeing through at least some of our most cherished cultural fabrications to understand our quandary with a different perspective.
Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Art & Cinema, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Politics, Science, Video -
Toward a Polyphony of Stories
[The 14th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
Our human story has never been simple or monotonous. In fact, it has been nothing less than epic. Beginning from relatively small populations in Africa, our ancestors traveled across the globe. As they went, they mastered new environments, even while those environments were continuously changing—sometimes in predictable cycles, sometimes unpredictably, as the planet wobbled in its orbit, the sun flared, a volcano blew, or other geophysical events transpired. Born during the ever-fluctuating conditions of the ice age, early humans soon mastered a great variety of adaptive living strategies. They combined cycles of nomadism and settlement. They fished, trapped, followed game herds, ambushed seasonal mass-kills, or even forbade the consumption of particular species at various times and places. They tended forests and grasslands with controlled fire, spread seeds, shifted cultivation, pruned and grafted trees, fallowed lands, and followed seasonal produce, among other techniques, managing their local environments and recognizing that their own wellbeing was intimately tied up with the health of local ecosystems. Through these practices, each community relied upon diets that included hundreds of species of edible plants and animals, from palm piths to pine needles, sea slugs to centipedes, mosses to mongooses—far beyond the foods we ordinarily think of today—and developed material cultures and pharmacopeias that might have included hundreds more. Such flexibility and breadth of environmental understanding promoted resiliency among what grew into a great diversity of peoples over hundreds of millennia, many of whom managed to steadily inhabit a particular region, maintaining an unbroken cultural continuity over hundreds of generations.Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Religion, Science -
Namit Arora interviewed by Scroll
Scroll commissioned my friend and fellow writer, Abdullah Khan, to interview me over email. I enjoyed responding to his excellent questions. Read it here, or read it on Scroll.in where it was first published with the title below.
________________‘No one person gets to limit what it means to be Indian’: Namit Arora, author of ‘Indians’
To write his book, Arora travelled to the seats of the different civilisations of India
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, History, Justice, Politics, Religion, Science, Travel -
Stories of Wealth and Distribution
[The thirteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the world of Star Trek, no one ever goes hungry or lacks access to healthcare. No one wants for housing, education, social inclusion or any other basic need. In fact, no citizen of the United Federation of Planets is ever seen to pay for everyday goods or services, only for gambling or special entertainments. The Federation suffers no scarcity of any kind. All waste is presumably fed into the replicators and turned into fresh food or new clothes or whatever is needed. Yet despite ample social safety nets, there’s no end to internecine politicking, human foibles and failures, corruption and vanity, charisma and venality. The world of Star Trek appeals so widely, I think, because it presents us with something colorfully short of a utopia, a flawed human attempt toward a just, caring, and individually enabling social order. It imagines a society based on a shared set of human values—fairness, cooperation, political and economic egalitarianism—where basic human needs are equitably answered so that no one has to compete for basic subsistence and wellbeing. As the venerable Captain Picard has put it, “We’ve overcome hunger and greed, and we’re no longer interested in the accumulation of things.” Some Libertarian Trekkies have been scandalized to realize that Star Trek actually depicts a post-capitalist vision of society.But Star Trek’s world is premised upon the existence of a cheap, concentrated, and non-polluting source of effectively infinite energy. Obviously, no such energy source has ever been discovered (solar-paneled dreamscapes notwithstanding). And the replicator, which eliminates both material waste and scarcity, is a magical technology. The Star Trek vision is also a picture of human chauvinism and hubris, presuming H. Sapiens as the only relevant form of Earthly life. So it falls short of a vivid and plausible imagining of an ecologically sustainable, technologically advanced, and egalitarian human civilization.
Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Economics, Environment, History, Justice -
Namit Arora interviewed at Kalinga Lit Fest
I greatly enjoyed my conversation with Abdullah Khan, friend, fellow writer, and author of the novel Patna Blues (the screen grab below shows the introducer). It was hosted by the Kalinga Literary Festival (1 hr).
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Musings on the Anthropocene
[The twelfth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the late 1960s and early 70s, Pocatello, Idaho, was one of the fastest growing towns in the United States. It was, and still is, a bland little place in the arid montane region of the American West. I don’t know why it mushroomed then; it has since stagnated and even shrunk. Nevertheless, the summer I turned four, my family was one among many who moved to reside there. Our little red brick house, still unfinished on the day we moved in, was the last house at the end of a newly laid street, still half-empty of houses. Our street stretched like a solitary finger into a kind of wilderness, an austere, high-desert landscape that surrounded our foundling residential colony. From my vantage as a child, preoccupied with the flowers, spiders, and thistles that stuck to my socks, I would see this place transformed.Little did I know that this landscape was, in fact, already overgrazed and degraded, that some of the plants, which so quickly became familiars—like the Russian Thistle, aka tumbleweed—were actually invasive species. Despite that, it thrived. The undulating hillsides were coarsely matted with hard grasses and sedges, sagebrush, gnarled juniper, all hues of dusty green and wood. Here and there, yellow flares of prickly pear blossoms. Blood red Indian paintbrush splashed across the pale dirt. A sprinkling of white sego lilies.
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Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
[The eleventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the beginning, the god of the Biblical creation myths makes the Earth and sky. Over the next several days, he makes the sun, moon, and stars, grasses and fruit trees, most of the animals, and rain. Then, scooping up a bit of fresh mud, he molds a being who looks much like himself, a man, and into this homunculus he breathes life. As a dwelling place for this newborn Adam, he plants a lavishly abundant garden, filling it with beautiful and delicious plants. The creator tells Adam, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Then, realizing that Adam might feel lonely, the deity gives him cattle, fowl, and all the “beasts of the field.” Yet none of these quite seems a suitable companion, so from one of Adam’s ribs, god fashions a woman.Quite pleased with his handiwork, the divinity instructs his new humans on how to live. He tells them they must increase their population. They must also replenish the Earth, and in doing so, subdue it and exercise dominion over all its living things. The almighty then leaves the newlyweds alone to get on with their business of eating, procreating, replenishing, and dominating, which they apparently take to just fine. Indeed, neither of the pair has any memorable comment on their situation, until the day Serpent piques Eve’s curiosity, telling her that if she and Adam were to eat from the one forbidden tree, rather than die, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Now Eve takes new notice of this tree, understanding that it could make her “wise.” Enticed, she picks a fruit and munches it. Whatever she discovers then—new knowledge or wisdom or just fine flavor—is simply too good not to share with her husband and, despite their creator’s clear injunction to him, Adam follows his wife’s lead. Yet soon the hapless couple realize that this new state they find themselves in—their eyes having been opened—is indeed problematic. They seem to have transgressed some cosmic order and find themselves possessed now of a discomfiting self-awareness, of moral judgments and political motives, just like the god who made them—and distinctly unlike the beasts they lived among.
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Sex and the City in Medieval India
(This essay first appeared in The Globalist)
What explains the disappearance of erotic sculptures from Hindu temples in India?
Among the most captivating and enigmatic features of medieval Indian art is the explicit erotica on the walls of temples like the UNESCO world heritage complex at Khajuraho. However, modern Indian temples have no trace of it. In fact, most Indians today are so prudish that they feel scandalized by this imagery from their past. So what motivated it back then. And why did it disappear so completely? -
Namit Arora interviewed by the Asian Review of Books
In which Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, interviews me about ‘Indians’ (~40 minutes).
“We can sometimes forget that “India”—or the idea of a single unified entity—is not a very old concept. Indian history is complicated and convoluted: different societies, polities and cultures rise and fall, ebb and flow, as the political makeup of South Asia changes. Namit Arora, author of Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, details some of these changing cultures. From the early Harappans, to the Buddhist centers of Nagarjunakonda and Nalanda, and ending at Varanasi, Arora takes his readers on a journey through South Asia’s rich and diverse history. In this interview, Namit and I talk about the many different cultures featured in his book Indians. We share the stories of some of India’s illustrious foreign visitors, and what it was like for Namit to research these lost histories.”
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Namit Arora featured on Cyrus Says
I’m the sort who dreads even the thought of appearing on live broadcasts with AMA style audience Qs, but I quite enjoyed my conversation on Indians with Cyrus Broacha, the smart, funny, inimitable host of the podcast Cyrus Says. Do listen! (Apple, Google, Spotify, Adori, etc.)
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Culture, History, Humor, Politics, Religion, Travel, Video
