Category: Video
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A talk on Marco Polo’s India of the 13th century
Last month, I was invited to speak about Marco Polo at the sixth annual Indology Festival organized by the Tamil Heritage Trust. The theme this year was “Wanderers and Witnesses: Travellers’ Tales of India” and the festival team had invited various “scholars, authors, and experts to explore how India was perceived, experienced, and recorded by travellers from distant lands through the centuries.”
Twelve talks happened at #THTIndoFest2025 over six evenings, 16–21 June 2025. My talk on Marco Polo (~90 mins, with Q&A) is embedded below but also check out others who spoke at this nice history festival (YouTube Playlist).
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“Indian Civilization is an Idea But Also an Enigma”: Karan Thapar interviews Namit Arora
I was honored and delighted to receive an invitation from Karan Thapar himself, one of the sharpest, most incisive, and intellectually astute professional interviewers in India today. He wanted to discuss the web series Indians on his show. But I’m also media-shy, and right after saying yes, I grew anxious about the interview.
Well, I think it turned out alright. 🙂 Thapar asked about 15 questions and skillfully summarized at several places what I’d said in long-winded ways, illustrating once again the basis for his high reputation and numerous awards. See for yourself!
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Exploring India’s Past: From Al-Beruni to Marco Polo and Ibn-Battuta
I was recently invited to participate in a forum called The Black Hole, an “educational and intellectual space” in Islamabad whose goal is to further science, art, and culture in Pakistan. It is run by Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist, author, and secularist known for his vocal and courageous advocacy of scientific temper and progressive values, and who I’ve long admired. He invites authors and thinkers to present and interact with his live audience.
I was delighted by the invitation and overcame my enormous media-shyness to join this event. The session, held on 24 March, began with an introduction by Pervez Hoodbhoy, followed by a screening of Episode 7 of Indians (Alberuni and Marco Polo in India) and a Q&A interaction in Urdu/Hindi/English that lasted over an hour.
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Indians | Ep 10: The Faiths of Varanasi | A Brief History of a Civilization
Varanasi, or Banaras, is among the world’s oldest living cities. Its archaeological finds go back to the 9th century BCE. Emerging in history as Kashi, Varanasi became an early centre of learning. The Buddha preached his first sermon here, which effectively launched Buddhism. The city has an impressive history of religious pluralism and still hosts Brahminical Hinduism, various major and minor faiths and sects of old India, shrines to sundry matas and folk gods, and many flavours of Islam: Shia, Sunni, Sufi, Ahmadiyya. Located on the left bank of the Ganga, it’s the city of Shiva, of seekers and pilgrims, Pirs and Aghoris, death and instant moksha. Muslims form 30% of its people and most of its weaving industry; their Hindu ancestors made Varanasi famous for textiles even in ancient times.
Foreigners like Xuanzang, Alberuni and Bernier left accounts of Varanasi. How do scholars today view religious conversions and temple desecrations in the city under Muslim rulers? In these centuries, popular religion—including Bhakti and Sufism—thrived in Varanasi with locals like Tulsidas, Kabir and Ravidas. It was Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, composed in the 1570s during Akbar’s rule, that turbo-charged Rama’s career as a god in north India. The city then also became a major centre of Indo-Persian culture, co-created by Hindus and Muslims at both elite and commoner levels. I’ll close with a few words on its present.
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Indians | Ep 9: The Mughals and Bernier | A Brief History of a Civilization
The Mughal Empire was founded in 1526 by Babur, who was part of a long line of people—since at least the Indo-Aryans—to have entered and settled in the subcontinent. It grew to become the largest, most opulent empire yet in India. As with most long-lasting, multi-ethnic, and multilingual empires, most Mughal rulers too espoused pragmatic ideals, especially Akbar and Jahangir. Co-opting elites from diverse groups of Hindus into their administration, they presided over a brilliant fusion of Indo-Persian culture and syncretic creations in art, architecture, literature, music, dance, painting, cuisine, dress, crafts, and more.
In 1658, a French doctor, François Bernier, came to Delhi as a physician to Dara Shikoh, and wrote about the bloody war of royal succession and the first decade of Aurangzeb’s rule. Bernier’s insightful account describes Mughal courtly culture in Delhi, the economic condition of Indians, their science and intellectual life, and Hindu cultural and religious customs. Scholars routinely critique the Mughal Empire’s record on many fronts, but the Mughals have lately also attracted much cultural vilification, especially from Hindu nationalists. They allege that the Mughals persecuted and forcibly converted Hindus to Islam on a large scale, and indiscriminately desecrated tens of thousands of temples. Is that true? I’ll explore the evidence behind such allegations—and a lot more—in this episode.
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Indians | Ep 8: The Vijayanagar Empire | A Brief History of a Civilization
The Vijayanagar Empire (1336–1565) once ruled much of south India. Foreigners have left vivid accounts of its capital city, aka Vijayanagar—its grand temples, palaces, royal baths, audience halls, Islamic quarter, bazaars, military might, and cosmopolitanism. Considered the birthplace of Carnatic music, Vijayanagar also evolved syncretic forms of architecture, governance, and courtly attire. Folk tales abound of its famous king, Krishnadevaraya, and his minister, Tenali Raman, who had a clever solution to every problem. The city’s remains now lie near Hampi village, in a beautiful rocky landscape by the Tungabhadra River.
How did Vijayanagar acquire all the wealth that impressed foreign travellers? Their eyewitness accounts—and contemporary scholars—reveal much about its economy, social customs, big festivals, and the cloistered lives of its elite women. I’ll describe what’s known about its trade, taxation, governance, policing, crime and punishment. I’ll also look at Vijayanagar’s religious landscape and courtly norms, its eager embrace of Persianate culture, and its war machine and shifting military alliances in which religion mattered little. And finally, the causes of the empire’s massive defeat at the battle of Talikota. Hindu nationalists today fondly imagine Vijayanagar as a self-conscious bastion of Hinduism bravely resisting the ‘onslaught of Islam’. Is that true? As we’ll see, history is messy, and it often confounds sectarian readings of the past.
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Indians | Ep 7: Alberuni and Marco Polo in India | A Brief History of a Civilization
In the early second millennium, two famous travellers visited India: Alberuni and Marco Polo, who’ve left behind vivid impressions of social life. Alberuni, a great scientist and scholar of the Persian ‘Golden Age’, was in north India between 1017–30, when Mahmud of Ghazni was raiding temples. Led by his own curiosity, Alberuni spent thirteen years studying Indian thought and society. He learned Sanskrit, studied the works of Brahminism, and sought out learned men to clarify his doubts. In 1030, he published his magnum opus, Alberuni’s India, containing sharp insights into Brahminical religion, scriptures, caste, marital norms, festivals, inheritance, taxes, crime and punishment, etc. He also assessed the quality of the ‘Hindu sciences’. Alberuni’s portrait of India is so perceptive that he deserves to be called the ‘first Indologist’.
Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant–adventurer. Returning home from China in 1292, he stopped in south India. He landed in the kingdom of the Pandyas, near modern Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. He spent a few months going around the coast, finally sailing out of Gujarat. Marco Polo was less scholarly and more gullible than Alberuni, but he still astutely recorded many practices of religion and caste, customs and professions, norms of beauty and sexuality. These travellers add colour and depth to our understanding of medieval India, with rich insights into how much has—or hasn’t—changed.
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Indians | Ep 6: Khajuraho and the World of Tantra | A Brief History of a Civilization
Khajuraho was the capital of the Chandelas who built 85 temples between 900–1150 CE. The 25 that survive are now famed for their fine sculpture, including graphic sex on their walls. In the late first millennium, such temples arose across India, at Badami, Mathura, Konark, etc. Who built them and why? What sort of a worldview puts explicit sex next to their gods? How did a dominant religious culture that glorified austerity, renunciation, and asceticism as the path to God, accept such sexual imagery—on temples, no less? And how did Indians of that era turn into today’s woeful prudes easily scandalised by such erotica, no hint of which appears on their modern religious monuments?
Clearly, Indian religious culture then was very different. A key difference was Tantra, whose pre-historic roots go back to non-Aryan folk traditions. Tantra revered the idea of fertility, and saw sexual love as a path to spiritual progress and liberation. Rising from below, Tantra fused with Jainism, Buddhism, the Puranic sects of Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta, and inspired sexual imagery on their monuments. The sex-positive, anti-caste, and goddess-centric folk culture of Tantra was also the soil that sustained the secular hedonism of the elites and the Kamasutra. But then came a huge conservative blowback within Hinduism that decimated Tantra. Discover the lost world of Khajuraho, the influence of Tantrism in early medieval India, and its decline.
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Indians | Ep 5: Nalanda and the Decline of Buddhism | A Brief History of a Civilization
Nalanda was a Buddhist monastery founded in the 5th century during the Gupta period (319–543 CE)—a creative age for literature, art, architecture, maths and science. Nalanda became the greatest centre of Buddhist learning in the world, lasting more than 800 years until the 13th century. It attracted student monks from across Asia, including three from China whose travel accounts contain fascinating insights into the social life of India and academic life at Nalanda in the 5–7th centuries. They describe urban life, laws, medicine, obsessions with purity and pollution, food taboos, untouchability and religious conflicts. They relate the rhythms of daily life at Nalanda, its curriculum, star teachers, academic debates, funding sources and more.
In this episode, I’ll also explore the many causes for the decline of Buddhism in India, starting in the second half of the first millennium. By the time of the Turko-Persian invasions, most Buddhist sites had already been abandoned, destroyed, or converted into Brahminical sites across much of India. Buddhist artifacts and texts were wiped out and Buddhism vanished from India’s public memory. By the early colonial period, Indians had even forgotten that a man called the Buddha had existed in their past! Only in the 19th century did Indians rediscover Nalanda and their amazing Buddhist heritage through archaeology, texts that survived in foreign lands, accounts of Chinese and Tibetan monks, and other sources.
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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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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 -
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 -
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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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 -
Herbert Fingarette on mortality
What is the point of it all, asks Herbert Fingarette, a philosopher, in this moving reflection on life and death. He “once argued that there was no reason to fear death. At 97, his own mortality began to haunt him, and he had to rethink everything.” (18 mins)
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Namit Arora on Indians: The Avid–BLF Lecture
I spoke about Indians in an online lecture, my first one based on the new book (1:08 hr). Hosted by Avid Learning and supported by the Bangalore Lit Fest, I delivered it on 25 Feb to listeners on Zoom (occasional choppy audio). If history or Indians interest you, check it out.
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