Dear readers, we thank you for being patient with us and gently prodding us to overcome difficulties and persist in the difficult task of publishing a serious magazine of high standards.
Dear readers, we thank you for being patient with us and gently prodding us to overcome difficulties and persist in the difficult task of publishing a serious magazine of high standards.
This issue carries an excellent interview with Madhavi Thampi who teaches in the Department of East Asian Studies of the Delhi University and who has over the years taught Chinese history and language to hundreds of students at the university. India and China are a matter of much curiosity and study among scholars all over the world. Their rise in the first decade of this century is being keenly analysed. However outside a narrow academic circle, very little is known about the relationship between these two ancient civilizations over millennia. This interview uncovers a small part of this relationship regarding exchange of ideas, philosophy, trade and technology from the ancient Buddhist period to the colonial era and would have served its purpose if it provokes the readers to investigate the subject more deeply. We also carry two important book reviews by D P Agrawal and K Raghavendra Rao. Agrawal has done seminal work in researching history of Indian science and technology and has trained several youngsters to carry the work forward. Irfan Habib is a well known scholar of history of medieval India, who has written a book on Technology in medieval India. We are carrying the entire review, though a bit long, because of the importance of the work and the scholarship of the gentlemen involved.
There has been intense debate in anthropological and indologist circles in the west recently about Hinduism. Wendy Doniger’s “The Hindus-An alternative history” has aroused admiration as well as controversy. A reaction is “Invading the Sacred” a collection of articles contesting some of her interpretations and those of other academics as well, written with anger, passion and contestation – K Raghavendra Rao has obliged us by reviewing both.
As study material we have reproduced a scholarly piece which throws light on the fascinating Harappan culture and its geographic extent. Unlike most academic papers this is readable and enlightening even to lay readers.
We also bring to you the story of a young anti-colonial revolutionary, Baji Raut from Odisha.
Surkhraj Kaur has written a short story based on her experience of the stifling atmosphere in our college class rooms.
While presenting this issue in your hands we appeal to you to check out our website frequently. We are paying special attention to uploading content into it so that you would not need to wait three months or more to read the latest. More over clearly our reach increases many fold when we put the content on the World Wide Web. We hope with your contributions to the website www.ghadar.org.in becomes one of the important internet resources on the Great Ghadar of 1857, on Indian History, Philosophy, Science and Culture to millions of people.