Chishtī Muʿīn al-Dīn Ḥasan Sijzī (1143–1236), known more commonly as Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī or Moinuddin Chishti, or by the epithet Gharib Nawaz, or reverently as a Shaykh Muʿīn al-Dīn, Muʿīn al-Dīn, or Khwāja Muʿīn al-Dīn by Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, was a Sunni Muslim preacher, ascetic, religious scholar, philosopher and mystic from Sistan, who eventually ended up settling in the Indian subcontinent in the early 13th-century, where he promulgated the famous Chishtiyya order of Sunni mysticism. This particular tariqa (order) became the dominant Muslim spiritual group in medieval India and many of the most beloved and venerated Indian Sunni saints were Chishti in their affiliation, including Nizamuddin Awliya and Amir Khusrow.
Unani or Yunani medicine is Perso-Arabic traditional medicine as practiced in Muslim culture in South Asia and modern day Central Asia. Unani medicine is pseudoscientific. The Indian Medical Association describes Unani practitioners who claim to practice medicine as quacks.
The Dom, also known as Domra, Domba, Domaka, Dombara and Dombari, are castes, or groups, scattered across India. Dom were a caste of drummer. According to Tantra scriptures, the Dom were engaged in the occupations of singing and playing music. Historically, they were considered an untouchable caste called the Dalits and their traditional occupation was the disposal and cremation of dead bodies. They are in the list of Scheduled caste for Reservation in India in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and West Bengal.
Urvashi Butalia is an Indian feminist writer, publisher and activist. She is known for her work in the women's movement of India, as well as for authoring books such as The Other Side of Silence: Voices from and the Partition of India and Speaking Peace: Women's Voices from Kashmir.
Dholavira is an archaeological site at Khadirbet in Bhachau Taluka of Kutch District, in the state of Gujarat in western India, which has taken its name from a modern-day village 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) south of it. This village is 165 km (103 mi) from Radhanpur. Also known locally as Kotada timba, the site contains ruins of a city of the ancient Indus Valley civilization. Earthquakes have repeatedly affected Dholavira, including a particularly severe one around 2600 BC.
Malhotra is a surname of the Dhai Ghar sub-group of Khatris from Punjab. Mehrotra is the modified version of Malhotra.
Rahi Masoom Raza was an Indian Urdu and Hindi poet and writer and a Bollywood lyricist. He won the Filmfare Best Dialogue Award for the film Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki in 1979, followed by Mili and Lamhe. He is best known for the screenplay and dialogues of 1988 TV series Mahabharat.
Hindush was a province of the Achaemenid Empire in lower Indus Valley established after the Achaemenid conquest circa 500 BC. According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, it was the "easternmost province" of the empire. It is believed to have continued as a province until the invasion of the empire by Alexander the Great circa 326 BC.
Janice Pariat is an Indian poet and writer. She was born in Assam and grew up in Shillong, Meghalaya.
S. R. Chishti is a tabla player of Lucknow gharana (tabla) and composer. S R Chishti completed his PhD from Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University, Agra in music (Tabla).
Jyoti Arora is an Indian author of several books, including Dream's Sake (2011), Lemon Girl (2014) and You Came Like Hope (2017). She is also a tech blogger.
In 2016 and 2017, there was a significant debate on how topics related to South Asia were represented in California middle school textbooks—a follow-up to a related set of debates that took place from 2005 to 2009. These new debates were fueled by varying religious groups who felt the 2009 changes were incorrect, or pushed political agendas. The California Department of Education runs a public process to update the history and social sciences curriculum frameworks, which help guide the textbooks that publishers develop for students. Starting in 2016, groups submitted textbook revisions dealing with a variety of issues related to histories of South Asia, India, Hinduism, Sikhism, Dalits, Muslims, Ravidassias, the Indus Valley civilization, and the rights of women, as taught in California 6th and 7th grade history and social science textbooks. The Department of Education made final decisions on the topics in 2017, retaining content on the caste system, and referring to all of historical South Asia as India, among many other decisions.
Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist, author, and Professor and holds the Chair in Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University. She is the co-founder of FemLab, a feminist future of work initiative. Her work focuses on internet usage in the Global South, specifically on global digital cultures, inequality and data governance. She is Indian, American, and Irish and currently lives in Amsterdam.
Permanent Black is an independent publishing press headquartered in Ranikhet, India. It was founded in 2000 by novelist Anuradha Roy, and her husband, author Rukun Advani. It is considered one of India's major academic imprints and has tied up with the Ashoka University to publish a scholarly series titled "Hedgehog and Fox" edited by the historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee. It has published books by noted scholars, including Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Muzaffar Alam, Romila Thapar, Tanika Sarkar, Sudipta Kaviraj, Sheldon Pollock, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Nivedita Menon, Ramachandra Guha, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Mukul Sharma, Kaushik Basu and Partha Chatterjee. Their books are distributed by the Indian publishing house Orient Blackswan. It has in the past partnered with various foreign university presses, such as University of California Press, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Chicago Press, University of Washington Press, and State University of New York Press to co-publish their titles in Europe and the USA.
The Shakti Bhatt Prize is a literary award established in 2007 in memory of Indian publisher, Shakti Bhatt. Between 2008 and 2019, it was awarded for first books published in India by an author of any age in the genres of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and drama. From 2020 onward, the Prize has been awarded in recognition of a writer's body of work, instead of a first book.
Shambhudan Gadhvi is a former master clerk and amateur geologist from Gujarat who discovered the Indus valley site of Dholavira in the early 1960s.
Alpa Shah is a British social anthropologist and writer specialising in South Asia. She is Professor of Anthropology at London School of Economics and author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas. a finalist for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Shah has written for newspapers and magazines in the UK, US and India, including the New Statesman, Foreign Policy, New York Review of Books, The Times of India and Hindustan Times. Shah has also made a radio documentary on ‘India’s Red Belt’ for BBC Radio 4 Crossing Continents, reported for BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent, and co-curated a major photographic exhibition ‘Behind the Indian Boom’.
Mere Gharib Nawaz is a 1973 Indian Muslim social film directed by G. Ishwar and produced by Mehboob Sarwar. The film is starred by Jagdeep, Bharat Bhushan, Jalal Agha, Mukri, Mumtaz Begum, Chandrashekhar Dubey, Veena, Anwar Ali, Renuka and Agha. The film was dedicated to the Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer Sharif.
Shubhangi Swarup is an Indian author, journalist and educator. She is best known for her bestselling novel Latitudes of Longing, which was published in 2018 by HarperCollins and was declared a bestseller soon after its release in India, and Sweden.
Latitudes of Longing is an award-winning debut novel by Indian author and journalist Shubhangi Swarup. One of the first Indian novels to engage with environmental changes, it is a “novella in four parts” featuring nature as a living, heaving entity. A literary fiction, the novel is set in the Indian subcontinent that follows the interconnected lives of its characters searching for true intimacy.
