The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Dravidian is first attested in the 2nd century BCE, as inscriptions in Tamil-Brahmi script on cave walls in the Madurai and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu.
Sanskrit is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting effect on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.
Dasa is a Sanskrit word found in ancient Indian texts such as the Rigveda, Pali canon, and theArthashastra. The term may mean "enemy" or "servant," but Dasa or Das can also have the following connotations: "servant of god", "devotee," "votary" or "one who has surrendered to God." Dasa may be a suffix of a given name to indicate a "servant" of a revered person or a particular deity.
Chanakya was an ancient Indian polymath who was active as a teacher, author, strategist, philosopher, economist, jurist, and royal advisor. He is traditionally identified as Kauṭilya or Vishnugupta, who authored the ancient Indian political treatise, the Arthashastra, a text dated to roughly between the fourth century BCE and the third century CE. As such, he is considered the pioneer of the field of political science and economics in India, and his work is thought of as an important precursor to classical economics. His works were lost near the end of the Gupta Empire in the sixth century CE and not rediscovered until the early 20th century. Around 321 BCE, Chanakya assisted the first Mauryan emperor Chandragupta in his rise to power and is widely credited for having played an important role in the establishment of the Maurya Empire. Chanakya served as the chief advisor to both emperors Chandragupta and his son Bindusara.
The Arthashastra is an Ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, political science, economic policy and military strategy. Kautilya, also identified as Vishnugupta and Chanakya, is traditionally credited as the author of the text. The latter was a scholar at Takshashila, the teacher and guardian of Mauryan emperor Chandragupta Maurya. Some scholars believe them to be the same person, while a few have questioned this identification. The text is likely the work of several authors over centuries. Composed, expanded and redacted between the 2nd century BCE and 3rd century CE, the Arthashastra was influential until the 12th century, when it disappeared. It was rediscovered in 1905 by R. Shamasastry, who published it in 1909. The first English translation, also by Shamasastry, was published in 1915. After a dormant reception, primarily confined to the academic circles, the conversation around Arthashastra in 21st century has generated sudden global interest, especially amongst global power-predictors, who are trying to decipher what a rising India would mean for the world, as it is anticipated to reflect the indigenous model of Shakti as defined by Kautilya's Arthashastra. It has a unique approach to defining Power of the nation states.
Robert Caldwell was a missionary for London Missionary Society. He arrived in British India at age 24, and studied the local language to spread the word of the Bible in a vernacular language, studies that led him to author a text on comparative grammar of the South Indian languages. In his book, Caldwell proposed that there are Dravidian words in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, the archaic Greek language, and the places named by Ptolemy.
Indology, also known as South Asian studies, is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent, and as such is a subset of Asian studies.
The Yadava were an ancient Indian people who believed to be descended from Yadu, a legendary king of Chandravamsha lineage.
Dhana Nanda, according to the Buddhist text Mahabodhivamsa, was the last ruler of the Nanda dynasty of ancient India. He was the youngest son of Mahapadma Nanda.
The horse has been present in the Indian subcontinent from at least the middle of the second millennium BC, more than two millennia after its domestication in Central Asia. The earliest uncontroversial evidence of horse remains on the Indian Subcontinent date to the early Swat culture .While horse remains and related artifacts have been found in Late Harappan sites, indicating that horses may have been present at Late Harappan times, horses did not play an essential role in the Harappan civilisation, in contrast to the Vedic period. The importance of the horse for the Indo-Aryans is indicated by the Sanskrit word Ashva, "horse," which is often mentioned in the Vedas and Hindu scriptures.
Sir Herbert Hope Risley was a British ethnographer and colonial administrator, a member of the Indian Civil Service who conducted extensive studies on the tribes and castes of the Bengal Presidency. He is notable for the formal application of the caste system to the entire Hindu population of British India in the 1901 census, of which he was in charge. As an exponent of scientific racism, he used anthropometric data to divide Indians into seven races.
Indigenous Aryanism, also known as the Indigenous Aryans theory (IAT) and the Out of India theory (OIT), is the conviction that the Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. It is a "religio-nationalistic" view on Indian history, and propagated as an alternative to the established migration model, which considers the Pontic–Caspian steppe to be the area of origin of the Indo-European languages.
Colin Paul Masica was an American linguist who was professor emeritus in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago. Besides being a specialist in Indo-Aryan languages, much of his work was on the typological convergence of languages belonging to different linguistic families in the South Asian area and beyond, more broadly on this phenomenon in general, and on possible explanations for it and implications of it in connection with both linguistic and cultural history.
Bhadriraju Krishnamurti was an Indian linguist, specialized in Dravidian languages. He was born in Ongole. He was Vice Chancellor of Hyderabad Central University from 1986 to 1993 and founded the Department of Linguistics at Osmania University where he served as professor from 1962 to 1986. His magnum opus The Dravidian Languages is considered a landmark volume in the study of Dravidian linguistics.
The Dravidian peoples, Dravidian-speakers or Dravidians, are an ethnolinguistic group of ethnic groups native to South Asia who speak Dravidian languages and share Dravidian culture. There are around 250 million native speakers of Dravidian languages. Dravidian speakers form the majority of the population of South India and are natively found in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Dravidian peoples are also present in Singapore, Mauritius, Malaysia, France, South Africa, Myanmar, East Africa, the Caribbean, and the United Arab Emirates through recent migration.
Hindu scriptures are traditionally classified into two parts: śruti, meaning "what has been heard" and Smriti, meaning "what has been retained or remembered". The Vedas are classified under śruti.
The conquest of the Nanda Empire was a war fought in ancient India in the late 4th century BCE between the Nanda Emperor Dhana Nanda and by a force under Chandragupta Maurya led to the establishment of the Maurya Empire. In this war Chanakya was the mentor of Chandragupta Maurya. Little is known from historical sources for certain dating about the conflict.
The early Dravidian religion constituted a non-Vedic form of Hinduism in that they were either historically or are at present Āgamic. The Agamas are non-Vedic in origin, and have been dated either as post-Vedic texts, or as pre-Vedic compositions. The Agamas are a collection of Tamil and Sanskrit scriptures chiefly constituting the methods of temple construction and creation of murti, worship means of deities, philosophical doctrines, meditative practices, attainment of sixfold desires and four kinds of yoga. The worship of tutelary deities and sacred flora and fauna in Hinduism is also recognized as a survival of the pre-Vedic Dravidian religion. Dravidian linguistic influence on early Vedic religion is evident; many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda, which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian. The linguistic evidence for Dravidian impact grows increasingly strong as one moves from the Samhitas down through the later Vedic works and into the classical post-Vedic literature. This represents an early religious and cultural fusion or synthesis between ancient Dravidians and Indo-Aryans that went on to influence Indian civilisation.
The Rajamandala was formulated by the Indian author Chanakya (Kautilya) in his work on politics, the Arthashastra. It describes circles of friendly and enemy states surrounding the king's (raja) state. Also known as Mandala theory of foreign policy or Mandala theory, the theory has been called as one of Kautilya's most important postulations regarding foreign policy.
Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family is an 1871 book written by Lewis Henry Morgan and published by the Smithsonian Institution. It is considered foundational for the discipline of anthropology and particularly for the study of human kinship. It was the culmination of decades of research into the variety of kinship terminologies in the world conducted partly through fieldwork and partly through a global survey of kinship terminologies in the languages and cultures of the world.
