What's the deal with Indian history?
Oct. 21st, 2020 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyOK so I know basically nothing about Indian history. But I see every now and then references to how much less understood it is than (say) European or Middle Eastern or Chinese history. So as someone who doesn't know the area, I'm just wondering: In what way are the records sparser, and (to the extent that anyone knows) why is that?
Like, India has had writing for at least like 3000 years, which I think is comparable to many other well-recorded civilizations. And this is a civilization with social complexity, big cities, etc. Certainly we have plenty of ancient and pre-modern Indian texts; e.g. they had a developed mathematical tradition, certainly. So what's the deal here? What is missing compared to Europe or the Middle East or China that makes Indian history harder?
And then, of course, the question is, does anyone have any idea why this information is missing, but I figure there is a good chance that just isn't known. But as someone who doesn't know the field, I'd first just like to know just what it is that's apparently missing in the first place...
Like, India has had writing for at least like 3000 years, which I think is comparable to many other well-recorded civilizations. And this is a civilization with social complexity, big cities, etc. Certainly we have plenty of ancient and pre-modern Indian texts; e.g. they had a developed mathematical tradition, certainly. So what's the deal here? What is missing compared to Europe or the Middle East or China that makes Indian history harder?
And then, of course, the question is, does anyone have any idea why this information is missing, but I figure there is a good chance that just isn't known. But as someone who doesn't know the field, I'd first just like to know just what it is that's apparently missing in the first place...
no subject
Date: 2020-10-27 11:48 pm (UTC)1) is it possible we're judging this by European standards and that there's plenty of information out there that just isn't something the Western world "counts"? That perhaps even, to an Indian historian not influenced by those western standards, our history - especially the incredibly whitewashed/cherry-picked version the US tends to present of itself - is the one missing a lot of information? Like, we don't even know where the kids of hundreds of present-day families are that we separated at the boarder, we've got some issues with documentation of important information ourselves.
2) is it possible that what happened to large swaths of Indian history & culture was Britan's colonization?
no subject
Date: 2021-08-09 08:58 pm (UTC)(1) I've heard that one reason it's very hard to reconstruct information about ancient India (say, before ~600 BCE, i.e., before the Buddha and Brahmagupta and Panini and other famous sages) is that it's a lot harder to preserve written records in a humid/tropical climate.
(2) I do think there's a huge cultural invisibility cloak, like the other commenter suggested. By way of analogy: I find it much easier to dig up resources about Western classical music than about Indian classical music. (Though, I suppose the Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi web is not so invisible to us as the Chinese-speaking web, or the Russian-speaking web, or the Arabic-speaking web...)
One book about Indian history/culture that I've enjoyed has been Mark Rosenfelder's India Construction Kit. It's aimed at the (Western, English-speaking) conworlding community, so it's very casual and accessible, but he's also very scrupulous about details and references.
Would love to hear from you sometime. I'm moving to Boston in a few weeks for year 2 of my postdoc.
no subject
Date: 2021-08-12 07:37 am (UTC)#1 might work as an explanation if the problem were limited to periods that old, but I don't think it is?
It's definitely true that my knowledge of Indian history is basically zero. I'm just relying on the people I read to know what they're talking about!
From what I've gathered since writing this, a big part of the problem seems to be that while there are plenty of texts, there are few histories among those texts? (Which help a lot with putting things together.) That raises plenty of questions of its own, but at least as an explanation it's distinguishing.
Man, I haven't read any of Zompist's "Construction Kit" books (not counting the original short online version of the LCK :P ). Maybe I should, they seem like a decent introduction to a lot of stuff I've been missing... I've been reading acoup.blog recently, have you seen that? Of course his specialty is Rome and the Mediterranean, but it's just like, man, a hell of a lot of stuff about the pre-modern world I had no idea about...
Oh you're up in Boston! Cool! I'm in New York these days. Uh, there are several other PROMYS people here in New York who you'd know... Dan Echlin's here, as is Phil. Um, I'm pretty sure they were both counselors when you were a student, right? They're the only ones I can think of offhand. IDK, I guess if you're in math you'd also know other math people, but I wouldn't know who! So wait, what sort of stuff are you studying?
(Edit: Also Josh Zelinsky is in New Haven! I forgot he was there when you were.)
I didn't manage to find a postdoc anywhere, so I've got this programming job and am slowly getting math done, and my backlog written up, in my spare time. Andreas Weiermann out in Ghent wants me to come work with him, but he doesn't have a spot open right now; we'll see if that ever materializes. In the meantime, well... I finally have a complete draft of some stuff that Juan Arias de Reyna and I came up with like 8 fricking years ago, so, uh, I'll likely write more about that soon once it's ready to go up on arXiv. :) Hopefully I'll remember to post here, I don't really do so very much these days...
no subject
Date: 2021-08-12 08:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-15 09:52 am (UTC)~Minh-Tam
no subject
Date: 2021-11-05 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-06 01:46 am (UTC)