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In The Vedic People, well-known astro-physicist Rajesh Kochhar provides answers to some quintessential questions of ancient Indian history. Drawing upon and synthesizing data from a wide variety of fields linguistics and literature, natural history, archaeology, history of technology, geomorphology and astronomy Kochhar presents a bold hypotheses by which he seeks to resolve several paradoxes that have plagued the professional historian and archaeologist alike.
Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.
The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by at least 700 million people throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands. They have a claim to great antiquity, with the earliest Vedic Sanskrit texts dating to the end of the second millennium B.C. With texts in Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan, this language family supplies a historical documentation of language change over a longer period than any other subgroup of Indo-European. This volume is divided into two main sections dealing with general matters and individual languages. Each chapter on the individual language covers the phonology and grammar (morphology and syntax) of the language and its writing system, and gives the historical background and information concerning the geography of the language and the number of its speakers.
This monograph aims to close the gap in our knowledge of the nature and pace of grammatical change during the formative period of today’s Indo-Aryan languages. During the 6th-12th c. the gradual erosion of the synthetic morphology of Old Indo-Aryan resulted ultimately in the remodelling of its syntax in the direction of the New Indo-Aryan analytic type. This study concentrates on the emergence and development of the ergative construction in terms of the passive-to-ergative reanalysis and the co-existence of the ergative construction with the old and new analytic passive constructions. Special attention is paid to the actuation problem seen as the tug of war between conservative and eliminative forces during their development. Other chapters deal with the evolution of grammatical and lexical aspect, causativization, modality, absolute constructions and subordination. This study is based on a wealth of new data gleaned from original poetic works in Apabhraṃśa (by Svayaṃbhādeva, Puṣpadanta, Haribhadra, Somaprabha et al.). It contains sections dealing with descriptive techniques of Medieval Indian grammarians (esp. Hemacandra). All the Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhraṃśa examples are consistently parsed and translated. The opus is cast in the theoretical framework of Functional Grammar of the Prague and Amsterdam Schools. It should be of particular interest to scholars and students of Indo-Aryan and general historical linguistics, especially those interested in the issues of morphosyntactic change and typology in their sociohistorical setting.
The articles in this survey of the Indo-Aryan controversy address questions such as: are the Indo-Aryans insiders or outsiders?
"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.
Part of the prestigious Debate series, this book brings together aa selection of pioneering essays. The introduction spells out the extremely topical Aryan debate. The central question behind this selection is, did the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans enter India from the Northwest in 1500 BC, or were they indigenous to India and identical with the people who inhabited the Indus Valley between 2800 and 1500 BC.
Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.