Index

Research Index

All 102 content pages, grouped. Nothing here is reachable only by guessing a URL. The threshold, Enter, search and this index are the four routes not listed as entries.

Looking for something specific? Search the whole platform.

Caste — how it was built

• The words of caste were innocent first.
• Varṇa means colour. It never means occupation.under review
• The explicit fourfold varṇa scheme appears together in one Rigvedic verse.under review
• The whole hierarchy enters in one late hymn.
• Caste-by-rebirth is one school's insertion — not shared scripture.
• A colour-word became a cage. Untouchability came last, and by design.
• Even in the later Vedic corpus, the four castes are thin, ritual, and rare.
• Caste was built, and the build is visible in the vocabulary.under review
• Caste was not always by birth. The rigidity was imposed — against a reality that kept breaking it.contested
• The holiest verse in Brahmanism was written by a warrior.
• Caste was abuse, encoded as law, disguised as religion.contested
• Dozens of legal systems were operating. One was in a single volume. That one became law.under review
• Ask who benefits from the critique, and you can predict what it leaves standing.
• Caste is written in the genome — and the two sexes are written differently.
• “When mixing stopped” means two completely different things in this dataset.
• The founder effects are at the jāti, not the gotra — and that is exactly what the two rules predict.under review
• Women's status did not fade with time. It was narrowed, on purpose, as land and priesthood hardened.contested
• The exclusion of women is the middle of the story, not the beginning.
• Not everyone tried to break the ladder. Many tried to climb it.
• The fifth varṇa entered Sanskrit as one man's guess about an ambiguous phrase.
• Śūdra appears once in the Rigveda. It appears 1,053 times in the law books.
• Hindutva defined a Hindu as one whose fatherland and holy land are both India. The genome puts the Vedic fatherland on the steppe.
• If caste were a Hindu doctrine, leaving Hinduism would end it. Millions of people have run that experiment.
• The government reports that no manual scavengers exist, and reports the deaths in the same reply.
• The same catastrophe ended both orders. The monks were back within a generation. The nuns were not.

The Rigveda and its world

• Nine men are named as enemies. Each death has a beneficiary.under review
• The named enemies hold forts, grain, wives and sons — and the hymns celebrate killing them for pay.contested
• Ninety-nine forts, in Indus country, three centuries too late.under review
• One party bought immortality. The other party got it.contested
• Poets sold reputation for livestock and itemised the fee in the hymn.under review
• How much of the Rigveda is contempt for outsiders?under review
• Words keep company. The company tells you what they are.under review
• Status was contingent on real estate.
• Two rivers carry the corpus: the Indus and the Sarasvatī.under review
• A war story, with a law code bolted on.under review
• Sixteen places where the record was adjusted.
• Credit attaches to whoever wrote it down — and to the last one who did, over the first.under review
• Cousin marriage, polyandry and matriliny in South Asia — and why the north–south story does not survive contact with Iran.under review
• Three of the named enemies have names Sanskrit cannot parse.under review
• The passages that bind hardest are the ones nobody signed.
• Some of what the sacred texts prescribe, modern India makes a crime.under review

Deep history and archaeology

• Before the Indus, the graves already faced the sun.under review
• The ash on the forehead is older than the god who wears it.
• The Indus built its cities around water — and left no palace to control it.
• Keeladi: a literate southern city — and an excavation the state could not leave alone.
• Meluhha: the Indus world, written down by its trading partners.
• No word for the plough until the last layer.under review
• Sanskrit, Śiva, the Buddha and the temple all crossed the ocean. The brahmanical social order did not.
• Three Chinese monks spent fifty years in India and wrote it all down.
• Where the objects were found
• Many gaps in this record follow the money and the politics of excavation.
• Greek writing survives for 250 years and produces no literature. Then it stops for four centuries.
• Who had it first.working exhibit
• Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra and the Nāsatyas are invoked in a Hittite treaty in northern Syria.
• The steppe evidence is a set of dated individuals, not a migration route.under review
• Three ancestries made South Asia. Then endogamy froze them in place.
• The Hittites spoke Indo-European. Their DNA carries no steppe marker.
• The deep root of Dravidian points west — and four sciences agree.
• The working language of the Persian empire, written for 2,300 years and still partly undeciphered.under review
• A Bronze Age grave in Gujarat: a stone circle, a central pit, a cairn of laterite rubble on top.
• One survey over Guatemala found 61,480 structures. Nothing comparable has been flown over the Indus or the Vaigai.
• Tamil merchants ran the Bay of Bengal for centuries. One year of it involved burning ports, and that is the year everyone knows.
• A community of five million people descends from about a hundred.under review
• A community used to model the Indus woman’s deep ancestry catches snakes for a living, and was told none of this.under review
• Eighty-one per cent of Tamil male lineages are indigenous, and castes and tribes carry the same ones.under review
• Every caste's maternal lineages are old, local and shared. Only the men were sorted.contested
• It was not three expansions. It is one pattern, five thousand years long, and it has not stopped.
• The ancestry that links Elam and the Indus was herding goats in the Zagros before farming reached either.
• The genome dates the sealing to two thousand years ago. The survey data says it has not opened.
• Two waves of men arrived. The people beneath both are in the hills, carrying the oldest lineages on the subcontinent.contested

Language, script and naming

• The earliest surviving names for the script come from a Buddhist list and a Jain story.under review
• One script, from Afghanistan to Tamil Nadu — across a line Aśoka called foreign.
• Pāṇini, Tolkāppiyar, and everyone else who was analysing language.under review
• What the mouth does to a name.under review
• Two classical languages, built the same way.under review
• Four languages still speak, and no one knows their relatives.
• The Vedda: an ancient population, and a language lost within living memory.
• Who named India? Never India.
• Nothing was forbidden. Everything was renamed.under review
• MLECHA[sic]
• Writing is not where things start. It is where claims start.
• A formal science of citing your sources, developed in Arabic.
• Every text was kept by someone with something at stake.
• Everything that survives — and how little of it has been opened.under review
• Tiṇai: a poetics that thinks with the land.
• Thirteen hundred and thirty couplets on how to live, and the word for caste is not in any of them.under review
• A Dravidian language is spoken in Balochistan. It shares 191 roots with Tamil.
• Veḷi means empty, open, outside, clear, light and true — and those are one word, not six.
• Eleven million people speak a language their fathers brought and their mothers never spoke.
• Four thousand inscriptions. Average length, five signs. Not one sign has been deciphered.

Religion, science and the living present

• The Buddha and Mahāvīra were not reforming Hinduism. They were speaking from a different world.
• The Buddha was not arguing with Hinduism. There was no such thing.
• Seventy-three poems by named women — and most people have never read one.under review
• Origin myths were made to order — divine ancestry, retrofitted for whoever needed legitimacy.contested
• The moment the world "aged into darkness" was never observed. It was calculated backward.under review
• Two skies, one calendar.under review
• A complete sky vocabulary, a landscape time-system, and a hereditary non-Brahmin astronomer caste.
• The Tamil harp is extinct in India and still played in Burma.under review
• Āraṇya“the elsewhere”
• Traditional medicine, taken seriously — which means taken critically.working exhibit
• The oldest instrument we can hold is a vulture bone with finger-holes.
• An instrument with six named varieties, tuned to five landscapes. Nobody alive plays it.
• Two medical traditions, compared on their own terms.under review
• A religion born in Bihar, dominant for a thousand years, and almost entirely gone from India by 1300.
• India had a school that denied gods, karma and scripture. We know it only from the books written to destroy it.
• Someone took a chisel to their name. The cuts were too deep to remove.
• The oldest large stone figures in India are not Vedic gods and not buddhas. They are tree spirits.
• The Ājīvikas left no documents. The land grants survive in tens of thousands, because a tax-free title is worth keeping.

Power over the record

• An electrical engineer wrote India's history curriculum.
• A civilisation was renamed in a textbook for eleven-year-olds.under review
• Why do people at the bottom of a hierarchy defend it?contested
• Their own heroes were merged into someone else's story.working exhibit
• They built a party around their own forgotten king. Then others claimed him.working exhibit
• They already knew. In 1873, they said it out loud.contested
• The science of ancestry is a battlefield. Read it accordingly.working exhibit
• A discipline founded to run courts, which read one dead language and legislated for a subcontinent.under review
• The Ledger.
• The scholar this platform leans on, examined the way we examine everyone else.
• What is checked, what is not, and what was found.
• Secrecy was everywhere. The question is what each kind of secrecy was for.
• A retreat held under the Grace of the Siddhas, at which no siddhar is quoted.
• India built genomic data sovereignty. It gave it to the state.contested
• One woman, buried at Rakhigarhi around 2500 BCE, with no steppe ancestry. What was done to that fact, in seven stages.contested
• Sixty-one skeletons gave one genome, by physics. Thirteen thousand artefacts gave "nothing," by decision.
• The oldest lineages on earth survive on the land nobody wanted.
• The two largest Indus cities are in Pakistan. So is the oldest farming village. Nobody there is sequencing them.working exhibit
• Two archaeologists dug at Rakhigarhi. One got a national museum. The other got transferred four times.contested