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.

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Caste — how it was built

• The words of caste were innocent first.
• Varṇa means colour. It never means occupation.
• The explicit fourfold varṇa scheme appears together in one Rigvedic verse.
• 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.
• Caste was not always by birth. The rigidity was imposed — against a reality that kept breaking it.
• The holiest verse in Brahmanism was written by a warrior.
• Caste was abuse, encoded as law, disguised as religion.
• Dozens of legal systems were operating. One was in a single volume. That one became law.
• 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.
• Women's status did not fade with time. It was narrowed, on purpose, as land and priesthood hardened.
• 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.

The Rigveda and its world

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

Deep history and archaeology

• Before the Indus, the graves already faced the sun.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Language, script and naming

• The earliest surviving names for the script come from a Buddhist list and a Jain story.
• One script, from Afghanistan to Tamil Nadu — across a line Aśoka called foreign.
• Pāṇini, Tolkāppiyar, and everyone else who was analysing language.
• What the mouth does to a name.
• Two classical languages, built the same way.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.
• Origin myths were made to order — divine ancestry, retrofitted for whoever needed legitimacy.
• The moment the world "aged into darkness" was never observed. It was calculated backward.
• Two skies, one calendar.
• 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.
• Āraṇya“the elsewhere”
• Traditional medicine, taken seriously — which means taken critically.
• 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.

Power over the record

• An electrical engineer wrote India's history curriculum.
• A civilisation was renamed in a textbook for eleven-year-olds.
• Why do people at the bottom of a hierarchy defend it?
• Their own heroes were merged into someone else's story.
• They built a party around their own forgotten king. Then others claimed him.
• They already knew. In 1873, they said it out loud.
• The science of ancestry is a battlefield. Read it accordingly.
• A discipline founded to run courts, which read one dead language and legislated for a subcontinent.
• 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.