The Wonder That Was India
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The Wonder That Was India
''The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent Before the Coming of the Muslims'', is a book on Indian history written by Arthur Llewellyn Basham and first published in 1954. Synopsis The book was aimed at a western audience. Basham, in the book, has attempted to correct the negative stereotypes of India created by authors like James Mill, Thomas Babington Macaulay and Vincent Arthur Smith. Reception Thomas Trautmann considers this book his primary influence which encouraged him to study India. The foreword of the 2005 edition by Picador was written by him. David Dean Shulman has said that the book fascinated him. See also * ''The Greatness That Was Babylon ''The Greatness That Was Babylon'' (1962; second edition 1988) is a book about Babylonia by the Assyriologist H. W. F. Saggs. Summary Saggs, writing for the "general reader", describes the ancient Babylonians before and during the ancient Assy ...'' References 1954 non-fiction ...
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Arthur Llewellyn Basham
Arthur Llewellyn Basham (24 May 1914 – 27 January 1986) was a noted historian, Indologist and author of a number of books. As a Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in the 1950s and the 1960s, he taught a number of famous Indian historians, including professors Ram Sharan Sharma, Romila Thapar, and V. S. Pathak. Early life Arthur Llewellyn Basham was born on 24 May 1914, in Loughton, Essex, the son of Abraham Arthur Edward Basham and Maria Jane Basham née Thompson. Although an only child, he grew up in Essex with his adopted sister, who was in fact his cousin on his father's side. His father had been a journalist who served in the Indian Army at Kasauli, near Simla during World War I, and it was the stories that his father told him about India that first introduced him to the culture of the country to which he would devote his professional career. His mother was also a journalist and short story writer further instilling a love of language and lite ...
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Thomas Trautmann
Thomas Roger Trautmann is an American historian, cultural anthropologist, and Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is considered a leading expert on the '' Arthashastra'', the ancient Hindu text on statecraft, economic policy, and military strategy, written in Sanskrit. Trautmann has mentored many students during his tenure at the University of Michigan. His studies focus on ancient India, the history of anthropology, and other related subjects. Trautmann's work in Indology has been credited with illuminating the underlying economic philosophy that governed ancient Indian kinship. He has also written book-length studies on both Dravidian and American Indian kinship. His most recent study concerns the use of the elephant in ancient India. Trautmann began as an assistant professor in 1968, teaching his entire career at Ann Arbor until he was awarded emeritus status. He has served as director of the University of Michigan History Departm ...
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Books About India
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is '' codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's ''Physics'' is calle ...
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1954 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 1 – The Soviet Union ceases to demand war reparations from West Germany. * January 3 – The Italian broadcaster RAI officially begins transmitting. * January 7 – Georgetown-IBM experiment: The first public demonstration of a machine translation system is held in New York, at the head office of IBM. * January 10 – BOAC Flight 781, a de Havilland Comet jet plane, disintegrates in mid-air due to metal fatigue, and crashes in the Mediterranean near Elba; all 35 people on board are killed. * January 12 – 1954 Blons avalanches, Avalanches in Austria kill more than 200. * January 15 – Mau Mau rebellion, Mau Mau leader Waruhiu Itote is captured in Kenya. * January 17 – In Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia, Milovan Đilas, one of the leading members of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, is relieved of his duties. * January 20 – The US-based National Negro Network is established, with 46 m ...
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The Greatness That Was Babylon
''The Greatness That Was Babylon'' (1962; second edition 1988) is a book about Babylonia by the Assyriologist H. W. F. Saggs. Summary Saggs, writing for the "general reader", describes the ancient Babylonians before and during the ancient Assyrian Empire. Topics discussed include cuneiform writing. Publication history ''The Greatness That Was Babylon'' was first published in 1962 by Sidgwick & Jackson. In 1988, the book was reissued in a revised and updated edition. Excavations in Mesopotamia have revealed a large amount of new information relevant to the study of Babylonian civilization, presented here as a revised and rewritten account of the book first published in 1962. The roots of much of western civilization lie in Babylonia the ancient civilization of south Iraq. Alexander the Great recognized the importance of its heritage and planned to make Babylon his world capital. The splendors and supposed wickedness of Babylon lived on in a tradition transmitted through the Bibl ...
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David Dean Shulman
David Dean Shulman (born January 13, 1949) is an Israeli Indologist, poet and peace activist, known for his work on the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music. Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the now defunct Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies, and now holds an appointment as ''Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies'' at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1988. Shulman is also a published poet in Hebrew, a literary critic, a cultural anthropologist. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from temple myths and templ ...
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The Hindu
''The Hindu'' is an Indian English-language daily newspaper owned by The Hindu Group, headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. It began as a weekly in 1878 and became a daily in 1889. It is one of the Indian newspapers of record and the second most circulated English-language newspaper in India, after '' The Times of India''. , ''The Hindu'' is published from 21 locations across 11 states of India. ''The Hindu'' has been a family-owned newspaper since 1905, when it was purchased by S. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar from the original founders. It is now jointly owned by Iyengar's descendants, referred to as the "Kasturi family", who serve as the directors of the holding company. The current chairperson of the group is Malini Parthasarathy, a great-granddaughter of Iyengar. Except for a period of about two years, when Siddharth Varadarajan, S. Varadarajan held the editorship of the newspaper, the editorial positions of the paper were always held by members of the family or held under t ...
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Frontline (magazine)
''Frontline'' is a fortnightly English language magazine published by The Hindu Group of publications headquartered in Chennai, India. Vaishna Roy is the editor of the magazine. It is a news and views magazine that provides in-depth coverage on various topics such as politics, world affairs, culture, science, health, business and personalities. ''Frontline'' gives coverage to developmental issues and issues related to the working classes, unorganized sectors, tribal regions and other under-served regions in India. History ''Frontline'' was first published in December 1984. It was originally intended to be a newspaper when it was started by the founders. They later had differences of opinion regarding the content and intent of the publication, and the magazine was sold to PL Investments Ltd, which later sold it to The Hindu Group. Contributors and perspective The magazine's long-serving editor was R. Vijaya Sankar, who retired in May 2022. The magazine's regular contributor ...
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Vincent Arthur Smith
Vincent Arthur Smith, , (3 June 1843 – 6 February 1920) was an Irish Indologist, historian, member of the Indian Civil Service, and curator. He was one of the prominent figures in Indian historiography during the British Raj. In the 1890s, he was key to exposing the forgeries of Alois Anton Führer, then working for the Archaeological Survey of India, who Smith caught in the act of making fake inscriptions. Biography Smith was born in Dublin on 3 June 1843 which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. His father was Dr Aquilla Smith, well known in medical and numismatic circles in Dublin and London. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, he passed the final examination for the Indian Civil Service in 1871, at "the head of the list", and served in what is now Uttar Pradesh until 1900, in the regular ICS roles, rising to "Chief Secretary to the government" in 1898, becoming a Commissioner the same year. Throughout this period he was a prolific ...
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many List of islands of the United Kingdom, smaller islands within the British Isles. Northern Ireland shares Republic of Ireland–United Kingdom border, a land border with the Republic of Ireland; otherwise, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. The total area of the United Kingdom is , with an estimated 2020 population of more than 67 million people. The United Kingdom has evolved from a series of annexations, unions and separations of constituent countries over several hundred years. The Treaty of Union between ...
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Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (; 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster-General between 1846 and 1848. Macaulay's '' The History of England'', which expressed his contention of the superiority of the Western European culture and of the inevitability of its sociopolitical progress, is a seminal example of Whig history that remains commended for its prose style. Early life Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire on 25 October 1800, the son of Zachary Macaulay, a Scottish Highlander, who became a colonial governor and abolitionist, and Selina Mills of Bristol, a former pupil of Hannah More. They named their first child after his uncle Thomas Babington, a Leicestershire landowner and politician, who had married Zachary's sister Jean. The young Macaulay was noted as a child prodigy; as a toddler, gazing out of the window ...
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James Mill
James Mill (born James Milne; 6 April 1773 – 23 June 1836) was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher. He is counted among the founders of the Ricardian school of economics. He also wrote ''The History of British India (1817)'' and was one of the prominent historians to take colonial approach. He was the first writer to divide Indian history into three parts: Hindu, Muslim and British, a classification which has proved surpassingly influential in the field of Indian historical studies. Mill was the father of John Stuart Mill, a noted philosopher of liberalism and utilitarianism, and a colonial administrator at the East India Company. Biography James Milne, later known as James Mill, was born in Northwater Bridge, in the parish of Logie Pert, Angus, Scotland, the son of James Milne, a shoemaker and small farmer. His mother, Isabel Fenton, of a family that had suffered from connection with the Stuart rising, resolved that he should receiv ...
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