Hindu inscriptions are actually Government records. Therefore, they provide us authentic and detailed information about historical events and people that they record. A single inscription often contains valuable information related to events occurring in different periods. In fact, some inscriptions are so profound that merit a serious study for its own sake.
‘Stories from Inscriptions’ derives its inspiration from the inscriptions themselves. The purpose of this book is to introduce various aspects of Bharatavarsha’s long, eventful, and often tragic history as narrated by her kings and ministers, businessmen and Bhaktas, and bards and warriors in their own words through the medium of inscriptions.
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Coming up: A review of the book ‘Stories from Inscriptions’ written by Sandeep Balakrishna.
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Before I proceed, a full disclosure: This book was bought with my own money and not been provided to me by the author or publisher.
Little bit about the author:
Sandeep Balakrishna is an author, editor, columnist, public intellectual and an independent researcher. He is the founder and chief editor of Dharma Dispatch and contributing editor in Prekshaa Journal. Sandeep Balakrishna is also a Fellow of the Indian Council for Philosophical Research. He writes on issues pertaining India and Sanatana Dharma including but not limited to Indian Philosophy, Culture, History, Literature.
Let me read the description of the book:
Hindu inscriptions are actually Government records. Therefore, they provide us authentic and detailed information about historical events and people that they record. A single inscription often contains valuable information related to events occurring in different periods. In fact, some inscriptions are so profound that merit a serious study for its own sake.
Hindu inscriptions also exhibit a powerful element of civilisational and cultural continuity and reveal the fundamental unity of India cutting across kingdoms and geographies within this sacred land.
However, it is astounding to note that till date, there are any number of Indian history scholars who parrot the colonial British falsehood that Hindus have no sense of history. Our inscriptional wealth is perhaps the most glaring proof to the contrary.
Just as India is home to the world’s largest number of UNESCO World heritage Sites, it also has the world’s largest repository of inscriptions. Our inscriptions are the mute witnesses waiting to narrate the story of our civilisation to the patient and willing listener.
Above all, every Hindu inscription, drawn from any part of Bharatavarsha, is unambiguously consistent in one aspect: the fundamental values that Hindus lived and died by. Truth, dharma, piety, charity, compassion, reverence for women, sacrifice, loyalty, heroism, and valour.
‘Stories from Inscriptions’ derives its inspiration from the inscriptions themselves. The purpose of this book is to introduce various aspects of Bharatavarsha’s long, eventful, and often tragic history as narrated by her kings and ministers, businessmen and Bhaktas, and bards and warriors in their own words through the medium of inscriptions.
The undertone is value, and historical facts provide the spatiotemporal context in which these values unfurl themselves through the lives and deeds of our ancestors. The fifteen stories in this book are sprawled across a sizeable geography of Bharatavarsha. They span a timeline ranging from the 9th century CE up to the 17th century CE.
Coming to the review of the book, the first thing I learnt from reading this book is that the study of inscriptions is known as Epigraphy. Out of the 15 amazing stories the author has mentioned in the book, I didn’t know a single one before.
The book talks about the Western bias and how Europeans studied our archaeological artefacts and inscriptions primarily from two perspectives:
1. India as a subject nation and Indians as a people with no sense of history
2. Indian inscriptions as museum pieces.
The downfall of Indian epigraphy after independence is another but familiar chapter in the tragic saga of our cultural destruction manned, helmed and directed by Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, and frontally executed by Communist Party workers disguised as historians and scholars.
Indira Gandhi’s so-called “land reform” legislation proved to be the axe that annihilated the unbroken tradition and practice of magnanimity whose source-fount was spirituality.
How while the Rashtrakutas justifiably deserve laurels as one of the world’s greatest empire-builders, they merit equally justified criticism for their myopic and indiscriminate policy of allowing Arab Muslims to flourish along the western coast. This policy would haunt future Hindu rulers in the region given the fact that these Arab Muslim businessmen (and Sufis, later) acted as recce agents for Turushka rulers who began invading deeper into India from the twelfth century onwards.
Jizya as Islamic Economic Terrorism has been very well explained and how it has been sanitised as a “poll tax.” And also about Kharaj i.e. land tax on infidels.
The delightful story of the cuss word, “Moo Devi” and also about how Jyeshta Devi materialised. And the other facet of Moodevi when you light lamps at home. The full story has been mentioned to make one understand why lamps are lit in the evening in a Hindu household.
The history of Bharatavarsha is also the history of its Gramas or villages. There is a whole chapter explaining Hindu Jurisprudence at the village level.
The book finishes with a tour of the extraordinary village administrative universe at Ukkal in Tamil Nadu.
Conclusion:
My personally favourite part of the book is the numerous colour pages spread in it where there are paintings of old village temples which are really haunting and inviting. The author deserves full credit for bringing such amazing stories out and making us aware of our history in such a simple manner. I sincerely hope that all these amazing stories someday will be taught to the future generations of our country. I give this book 4.75/5 and highly recommend it.
This is a very small book of only 163 pages and the printed price of this book is Rs. 299/- but at the time of recording this podcast, it is available for order for just Rs. 269/- at the publisher's website. I will post the buy links in the show notes.
Last but not the least, thank you for spending your valuable time listening to this book review. Really grateful. Please don't forget to subscribe to the Historylogy podcast on your favourite podcasting app and also feel free to leave a review. Also, please check historylogy.com for all previous episodes. Thanks and looking forward to hearing from you. Jai Hind! Vande Mataram!