Indians and Westerners who know Buddhism through Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar and other modern pamphlet literature,  sometimes believe that the Buddha started a movement of social reform, mobilizing against caste and recruiting among low-caste people. As against this, Chinese and Japanese Buddhists who have studied their religion only through its source texts, think that Buddhism was an elite movement, recruiting among the upper castes and patronized by kings and magnates. We will argue that these believers are right, while the neo-Buddhists in India and outside enthusiasts in the West are wrong.

Co-author of acclaimed book "Breaking India", Aravindan Neelakandan has worked for the past decade with an NGO in Tamil Nadu serving marginalized rural communities in sustainable agriculture. He is also a popular science writer in Tamil and is part of the editorial team of highly popular Tamil web portal www.tamilhindu.com.

Given how little thought India’s contribution to the World Wars gets in our collective historical memory, it is almost strange to think that in the First World War India made the largest contribution to the war effort out of all of Britain’s colonies and dominions. Close to 1,700,000 Indians – combatants and non-combatants – participated in WWI.

Hampi is India's Pompeii. Once home to half a million people, it was sacked in 1565 by the armies of the Bahamani sultanates. For hundreds of years, the City of Victory lay abandoned until it was rediscovered by the British in the 19th century. Now it is a place of sprawling beauty, a world heritage site of 2,000 monuments scattered across a landscape of enormous granite boulders, pulling in nearly half a million visitors a year from around the world.

But of the people who helped transform it from an overgrown ruin, who made it a living monument rather than a museum, there is virtually no sign. They have been swept away, ordered out by conservation authorities determined to restore the site to the way it looked in its medieval heyday.

Many had been there for decades, setting up home in the small stone pavilions, known as mandapas, which line the bazaar, catering for the needs of the tourists and pilgrims. But in April the Karnataka high court threw out their last legal challenge and backed the Hampi World Heritage Area Management Authority and the Archaeological Survey of India in their plans to remove all modern traces from the bazaar.

The linga (phallic emblem of Shiva) symbolizes the great generative force of the universe. It is usually the most sacred object in a temple dedicated to Shiva and is housed in the main sanctum. When plain (simply phallic), the linga represents Shiva in his most abstract form. In this example, Shiva's face has emerged from the central shaft. He is adorned with earrings and a necklace and his hair is worn in a double bun with a crescent moon on one of the buns.
This sculpture was made during the short-lived Shahi kingdom (seventh—ninth century) of eastern Afghanistan, which produced a small number of extraordinary sculptures. They were carved in a distinctive white marble and their style derived from sculptural traditions of northern India and Kashmir

Mr. Prasad is a contrarian. He calls government welfare programs patronizing. He dismisses the countryside as a cesspool. Affirmative action is fine, in his view, but only to advance a small slice into the middle class, who can then act as role models. He calls English “the Dalit goddess,” able to liberate Dalits.

Along with India’s economic policies, once grounded in socialist ideals, Mr. Prasad has moved to the right. He is openly and mischievously contemptuous of leftists. “They have a hatred for those who are happy,” he said.

A new goddess has recently been born in India. She's the Dalit Goddess of English.

May 27, 2012, marks the completion of 100 years since the hosting of the first Carnatic Music conference in the modern sense of the term. That event was not held in Madras but rightfully in Thanjavur, the heartland of South Indian music and hosting it was a Christian practitioner of native medicine – Dr. Abraham Pandithar.

Born in 1859, Abraham Pandithar had qualified as a teacher and he, along with his first wife Gnanavadivu Ponnammal, joined the Lady Napier School in Thanjavur. By 1890, the couple had quit so that Pandithar could pursue the first of his two great passions – native medicine. Purchasing a large tract of land outside Thanjavur, Pandithar converted it into a farm for growing medicinal plants.

Other scholars, however, say that government itself is the problem. T. N. Srinivasan, a professor of economics at Yale University, says that political freedoms, to work, need to be complemented by economic freedoms. Mr. Sen, he said, ''doesn't emphasize enough the importance of free markets, trade and access to world markets and capital.'' The reason authoritarian China has grown more rapidly than democratic India, he said, is its embrace of economic liberalization. Mr. Sen, he added, ''seems to have a much dimmer view of globalization than people like me, who see open markets as the best opportunity of the last century'' for countries to grow and develop.

The Tanjore region became the bhajana tradition’s stronghold with the arrival of the bhajana sampradAya trinity, namely Sadguru Swamin, Bhodendral and Sridhara Venkatesa Ayyaval. The trio existed between 1684 and 1817 AD. Ayyaval who was the senior most is considered the father of the Bhajan tradition in South India. Born in Tiruvisanallur, Tanjore District, Ayyaval was a contemporary of King Shahaji I (ruled 1684-1712). He firmly believed in nAma siddhAnta, the principle of chanting God’s name and composed several simple songs for congregational singing. The test of his devotion came on a day when he had invited several Brahmins to his house in connection with certain rites to please his ancestors. As the ceremony was to commence, a starving person of a lower caste appeared at Ayyaval’s doorway and moved by his plight, Ayyaval offered him the food meant for the Brahmins. This angered the priests who refused to partake of food in his house unless he had purified himself by bathing in the Ganges, which of course was several thousand kilometers away. Ayyaval proceeded to the well at the back of his house and composed a hymn in praise of the great river. The waters of the Ganges flooded his well, enabling him to teach the Brahmins a lesson in equality of all before the Supreme. Ayyaval is commemorated till date at Tiruvisanallur, where the bhajana tradition is maintained.

He virtually pioneered, in the Indian context, the genre of science fiction stories, and it is alleged that the script for Steven Speilberg’s immensely successful E.T. was based, though unacknowledged by Speilberg, on a script that Ray had sent to him many years ago.

Sasirekha Parinayam (the marriage of Sasirekha) is a folk tale based on oral traditions, popular in Andhra Pradesh, India. It is based on the Mahabharata, but is not present in it.[1]

The plot concerns the marriage of Sasirekha, the daughter of Balarama, to Abhimanyu, the son of Arjuna. It echoes the marriage of Arjuna to Subhadra in the Mahabharata.

The story is popular in performances, including shadow-puppets,[2] Yakshagana and Kuchipudi.[3][4]

Did you face any religious dilemma while you were married to a Hindu lady Reena Dutta and later on to Kiran Rao?
No, none whatsoever. We never practiced each other's religion neither did we force each other to do so. But, of course, I had made it very clear that my kids will always follow only Islamic religion.

FEARS over incurable strains of tuberculosis in India have just been reinforced.

People diagnosed in January with "totally drug-resistant TB" (TDR TB) have been independently retested at the National Tuberculosis Institute in Bangalore. The tests confirm that the bacteria resist all first and second-line drugs used to treat TB - although the World Health Organization says that limitations in the lab tests mean the bacteria are not yet proven untreatable.

Paul Nunn, head of TB drug-resistance at the WHO, lauded stepped-up efforts by India's health ministry to identify and treat cases of multidrug-resistant TB, from which the new strains arose. The ministry plans to quadruple its TB budget and re-open a 200-bed TB sanatorium in Mumbai (Thorax, DOI: 10.1136/thoraxjnl-2012-201663).

Zarir Udwadia, the clinician at Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai who identified the original 12 cases of TDR TB, says there have been two new cases. "Most worrying is one in a girl with no history of past TB and no contact with anyone who has multidrug-resistant TB."

Three of the first 12 patients have died, six are being treated and three have gone missing.

The Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team has totally disagreed with the observations of amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran, and said no case can be made out against Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in connection with the 2002 communal riots under any of the Sections of the Indian Penal Code mentioned by him.

Mr. Ramachandran, in his report, which formed part of the SIT closure report submitted in the Ahmedabad metropolitan court, observed that prima facie offences under Sections 153 A (1)(a) and (b), 153 B (1)(c), 166 and 505 (2) of the IPC could be made out against Mr. Modi for his alleged “instructions” to police officers to “go soft on the Hindu rioters” and his subsequent role in handling the riots and alleged offensive media statements that could have contributed to instigating violence.

Giving point-by-point answers to all observations made by the amicus curiae after investigating the charges, as directed by the Supreme Court, the SIT said: “The offences under the aforesaid sections of law are not made out against Mr. Modi.” The report signed by the investigation officer in the Zakia Jafri petition case, Deputy Commissioner of Police Himanshu Shukla, said, “in the light of the aforesaid facts, a closure report in being submitted for favour of perusal and orders.”

(Ms. Jafri, wife of the slain former Congress MP Ahesan Jafri, levelled serious charges against Mr. Modi and 62 others in connection with the communal riots.)

The SIT dismissed as “false and fabricated documents” two “fax messages” claimed to have been sent by the suspended IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who was then Deputy Commissioner in the State intelligence branch, to the Chief Minister and Minister of State for Home Gordhan Jhadafiya, with copies to the Ahmedabad Police Commissioner, the State police control room and others, alerting them about the developing communal situation.

The “fax messages,” which claimed that the Chief Minister was informed in advance of the tension building up in Gulberg Society and that the city Police Commissioner was informed of the need for advanced preparations for possible communal repercussions in view of the government's decision to bring the bodies of the victims of the Godhra train carnage to Ahmedabad, were cited as examples of “dereliction of duty” on the part of the Chief Minister, his Cabinet colleagues and the senior police officers.

An amicus curiae (also spelled amicus curiæ; plural amici curiae) is someone, not a party to a case, who volunteers to offer information to assist a court in deciding a matter before it. The information provided may be a legal opinion in the form of a brief (which is called an amicus brief when offered by an amicus curiae), a testimony that has not been solicited by any of the parties, or a learned treatise on a matter that bears on the case. The decision on whether to admit the information lies at the discretion of the court. The phrase amicus curiae is legal Latin and literally means "friend of the court".

the thrust of CM’s speech everywhere was that the incident was heinous, organised and that the culprits would be brought to strictest punishment.. . . .

it is not the case that the Chief Minister made any assertion concerning- the obligation of any religious community to do such acts, as are likely to cause disharmony. He did not make any appeal to Hindus or Muslims to take up arms against each other.’

it is reasonably concluded that no utterances on part of Shri Narendra Modi could ‘be attributed suggestive to any intended promotion of hatred ill-will etc.. amongst religious groups

This morning, a piece in Business Standard, one of India's most respected newspapers, caught my eye.

Examining data on the economic performance of Indian states during a seven-year-period (2004-11), AK Bhattacharya, editor of the newspaper, wrote that he was puzzled by the data on Gujarat.

Gujarat is ruled by Narendra Modi, one of India's most controversial politicians, who has modelled himself as a no-nonsense economic reformer of one of India's fastest-growing states.

In March, a senior minister of his cabinet told me that Gujarat has been recording scorching double-digit growth, prompting even The Economist magazine to call it India's Guangdong. "Modi Means Business" said Time magazine when it put him on the cover recently.

Mr Bhattacharyya, however, wrote in Wednesday morning's edition of his paper that Gujarat's economy grew by 6.3% annually during this period, up from average growth every year of 3.6% - a relatively low base - in a 10-year period ending in 2003.

"It has seen the most stable of governments for the last several years," Mr Bhattacharya wrote. "And yet, it has seen its growth hovering around 6% for the last seven years."

I wrote a blog post with a link to the piece wondering whether Gujarat's red-hot economic growth was an invention of the foreign media which has been written extensively about Mr Modi's reformist government.

I had also wondered whether there was something amiss with the data on Gujarat in the Business Standard article.

Indeed there was - and I have updated the blog post to reflect this.

Since I wrote my earlier version, Mr Bhattacharya has carried out some crucial corrections in his Business Standard article - the modified version appeared on the newspaper's website later in the day.

He has written that Gujarat actually clocked a growth rate of 10.08% annually during a seven-year period beginning 2004-05. That is obviously far better than the 6.3% growth that he mentioned in the earlier version.

He has also taken out a paragraph in which he wrote: "It (Gujarat) has seen the most stable of governments for the last several years. And yet, it has seen its growth hovering around 6% for the last seven years."

Double-digit growth, of course, puts Gujarat in the league of the high growth states in India. The doubts that I had about it after reading Mr Bhattacharya's piece have now been clarified by the writer himself.

He writes in the modified piece:

"… which are the states that clocked double-digit growth in its gross state domestic product during the seven-year period from 2004-05? Only six states will make that list. On top of that list is Uttarakhand at 13.2%, followed, as expected, by Bihar at 10.9%, Maharashtra at 10.7%, Tamil Nadu at 10.4%, Haryana at 10.1% and Gujarat at 10.08%."

In the amended version Mr Bhattacharya also adds that "Gujarat's story is well-known and shows what sustained growth-oriented policies can do to a state's economic fortunes".

There is a vigorous debate on whether such high growth is delivering adequate social development in Gujarat. It is a point which many believe is valid is for the whole of India. But Gujarat, going by the data, is indeed a red-hot economy.

The inscrutable politics of Subramanian Swamy

Vijay Prashad is a familiar type: a Nehruvian secularist, i.e. an institutional winner but a loser on contents. He was one of the people who clamoured, after my Ayodhya lecture in Madison WI 1996, that “a scholarly rebuttal should be given”, but whose scholarly rebuttal is still awaited. For a while he took part in a debate with Rajiv Malhotra, for which a whole yahoo list was  created, but he wimped out. On the Hindu Holocaust too, he takes comfortable conformistic positions but he has never written a serious rebuttal of the “Hindu nationalist” (actually purely historical) theory that Muslims killed millions of Hindus.

Reason Magazine
India's Misguided Push for Food Security
Posted by Baylen Linnekin on Saturday Apr 21st at 12:00pm
Earlier this month a country that’s home to millions of poor and hungry people tested a missile capable of striking deep into distant continents. North Korea may come to mind, but the country whose missile proved it’s actually capable of targeting (rather than merely intended to target) foreign lands is India.
While spending dearly (something on the order of $500 million) to test launch the Agni-V missile and flex its military muscle, India is also poised to introduce a law that the country hopes will guarantee an end to hunger. A “right to food” movement has built momentum in India over the last decade thanks to a Supreme Court case there. The Food Security Bill now under consideration would “offer nearly two-thirds of India’s population a legal entitlement to foodgrain.”

In a recent piece in The Wall Street Journal, New Delhi-based researcher Ashwin Parulkar endorsed the measure. “Discounted food,” he wrote, “should be a universal entitlement.”
But the staggering cost of ensuring a right to food for all Indians—estimated at $22 billion, or the cost of more than 40 Agni-V rockets per year—is just one problem with a government guarantee of food for all.
The larger question is whether any government can make good on a guaranteed right to food. If the Indian government’s recent food-policy failures are any indication, establishing a right to food will be a grand subcontinental experiment in wasting food, money, and lives.
After all, malnutrition in India (a leading cause of death) is often the result of inept government micromanagement of the food economy and other counterproductive policies. And even before it’s enacted, the pressure of ensuring a right to food has already played a role in wasting food and hurting farmers. In 2007, for example, India banned wheat exports entirely after the country’s leaders claimed they needed time “to judge its wheat availability in the light of the proposed Food Security Bill.”
These policies led to a domestic wheat glut, which happened to coincide with a global surplus.
When the Indian government finally did open exports again more than four years later, many farmers found it was months too late for them to sell on the world market.
India’s government itself was unready for the excess of grain its own policies created, since government capacity to store grain was far less than its ability to bolster domestic grain production by decree. Hence, today the government “does not know where to store the bumper grains to be harvested for the third year in a row,” leading to the likelihood “that the grains would be out in the open, rot and be eaten by rodents even as millions go hungry in the country which is planning to enact a right to food law.”
Is there a way to feed the poor without top-down government food policies? Yes, and economic growth is the key. From the big business tech boom to small entrepreneurs benefiting from microfinance to some government recognition of economist Hernando de Soto’s arguments about reducing barriers to starting businesses, India has been a success story. According to the World Bank and other sources, for example, poverty in India is receding greatly as the country’s economy expands. “India’s poverty declined by 19% between 1990 and 2005,” according to World Bank estimates.
There’s also no shortage of charitable, non-governmental organizations working to feed India’s most impoverished people. Reforming the country’s charitable-giving laws is one necessary fix that could boost this output even further. For example, India currently taxes charitable organizations on what in the United States would be tax-free earnings.
And there’s also this: The poor are very often capable of providing for themselves if left to their own devices.
The startling thing about a recent attack by some radical Hindus on a group of Dalits (members of India’s lower caste) who were eating beef (which is verboten to many Hindus) at an outdoor festival is not the vile attack itself. No, the surprising fact is that Dalits—two-thirds of whom are among India’s poorest—gathered in numbers greater than a thousand to share a meal of beef (a food of the wealthy in most any country).
"Everyone should have the freedom to eat the food of their choice,” said event organizer B Sudarshan.
Of course he's right. And when such a choice is available to even the poor, then the need to codify a right to food seems inapt. Add to this India's recent failures at centrally planning its food supply and the country's ability to ensure a right to food seems downright implausible.
Instead of India’s government trying (and failing) to provide its hungriest with food, India should create a legal and policy climate that lets those Indians who can provide for themselves do so, and encourages domestic and foreign charitable giving to fill the gaps as needed.
Baylen J. Linnekin, a lawyer, is executive director of Keep Food Legal, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit that advocates in favor of culinary freedom.


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Theodor Benfey (January 28, 1809, Nörten near Göttingen – June 26, 1881, Göttingen) was a German philologist and the son of a Jewish trader from Nörten in Lower Saxony. In 1834 he became a Privatdozent (associate professor) at the University of Göttingen,[1] teaching Sanskrit and Comparative Grammar.

It slowly dawned on me that i had seen a similar scene that very day - of two rivals facing each other in battle. In the famed corridors of the Nellaiappar temple - is a rare sculpture of Karna - the eldest son of Kunti, elder to 5 Pandavas, but forced into the enemy camp by evil fate - yet the greatness in him, the Son of the Sun God, he who never sent back anyone from his door empty handed - even giving up his invincible body Armour and Ear rings in alms to Indra. He who fought for the sake of friendship against his own brothers and he who wanted to kill his own brother Arjuna.

Karna knew that the only weapon he had that could fell Arjuna was the Naga Astra - for which Arjuna had no counter, for it was the very personification of Awasena ( the snake - son of the Snake king, the only one who escaped the burning of the Khandava forest by Arjuna and Krishna and he was out to avenge his mother !)
The pillar sculpture is of massive proportions - with Karna sculpted to be about 12 feet, but is not free standing ofcourse - but carved out of hard granite with other sculptures in the round and the weight bearing load of the roof above supported by the pillar..

One of the famous temples in Tamil Nadu steeped in tradition and history and also known for its musical pillars and other brilliant sculptural splendours, this is one of the largest temples in South India.[citation needed] This temple houses a shrine to Shiva and Parvati dating back in time. Shiva is said to have been worshipped by Agastya in a bamboo grove and by Rama after having killed Mareecha some nine miles away at Manoor. There is also a shrine to Vishnu near the sanctum, signifying the belief that Nellai Govindan (Vishnu) visited Tirunelveli to officiate the divine marriage of Shiva and Kantimathi. There are several other legends associated with this temple.

Indeed, whereas the Christian Middle Ages were bedevilled by fear of the irrational, Hindu civilization learned to cope with it. It had a fundamental sanity where Christian and Islamic civilization were based on a belief in the divine intrusion into history. But Romila Thapar cannot bring herself to seeing this fact and naming it by its proper name: Hindu civilization had a fundamental sanity. It reminds me of Mani Shankar Aiyar, a Minister in the last Congress government, who wrote in his Sunday column some twenty years back to this effect: "There is something in the air here that makes us tolerant"-- but he didn't dare to name that something because it was called Hinduism.

In a recent op-ed in The Hindu , Amartya Sen has clarified his views regarding what importance we should assign to growth in the policy discourse . Coming as it does in response to a debate on the Cuts Forum to which I had actively contributed, Sen's clarification justifies a rejoinder by me. The lively debate on the Cuts Forum had been triggered by a lecture Jagdish Bhagwati had delivered at a joint session of the Parliament on December 2, 2010 and subsequent remarks Sen made on India-China growth comparisons while speaking in New Delhi. Bhagwati , who actively contributed to the Cuts Forum debate, had emphasised in his Parliament lecture the centrality of growth to poverty alleviation firstly as a force that "pulls up" the poor into gainful employment and secondly as a source of revenue to expand anti-poverty programmes.

In contrast, in his New Delhi talk, Sen had argued that the Indian fixation with surpassing China's rate of economic growth was "very stupid" as a measure of the nation's advancement (James Lamont in the Financial Times, December 21). He noted, however, that growth was a "positive thing" in the context of social justice, poverty reduction and directing greater revenues towards health and education. In the op-ed , Sen elaborates on these views. He states that growth can be a good thing, denounces growth for its own sake (anon sequitursince no serious analyst advocates growth for its own sake), notes the importance of growth in generating "resources for the government to spend according to its priorities" and characterizes as "silly" the focus on growth in India-China comparisons.

Sen leaves the impression that growth is at best a sideshow when it comes to the well- being of the poor. He essentially ignores the direct contribution growth makes to the creation of income and employment for the poor when he states: "The central point to seize is that while economic growth is an important boon for enhancing living conditions, its reach depends greatly on what we do with the fruits of growth. To be sure, there are large numbers of people for whom growth alone does just fine, since they are already privileged and need no social assistance." Thus, contrary to the evidence that growth directly benefits the poor, Sen emphasises the accrual of such benefits only to those "already privileged" with the benefits to the poor depending principally on how what the government does with the "fruits of growth" . Why does it matter whether you choose to see growth as central to improving the wellbeing of the poor or as a sideshow ? Because the policies you would advocate critically depend on this choice. Bhagwati, who sees growth as central, has long advocated policy reforms that enhance growth prospects while also recommending increased expenditures on antipoverty programmes.

Sen, who sees growth as a sideshow, has rarely spoken in favour of promarket reforms, implicitly giving a nod to the licence-permit raj, which denied higher incomes and better employment opportunities to the poor. All politicians now recognise the centrality of growth in generating revenues to finance expenditures on health, education and employment programmes in a poor country like India. Because India started extremely poor at Independence and also grew very slowly for nearly four decades, successive governments failed to muster enough revenues to finance expenditures on these sectors. As a concrete example, Article 45 of the directive principles of state policy in the Constitution had required free compulsory primary education . But despite repeated attempts throughout, the goal remained unfulfilled until 2010 when accelerated growth finally yielded sufficient revenues to permit the implementation of the right to education as a fundamental right.

[The article originally appeared in Economic Times on February 23, 2011.]

Acharya Nāgārjuna (Devanagari:नागार्जुन, Telugu: నాగార్జున, Tibetan: ཀླུ་སྒྲུབ་ klu sgrub, Chinese: 龍樹, Sinhala නාගර්පුන) (ca. 150–250 CE) was an important Buddhist teacher and philosopher. Along with his disciple Āryadeva, he is credited with founding the Mādhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism.[1] The Mādhyamaka school was in turn transmitted to China under the name of the Sānlùn School (Ch. 三論宗, "Three Treatise School").

Nāgārjuna is sometimes credited with developing the philosophy of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, and being associated with the Buddhist university of Nālandā. In the Jodo Shinshu and Shingon schools of Buddhism in Japan he is considered the First Patriarch. In some Mahāyāna traditions, Nāgārjuna is regarded as a second buddha.[2]

Even quite liberal Pakistanis can seem hopelessly conflicted over this state of affairs. Just recently, I had a conversation with a prominent Pakistani intellectual. He went from decrying the influence of fundamentalists on the school curriculum, to saying – with evident pride – that India had been unable to retaliate for the Mumbai terror attacks, because Pakistan is a nuclear-weapons state. As for the Americans, they too should remember that Pakistan has nuclear weapons and should therefore be careful about how far they push Pakistan. It was one of the more depressing conversations I’ve had recently.

Much of the discourse in our mainstream media is about Government, more dependence on Government. Since 2004, this dependence on Government has assumed an even greater proportion thanks to the Left liberal agenda pushed by the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council. By passing a series of laws that have created a long list of ‘rights-based entitlements’, the UPA Government has gone about deliberately fostering a culture of entitlement and a mindset of dependence on Government. It was, therefore, heartening to see that deep inside the villages of Gujarat there is still that ethic of seeking local solutions to local problems, with local communities taking responsibility to reduce the burden on Government and in the process limiting their own dependence on officialdom.

The article , written by Mariana Baabar delves into how Hindus in Sindh, especially girls, are forced into Islam. Some excerpts :

Hindus constitute about 2.5 per cent, or 26 lakh, of Pakistan’s population.
Though sprinkled all over Pakistan, 95 per cent of Hindus are in Sindh.
Only Tharparkar district in Sindh has Hindus in majority: 51 per cent.

There can scarcely be as dramatic a text for insights into traditions of political fasting in India as Kalhana’s 12th century ‘Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir’ known as the Rajatarangini. This book by a Kashmiri Brahmin furnishes incontrovertible evidence of the widespread recourse to fasting. King Chandrapida himself fasted as a form of penance, in atonement for his inability to bring to justice the murderer of a man whose widow sought death by starvation unless punishment were inflicted on the guilty man (IV:82-99). The remedy of fasting, however, appears generally to have been available only to Brahmins, and Kalhana was not averse to passing sharp remarks on the ease with which members of his community would, singly or collectively, stage a hunger strike to safeguard their interests. As an illustration, Kalhana describes the events of the year 1143, in the reign of Jayasimha. Enraged by a plot to overthrow the king, in which they suspected the hand of the ministers Trillaka and Jayaraja, ‘and anxious to safeguard the country’, the Brahmins commenced a hunger strike ‘directed against’, notes Kalhana, ‘the king’—the king because he had, through his weakness and inaction, permitted the kingdom to fall into ruin. Kalhana suggests that the Brahmins may at first have been moved by noble intentions; but, ‘intoxicated with their own knavery’, they ‘obstinately persisted in their perfidious course’ until they had prevailed upon the king to dismiss his honest minister Alamkara and promise them that he would ‘uproot Trillaka after he had disposed of the pretenders to the crown’ (VIII:2737).