There are other places of the stone age human activities in South Asia so far no place has been found that matches the splendour of Mehrgarh. This could be due to the missing archeological research in those areas. Northeast India being one of the most diverse regions of Asia in terms of human civilization through…
Mehrgarh is a Stone Age site located at the foot of the Bolan Pass on the Kachi plain of Baluchistan in modern day Pakistan. Continuously occupied between about 7000 to 2600 BC, Mehrgarh is the earliest known Neolithic site in the northwest Indian subcontinent, with early evidence of farming (wheat and barley), herding (cattle, sheep,…
A civilization is a complex human society, usually made up of different cities, with certain characteristics of cultural and technological development. In many parts of the world, early civilizations formed when people began coming together in urban settlements. However, defining what civilization is, and what societies fall under that designation, is a hotly contested argument,…
Since Dalits are excluded from the four-fold varna system of Hinduism and are seen as “Avarna”, they are examined separately. Dalit (meaning broken, shattered in Sanskrit) is a name for people who used to belong to the lowest jatis (occupational castes) in India. They are called “untouchables” because they are considered impure in the religious…
The term “caste” is of western origin based on the Latin “castus” meaning pure. It was obviously created and introduced during the time when western (Portuguese, Dutch, French, British) seafarers and conquerors came to India and tried to make out and understand the society they found in India. The caste is legitimized by Hinduism social…
Hinduism which is also called Sanatana Dharma (eternal law), refers to the idea that its origins go back beyond time and space, has about one billion followers; they represent about 15% of the world population. After Christianity (31%) and Islam (23%), Hinduism is the third largest religion globally. Other than Islam and Christianity it is…
Globalization that includes the interaction, cohabitation and mixing of people from different ethnicities, cultures, religious backgrounds, values and world views has changed the world consisting of nation states considerably. The growing presence of the “other” in one’s neighbourhood has opened up tensions, questioned identities and resulted in a struggle to hold on to one’s inherited…
Sikhism is a religion originated in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent around the end of the 15th century AD. It is one of the youngest of the major South Asian religions and the world’s fifth-largest organized religion, with about 25–30 million Sikhs as of the early 21st century. Sikhism developed from the spiritual…
Surrounded on three sides by the sea and closed in the north by high mountain ranges, the relatively segregated geographical position of the subcontinent and the strong and persistent influence of the Indian caste system have resulted in certain specifics with regard to Indian Islam. One is that the spread of Islam has been extremely…
With the largest population of Muslims in the world, Islam is the second largest religion in South Asia with about 600 million Muslims, forming about one-third of all Muslims of South Asia’s population. The dominant religion in half of the South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Maldives and Pakistan), in India Islam is the second-largest religion while…
