200 years of British colonialism and globalization have drastically changed the upper crust of South Asian civilizations. The South Asian subcontinent is a relatively isolated space. In the northwest, north and northeast it is surrounded by the highest mountain chains of the world, the Hindukush, Karakorum and Himalaya and the eastern and western sides down…
Islam is the second largest religion with about 600 million Muslims, forming about one third of South Asia’s population. South Asia has the largest population of Muslims in the world, with about one-third of all Muslims being from South Asia. Islam is the dominant religion in half of the South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Maldives…
Hinduism covers a wide variety of related religious traditions native to the Indian subcontinent. There is a certain influence of Hindu civilization in places where Hindus have settled over the centuries in a sizeable number like for instance in Southeast Asia. There is a scholarly dispute about the origins of Hindu civilization. Mainly western historians,…
The Gandhara civilization existed in what is now Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan from the middle of the 1st millennium BC to the beginning of the 2nd millennium AD. Although multiple major powers ruled over this area during that time, they all had in common great reverence for Buddhism and the adoption of the Indo Greek…
The Indus Valley Civilisation was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1300 BC, and in its mature form from 2600 BC to 1900 BC. Together with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was one of three early civilisations of the Near East and South Asia,…
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…
