Ishwa helper Reged: 03/03/02 Posts: 553

Re: Is Hinduism a Religion? [Re: vinaire] #13519 - 03/16/02 08:16 AM Edit Reply Quote

Mughal wrote: India was almost never a unfied whole until the British Raj, yet there was always very keen awareness of civilizational unity. The Brahmins had the concept of Aryavarta,..... Before the British, we have the Mauryan unity and the Guptan unity in the so-called (for westerners) historian period. Socio-culturally the Indian subcontinent and far beyond there was relative peaceful uniformity without conquering, something unheard of elsewhere in human history. The Aryavarta concept has to do with nostalgia of later writers from the Kuru Brahmana period on about the remote past when there were chakravartin emperors. The Kuru-Pandus themselves were great unifying emperors, as their heirs the Kuru-Barhadrathas. The problem with Indian history is this. It is too much coloured by western oriented outdated axiomata. It'll take time to remove the clouds of deliberate renaming and changing non-western civilizations to their models. This is a painstaking process in which Hindu (culture)-haters take every change to slow it down. But what counts for Hindu Culture, does count for other cultures too, Islamic included!