The India Insights Blog

Ancient India

Ancient India is counted among the world’s six cradles of civilization alongside Mesopotamia & the Levant, Ancient Egypt, Ancient China, Caral-Supe (Peru), and the Olmecs (Mexico).

However, while most of the other ancient civilizations have gone extinct, leaving behind nothing but buried artefacts for modern historians to break their heads over, Ancient India is vibrantly alive and thriving, still very much a part of our everyday lives.

Anyone interested in understanding the history of humankind could do no better than to study ancient India, so this is one of my intended themes for the India Insights blog.

What Makes India a Nation?

As a child, I sang patriotic songs in school. Ninety percent of those songs had the same theme, namely that India is a land of unity in diversity.

The diversity is obvious and often stated – the landscapes, languages, food, fashion, festivals, all change every hundred kilometers or so in India. The unity, however, is assumed. Most Indians take it for granted. They do not actively consider why or how India is one nation.

And yet, right from ancient times, people around the world have viewed India as a single cultural block; as a people with a shared civilizational identity. For our part, we have taken pride in our shared cultural heritage, but perhaps we take it for granted and don’t think about it in concrete terms.

Another theme I have in mind for this blog, therefore, is to find the unity in the diversity. My goal is to take up the various aspects of our shared heritage and make them more obvious.

My Background

I have been studying and writing about Indian classical music for the past 20 years or more. More recently, I have been attempting to trace its history back to its roots, in the Vedas (ancient Indian scriptures from the second millennium BCE). This has led me to becoming very interested in ancient India as a whole.

I also have a pan-Indian background. Originally from Tamil Nadu, I spent my childhood in Northeast India, went to university in New Delhi, and lived in Varanasi subsequently for several years. I speak Hindi and Tamil fluently and have studied Sanskrit in school. I have lived in rural India, small-town India, and metropolitan India.

Of course, in spite of all this, I can only begin to scratch the surface of what India is. Still, we must all begin somewhere, and for now, that is what this blog is – a beginning.

Please write to me at sadhana@india-insights.com or leave a comment below if you’d like to hear about any topic in particular. You can also follow and interact with me on X.

Thank you!

Sādhana