In February 2026 archaeologists working in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings made a discovery that completely rewrote our understanding of the ancient Mediterranean. Historians have long known about the maritime spice route. Decades of excavations at Red Sea ports like Berenike yielded Indian trade goods and painted a picture of strictly transactional commerce. The standard assumption was always that Indian ships arrived at the coast and the sailors simply waited in port for the monsoon winds to take them back across the Arabian Sea.

The new findings permanently shatter that coastal limitation. Deep inside the royal tombs of the Theban Necropolis, researchers found dozens of inscriptions in Tamil and Sanskrit carved alongside the graffiti of Greek and Latin tourists. This revelation arrived on the heels of an equally stunning finding at the Red Sea port of Berenike in 2022, where researchers discovered an Anatolian marble statue of the Buddha standing in the courtyard of a Greco-Roman temple dedicated to Isis. Together, the epigraphy and the marble paint a startling picture. The ancient Indian diaspora in Egypt was rich, established, and entirely comfortable projecting its cultural and economic power deep within the heart of the Roman world.

But this staggering display of foreign wealth begs a far darker macroeconomic question for their hosts. We must ask who was paying for South Indian merchants to commission imported marble statues and leisurely tour the inland monuments of the Pharaohs. The answer points to a catastrophic financial hemorrhage that ultimately reshaped the ancient world.

History traditionally, and rightly, blames the ultimate fall of Rome on external martial forces, namely the Hunnic pressure and the resulting Germanic incursions. Yet a much larger, far more consequential precursor often gets entirely overlooked in popular imagination. Long before the first Vandal arrived at the gates of Rome, a fatal, centuries-long trade deficit was already hollowing out the empire from the inside out. Rome was bleeding its finite reserves of silver and gold eastward to fuel an insatiable, patrician appetite for Eastern luxuries, spices, and fine textiles.

When this unsustainable economic engine finally stalled, the resulting breakdown of commerce with India stripped the empire of its fiscal resilience. It triggered what can arguably be called the world’s first global financial crisis, which is what this article aims to explore. We will look beyond the battlefield and understand how a sophisticated South Indian trade network slowly and deliberately drained the Roman treasury dry, leaving the greatest military power of antiquity financially bankrupt and structurally incapable of weathering the barbarian storms to come.

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According to the report of the Chinese local authorities in Sinkiang, Frontier Guards of the Chinese Liberation Army stationed in the south-western part of Sinkiang discovered in succession on September 8 and 12 two groups of Indian armed personnel at Tahungliutan and Kegrekirekan on the Sinkiang-Tibet road on Chinese territory. These personnel had clearly intruded into Chinese territory to conduct unlawful surveying activities within Chinese borders. They were therefore detained by the Chinese Frontier Guards…The Chinese Government requests the Government of India to guarantee that no similar incidents will occur in future.

Sinkiang is present-day Xinjiang. Tahungliutan is now known as Dahongliutan, literally “Red Willow Beach,” a key military outpost and logistics node on the G219 Highway. This road is the modern successor of the Xinjiang-Tibet route cited in the memorandum and runs through the stark, high-altitude expanse of Aksai Chin at roughly 13,800 feet. Kegrekirekan, meanwhile, corresponds to the isolated tracts near the Karakash River and the Kongka Pass in the southwestern reaches of the Aksai Chin plateau.

The memorandum itself was issued in response to an earlier informal note from the Indian Foreign Secretary to the Chinese Ambassador. That note asserted that the highway lay within Indian territory and sought information on the whereabouts of an Indian patrol party reported to have disappeared in the area.

Neither side realized it then, but this diplomatic exchange marked the beginning of a border dispute that would manifest as a full-scale war four years later and remain unresolved well into the following century. At stake was a little over 7.5 million acres of some of the most hostile and desolate terrain imaginable on the far side of the Himalayas, also known as the “Soda Plains.” This essay attempts to answer a single question. Who owns Aksai Chin? The focus here is strictly historical, not moral and not political. Only the history.

A Forbidding Geography

Aksai Chin is a high-altitude plateau, rising roughly between 15,000 and 16,000 feet above sea level. The environment is severe. The land is unsuitable for agriculture and supports no permanent settlements. “Not a blade of grass grows there,” is how Nehru is famously alleged to have described the region, although the exact phrasing was “no tree grows anywhere in this wide area—there may be some shrubs.”2 The remark was rhetorical rather than literal, since sparse grass does grow there, enough to support seasonal grazing during the summer months for sheep, goats, and yaks.

The plateau is isolated by a series of high-altitude natural boundaries. Its northern perimeter is defined by the Kunlun Mountains with perennial snow zones and a steep descent into the Tarim Basin. To the west, lie the offshoots of the Karakoram. And to the east and southeast lies a significant, though less documented, ridge rising about 20,000 feet. Described by early surveyors like Frederic Drew as the primary watershed ridge, this range (centered on the Lanak La) functions as a hydrological divide separating the endorheic westward drainage of the Amtogor and Sarig Jilgnang basins from the eastward discharge toward the Leighten and Tsoggar systems.3

This topographic configuration establishes a distinct internal geography for the plateau. The western sector of the Aksai Chin remains accessible exclusively from the southwest, from the settled regions of Ladakh. This point becomes important later. This geographical proximity once allowed Ladakhi pastoralists to conduct seasonal altitudinal migrations, driving livestock to higher elevations during the summer months without the necessity of traversing major orographic barriers. Such cyclic grazing patterns rendered the western plateau, particularly the Chang Chenmo valley and its contiguous rangelands, a viable resource for seasonal exploitation.

The environment nevertheless remained precarious. Abrupt, premature snowfall routinely compromised accessibility and obscured the already limited forage. These unpredictable weather events often resulted in significant livestock mortality before the herds could be successfully extricated to lower elevations.

At the same time, the same geography that permitted limited Ladakhi access made the plateau forbiddingly dangerous for herdsmen approaching from the north or east. Entry from those directions required crossing high mountain ranges, effectively reserving much of the western plateau, by force of terrain alone, for seasonal Ladakhi use.

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It was here, across the lush hills of Assam and Meghalaya, that a people from the southeast of China arrived between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. They were the Austroasiatics—rice cultivators, toolmakers, and early speakers of a language that would one day crystallize into Santali, Mundari, Khasi, and many others we barely acknowledge today. Unlike the pastoral migrants of later epochs, these were farmers. They brought not horses or chariots, but grains and words. Their journey marks one of the earliest known migrations into India after the first Africans, and though their story survives only in genes, speech, and soil, its imprint is vast.

From them came the domestication of rice in its most enduring form, the linguistic threads that tie Santali to Khmer and Vietnamese, and perhaps even the earliest whispers of metallurgy. The Munda words that would later rise again in Sanskrit, the Asur smiths of Jharkhand who would help forge the Iron Age, and the megaliths they raised in Orissa and the Northeast that would prefigure the earliest Hindu temples.

To view India’s making only through the Indus or the Aryan lens is to overlook the first revolution that took root along the Brahmaputra—the revolution of rice, iron, and language. This is the story of India’s forgotten beginning.

From Yangtze to Brahmaputra

This story begins about ten thousand years ago. It is not the true beginning though because the subcontinent had already been inhabited for at least sixty thousand years by the first immigrants from Africa. Those earliest settlers had long made the land their own, hunting wild buffalo and fishing in swollen rivers while gathering jāmuns in the forests that covered most of India. For tens of millennia life followed the same rhythm. Communities hunted, ate, and moved on. The subcontinent had its people, but they had remained largely untouched by anyone beyond their own. India was still sealed off from the world outside. That long isolation was about to end as the Pleistocene ice thawed.

Around ten thousand years ago a new movement began on the horizon. Across the mountains in the far northeast, new people started crossing into the subcontinent. They came down from the highlands and followed the rivers into the fertile plains of the Brahmaputra. The land they found was rich, green, and soaked in rain, a perfect refuge for anyone seeking new ground.

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However, this spectrum had already started a slow shift in favor of higher prohibitions toward the end of the Upanishadic period. Even as Yajnavalkya admits to his love for beef, for instance, he still warns us against it, lest one become the bearer of a grave sin and be reborn as a “strange being.” Was this a Shramanic influence? Did the Buddha’s emphasis on nonviolence and karma inform the Upanishadic ideals in this regard? That’s the notion much of mainstream scholarship operates on. It’s therefore a good idea to ascertain if that really is the case. And if at all that weren’t the case, the question one cannot deny that Hindus are visibly less meat inclined today than they were back in the day. There has to be a point where something changed drastically and that point is not the Upanishads.

We know that Hinduism underwent its most significant codification in the early centuries AD—a process often described as the śāstrification of Vedic philosophy. Although it likely began under the Kushans, it reached its fullest expression under the Guptas. This period witnessed the rise of a new body of literature known as the Dharmaśāstras, the most prominent of which is the Mānava Dharmaśāstra, better known as the Manusmṛti.

To understand the status of meat during the Common Era, it is essential to examine Manusmṛti’s view on food. That is our starting point here. For a more comprehensive picture, however, we will also consider how meat was perceived in society under the Kushans, the Śakas, the Guptas, and in the post-Gupta India. Although pre–Common Era dietary practices were discussed in a previous article, we will briefly revisit that period to address one crucial omission—the Mauryas. This will include Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra alongside Buddhist and Jain sources, to finally clarify the question of Shramanic nonviolence in relation to meat consumption.

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At the same time, we do have a large number of communities where meat isn’t just permitted but enforced as divine offerings. A most well-known example is that of Bengal and the neighboring Jharkhand where goats are sacrificed during Durga Puja and partaken in as the prasāda from the goddess. Animal sacrifice is also a common feature in Bihar and a few other places as part of life events, such as wedding. Even without ritualistic slaughter, there are a number of Brahmin communities that consume meat without any injunction. These include, but are not limited to, Kashmiri Pandits and Maithili Brahmins.

Who then is the real Hindu? Can one consume meat and still be as Hindu as one who doesn’t? The question isn’t as close ended as it seems. It warrants a thorough exploration of what our vast scriptural corpus says on the matter. This is what we aim to do in this article. We will start right from the beginning and proceed from there, examining both textual and archaeological exhibits along the way. We will consider not only what the layman ate but also what the sacerdotal authority stipulated. Because tradition must account for both. In the interest of depth, we divide the discussion into two parts. This one goes only as far as the epics. In a later piece, we will explore the Shastras, the Puranas, and the Shramanic traditions like Buddhism and Jainism.

Prehistory

It’s extremely challenging to conclude with absolute certainty what our prehistoric ancestors ate. This is for a variety of reasons the most crippling one being our continued inability to read their writing. We’re still far from figuring out the nature of their writing, much less its content. A related factor is the very fact that they wrote so little. The longest known Indus inscription is less than thirty symbols long. That’s not a whole lot to work with. We don’t have large bodies of monumental inscriptions the likes of which made it possible to decipher Mesopotamian and Ashokan writings with much greater ease. Having said that, educated guesses can still be made, sometimes with a fair amount of conviction.

For instance, they were an agricultural community, had been since as early as Mehrgarh, long before Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. From that, we can most certainly assume that cereals formed part of their diet. But did they eat meat?

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In 1922, Rakhal Das Banerji began excavations on the northwestern mound of Mohenjo-daro, the site’s loftiest elevation. His work, later continued in 1925–26 under B. L. Dhama and directed by John Marshall, revealed a Buddhist complex that Marshall documents in detail. At its core stood a quadrangular courtyard dominated by a central stupa and enclosed by monastic cells, rebuilt several times at progressively higher levels. The original stupa, over fifty feet wide, included an elaborate eastern stairway and a prominent image niche that once housed a seated Buddha. Although its dome has disappeared, the circular drum survives to a height of eight feet, while earlier treasure-seekers had disturbed its hollow core and uncovered fragments of an alabaster reliquary.

Banerji suggested that the monument was designed as a hollow structure, plastered and painted within, yet Marshall questioned this interpretation. Finding no clear traces of interior decoration, he argued that the stupa, like others in India, was more likely filled with debris and capped by a dome, with only a modest relic chamber at its heart. Constructed of reused bricks set in mud mortar, the monument displays rough workmanship compared with the earlier Indus remains it overlies. Still, it stands as evidence of the long persistence of Buddhist activity at Mohenjo-daro, imposed upon the ruins of the city’s prehistoric past.

Or does it?

So, for the longest time, Mohenjo-daro was a desolate wasteland with nothing but arid dirt and earth covering whatever might lay underneath. Its “citadel” jutted out of its surrounding like an invitation to archaeologists to dig it out of centuries of neglect, but the Archaeological Survey of India had its hands full with Harappa, a site it had started digging only months before. The unusual outcrop, after which Mohenjo-daro or “Mound of the Dead” got its name, was casually read as a stupa from the Kushan era. These rulers, especially after Kanishka, were heavily into Buddhism and ruled the area roughly between 75 and 250 AD. In fact, the region had been under Buddhist influence even before the Kushans arrived. The Parthians, the Greeks, the Maurya, had all ruled the area before the Kushans and all of them patronized Buddhism in their own way. Therefore, the theory of an ancient Buddhist stupa in the region had no reason to invite scrutiny.

Banerji had surveyed the area in 1919 and was keen on digging. But he only got the chance in 1922 when he finally put the trowel to the mound with a team of excavators. Worth reiterating and bearing in mind here is that the mound was assumed to be a stupa long before its excavation. This is important. Banerji’s boss was none other than the ASI Director-General John Marshall.

Before we proceed with the nature of the “stupa,” it’s important to establish the necessity of such establishment. Ideally, it would be a mere subject of curiosity and exploration, but as most things Indian, this one too comes with a great deal of political and ideological baggage. IVC is where the Indian society took roots. Hence, there’s much to be gained ideologically from appropriating its cultural and more importantly religious legacy. Whichever religion the Harappans practiced automatically becomes India’s primary religion. There are two major contestants right now, Hinduism and Buddhism. It’s the classic “alien versus sons-of-soil” argument. Of course, this also fits neatly within the Indian “Left versus Right” discourse where the Left gains from a Buddhist IVC and the Right from a Hindu or Vedic IVC. The third alternative that it could be neither, given that we’re yet to crack its code, is far less glamorous and finds few takers in this ideologically charged debate. The attempt here is to, as always, stick to the verifiable and discard the unverifiable. Let’s continue.

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What makes Pataliputra so captivating? Imagine a metropolis that hosted philosophers like Buddha, emperors like Ashoka, and attracted invaders from faraway Greece and Persia, only to fade into ruins before rising again as a spiritual lighthouse. In an era where history often feels dry and distant, Pataliputra’s tale pulses with drama—prophetic floods foretold by the Buddha himself, romantic legends of flying lovers founding cities, and the quiet migrations of scholars fleeing decay. Yet, this is no fairy tale, it’s grounded in inscriptions, excavations, and ancient texts that paint a vivid, verifiable picture.

As we dive into this longform exploration, we’ll trace Pataliputra’s journey from a strategic outpost to a bustling urban powerhouse, through periods of unparalleled prosperity under dynasties like the Mauryas and Guptas, and into its decline amid natural disasters and political intrigues. We’ll examine the forces that led to its de-urbanization, the emigration of its inhabitants, and its ultimate sanctification as a tirtha, a holy place drawing pilgrims across centuries. By the end, you’ll see why Pataliputra isn’t just a footnote in history books but a living legacy that continues to influence Bihar’s cultural landscape today. Buckle up for a journey through time that uncovers the metamorphosis of a city that refused to die even in decay.

The Flowers of Confluence

It’s extremely rare for a river to be masculine in Sanskrit, thanks to the general Indic tradition of river goddesses. One such rarity is Son, Śо̄ṇa in Sanskrit. Originating deep in the jungles of Amarkantak in Chhattisgarh, this river runs east for a few hundred miles before turning north to ultimately pour into the Ganges not far from Maner in Bihar. At this confluence of the masculine and the feminine was once a pocket of beautiful pink vegetation still common in the region—the trumpet flower. In the neighboring Bengal they call it pārul, but here, in Sanskrit, it was pāṭalī. Botanists now assign it the name Stereospermum chelonoides. More than two thousand years ago, perhaps three, a tiny unassuming settlement took shape among these groves. Nestled in the angle between two large perennial rivers, this hamlet was destined for greatness right from the beginning. They called it Pataligrama, or “the village of pātalī.”

This wasn’t a unique ecosystem in this regard. So far as we know, the flower has lent its name to at least two other cities, both in the angle of two water bodies. There’s a Pāṭala near Kannauj at the confluence of Ramganga and Ganga. And there’s a Patala in a faraway Sindh where the Indus meets the sea. Of the three, only Pataligrama survives to this day, albeit with a very different name. This straggling gentrification also came to acquire alternative names such as Pādalipura, or the “pādali town.” Padali was just a local Pali corruption of Sanskrit pātali. But men have settled lands by the river since the beginning of time. What makes this one so special?

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The Indus civilization remains an odd mystery majorly because it has left behind very little writing. Everything we know so far is educated guesswork, logical extrapolation. But there’s a great deal we still don’t know even with such extrapolations. For instance, we’re yet to confidently ascertain what they imported. We know they exported carnelian, bronze, fowls, buffalos, and other exotic items to the Mesopotamians, but we don’t know much about that they got back in return. A correct decipherment of their script could help answer a long list of similar questions.

With over 4,000 inscriptions recovered so far, it’s hard to believe that they left behind insufficient writing. But while the volume of inscriptions is great, not so great is the average size of these inscriptions. The longest is about 30-35 characters, the shorted just one character. The average hovers around 5. That’s not a whole lot to work with. But that doesn’t mean attempts haven’t been made.

As is the case with the Aryans, the Harappans too come with immense political and ideological baggage. The Indus civilization is primordial India. Whoever gets to claim it, gets to claim India. Much ideological debate in the subcontinent revolves around the ethnic identity of the Meluhhans or Harappans with two major contentions—Dravidian or Aryan. South Indians want the civilization to be Proto-Dravidian so they could claim primacy over the country’s civilizational heritage. This ties in well with their notion that they are natives and the Aryans or North Indians, foreign invaders. The converse is claimed by North Indians.

This politics colors scholarship. Many scholars are also ideologues and enter the study not to find out the truth, but to confirm something they already hold as the truth. In the simplest terms, this debate boils down to language. South Indian ideologues want the Indus language to be some kind of a Proto-Dravidian dialect, so as to fortify their claims of nativity. North Indians, on the other hand, want the Indus language to be Sanskrit, for the exact opposite reasons. Who is right then?

This article does not answer that question. Hundreds of scholars and experts all over the world are working hard to crack this code, certainly not something an article like this could even begin to cover. What this article does endeavor is to pick one of the myriad hypotheses and examine it objectively for viability. We’re talking a 2024 paper titled “A Cryptanalytic Decipherment of the Indus Script” that makes a bold claim in favor of Sanskrit. The paper which is yet to be peer-reviewed and published in a journal, uses an impressive array of cryptographic novelties to arrive at its conclusions. Reading it thoroughly before proceeding is highly recommended even if not an absolute necessity.

This piece is going to be very different from all others on this site, because this one involves a good deal of math and a little bit of computers, in addition to linguistics and history. Cryptography is a math-intensive discipline and therefore hard to keep purely equation-free. As for computers, there’s only this concept of regex. Not the whole concept, but a couple of real-world examples. Nothing that should deter a sincere reader. The only caveat here is that the Indus glyphs are mentioned using their short English descriptions rather than the characters. This is because the Indus font is not supported on this platform yet, so the glyphs would render as unreadable blocks like this—. So, instead of typing out the jar character, we’ll just spell out “jar.” We’ll start with some elementary jargon and relevant math and then wiggle our way into the meat and potatoes of Yajnadevam’s decipherment.

The Mathematics of Decipherment

Entropy is randomness. It measures the unpredictability in a system. The higher the predictability, the lower the entropy, and vice versa. This is not just some vague abstraction, but a tangible, quantifiable value that can be derived and expressed in real numbers. Mathematically, this randomness is expressed in bits. Why? Because it’s the lowest unit of information. For instance, the answer to a basic yes/no question only needs two states, and those can be expressed as either 0 or 1, i.e. using a single bit. If a question can be answered one of four ways, a single bit isn’t sufficient. Two are—00, 01, 10, and 11. The number of bits required to express a piece of information can be calculated as:

Where i is the number of possible values in the information. So, for a yes/no question, i is 2, which can be expressed using log₂(2) = 1 bit. For a question that can be answered 10 different ways, log₂(10) = 3.32 bits would be needed.

For languages, entropy tells us how much information is packed into each symbol (like letters). If a language is very predictable (e.g., “th_” often becomes “the”), its entropy is lower. In this context, the number of possible answers is the probability of a given letter. We know that all letters are not equally ubiquitous. “E” is far more frequent than, say, “X,” and so on. Thus, for a letter, its frequency or probability is what governs its entropy. This probability is a quantifiable value. Thus, the above entropy formula can be extended to calculate the overall entropy for an entire language system:

Where:

• p_i = probability of the i-th symbol (e.g., how often “A” appears in English)

• n = total number of symbols (e.g., 26 for English)

This formula sums up the contributions of all symbols based on their probabilities. Once again, the final value is expressed in bits. Let’s illustrate this with a calculation. English has 26 letters, but they don’t appear equally often. For simplicity, let’s use approximate probabilities for common letters:

• “E” appears 13% of the time, hence p_E = 0.13, H_E = -p_E ⋅ log₂(p_E) ≈ 0.38 bits.

• “T” appears 9% of the time, hence p_T = 0.09, H_T = -p_T ⋅ log₂(p_T) ≈ 0.31 bits.

• Other letters have lower probabilities.

For “E” and “T” we get a total entropy of 0.69 bits. If we calculate this for all 26 letters in English, using their actual probabilities (which vary widely), we find that English has an average entropy of about 1.5 bits per letter. This means that each letter carries about 1.5 bits of information on average.

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The roots of this scrutiny trace back to 1786, when Sir William Jones, a British judge in colonial India, noted striking similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin during an address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He suggested these languages descended from a shared source, a claim that birthed the Indo-European language family hypothesis and, eventually, PIE. For two centuries, linguists have built on this idea, reconstructing PIE’s sounds, words, and grammar from its presumed daughters. However, the absence of direct evidence—no inscriptions or texts in PIE—fuels doubt. Critics ask whether these similarities could arise from contact, borrowing, or independent development rather than a single ancestor.

In India, skepticism often carries additional weight. Sanskrit, enshrined in ancient texts like the Rig Veda, holds a revered status as a cornerstone of cultural and linguistic heritage. For some Indian scholars, the notion that Sanskrit derives from a reconstructed PIE—often linked to a distant steppe origin—challenges its primacy. This perspective is compounded by historical context: Jones’s work emerged under British colonial rule, raising concerns that PIE might reflect a Western agenda to reframe India’s linguistic past. Such doubts align with broader critiques questioning whether PIE is a testable hypothesis or an unprovable abstraction.

The debate hinges on fundamental questions. If PIE existed, what evidence supports it? How do linguists reconstruct a language never recorded? Can shared features among Indo-European languages only be explained by a common source, or are alternative explanations viable? Beyond linguistics, does archaeology provide corroboration, or does it complicate the picture? These questions are not merely academic—they touch on identity, history, and the reliability of scientific methods applied to the past.

This article hopes to settle the debate to the best possible extent using all available evidence. We’ll start with the theory’s conception, then trace its development over the years, going through all the changes and new ideas along the way. Also, along the way, we’ll get a quick tutorial on all the linguistic ideas of relevance, such as phonetic terms and concepts like Grimm’s Law. Then we will endeavor to get a clear picture of all the arguments against it and those for it, before finally drawing conclusions. In keeping with the tradition of objectivity here, equal space will be accorded to voices from either side of the argument.

This structure aims to provide a comprehensive evaluation. Each section builds on the last, grounding the discussion in established scholarship while remaining open to critique. The goal is not to prejudge PIE’s existence but to interrogate the evidence—linguistic patterns, sound laws, artifacts—systematically. Whether PIE emerges as a concrete language, or a contested hypothesis depends on how this evidence holds up under scrutiny.

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The question that arises then is, did slavery come to India with the Muslims? We know Islam institutionalizes and unambiguously endorses slavery. Muhammad himself owned a few, as did every caliph, be it Rashidun or Abbasid. But again, did Islam bring slavery to India?

A most pervasive notion, particularly among certain nationalist circles, holds that the institution of slavery was alien to ancient Indian civilization—introduced first by Muslim rulers and later perpetuated by European colonizers. This perspective situates slavery, along with other social ills, firmly outside India’s cultural boundaries, thus distancing it from Hindu traditions and institutions. Such notions serve to establish civilizational and moral superiority by creating an idealized pre-Islamic past untainted by practices now universally condemned.

The view is, of course, aggressively contested by voices from the other side of the line that are best served by an India that was at least as regressive and evil as the rest of the world at the time, if not more. Naturally, the topic comes with immense political and ideological baggage which, as is often the case with such topics, clouds academic judgment. here we attempt to take a very dispassionate view of the matter and let the records speak for themselves. in keeping with our tradition, we’ll be lending an ear to voices from both sides of the divide and scrutinize every reference, every evidence with the maximum possible skepticism and with little regard for political correctness or social sentiments. May facts and nothing but facts prevail.

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Goes without saying, since the attribution is made to political Islam, the subject is inherently polarizing. Lal himself has been firmly placed among the likes of R. C. Majumdar and Sita Ram Goel as a Rightwing ideologue and even history revisionist. Having said that, the apparition of his bodacious claim continues to haunt ideological and political discourses in the country to this day, more than two decades after his passing. The objective of this article is to establish the veracity, or otherwise, of Lal’s claim purely in the light of historical facts at our disposal. As we always do, we’ll scrutinize arguments from both sides of the aisle for a comprehensive, well-rounded conclusion.

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Earlier attempts to estimate Earth’s age, such as those by Lord Kelvin in the nineteenth century, suggested it was much younger—around 20 to 40 million years—based on the rate at which Earth was losing heat. Back in the seventeenth century, Bishop James Ussher of Ireland famously calculated that Earth was “created” in 4004 BC, which suggests an Earth age of around 6,000 years, based on genealogies in the Bible. But thousands of years ago, the Atharva Veda had already calculated a value that matches, with remarkable approximation, the value accepted by the scientific community today. Naysayers dismiss it as motivated Hindutva interpretation with no basis in reality.

Similarly, India’s Vedic ancients had also discovered other values crucial to modern physics, like the speed of light and gravity, long before there even was physics. Again, scholarship stands divided on the topic with one side standing by the claims and holding them as Vedic India’s scientific supremacy, and the other dismissing it wholesale as a late Hindutva fabrication out of political and ideological motivations. Both cannot be right. With this investigation, we hope to find out just which one is. Read with an open, apolitical, and irreligious mind, for truth follows reason and reason is not beholden to religion. As always, we shall examine multiple works by multiple scholars from both sides of the aisle in the interest of objectivity and completeness.

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sa sāgaram anādṛśyam atikramya mahābalaḥ, 
trikūṭaśikhare laṅkāṁ sthitāṁ svastho dadarśa ha.
“The mighty Hanuman crossed the inviolable sea, stood comfortably on the peak of Trikuta mountain and looked at Lanka.” (trans. Kataka)

With this, Valmiki establishes Lanka as a mystical island across the raging sea.12 Elsewhere in his work, he offers vivid elaborations of a city of skyscrapers, gold, blue lotuses, and formidable rakshasas. Lanka is the Shangri-La reachable only by those with special divine endowments. Today, we know it as the island nation of Sri Lanka. This identification is a culmination of centuries of reinforcement and finds strong support in a long list of material finds. The island is littered with sites mentioned in the epic. From the cave where Ravana meditated, to the enormous plateau on top of which sat his palace, to the spot where Sita was held captive, an entire catalog of Ramayana sites has attracted pilgrims from all over the Indian subcontinent and beyond for centuries. There’s even a giant footprint believed to be of Hanuman.

It’s strange, then, that there should even be a debate of any kind on the subject. That Lanka is Sri Lanka has remained part of mainstream scholarship for ages. What’s there to debate?

Turns out, a lot. There’s a growing body of academicians who question the very fundamentals of this association. They suggest removing the entire island nation from the equation and confining the epic’s entire geography to the Indian mainland. In this view, Lanka is located not in Sri Lanka but in India. Where in India? That depends on who we ask. Some suggest the vicinity of Delhi, others go with the Chhotanagpur plateaus in the east. Are they right? Does their position hold water against available scriptural and archeological data? That’s what we intend to explore in this article. If you wish to follow a similar exercise for Ayodhya, we’ve already done that here.

Before we get down to the brass tacks, let’s quickly outline our approach. The pieces we have at our disposal are literary, folkloric, geographical, ecological, and linguistic. We will examine them all. We will also examine theories from not just Hindu but also Buddhist works for a holistic understanding. The story of Ramayana, although originally Indian, has traveled far beyond the subcontinent over centuries. Associated folklores and traditions have emerged in places as far out as Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka. We will consider some of those too. And, of course, as the practice here goes, both hypotheses—that Lanka is Sri Lanka and Lanka isn’t Sri Lanka—shall receive their due limelight. One last thing to note before we proceed, and keep in mind throughout the investigation, is that the subject at hand is of a highly political nature and must be seen as such at all times. When a religious topic acquires a political character, every piece of evidence on either side of the argument becomes suspect of ideological biases. In the case of Lanka, there’s a clear divide of precisely that nature—The Hindu Right tends to place it in Sri Lanka, the Left in India, if at all. Every theorist in this domain is likely, although not necessarily, an ideologue. So, keep that in mind as we go through every piece of evidence advanced in support of either theory.

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We know that Sanskrit is the oldest Indic language, older than the entire Dravidian family. This debate has been extensively studied and settled in an earlier article on the subject.

The traditional view is that most non-Dravidian languages spawned from small set of nonstandard ancestors collectively called Prakrit. These Prakrit tongues are typically contrasted with Sanskrit in prestige, status, and semantic standard. Whatever be one’s position on this contentious subject, learned consensus largely remains that Prakrit follows Sanskrit and not the other way around. In which case, we must address a nagging question—Why doesn’t epigraphy support this order? The oldest specimens of Indic writing, outside of Indus seals and aboriginal cave scribbles, known to us come from the imperial edicts of Aśoka. These edicts are in Pali, Aramaic, and even Greek. But not Sanskrit. This is roughly between 260 and 232 BC. But the first specimen to exhibit Sanskrit, as traditionally (but erroneously) held, wouldn’t come until around 150 AD with Rudradaman’s rock inscription at Junagadh. That’s almost four hundred years between written Prakrit and written Sanskrit.

If Sanskrit emerged before Prakrit, how come Prakrit inscriptions predate Sanskrit inscriptions? This is a linguistic paradox that has been extensively studied and investigated for almost a century now with few clear answers. In this article, we’ll attempt to follow this study and arrive at a working theory that stands the test of reason and logic. In light of available historical facts, of course. In the course of this investigation, we will also tangentially touch upon the history of writing in the Indian context. The epigraphic gap between the Indus collapse around 1800 BC and Aśokan edicts around 250 BC is troubling. We will appreciate this gap, if not fully decode it. The first order of business in that direction is to clearly establish the distinction between Sanskrit and Prakrit. And address some misconceptions along the way.

The Concept of Diglossia

A proper understanding of the subject at hand warrants a degree of familiarity with a couple of linguistic concepts. One such concept is diglossia but even before that, we ought to understand code-switching. While the term itself might sound unfamiliar, the phenomenon it describes isn’t. Unaware of its technical appellation, we engage in code-switching almost instinctively at all times. At least those of us who speak more than one language. So, what is it?

Code-switching is the practice of alternating between two or more languages or language varieties within a single conversation, sentence, or even phrase. It typically occurs in multilingual or bilingual communities where speakers are fluent in more than one language. Code-switching can happen for various reasons, such as expressing identity, conveying specific meanings, accommodating different listeners, or adhering to social or cultural norms. Or just plain old habit. An excellent example in the Indian context is Hinglish, a seamless nonstandard blend of Hindi and English:

“Kal meeting hai, so don’t be late.”

In this example, the same sentence is rendered partly in Hindi and partly in English. In fact, even the Hindi part comes embedded with an English word, meeting. This practice of instinctively switching between two or languages in the same context, often in the same sentence, is common to all multilingual societies. In some cases, also a marker of social status. Hinglish is widely used in urban India, among younger generations, and reflects the linguistic and cultural interaction between Hindi and English. The phenomenon is often studied in sociolinguistics because it reveals how language interacts with social contexts, helping speakers negotiate different social identities or roles. It also shows how languages influence each other in multilingual settings.

Since code-switching involves multiple languages or dialects, one language or dialect typically stands out as the dominant substrate. It serves as the primary grammatical framework within which elements from other languages are inserted during conversation. This dominant tongue is called the matrix language, the second concept fundamental to the subject at hand. The non-dominant components are called embedded languages. The matrix language controls the sentence structure, word order, and other grammatical rules, while the embedded language provides individual words or phrases. In the case of Hinglish, for instance, Hindi is the matrix language because it dictates the word order and the sentence structure, and English, which contributes little more than rudimentary vocabulary, serves as the embedded.

The matrix language concept is particularly important in studying code-switching because it helps linguists understand how two or more languages interact in bilingual speech, with one language, the matrix, setting the structural norms and the other, the embedded language, contributing lexical items or short phrases.

And now we can finally discuss diglossia. It’s a subset of the above sociolinguistic situation, where two distinct varieties of the same language coexist within a speech community. The varieties can be classified as High and Low, and they often differ significantly in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and usage contexts. The High variety is typically used in formal settings, such as in literature, education, government, and religious contexts. It is usually regarded as the prestigious or “standard” form of the language. The Low variety, on the other hand, serves informal settings, such as everyday conversation, family interactions, and social gatherings. It may be considered colloquial or nonstandard.

Speakers generally do not blend High and Low varieties within the same context. For example, one might use the High variety during a speech or a religious ceremony, while the Low variety is employed in casual conversations with friends or family. Consequently, code-switching is virtually nonexistent between these varieties. Diglossia often mirrors societal attitudes toward different language forms, with the High variety typically associated with education and prestige, whereas the Low variety may be linked to regional identity or informal speech. A noteworthy example in the Indian context is the distinction between the Hindi spoken in Delhi and that in Mumbai or Bihar. The former represents standard, educated speech, while the latter varieties are frequently dismissed or even derided as uneducated vernaculars. Beyond India, this distinction is observed in Greece with Katharevousa and Demotic, though Demotic has now become the standard. In the Arab world, Standard Arabic contrasts with dialects like Egyptian Arabic. Similarly, in German-speaking regions of Europe, Hochdeutsch (High German) is distinguished from Plattdeutsch or Niederdeutsch (Low German). Examples also exist in English, including within subsets like American English, where the East Coast dialect enjoys more prestige than Ebonics or Texan English. Similarly, in British English, there are distinct class differences between Queen’s English and vernaculars such as Geordie or Cockney.

While code-switching is not a characteristic of diglossia, the concept of matrix language remains relevant. In this context, the matrix language refers to the more dominant language in everyday speech—the register most commonly used in informal communication. Typically, this is the Low variety specific to a region, such as Bihari Hindi in Bihar or Cockney in certain parts of London. The Low or matrix dialect is the one most speech communities default to unless in formal settings that require the High or “educated” variant. With these fundamentals in place, we are now sufficiently equipped to discuss Sanskrit and its relationship with Prakrit.

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However, the historical reality of Buddhist practices betrays a far more complex relationship with the caste system than the Buddha’s teachings might suggest. Over the centuries, as Buddhism spread throughout South Asia and beyond, it interacted with deeply entrenched social structures, including the caste system, in ways that were not always consistent with its founding ideals. In ancient India, early Buddhist communities may have been more inclusive, admitting individuals from all social backgrounds into the monastic order. Figures like Upāli, a low-caste barber who became a prominent monk, reflect the egalitarian aspirations of the Buddhist Sangha.

Yet, as Buddhism evolved and became institutionalized, particularly under powerful rulers like Aśoka during the Mauryan Empire, its communities often came into contact with the dominant social norms of the time. Over the centuries, particularly as Brahmanical influence resurged and Buddhism itself began to decline in India, the monastic and lay communities started to mirror the social hierarchies they had once resisted. Even in regions outside India, such as Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, caste-based discrimination and exclusionary practices crept into Buddhist institutions. Monastic hierarchies and lay interactions began to reflect caste divisions, despite the doctrinal insistence on equality.

This paradox—the coexistence of Buddhist egalitarian ideals with the reality of caste-based discrimination—continued into the modern era. While the revival of Buddhism in India, particularly under Ambedkar, sought to reclaim the religion’s egalitarian roots, contemporary Buddhist communities in South Asia often still grapple with lingering caste consciousness. The tension between doctrine and practice, ideal and reality, remains a significant aspect of the historical and sociological study of Buddhism.

We will explore the historical evidence of caste discrimination within Buddhist practices, tracing how and why this paradox arose and persisted, and examining the ways in which Buddhism has been both a vehicle for social equality and a participant in caste-based exclusion. Through this lens, the complex and often contradictory relationship between Buddhism and caste will be critically analyzed, offering insights into how the religion navigated—and continues to navigate—the deeply ingrained social hierarchies of the Indian subcontinent.

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A most immediate question once the awe tempers is, is it true? Unfortunately, that’s an extremely charged question and connotations can range from harmless skepticism to ideological violence, from prudish ignorance to flat-out Hinduphobia. So, let’s ask the same question a little differently. Ramayana is held as practically primordial, going as far back as 1500 BC by some reckoning. There are those who go even further, but this is the most commonly accepted dating. We won’t go into the scientific and archeological veracity of such a dating, least of all in matters of faith such as this one. But we can now rephrase our question with this vintage in mind. Is it possible for the city described in Ayodhya Kanda to have existed in modern-day Uttar Pradesh 3,500 years ago?

Related to this question is another. We know one of Daśaratha’s wives was Kaikeyi, who came from the kingdom of Kekeya, a polity that lay between modern-day Punjab and ancient Gandhara. In fact, the Ramayana itself locates it bordered by the Beas River to the east and Gandhara to the west. And Kosala, as we all know, was in central Uttar Pradesh. And this raises the question, how probable was a marital alliance across such vast distances in those days? In other words, could a king this deep in the Gangetic heartland think of marrying a princess from a place as far as modern-day Afghanistan-Pakistan, skipping neighbors like Videha, Kashi, Magadha, Panchala, and even Kuru? How did they communicate?

These are no new questions. They had already been asked more than forty years ago by eminent subject matter experts like archeologist Hasmukh Dhirajlal Sankalia. These are not popular questions for obvious reasons, but they stand, nonetheless. This essay does not expect to answer them, but it does hope to get somewhere charting the course taken by giants like Sankalia, Lal, Cunningham, and others. To distill everything that we discussed so far into a single, portable problem statement, is the Ayodhya of today the Ayodhya of Ramayana?

Indian historiography is a hotly contested space, both ideologically and politically charged. It’s no secret that there are two broad camps with two conflicting objectives—Hindutva and Marxist. Calling one more eminent than the other, tempting as it may seem, is a grossly inaccurate oversimplification. They just come with different endgames, that’s all. This difference does not affect their scholarship, it only affects how they deploy that scholarship and to what end.

The choice of Sankhalia is of interest and merits some explanation. Right off the bat, it’s the fact that he was the first to ask these questions, but more than that, Sankhalia is held in high regard by all with no ideological ascriptions tarnishing his legacy. If anything, it’s said he harbored “a strong sympathy and desire to ‘prove’ the existence of traditional accounts” or Ramayana,3 and yet was objective enough to ask difficult questions. This makes him a worthy participant in any conversation on Ramayana. He comes with no political baggage. And also, as “father of post-Independence archeology,” he has much of immense value to offer. But we’re not listening to Sankhalia alone. In a tradition we’ve consistently maintained since inception, we will listen to experts with political baggage too. We will listen to Marxist historians, and we will listen to Hindutva historians. This will be a long discussion.

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