“It’s sort of like the most dangerous situation she’s been put in, even though it’s her son. And it’s taken this very incestuous, intimate turn.”
— OLIVIA COOKE
Turkic people are saying how not calling Central Asia as Turkestan is erasing Turkic identity of Central Asia. Iranian chimes in and says that that is the erasure of Iranian people. Both forget how Indic people were erased.
You've heard of "East Turkestan", or the Chinese name "Xinjiang", or perhaps even the older names like Kingdom of Khotan, or the Kingdom of Yutian. The original name of the land was Gosthana (land of cows). If we don't count the Mahabharata era, the original inhabitants of Central Asia were the Indicised Iranian Saka and Kushan peoples. They spoke the Gandhari prakrit, wrote in the Brahmic Kharoshthi script, their court language was Sanskrit, and they were Hindu and Buddhist. The foundational rulers of Gosthana belonged to the Vijaya (Yuchi) Dynasty. According to the kingdom's official founding legend documented in the Tibetan text The Prophecy of the Li Country, Gosthana was established around 224 BCE by an exiled prince claiming lineage to the Indian Mauryan Emperor Ashoka.
Every single native king of Gosthana took the prestigious Sanskrit throne name "Vijaya" (victory), such as Vijaya Sambhava, Vijaya Vahana, and Vijaya Kirti. King Vijaya Kirti of Gosthana allied with King Kanishka the Great. The Kushans annexed Gosthana, facilitating a cosmopolitan, golden age of trade and cultural exchange. Kanishka before he embraced Mahayana Buddhism under the guidance of Ashvaghosha believed in Avestan, Hindu and Greek gods, as was the norm in the region at the time. He built the legendary Kanishka Stupa in his capital of Purushapura (modern Peshawar, Pakistan), which was one of the tallest and most magnificent structures of the ancient world. According to numismatic evidence, Kanishka at the very beginning of his reign credits his rise to power to goddess Nana, alongside other Zoroastrian deities like Ahura Mazda (referred to as Mozdoo). Because Bactria (Bahlika) had been ruled by Alexander the Great's successors for centuries, Kanishka’s earliest coins were minted using the Greek alphabet and featured Greek gods like Helios, Selene, and Hephaestus. As his father (Vima Kadphises) and grandfather expanded the empire into India, the Kushan royal family grew fond of Hinduism. His father had been a devout worshiper of Shiva. Kanishka carried this tradition into his early years, prominently featuring Shiva (Oesho) holding a trident on his currency.
As you can see from here, Gosthana and Kushan empire were cosmopolitan where Hinduism, Buddhism, Avestan (Zoroastrianism) and the ancient Greek religion all flourished. Their administrative language was Sanskrit and all their high culture was Indic. Although the Sakas were Eastern Iranian, their rulers like Rudradaman I chose to write prestigious state proclamations in classical Sanskrit. Sakas too are still present in India, in the form of the Saka calendar (this is the OG calendar in India that was truly pan-Indian and also spread as far as Indonesia). I will write about Sakaldwipiy Brahmins in a separate post.
The first major demographic shift in Gosthana occurred after the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate in Mongolia in 840 CE. Following a devastating defeat by the Kyrgyz, the ancient Uyghurs fled south and west into the Tarim Basin. At this stage, the Uyghurs did not violently drive out the Indo-Iranian Gosthana inhabitants; rather, their arrival introduced a massive, permanent Turkic presence to the northern and eastern rims of the Tarim Basin. The decisive blow to the Indo-Iranian character of Gosthana came from the Kara-Khanid Khanate, a different confederation of Turkic peoples who had converted to Islam. In the late 10th century, the Kara-Khanid ruler Sultan Satuk Bughra Khan and his successors declared jihad against Gosthana. The war lasted for several grueling decades. The Indo-Iranian Gosthana people fiercely resisted, occasionally allying with Dunhuang and Bhota (Tibet) to push the Turkic Muslims back. In 1006 CE, the Kara-Khanid Turks breached the fortress and sacked the Gosthana ruler. The people of Gosthana were subjugated, forced to convert to Islam, and systematically Turkicized and assimilated over generations. The Gosthana language was gradually replaced by Turkic (specifically Old Uyghur). By the 12th and 13th century, the Gandhari prakrit was spoken no more, the Indo-Iranian dialects went functionally extinct.
A explicitly abusive version of [King Lear] robs us of our ability to feel for Lear. But an explicitly sympathetic Lear robs us of the ability to feel for his daughters. So I think the best version of Lear is exactly the one that Shakespeare wrote: ambiguous. It's the only version in which each character is frustratingly, but fascinatingly, complex. Cordelia loves her tyrannical and mercurial father, but she can't bring herself to say it. It's a paradox- and a question- so rich and sad that Shakespeare required a whole play to explore it.
Jillian Keenan, Sex with Shakespeare: Here's Much to Do with Pain, but More with Love
YouTube's pop historians and their interest towards Indo-European and Indology studies - how they weaponise history and science against Hindus or India
I came across this post by Tom Rowsell, who runs the Survive the Jive YouTube channel. He has a big following, and he has been making videos on genetics, archaeology and Indo-European migrations and mythologies for a while now. I'll tackle his post point by point, but first, I'll tell my observations about his channel.
The reason why I am discussing Rowsell's channel is because he frequently pushes subtle Hinduphobic and racist narrative. What makes Rowsell particularly sinister is that he utilises peer-reviewed scientific papers on Yamnaya steppe migrations, Bronze Age cultures, and ancient DNA, in interpreting the data in a way that pushes his views that are reminiscent of the 19th century racist European eugenicist theories.
Rowsell frames his channel as an objective response to corporate or academic institutions and "politically correct biases." However, his historical analysis is highly selective. He routinely boosts fringe, neoreactionary, and identitarian authors, such as Alain de Benoist or Aki Cederberg, who view history not as an objective study of the past, but as a spiritual and political toolkit to awaken "European tribal consciousness". The fundamental flaw in Survive the Jive's historical methodology is treating haplogroups and autosomal DNA as a direct proxy for cultural, spiritual, and national identity. Rowsell frequently implies an intrinsic, biological link between Indo-European DNA and European "pagan spirituality". He promotes the pseudo-historical idea that modern Europeans possess a genetic inheritance to the "proto-Indo-Europeans" who composed the Vedas (the Vedas were composed by 100% Indians). Now, let's get to debunking his post.
Claim: Charles Masson first described the ancient ruins of Harappa in the 1840s.
Status: Misleading. Masson stumbled upon the massive brick mounds but he did not realise he had found a 5,000-year-old civilization. Instead, he mistakenly hypothesized that the ruins belonged to the settlement of Alexander the Great. It was in 1921 that Indian archaeologist Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni began systematic excavations at Harappa. Rakhaldas Banerjee discovered and excavated Mohenjo-daro the same year. These two Indian archaeologists proved that the unknown artefacts they found beneath the layers of ruins from different periods of time belonged to a far more ancient civilisation. In 1924, ASI Director-General Sir John Marshall formally announced to the world the discovery of the "Indus valley civilisation".
Claim: Alexander Cunningham founded the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in 1861. He and later archaeologists mapped, surveyed, and excavated hundreds of ancient sites across South Asia.
Status: True, but misleading. Cunningham is the founder of ASI, he introduced structured methods for surveying, recording inscriptions, and publishing official archaeological reports. He did map and survey many ancient sites. Cunningham had the institutional support to do so. While he did immense work for mapping archaeological sites, decades before Cunningham founded the ASI, Indian historians and archaeologists laid the foundational intellectual framework for studying Indian antiquities. For example, Ram Raz (Rama Raja) was a scholar from Bangalore who penned the groundbreaking work An Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus in 1834. He was the first scholar to bridge the gap between ancient Sanskrit texts (Vastu Shastra) and surviving structural ruins. He had to study because the British scholars claimed that ancient Indian monuments were built haphazardly without any mathematical logic or written architectural science. Raz proved to the Western world that Indian temple building was a highly sophisticated, standardised, based on rigorous geometry, and completely independent of Greek or Roman influence. Radhakanta Deb collected, translated, and preserved ancient epigraphic inscriptions and numismatic coins that Westerners could not read without local expertise in the early 1800s. Rajendralal Mitra began his career at the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1846. He became the first Indian to explicitly demand that Indians interpret their own antiquities using rigorous, scientific methodology. He famously led major documented research expeditions, such as his 1868 survey of the temples of Odisha, publishing monumental analytical volumes like The Antiquities of Orissa. He engaged in a decades-long intellectual battle with James Fergusson, the leading British authority on Indian architectural history, because Fergusson had asserted that Indians had no knowledge of stone architecture prior to Alexander the Great's invasion and that Indians learned stone-carving entirely from the Greeks. Mitra famously wrote that history should be evaluated through rigorous facts rather than racial theories. Source.
Claim: H. C. P. Bell discovered/excavated the old capital of Sri Lanka, Polonnaruwa, which was forgotten since the 13th c.
Status: Misleading. H. C. P. Bell did not "discover" a completely unknown city from scratch. Instead, he relied heavily on historical Sri Lankan texts to locate the ruins. Source.
Claim: The Dravidian language family was first discovered/ identified as a distinct, non-Indo-European group of languages in 1816 by Francis Whyte Ellis, a British civil servant. Dravidian was later properly identified by Robert Caldwell.
Status: True, but misleading. It is true that Ellis, working alongside local scholars like Shankara Shastri, compared the grammatical structures and vocabulary roots of Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada, and proved that their core vocabulary and grammatical systems were distinct and belonged to a separate, non-Indo-European "South Indian family" of languages. Later, Scottish missionary Robert Caldwell published his book A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856). He took the Sanskrit word dravida (historically used to refer to Tamil) and applied it as the formal name for the entire language group. It is misleading because Indian grammarians recognized the distinct nature of South Indian languages centuries before the British. However, their approach and objectives were completely different from modern European philology. Astika philosopher Kumarila Bhatta in his 7th century CE text Tantravarttika noted that people in the south spoke what he termed "Andhra-Dravida Bhasha". Bhatta wrote that these southern dialects lacked the standard grammatical case endings, vowel structures, and suffixes found in Sanskrit. Source. Another work, Lilakatikam from the 14th century CE, detailed how the syntax, internal phonetic rules, and verbs of the southern dialects were different to Sanskrit grammar, treating them as separate systems that required careful poetic bridging. Source. Traditional Indian grammarians acknowledged the differences between southern dialects and Sanskrit, and they documented these to create translation and poetic rules. Indian grammarians viewed Sanskrit as a universal cultural matrix, and the interaction was natural. The western linguists intention was a mix of practical colonial governance, an obsession with global racial mapping, and religious missionary strategies. Source.
Claim: Indo-European, first identified in 1786 by the British judge in India, Sir William Jones. Jones' linguistic work also looked at mythology and contributed to the idea of a unified "ancient Indian religion" - this was popularised by Max Müller who formalised the idea of a single "Hindu religion" based on Sanskrit texts - and he used the term "Hindu", which first appeared in a 1787 letter by Charles Grant, a British East India Company official.
Status: Half true, misleading. It is true that Sir William Jones was the first to recognise the Indo-European language family based on comparative and philological studies, shattering Europeans' previous belief that the European languages descended from Hebrew. Why didn't Indian scholars discover this connection, despite the ancient Greeks interacting extensively with the ancient Indians? Especially when India possessed an exceptionally sophisticated tradition of linguistics, most notably pioneered by the grammarian Panini in the 4th century BCE? It's because Indian scholars worked in geographical and intellectual isolation from European languages. They focused strictly on analyzing Sanskrit phonetics, grammar, and Prakrit. They had no exposure to classical Greek or Latin texts. Even the presence of Alexander the Great, and the subsequent Indo-Greek Kingdoms, and bustling maritime trade networks, the connection between Ancient Greek and Sanskrit was not noted by either civilisation. Perhaps it was not a big deal to either? Greeks did notoriously call non-Greek languages as barbarian, even their fellow sister languages like proto-German in Europe. Indians had no interest in other languages except Sanskrit. While they missed the language connection, both Indians and Greeks were fascinated by similarities in their philosophies and mythologies. Greeks frequently embraced Indian gods onto their own pantheon (for example, identifying Shiva or Krishna with Dionysus or Herakles). Similarly, Indian texts wrote an entire treatise on the astronomical skills of the Yavanas (Greeks), even integrating it in formal use alongside with the Vedic astrology. Perhaps the Greeks and Indians noticed linguistic similarities, but it was not a strange or noteworthy thing to them. What about the word "Hindu", was Müller really the first to formalise the idea of a single Hindu religion? No. Several Indian poets, scholars and kings have used the word "Hindu" to define a shared religious and philosophical identity centuries before British colonization. Read here more about the word Hindu. King Bukka Raya I of the Vijayanagara Empire in 1352 CE was given the title "Hinduraya suratrana" (Hindu king among sultans) as a political identity to resist the expansion of the Islamic Sultanates that had captured northern India. In the 15th century, poet Vidyapati, in his Apabhramsha work Kirttilata, wrote about Hindu dharma and how it was different from the Turaka (Muslims). In Kashmir, this Sanskrit scholar Jonaraja used the term Hinduka in his continuation of the historical chronicle Rajatarangini to differentiate the non-Muslim populations from the surrounding Muslims. The medieval Gaudiya Vaishnava works Chaitanya Charitamrita and Chaitanya Bhagavata wrote about "Hindu dharma" being a unified cultural and spiritual identity that was different from the Mlecchas (which denoted Muslims in their context). Eknath and Tulsidas wrote about unified philosophical, cultural and moral identity of the Hindus too. Charles Grant himself learned the word "Hindu" from the Persian language records in Bengal.
Claim: James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script in the 1830s which unlocked forgotten knowledge of the Ashokan inscriptions and early Indian historical chronology.
Status: Half true, misleading. I wrote about the Brahmi script and Ashoka in this post.
Claim: Henry Thomas Colebrooke rediscovered the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali lost since 16th century. Helped establish academic Sanskrit studies in Europe.
Status: Misleading. While it is true that the Yoga Sutras had fallen out of widespread popular practice and mainstream philosophical dominance, the claim that they were completely forgotten or unexamined by Indian scholars is not true. The narrative of "total oblivion in India" was popularised by some Western historians, such as David Gordon White in his book The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography. Indian scholars actively preserved, debated, and wrote extensive bhashyas (Sanskrit commentaries) on the Yoga Sutras during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries - immediately leading up to Colebrooke’s arrival. For example, Vijnanabhikshu from 15th century Bihar wrote Yogasarasamgraha and Yogabhashyavarttika on Yoga Sutras. Colebrooke did not find a long forgotten text that was not practiced by the Hindus, he relied heavily on the living tradition of the Pandits who read, taught, and preserved these continuous lineages of commentaries.
Claim: Buddhism mostly disappeared in India during medieval times, but ancient literature was rediscovered in Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka etc by Brits; Brian Houghton Hodgson collected the Mahayana sutras and Vinaya (monastic rules). Charles Henry Allan Bennett introduced Buddhism to the West and fostered its growth in Burma and Sri Lanka.
Status: Misleading. Regions like Ladakh, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Tawang (Arunachal Pradesh), and parts of Bengal (Darjeeling), Tibetan and Himalayan forms of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism were continuously practiced for centuries. Small, isolated communities of Theravada Buddhists preserved their traditions uninterrupted in eastern Bengal and Assam, dating back to pre-medieval times. Despite its decay, the Mahabodhi Temple in Bihar remained a known sacred site. It drew continuous, small-scale pilgrimages from Burmese, Tibetan, and Sri Lankan monks throughout the medieval and early modern eras. Mahabodhi was protected by Shaiva priests until 19th century. The decline in Buddhism happened because Indian Buddhism was centralized Sanghas, such as in universities like Nalanda. When these centers were destroyed in the 12th-century Islamic Turkic invasions, the institutional backbone fractured. This happened for Hindus too when temple and royal institutions crumbled in the Indo-Gangetic belt, but Hinduism survived better in those regions in two ways: 1) the folk Hinduism that survived the invasion, some Brahmins survived and preserved their knowledge and went into geographically isolated areas, 2) Hindu kings resisted, which gave Hinduism the necessary breathing space. Over centuries, Buddhists went to Hinduism or Jainism as those were the communities that survived in the Indo-Gangetic belt. This is the time when caste identities started getting more rigid - Jains formed their own merchant guild identity, Hindus isolated themselves in order to avoid assimilation in the new world order. However, Hindu scholars were aware of the Astika (orthodox/Vedic) and Nastika (heterodox/non-Vedic) classifications centuries before British colonisation. In traditional Indian intellectual centers like Kashi, Mithila, and Nadia, the dominant system of philosophy was Navya-Nyaya. To master Hindu logic, a student was strictly required to study the arguments of great Buddhist logicians like Dignaga, Dharmakirti, and Ratnakirti. Hindu treatises from the 14th to the 18th centuries are filled with refutations of Buddhist concepts like Kshanikavada (the doctrine of momentariness) and Anatman (non-self). Scholars could not refute these ideas without thoroughly memorizing and understanding them. Moreover, In the 11th century, a Kashmiri Hindu scholar named Somadeva compiled the Kathasaritsagara, a massive 20,000-stanza Sanskrit masterpiece, where several Buddhist Jataka tales were integrated. Hindu scholars reading this text in the aforementioned intellectual centres were fully aware of stories like the selfless King Shibi (who gave his own flesh to save a dove), but they viewed it as a universal Indian moral tale of Dharma and ultimate sacrifice, rather than a sectarian Buddhist text. It is disingenuous to frame it in a way that Buddhism was mostly forgotten in India, completely omitting historical realities of India, and ignoring the fact that in native scholarship and folklore, Buddhism did exist, even after a collapse. When colonial scholars began translating the Pali Canon from Sri Lanka and monastic manuscripts from Nepal, they realised that the fables popular in European folklore (like Aesop's Fables or La Fontaine) and Indian folklore had similarities, and that they had their roots in Buddhist Jataka tales and Hindu Pancharatra tales. The Europeans at the time simply had access to texts from various countries and the leisure to study them. 
Claim: A. H. Fox Strangways made important early contributions to documenting Indian classical music traditions - recording and systematising observation of Indian music.
Status: Misleading. While Strangways' systematic approach to analyzing Indian melody and rhythm laid critical groundwork for comparative musicology, Indian musicology is backed by an ancient, uninterrupted textual tradition called Sangita Shastra. There's Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra (2nd Century BCE – 2nd Century CE), which is the foundational text on Indian performing arts. It categorised instruments, outlined the emotional essence of performance (rasa), and mathematically divided the octave into 22 microtones (shrutis). Matanga Muni’s Brihaddesi (6th Century) was the very first known text to define and use the word Raga as a formal melodic framework. Sharngadeva’s Sangita Ratnakara (13th Century) is regarded as one of the most definitive structures for both northern and southern musical systems. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Mughal court scholars frequently wrote musical manuals in Sanskrit and Persian to preserve the core repertoires and canonize the music of the era. Right before and during Strangways' lifetime, Indian scholars were already leading a major, self-driven movement to standardize and preserve Indian music via modern print technology. Strangways did not introduce musicology to India. Instead, he tried to translate the pre-existing Indian musicology into a Western musicological framework. He worked alongside the living traditions and contemporary scholars of his time.
In conclusion, we can appreciate the work that some of these British scholars did to collect and translate Indian texts an artefacts, but let us completely debunk the notion that is being perpetuated that Indians forgot their own history, or that Indians had no scholarship of their own.
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