Humanities and Social Sciences

is a meta-ideology which includes principles values and elements. " The belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice. " (Oxford Dictionary of Politics) The word liberty is derived from the latin word, 'liber' meaning " free ". Liberalism retains the idea of progress widely accepted in the late 18th and 19th centuries. That idea embraced the prospects for developments in knowledge, in welfare and in morality. Rise of liberalism Thomas Aquinas thought that by nature all human beings were both free and equal. Aquinas's concept of liberty denotes the individual's capacity for free choice, in which one is master of oneself, as opposed to servitude, a markedly Aristotelian conception. The English philosopher William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347) was perhaps the greatest champion of individual liberty before the Renaissance and the Reformation. The collapse of feudalism is an important cause of the origin of liberalism. In the feudal period the feudal lords practically controlled the economy and politics along with the church and its fall opened the advent of capitalism and emergence of a middle class which aspired to have a positive role in politics. The capitalist class and the middle class did not want the dominant role of the church. The capitalists supplied the finance for the management of state and the middle class supplied executives and administrators. Slowly but steadily these two classes captured the power of the state and wanted to impose restrictions upon the government. In this way there arose liberalism in embryonic form.

In India the race discourse was distorted in the nineteenth century by pseudo-scientific anthropological classifications of Indian populations. Long lists of fictitious races filled academic publications -- and sometimes continue to be taught today, even though the race concept collapsed long ago. In the last two decades, population genetics has emerged as a powerful tool of inquiry into prehistoric migrations, and several studies conducted by multinational teams have cast a fresh look at India’s huge genetic diversity. Most have concluded that genetic connections between North India and Europe are much more ancient than the proposed dates for the Aryan invasion / migration, and failed to note a major addition to India’s gene pool in the second millennium BCE. Other important conclusions, such as a genetic continuum between Indian castes and tribes, are bound to radically alter our understanding of Indian populations. This paper presents a summary of recent findings in the field.

The presence or absence of the horse in the Indus-Sarasvati civilization has long been a matter of debate, especially in the context of the Aryan invasion theory. The argument is familiar: the Rig-Veda uses the word ashva over 200 times, ergo the Vedic society must have been full of horses, ergo the Harappan civilization, from which the noble animal is conspicuously absent, must be pre-Vedic and non-Aryan. The horse must therefore have been brought into India around 1500 BCE by the invading Aryans, who used its speed to crushing advantage in order to subdue the native, ox-driven populations. However, on closer scrutiny, there are serious flaws at every step of the argument — and indeed several concealed steps. This paper first examines the physical evidence of the horse from various Harappan sites, both in terms of skeletal remains and depictions, before turning to problems of methodology that have compounded the confusion, in particular the double-edged use of negative evidence, and the persisting colonial misreadings of the Rig-Veda.

The recent find of a stone axe in Sembiyan-Kandiyur bearing signs that look like Indus signs has brought fresh attention to the question of a relationship between Harappan and Tamil cultures and languages, and in particular to the theory that the Harappan language might have been proto-Dravidian. However, the issue often tends to be oversimplified owing to faulty methodology. For instance, in view of Harappan contacts with Dilmun, Mesopotamia or Margiana, exchanges with South India are quite likely and have long been suspected; this could explain a few instances of Harappan script in the South — the presence of the script tells us nothing about its authorship. Also, if some communities did adopt a Harappan-like script, they may have used it to write their own language, not the Harappan language — script and language are distinct issues. Further, the absence of any Harappan artefacts and features south of the Vindhyas as well as recent findings on the Central Indian origin of Brahui,...

In the Rig-Veda, the Sarasvati is both a goddess and a river—a “mighty” river “flowing from the mountain to the sea”, and the only one to be deified in the Vedic hymns. Yet it disappeared in the post-Vedic era—the only major river to do so in northwest India. As it did, Sarasvati, the goddess of speech, knowledge and the arts, grew in stature and became one of the fountainheads of India’s classical civilization. This presentation traces the riddle of the Sarasvati’s disappearance and the story of its rediscovery, beginning in the first half of the 19th century and involving numerous surveyors, topographers, geographers, Indologists and geologists. The result of these researches will be the identification of the now seasonal Ghaggar–Hakra (in Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Cholistan) as the relic of the Vedic river. In the 1940s, when archaeological explorations unearthed hundreds of Harappan sites in the Sarasvati’s basin (the Yamuna–Sutlej interfluve). Recent satellite, climatic, geological and river studies have completed the picture, confirming in particular a connection between the disappearance of the Sarasvati in its central basin and the break-up of the Indus–Sarasvati civilization, with important implications on the dating of the Vedic era.

Ancient India developed great skills in a number of technologies, transforming stone, extracting metals, planning and constructing cities and developing sophisticated water structures. Together with those, gem and textile technologies ensured a flourishing economy for many centuries. While some of those traditional technologies have survived (through craft traditions, for instance), others — especially dealing with agriculture and irrigation — are being rediscovered. This lecture presents an overview of past achievements, based on recent research.

First Dr. Govind Chandra Pande Memorial Lecture. India’s past scientific and technological advances have been well documented, even if mainstream history of science is yet to take full notice of it. What is generally overlooked, however, is the cultural framework within which those advances took place. Because Indian savants were steeped in specific cultural concepts involving a quest for infinity, the equivalence of microcosm and macrocosm, and a certain cosmic order, we find these concepts reflected in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and architecture, and giving Indian developments in these disciplines a specific stamp.

Numerous systems of units were developed in India for lengths, angles, areas, volumes, time or weights. They exhibit common features and a continuity sometimes running from Harappa to Bhaskaracharya, but also an evolution in time and considerable regional variations. This paper presents an overview of some issues in Indian metrology, especially with regard to units of length and weight, some of which are traceable all the way to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. It discusses, among others, the angula and its multiple variations, and the value of yojana and its impact on calculations for the circumference of the Earth.