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Rethinking Bihar and Bengal: History, Culture and Religion

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It is almost impossible to provide a continuous account of the near disappearance of Buddhism from the plains of the Indian Subcontinent. This is so primarily so because of the dearth of archaeological material and the stunning silence of the indigenous literature on this subject. Interestingly, the subject itself has remained one of the most neglected topics in the history of India. In this book an attempt has been made to trace the history of the decline of Buddhism in India and critically examine various issues relating to this decline. Following this methodology, first an attempt has been made at a region-wise survey of the decline in Sind, Kashmir, Northwestern India, Central India, the Deccan, Western India, and Bengal, Odisha, and Assam, then a detailed analysis of the different hypotheses that propose to explain the decline of Buddhism in India has been taken up. This is followed by author’s proposed model of decline of Buddhism in India.
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1. The archaeology of early historic South Asia 2. The environmental context 3. The end of Harappan urbanism and its legacy 4. Language, culture and the concept of ethnicity 5. Dark Age or continuum? An archaeological analysis of the second urban development in South Asia 6. The prelude to urbanisation: ethnogenesis and the rise of late Vedic chiefdoms 7. City states of north India and Pakistan at the time of the Buddha 8. Early cities and states beyond the Ganges valley 9. The rise of cities in Sri Lanka 10. The Mauryan state and empire 11. Mauryan architecture and art 12. Post-Mauryan states of mainland South Asia (c.185BC-AD 320) 13. The emergence of cities and states: concluding synthesis.
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In this paper, I attempt to look into the patterns of social patronage to Buddhism and Brahmanism in the Samatata-Harikela subregion of early medieval Bengal through the prism of votive inscriptions on sculptures. I have also looked into some of the social and religious processes that were in operation in this part of early medieval Bengal. I have argued that despite being part of the cultural and socio-economic matrix of early medieval Bihar and Bengal, Samatata-Harikela had some peculiarities of its own. That, however, does not justify treating this entire area as a ‘frontier’. This paper questions those historiographical models which explain the Islamization of this area in terms of Islam being the ‘harbinger of rice revolution’ in the same during the medieval period.
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Geographical histories around the region of Sylhet, in north-east Bangladesh, indicate that transactions between mobility and territoriality, which typify globalisation, have long operated in diverse spatial and temporal registers - ecological, religious, demographic, economic, and political - to transform the social and cultural spaces where people invest in nature. Scholars, policy-makers and activists would thus do well to abandon the idea that national maps alone constitute the geography of modernity.
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Previous scholarship on women's involvement in Buddhism in medieval India assumes that women, both lay and monastic, disappeared from the scene by the ninth century. This view may be rooted more in our way of seeing (or not seeing) than in historical reality. By exploring neglected material evidence that shows patronage patterns of Buddhist religious objects, such as inscriptions, manuscript colophons, and visual representations of donors, this article suggests that women played a visible role in supporting medieval Indian Buddhist institutions. First, two objects donated by two nuns are examined to discuss the continuing existence of the bhikṣuṇī (Buddhist nuns) order in twelfth-century India that had a considerable command over economic resources. The second part of this article attempts to uncover the voice for lay female donors and addresses their participation in religious practices in a medieval Indian Buddhist context based on a socioeconomic analysis of art historical and epigraphic evidence.
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Cynthia Talbot discusses Hindu temple donations and endowments in Andhra Pradesh during the thirteenth century. Based on epigraphic research, she finds two distinct patterns: first, a few highly patronized temple complexes in the northern coastal region; second, a network of small temples in the interior, each with a few donations. She explains that in the thirteenth century, with an improvement in irrigation technology, the hinterland experienced a growth in wealth that is reflected in the donations recorded through temple inscriptions. She concludes this inland style of donation illustrates how local landowners, who were usually the temple's sole patron, used their donations to strengthen political alliances among social groups within their newly prospering territories. The multipatron large coastal temples served to incorporate representatives of varied communities from a much wider area and reinforced older patterns in the Andhra Pradesh central place hierarchy.
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This is a continuation and the concluding part of our epigraphical study on maṭhas and medieval religious movements in Tamil Nadu published in Indian Historical Review’s 2010 issue, in which we examined the inscriptions referring to maṭhas in order to learn about their activities during the four hundred years up to 1300 CE, covering the Chola period. In this study, we have examined the inscriptions for the next four centuries covering the Pandyan and Vijayanagar periods. Our purpose was to clarify the medieval religious movements that might have occurred, but about which nothing is known from religious texts of the period. The inscriptions, however, reveal many facts: an influx of North Indian Brāhmaṇa ascetics into the Chola country in the eleventh century; participation by various people, including low-ranked jātis, in maṭha activities from the twelfth century; the recitation of Dēvāram hymns and Tirumuṟai in maṭhas, including Gōḷaki ones, in the thirteenth century; and references to the Meykaṇḍār lineage from the fifteenth century. The chronological distribution of the inscriptions clearly shows that some religious movements did occur through the maṭhas during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They all show that the religious movement was closely related to contemporary social change, through which various non-Brāhmaṇa communities increased their power greatly. This brought about the establishment of Tamil Saivasiddhantism in Tamil Nadu in the thirteenth century.
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Indian Buddhist monasteries, as institutions in dynamic interactions with other societal institutions, have created a vast functional matrix or were parts thereof. In the past hundred years or so, contours of this matrix have been generally reconstructed with a macro perspective. Now we need to go beyond macro generalizations. We need to analyse individual monasteries in their local and supra-local contexts.
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This article discusses the growth of predominantly Muslim populations in two regions of South Asia-western Punjab and eastern Bengal. No evidence supports conventional understandings that Islamisation in these areas resulted from a desire for social liberation on the part of the lower orders of the Hindu caste system. Nor should Islamisation in these regions be characterised as instances of 'conversion', a term embedded in the nineteenth century Protestant missionary movement and thus, inappropriate for reconstructing religious processes in medieval Bengal and Punjab. Rather, transformations of religious identity in these two regions appear to have been gradual and unselfconscious in nature. They also appear to have been part of larger socio-political and economic changes that were occurring in the regions, in particular the diffusion of settled peasant agriculture.
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The article discusses the spread of agriculture to an unprecedented degree in the period from c. A.D. 500 to 1300 (early medieval times) on the basis of both epigraphic and textual materials that also speak of considerable diversity of crops, including what may be considered as cash crops. The author pays attention to the role of metal - especially iron - technology in the development of agriculture during this period. It also argues for betterment in manuring. Inseparably associated with the expansion of agriculture - as an impact of the issuance of profuse number of land grant - are better irrigation technologies. The diversity of irrigation techniques and hydraulic projects, local and supra local, had intimate linkages with the variability of access to precious water resources in disparate areas of the subcontinent. In this connection, the article also offers early Indian perceptions of the monsoons; it also seeks to underline the meteorologists' observations of the correlation between the flood-level in the Nile catchment area (by the use of the Nilometer) and the pattern of rainfall in the subcontinent on a long chronological range.
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I. General Considerations . 1. Introduction —It may seem presumptuous in one who is neither a geologist nor has any pretension to geological knowledge to venture to address this Society on a subject so nearly akin to their special science. My excuse must be that, having resided for five years on the banks of one of the most active of the Bengal rivers, I have had opportunities which are not vouchsafed to every one of observing their phenomena, and have been a witness of the changes I am about to describe. I may also, perhaps, be allowed to state that, when I first became aware of the disturbance that was taking place around me, I set myself carefully to measure and observe what was passing; and , in 1835, made a sketch-survey of the lower Ganges and Brahmapootra, from Jaffiergunge to the sea. This was published by Mr. Tassin a few years afterwards, and is, so far as I know, the only survey that was made—certainly the only one published—between that made by Major Rennell and the survey now in progress, but which has not yet been given to the world. I may also mention, in extenuation, that I have waited for more than a quarter of a century in order that some one more worthy might undertake the task; but, as no one has come forward, I may perhaps be now excused for venturing upon it. In order, however, to obviate the reproach of presumption, my intention is to confined myself
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L'A. traite des images sculpturales hindoues et bouddhiques en Inde, en prenant l'exemple d'empreintes du Bouddha venerees dans des padas du nord-est du pays dans le Bihar, a la fois par des pelerins hindous et bouddhistes qui leur attachent des significations differentes qui se melent.
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This paper links three major stages of Buddhism's growth and expansion (c. sixth century BC, C. second century BC, and c. first to third centuries AD) to the successive growth and expansion of urban base in India. In the subsequent stages, especially in the period closer to Buddhism's end as a major religious force in the subcontinent in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries AD, the emphasis shifted to the support derived ‐ apparently exclusively ‐ from the regional power‐bases like the Bhaumakara kings of Orissa and the Palas of Bengal. What is offered in this paper is only the sketchiest of a sketchy outline, and I suggest that Buddhist sites now call for detailed attention as archaeological sites ‐ not merely as monuments.
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The Buddhist site of Kanheri on the west coast of India continued to receive patronage from the first to the tenth centuries AD. This was in the form of money and land donations in the early centuries of the Christian era, whereas, in the early medieval period, the pilgrims built votive stupas of brick.Enshrined within these stupas were relic caskets and copper plates or stone tablets bearing the Buddhist creed. Many of these stone tablets have been found at early centres in Southeast Asia, together with sealings of unbaked clay and small votive stupas, and no doubt provide archaeological evidence of the pilgrim traffic by sea between South and Southeast Asia.
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In a recent course of exploration in the area identified as Kṛimilā Adhiṣṭhāna of early medieval period by D.C. Sircar is near modern town Lakhisarai, a district headquarter of Bihar. It is situated around 125 kilometers east of Patna, the state capital. It is well connected by rail and road; Patna Howrah main line and NH 80 passes through the place. The longitude of city is 86°06′ east and latitude is 25°10′ north. The area around 25–30 square kilometers of the city has large number of historical monuments, particularly Buddhist Stupas and Brahmanical temples. Beglar and Cunningham explored the area and reported the antiquity of the region in 19th century. They have identified existence of Buddhist Stupa and Brahmanical temples in the area. In 1950s and 1960s D.C. Sircar and subsequently R.K Choudhary visited the region and reported few inscriptions of early medieval period. An extensive exploration conducted by me, has revealed many interesting facts undisclosed about the early medieval historiography. There are more than thirty big mounds which are unexcavated lying between Valgudar and Rampur in Lakhisarai district of Bihar. Recent exploration has yielded six image inscriptions and more than 100 Buddhist as well as Brahmanical sculptures. Stylistic analysis of these sculptures suggests us the early medieval dates, and different phases of construction activities. The whole area falls around 30 square kilometers, which has more than thirty mounds, more than twenty ponds and three lakes. Few brick structures over the mounds are exposed due to natural calamities or encroachments by the local people. Overall survey of the area and decipherment of the found inscriptions, suggests us about an existence of a large religious and administrative centre of early medieval eastern India.
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Art and inscriptions from the Jamālpur site in the southern section of Mathurā city help characterize an early Buddhist monastic community and its relationship with lay patrons of non-royal backgrounds. Although named after Huviska, a powerful ruler of the Kusāna dynasty in the mid–second century CE, the monastery at this site was supported by monks, local administrators and members of professional groups such as actors. Monks specialized in textual interpretations, recitations and meditative practices, but were also successful fund raisers who actively influenced Buddhist imagery. Figures of lay worshippers carved in a naturalistic style are privileged in sculptures from this monastery. Visiting monks were instrumental in introducing elements of Kusāna royal symbolism into local art production. The role of this monastery was primarily to help local political elite to gain legitimation through their association with the Kusāna name and royal symbols on the one hand, and on the other, with a local nāga cult. Worshippers of the nāga deity, who otherwise occupied a low position in society, gained recognition by joining the patronage network of the monastery. Certain groups—craftsmen, merchants and agriculturalists—as well as women, however, seem to be conspicuously absent as donors at this site.