Lonely boy and his scribbles

Bodhidharma; Yoshitoshi, 1887  "As we move, the story travels. But if you misunderstand a story for history, then that’s pathetic."   - R. Balakrishnan, Indologist There is something profoundly human about wanting our stories to be real. Not just meaningful or metaphorical. Real. As in datable, documentable, diggable-from-the-earth real. Somewhere along the line, meaning ceased to be enough. Somewhere, we began to look at myth, the shimmering, breathing soul of every civilization, and say: “Prove it.” This demand, this quiet, almost innocent insistence, is where presupposition of historicity begins. Not with dogma, but with longing. I have seen it in the eyes of those who mean no harm. An Indian Christian, young and devout, beams as they point to the Book of Kings, convinced that the phrase “distant lands of gold” must be India, the forgotten land of Ophir. Not because archaeology says so. Not because it changes doctrine. But because the need to be included eclipses the cauti...

What should I do, and where should I go? A thief has taken hold of my flesh! For there in my bed‑chamber Death does abide, and wherever I turn, there too will be Death. — Gilgamesh, Tablet XI   Men have always had but one death.  For some it is as weighty as Mount Tai.  For others as light as a goose‑feather.  The difference lies in what they make of it. — Sima Qian, Shiji   Long before the Hebrew Bible thundered its warnings of divine wrath, before the Matsya heralded a new Yuga, before Athens wrote its tragedies or Confucius laid down rites, there stood Gilgamesh,  part man, part god, and fully mortal. The Epic of Gilgamesh is not simply the oldest surviving written story in human history, it is the oldest surviving confession. It is a king’s admission that all his power, cruelty, beauty, and conquest are nothing before the slow certainty of death . Gilgamesh begins as a tyrant of Uruk (Sumeria), a man who built walls high enough to insult the ...

 In the centuries after Ashoka's dhamma echoed across India and before the dust of the early medieval kingdoms had even begun to settle, a shadow crept southward, not as a singular wave but as a series of shifting dunes. It carried with it the scent of the steppe and the silence of collapsed empires. These were the Hunas,  riders from the roof of the world, who descended into the Indian subcontinent not only with fire, but with memory, ambition, and eventual oblivion. The stage for this Northwestern influx had already been set by those who came before. The Indo-Greeks, Indo-Scythians, Kushanas, and Indo-Parthians had all walked the tightrope between conquest and assimilation. But their legacy was one of paradoxes: invaders who became patrons, foreigners who turned native, nomads who built cities. The Hunas would follow this path, but not before splintering the Gupta world that stood in their way. The first tremors came from the Kidarites , a group who cloaked themselves in Ku...

 Kerala is often praised and criticized for its so-called “communal harmony.” To some, it is a secular utopia where faiths walk hand in hand beneath the coconut groves. To others, it is a terrifying aberration, a ticking clock of cultural erasure. But Kerala’s pluralism is neither accident nor anomaly, and certainly not a free-for-all. It is not born from sameness or affection, but from balance, tradition, memory, and a shared grammar of difference. Like the music between the strings, it arises not from the notes themselves, but from the space between them, filled with historical, spiritual, intellectual, and political dimensions. To understand it is to confront several false images: the utopian Kerala of outsiders, the dystopian Kerala of ideologues, the rootless Kerala of postmodernists, the derivative Kerala of its neighbours, and the indifferent Kerala of the average Malayali. Tracing this deep architecture behind Kerala’s pluralism reveals a story not set in stone, but one imp...