-Vani Mishra When we talk of the great universities of the world, our imagination tends to roam to Oxford or Cambridge, to Bologna or Paris, or to the sprawling lecture theatres of institutions today. But long before many of these centres came into being, on Indian soil stood Nalanda, where the search for knowledge became […]Read More
~Vani Mishra The tale of colour in ancient India is as much a story of art or fashion. It is a tale of soil, plants, minerals, rituals, and people who saw colour not merely as a decoration but as an integral part of life’s fabric. When we want to know how ancient Indians colored their […]Read More
-Vani Mishra When we glance back over India’s past, the urge is always to turn our attention to great names emperors and warriors, great palaces, battles waged with elephants and steel. But history is not just a king’s tale. Often, it is forged by softer, subtler things, things that seep into daily existence so quietly […]Read More
-Muskaan A seed of a new Indian city was sown when the dawn of August 22, 1639, brought a historical blow to the urban establishments in India. The British East India Company signed a land grant with local Nayak rulers of the Vijayanagara Empire (present-day Chennai). The strip of land named Madraspatnam was purchased by […]Read More
-Ananya Sinha The history of the Trojan War has fascinated human minds for almost three thousand years, perpetuated in Homer’s Iliad as an epic of heroism, passion, revenge, and the human cost of war. It is a tale of kings and warriors—Agamemnon, Achilles, Hector, and Priam—against the backdrop of an epochal siege that was ignited […]Read More
Ananya Sinha Few myths have created as much interest and controversy as the legend of Atlantis. First written down by Greek philosopher Plato in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, Atlantis was portrayed as an immense and highly developed island civilization that sank into the sea “in a single day and night of disaster.” For more […]Read More
-Ananya Sinha Mahabharata is one of the greatest achievements of world literature such an epic on a phenomenal scale that it goes beyond mere narration to integrate myth, philosophy, history, and moral exploration. Its core is the Kurukshetra War, a battle whose reverberations have run through centuries in Indian cultural memory. But questions remain: Was […]Read More
-Vani Mishra Civilization’s past is not carved on stone. Nor is it written only on the walls of temples or the gates of great cities, nor indeed in the annals of kings and tales of their victories. A civilization is as much in the bubbling clay pot over a low flame, in the dust of […]Read More
-Vani Mishra Well before the world was familiar with India for its glittering silks or its glittering spices, there existed another jewel it took unobtrusively through the centuries the perfume. Perfumes in ancient India were not mere indulgences for the affluent. They were filaments spun into the very texture of everyday life, into love and […]Read More
-Vani Mishra When we consider history, our imaginations tend to bound to epic episodes the thunder of troops on open fields, the hush of agreements shared in dark corridors, the weighty crowns placed upon the foreheads of monarchs. But there is a second reality behind all these pageants, a reality of lesser glamour but no […]Read More