History. 1 essay and 7 notes.

What a legend. Came across the name for the first time in India after Gandhi: With the enactment of the Government of India Act 1935, the couple joined the Muslim League and entered electoral politics. In the 1937 elections, she was one of the few women who successfully contested from a non-reserved seat and was…

So true:

“To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people.” [1, 2]

This quote originates from the book ++A Way of Being Free++ (1997), a collection of essays and aphorisms written by the Booker Prize-winning Nigerian author ++Sir Ben Okri++.

Hat tip to Jim O’Shaughnessy:

I often tell my friends that I’m white at heart because I know far more about American and European history than Indian history, and it’s a shameful fact that I’m working to fix. ​One of the books I bought a while ago was Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, which I hadn’t got around to reading. I finally picked it…

This is sad:

The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use.

Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn’t start, and didn’t ask for.

If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren’t just limiting bots. They’re erasing the historical record.

This is so cool. Goes to show the extent of ancient trade links.

A path-breaking finding has shed new light on trade links between ancient Tamilagam, other parts of India and the Roman Empire. Two researchers have identified close to 30 inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi, Prakrit and Sanskrit at tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. These inscriptions are said to belong to the period between the 1st and 3rd Centuries C.E.

These inscriptions were identified during a study carried out in 2024 and 2025 by Charlotte Schmid, Professor at the French School of Asian Studies (EFEO) in Paris and Ingo Strauch, Professor at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. The team documented them across six tombs in the Theban Necropolis. They followed the footsteps of French scholar Jules Baillet, who surveyed the Valley of the Kings in 1926 and published more than 2,000 Greek graffiti marks.

The paper was presented at this event. Haven’t yet watched it though.

YouTube · youtube.com ↗DAY 1 - A FOUR-DAY INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON TAMIL EPIGRAPHYTamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology on YouTube

Hat tip to Krzysztof Iwanek for sharing this.

Interesting discussion.

I read this article in the Scroll, and for the second time, I found myself thinking about how passionate individuals who genuinely care about their culture and history are load-bearing pillars in the broader effort to preserve historical memory. In this case, Priya Paul’s multi-decade effort to collect paintings…

Nice reflection on history: Some months later, I joined a book club. Run by Venkatesh Rao, this year’s edition focuses on a simple idea that goes a long way: Maybe grand historical paradigms like modernity and postmodernity are not suddenly emerging monoliths. Instead we might see them as “history machines” consisting…