Even though the Taj Mahal was 350 years old many years back, the Govt celebrated it’s 350th anniversary recently. Right now the controversy is, Is the Taj Mahal leaning, like the tower in Pisa.? But there is one report which says it is not.

Talking to The Pioneer on Tuesday, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI Agra, Dr D Dayalan, said that though it is a fact that one of the front minarets of the Taj mahal was indeed ’tilting’ by 8.5 inch outwards, this was either a deliberate structural feature introduced by the architect of the monument or it may have occurred sometime back in history due to a natural calamity like an earthquake.
Dayalan said that this issue was not new, in fact it had been raised by the media a few decades ago as well. Following this, the department had fixed glass strips in the base of the minarets to ensure that if there indeed was a movement in the minarets even by 1mm, the strips would crack, but they haven’t cracked till date.
This indicated that the minarets were not tilting any further and the controversy being raised over the ‘Leaning tower of Taj Mahal’, is completely hypothetical, created by a section of the media bent upon sensationalising the issue. [Baseless babble over ‘leaning’ Taj Mahal]

Manish at Sepia Mutiny has an interesting entry on Fibonacci numbers which in fact should be called Hemecandra numbers.

The Fibonacci series is the set of numbers beginning with 1, 1 where every number is the sum of the previous two numbers. The series begins with 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. They were known in India before Fibonacci as the Hemachandra numbers. And the ratio of any two successive Fibonacci numbers approximates a ratio, ~1.618, called the golden section or golden mean.

It’s long been known that the Fibonacci series turns up freqently in nature. The numbers of petals on a daisy and the dimensions of a section of a spiral nautilus shell are usually Fibonacci numbers. For plants, this is because the fractional part of the golden mean, a constant called phi (0.618), is the rotation fraction (222.5 degrees) which yields the most efficient and scalable packing of circular objects such as seeds, petals and leaves.

But Bhargava points out that the series also shows up in the arts. Sanksrit poetry, tabla compositions and tango, to name a few examples, use the series to find the number of possible combinations of single and double-length beats within a stanza.[Sepia Mutiny: Hemachandra numbers everywhere]

Fibonacci himself wrote that he had studied Indian numbers and did not come up with the number series. Donald Knuth also wrote about this

Before Fibonacci wrote his work, the sequence Fn had already been discussed by Indian scholars, who had long been interested in rhythmic patterns that are formed from one-beat and two-beat notes. The number of such rhythms having n beats altogether is Fn+1; therefore both Gospala (before 1135) and Hemachandra (c. 1150) mentioned the numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, … explicitly.[Who was Fibonacci?]

Sirpur was the happening place about 1300 years ago. It had a Shaivite king Mahashivagupta who entertained Huen Tsang and philosopher Nagarjuna. Mahashivagupta’s mother Vasata built a Laxman temple which is the first temple in India to be built using bricks. This temple was completed in 650 AD and is located on the banks of the river Mahanadi.
Now Archaeologists have unearthed a floor below the the ancient floor pushing the age of the temple back by 150 years, making its time of completion around 500 AD. (Same time as Aryabhata)
Also see our new Indian History Timeline

Theodore Bhaskaran discovered some panels in the Great temple at Tanjavur showing the Buddha.

There are at least two panels featuring the Sakyamuni: one at the base of the second gopuram and the other in the main temple. Here, events are depicted in comic-strip style, using small sequential sculptural panels. This was an artistic convention that can be observed in the temples of the medieval period in Tamil Nadu. You can see similar story-telling miniature sculptures in other temples also. It could be an episode from mythology or depicting a historical event. At the Vaikuntha Perumal temple in Kanchipuram, certain events from Pallava history are told in the manner, while at the Gangaikondacholapuram temple, the story of Bhagiratha is depicted similarly.

The second set of Buddha figures is in the body of the main temple, on the right balustrade of the step leading into the sanctum and on the southern side. There are three sculpture pieces here. The first one shows Buddha seated under a tree, flanked by royalty. The gandharvas are depicted on the upper part of the frieze. The next one shows Buddha standing under a tree, and royalty worshipping him. Behind them are the gandharvas, also in a posture of supplication.The Buddha at Thanjavur

In that article there is mention of Buddhism flourishing in the coastal region during the Chola period and Jainism in the delta region. In Kerala there were many Buddhist temples many of which were later believed to be converted to Hindu Temples. The most famous of them is Ayyappa temple at Sabarimala.

Korea and India had relations from the middle of the first century AD when a princess of Ayodhya travelled to Korea and married there. Here is some more information on the relations between the two countries due to Buddhism.

Many Buddhist monks worked to shape the religion, a major early figure being Marananta, who came to Paekje in the 4th century A.D. However, it is the Samguksagi is not clear on how an Indian monk came to receive a warm welcome from the king. In A.D. 574 three Indian monks came to the peninsula with a Korean monk, Anhong, and initiated the construction of many monasteries and temples.

According to one story, King Ayuk (Muwa), identified with Ashoka Maurya of India, sent iron and gold to Korea to cast the image of the Buddha. Koreans used the metals to construct the monastery. However, the historical records show the Ashokan period was much earlier than the construction of the Hwangnyong Monastery.

After the introduction of Buddhism to Korea, many scholars and monks exhibited great enthusiasm for visiting India to learn more about Buddhism or for pilgrimages to places important to the memory of the Buddha. Some Korean monks set out for India in the early 6th century A.D.

The monk Kyomic was the first to visit India. He studied the Vinaya text, first going to the Samghana Temple of central India where he collected the Sanskrit text of the Mahisasaka Vinaya. Later an Indian monk, Devadatta (Pei-da-duo) ,came to Korea with Kyomic where he translated 72 books of the Vinaya under the patronage of the King Song of Paekje.

From the early 8th century onwards, Korean Buddhists showed a keen interest in India and Indian culture. The cultural bridge between the two countries grew from then onwards, Buddhist monks being credited for nurturing the relationship. Biographies of eminent monks of the Tang Dynasty in China recorded the brief histories of some 56 pilgrims who went to India. Among these was a Korean monk, A

By 1942, there were many Indians in the POW camps of the Germans. These Indians were fighting in the British Army against the Germans. Subhash Chandra Bose visited Germany at that time and organized a Free India Legion army by converting these POWs into soldiers swearing allegience to Hitler. But later Bose abandoned them and moved to Japan. .

Finally, by August 1942, Bose’s recruitment drive got fully into swing. Mass ceremonies were held in which dozens of Indian POWs joined in mass oaths of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. These are the words that were used by men that had formally sworn an oath to the British king: “I swear by God this holy oath that I will obey the leader of the German race and state, Adolf Hitler, as the commander of the German armed forces in the fight for India, whose leader is Subhas Chandra Bose.”

I managed to track down one of Bose’s former recruits, Lieutenant Barwant Singh, who can still remember the Indian revolutionary arriving at his prisoner of war camp. “He was introduced to us as a leader from our country who wanted to talk to us,” he said. “He wanted 500 volunteers who would be trained in Germany and then parachuted into India. Everyone raised their hands. Thousands of us volunteered.” [Hitler’s secret Indian Army. (via World in the times of Sridhar)]

In the first centuries AD, there was both trade and missionary activity by Indians to South-East Asia which resulted in the spread of Indian culture to the Malay Peninsula, Thailand, Vietnam etc. The spread of Indians to Cambodia resulted in the Khemer kingdom, who built the magnificient Hindu temples of Angkor Wat. Now here is a story which connects Korean history to India, more specifically to Ayodhya.

The origin of the historical ties can be traced back to the middle of the first century AD. According to Sam Kuk Yusa, the ancient history of Korea, Queen Huh, wife of legendary King Suro, who founded the Karak Kingdom, was born in Ayodhya.
Queen Huh was a princess of the kingdom. Her father, the king of Ayodhya, on receiving a divine revelation, sent her on a long sea voyage to the Karak kingdom in southern Korea to marry King Suro, states the lines inscribed on the plaque at the monument in Ayodhya. The clan that descended from the Ayodhya princess Huh and South Korean King Suros, today known as Kim-Hae-Kim clan, has a little over six million Huh descendants in the Republic of South Korea.[South Korea’s Ayodhya connection]

The largest number of tourists to Jammu and Kashmir are from Israel and Muslims in the Kashmir Valley even started writing boards in Hebrew to attract them. One of the reasons Israelis visit Jammu and Kashmir is to visit the graves to Jesus amd Moses (yes as in Jesus Christ and Moses from Egypt).

The main attractions in the Valley for the Israelis are two graves, believed by some to be those of Jesus Christ and Moses. A section of the local population believes Kashmiris are one of the lost tribes of Israel. Aziz Kashmiri, the author of the book Christ in Kashmir, insists that the Kashmiri people’s ancestors were one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel and that Jesus died during a visit to the Valley.[Jesus’ tomb in Kashmir?]

While there has been no proof for these graves, as well as the assertion that the ancestors of Kashmiris were from the lost tribes of Israel, there is now evidence that people of Mizoram are descendents of Menashe, one of the lost tribes of Israel.

This is a clear indication that there was a Jewish female founder effect in the Kuki community. “It is scientifically impossible to have the same genetic sequence in two populations living so far apart if they did not originate from a common stock who historically inhabited a common space,” says Maity. He also found a specific mutation in some Lusei and Kuki samples that is also present in Indian Jews.

There are also historical pointers to this claim. Zaithanchhungi, a scholar who has been studying the Mizo claim to Israeli ancestry for over 20 years, is convinced that all Mizos are descendants of the Menashe. “The Menashe were enslaved by the Assyrians and taken there [Assyria] when Jerusalem fell,” she says. “From there they migrated to the Afghanistan region. During Alexander?s invasion they were driven further on to Mongolia through the Kashmir region and Tibet plateau, and they settled in the Chhinlung region of China. They entered Mizoram about 300 years ago from Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Burma.”[The new Jerusalem via Indian Archaeology]

It seems there were four waves of migration of Indians to rest of the world. The first was after the earthquakes which caused the drying up the river Saraswati. The second wave 1500 years later when Indian soldiers battled in Persian armies. The third wave was when the Roma or Gypsies left India.

The third wave is remembered with greater clarity. This was the Roma, or Gypsies, who left India a thousand years ago as a result of the Arab and Turkish wars. According to the Chachnama, a contemporary account of Muhammad al-Qasim’s campaigns in Sindh in 712-3, several thousand Jat warriors were captured as prisoners of war and deported to Iraq and elsewhere as slaves. A few hundred thousand women were likewise enslaved. The process of enslavement was accelerated during the campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni. Abu Nasr Muhammad Utbi, the secretary and chronicler of Mahmud, informs us that 500,000 men and women were captured in Waihind alone in 1001-2. During his seventeen invasions, Mahmud Ghaznavi is estimated to have enslaved more than a million people. According to Utbi, “they were taken to Ghazna, and merchants came from different cities to purchase them, so that the countries of Mawarau-un-Nahr, Iraq and Khurasan were filled with them.”[The Roma and the Persistence of Memory]

Now a new genetic study shows that the Gypsies came from India and not Egypt as it was believed.

As well as looking at over 1100 samples of Romany from Europe, they studied six samples from India and found that the similarity in genetic markers supported the theory that the founder group, of perhaps under 1000 people, came from India. The idea that Romany people came from India was first proposed 200 years ago based on similarities between their language and the Indian language Sanskrit, said Kalaydjieva. But such studies were inconclusive.

“There are quite a few examples where a population adopts a language but this does not necessarily mean its biological roots belong to the same place as the larger population that speaks this language,” she said. “So from the biological point of view we have provided we have provided the best evidence so far that this is indeed a population that derives from the Indian subcontinent.” Kalaydjieva and team’s analysis of disease genetic markers supported the scientists’ previous research on male and female genetic markers. “It all points in the same direction,” she said.[Romany Gypsies came out of India]

It is the 400th year of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. The daily times has an article about this book, which tells us about the Sikh Gurus and also why Sikhs have turbans.

It contains, besides the works of the Sikh Gurus, writings of several Hindu and Muslim sages and holy men. Altogether there are 3,384 hymns of which nearly 1,000 are attributed to non-Sikhs. Among the Muslim saints whose contribution to the Guru Granth Sahib stands out clearly is Shaikh Farid. This way Sikhism is an eclectic rather than an exclusive creed. This breadth of vision truly captures the essence of the spiritual and humanist traditions of South Asia.

The hymns included were originally composed in several languages including Punjabi, Hindi, Sanskrit and Persian but have been made accessible to the Punjabi readers in the Gurmukhi script in which the Guru Granth is written. Recently it has been rendered into the Persian or