User:Jijithnr

		The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
		Excellent work. Arjun G. Menon (talk · mail) 02:19, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

About Me

I have created around 150+ new articles and contributed around 25+ images to wikipedia. Most of them are related to epic Mahabharata.

My Most cherished moment till date

My Contributions

Articles

Some among the 150+ articles created by me:-

Kuru Kingdom

Panchala Kingdom

Vatsa Kingdom

Kosala Kingdom

Kasi Kingdom

Videha Kingdom

Dakshina Kosala Kingdom

Malla Kingdom

Surasena Kingdom	Dwaraka Kingdom	Anarta Kingdom	Saurashtra Kingdom	Heheya Kingdom
Nishadha Kingdom	Gurjara Kingdom	Karusha Kingdom	Chedi Kingdom	Dasarna Kingdom
Kunti Kingdom	Avanti Kingdom	Malava Kingdom	Matsya Kingdom

Trigarta Kingdom	Salwa Kingdom	Madra Kingdom	Sindhu Kingdom	Sauvira Kingdom
Sivi Kingdom	Kekeya Kingdom	Gandhara Kingdom	Youdheya Kingdom	Pahlava Kingdom

Bahlika Kingdom	Parama Kamboja Kingdom	Uttara Madra Kingdom	Uttara Kuru Kingdom
Yavana Kingdom	Khasa Kingdom	Saka Kingdom

Kasmira Kingdom	Kamboja Kingdom	Darada Kingdom	Parada Kingdom	Parasika Kingdom
Tushara Kingdom	Huna Kingdom	Hara Huna Kingdom	Rishika Kingdom	China Kingdom
Parama China Kingdom

Magadha Kingdom	Kikata Kingdom	Anga Kingdom	Pragjyotisha Kingdom	Sonita Kingdom
Lauhitya Kingdom	Pundra Kingdom	Suhma Kingdom	Vanga Kingdom	Odra Kingdom
Utkala Kingdom

Vidarbha Kingdom	Anupa Kingdom	Surparaka Kingdom	Nasikya Kingdom
Konkana Kingdom	Asmaka Kingdom	Danda Kingdom	Kalinga Kingdom

Telinga Kingdom	Andhra Kingdom	Kishkindha Kingdom	Gomanta Kingdom	Karnata Kingdom
Kanchi Kingdom	Chola Kingdom	Pandya Kingdom	Tulu Kingdom	Mushika Kingdom
Satyaputra Kingdom	Kerala Kingdom	Sinhala Kingdom

Saraswata Kingdom

Abhira Kingdom

Sudra Kingdom

Nishada Kingdom

Kimpurusha Kingdom	Pisacha Kingdom	Naga Kingdom	Kinnara Kingdom	Yaksha Kingdom
Gandharva Kingdom	Kirata Kingdom	Himalaya Kingdom	Parvata Kingdom	Nepa Kingdom

Geometric Limited

Images

Some among the 25+ image created and contributed by me:-

• 
  Maya Sabha
• 
  Burning of Khandava
• 
  Indraprastha
• 
  Initiation of Maya Sabha
• 
  Epic India Kingdoms
• 
  Places Related To Rama
• 
  Ugrasrava and Saunaka
• 
  Vyasa and Ganesa
• 
  Janamejaya and brothers
• 
  Pandavas
• 
  Yudhisthira
• 
  Bhima
• 
  Arjuna
• 
  Nakula
• 
  Sahadeva
• 
  Panchali

More about me and my Viewpoint

I am a scientist from India. I have considerable interest in Ancient Indian History. My idea is to extract historical and geographical information of

movement in India. The earliest parts of both of the epics primarily dealt with the life of prominant people of those times.

I started reading the Indian epics from the age of ten.

. Still my interest in the Ancient Indian History is alive and i am doing it as a part time research. I also create art work related to epic literature as well as astronomy.

I find Wikipedia as a wonderful media, to grow and discuss ideas, and to express myself, to know about people with similar interest. I hope to continue with Wikipedia. The experience is wonderful.

My strong belief is that

. Absolute events transform into history after a few decades and history transforms into mythology after a few centuraries. It is always possible to extract history from mythology and absolute events from history, but with a predictable loss of information.

My view on the Indian epics Mahabharata and Ramayana is that they are the substitutes of history of the period they describe. Just like a candle-light is better than total darkness, these epics serve to tell us something about those periods. In the absence of a proper history to describing these periods, Mahabharata and Ramayana serve as something close to it. They are closer to historical documents than to mythological or imaginative works. It is very inappropriate to dismiss them as mere imaginations or as fables and legends or even as mythology. Careful readers can easily separate, fact and fiction from the narrations in Mahabharata and Ramayana.

I will put it this way:-

Mahabharata:- Historical content (aprox. 80%) Mythological (non-historic)content (aprox 20%)

Ramayana:- Historical content (aprox. 70%) Mythological (non-historic) content (aprox 30%)

Puranas:- Historical content (aprox. 50%) Mythological (non-historic) content (aprox 50%)

Geographical and Historical content in Mahabharata and Ramayana

In Vyasa's own words, Mahabharata is:-

(MBh 1.1) the mystery of the

, Orthoephy and Treatment of diseases; charity and Pasupatadharma; birth celestial and human, for particular purposes; also a description of places of pilgrimage and other holy places of rivers, mountains, forests, the ocean, of heavenly cities and the kalpas; the art of war; the different kinds of nations and languages: the nature of the manners of the people; and the all-pervading spirit;--all these have been represented (in this work)

The highest concentration of geographic information in Mahabharata is found at the start of Bhisma Parva (Mahabharata: Book 6) chapters 6 to 12, where he mentions more than 10000 geographic entities like rivers, lakes, place-names and names of kingdoms, regions, and sub-continents. Bhishma parva is belived to be the starting point of the core of Mahabharata, authored by Vyasa known as Jaya. The rest of the epic that preceeds

, where he describes the art of war, its strategies and finally its ill effects.

The Sabha Parva (Book 2), Chapter 14 contains passages that show glimpses of a political scenario, resulted due to the rising power of

, which, as the name Ahi (Naga) indicates, belonged to the Nagas.

Ramayana, as the name indicates is an account of travels (ayana) of Rama, and thus is related to geography. At least, Valmiki when he named the epic as 'Ramayana' (which directly translates to travels of Rama) had this thought in his mind, and developed his epic to describe the extensive travels made by Rama from Ayodhya to Lanka. In later stages this original intent was long forgotten. Focus was shifted to the tragic story of Rama and Sita.

Divinity of Rama and Krishna

In a much later stage (effected by the

). Much the same happened to Krishna, as revealed by epic Mahabharata. My view is that, while it is consistent with the Indic belief-system to consider them as gods, one should not be blind to ignore the actual human-being behind these divinities, to the extent that it becomes impossible for others to analyze their historicity. By the same coin, those who study the historicity of these personalities should not hurt the religious sentiments of people who consider them as divinities. Again, those who adore them as divinities, should know that the images of Rama or Krishna, are a means to attain the ultimate divinity and are not to be mistaken as the ultimate divinity, which as per Vedanta principles, is within ones own self.

Epic literature and fossils

I always tend to think about the similarity of epic literature and fossils. Just like fossils preserve signs of the existence of a creature that lived in the past, epic literature preserve information about the people and their lives in the past distorted yet reconstruct-able. Just like fossils are deposited layer by layer, epic literature is accumulated in layers after layers. By knowing in which fossil-layer a fossil belongs we are able to approximately know in which time the creature is fossilized. Same is more or less true with information crystallized inside layers of epic literature.

Epic personalities and distant light sources

Another analogy that comes into mind is the nature of epic personalities and their similarities with distant light sources as explained by astronomy. In astronomy we know that some of the distant stars that we think as single are actually binary stars, multiple stars or some times even a galaxy of stars. Some times these stars that appear as one are never related and could be located at locations separated by light-years and appear as one as they happened to be on the same line of sight from us. This is true with some of the epic personalities like Vyasa and Vasistha. Due to their temporal-distance in the past they seem to us, when analyzing the epic literature, to be a single person. But close study reveals them as a generation of people. Some times multiple personalities that lived at different ages and different places are fused together into one personality. Many personalities in epic literature, including Rama and Krishna shows this fusion of multiple personalities.

Transmission loss of information in epic literature

Deep analysis of epics reveals that at their cores are actual events that occurred in some point of time in the distant past. Later, these turned into contemporary history. But unlike in our age, this historical information was transmitted from generation to generation through oral traditions.

and Anikini (MBh 1.2). If we follow this calculation we get an impossible figure (considering the human-population of that era) as the number of soldiers and animals who took part in the war. Some historians had used this impossibility to rule out the historicity of Kurukshetra War, dismissing it as a fable. By the same way lack of knowledge of exact duration of the war resulted in the myth that it took place in 18 days, making the war much more impossible to occur historically. This is the negative effect of adding fables to historical facts.

Some times the gaps in information is not due to transmission loss. The information required in a later stage some times is never transmitted initially but became a necessity subsequently. An example is the lack of information about the exact origin of the

Panchali

were also are other examples.

Some times absent information is never substituted by any fable but are approximated by other means. Examples are the names like

Krishna Dwaipayana Vyasa

.

Steps taken to prevent the transmission loss

The ancient sages had devised a means to minimize the transmission loss by rendering the literature as

check-sum

used to ensure the integrity of transmitted information in digital transmission. Though this helped to reduce the distortions that occured during oral transmission of epic literature, it could not eliminate the information-loss completely.

Similary one of the major occupation of the ancient sages and people who handled this epic literature though oral transmission was to assemble togather at one place and render the whole epic commited in memory so that others can varify that they are having the same version and errors had not crept in. This tradition is still existing in India, in spite of the fact that the entire epic has already been writen down and commited to text, and now into hypertext over Internet. The myth of Ganesha writing down the Mahabharata, as Vyasa rendered it from his memory is a glimps of the stage at which the orally transmitted epic is writtend down into text for the first time, possibly by Gana-Patis (heads of the republics) of those ages.

Preservation effect of fables

There is a positive effect also in adding fables to historic facts. They serve to make the information more attractive and appealing which could encourage a society who were less inclined in preserving historical fact than in preserving stories that invoke a sense of wonder and those that deals with their religion. The fiction part of the epic serves as an outer envelop that preserve the core historic information by continuous retelling over generations so that they reach us now (like a fruit is preserved by its outer covering, until it is ready to be consumed by its intended consumers). The ancient sages some times deliberately added these fables to the factual information to make the information long lived. This is like the mummification of information, which otherwise could have dissipated completely in course of a few centuries.

Comparing Illiad and Oddyssy to Mahabharata and Ramayana

Comparison of

.