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23 Jan, 4 tweets, 1 min read
It might be a cultural aversion to certain forms of battle. The Japanese also disliked firearms and considered unmanly. India had a very serious ethics of war. For example, siege warfare by enforcing starvation (of which the Mughals was masters) was not mentioned in Indian texts.
Total warfare by laying the entire country to waste, followed thoroughly by the Turkish conquistadors, was similarly unknown in India. Destroying the will of resistance in people by forced famine, as the British did in Ireland and Bengal, was also absent in India.
Indians had to understand the new rules of the game of war, and the new requirements for the mode of operation needed for survival. Some things were not learnt in the right time, some were not learnt ever.
I don’t think it was a resource constraint for gun powder. Indians had excellent knowledge of chemistry, and were producing the best salt petre (nitrate) in the world, until the Chilean Guana was discovered. I think it is cultural aversion that stopped them from fully using it.

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More from @vakibs

vakibs Profile picture
25 Jan
In this thread, I will discuss new word forming suffixes in Telugu. I will compare with examples from English, which is rich in the fluid use of suffixes, making it an effective language for science and technology. I hope similar fluidity and ease will come in Indian languages.
I am writing this thread in English so as to inform speakers of other Indian languages as well. Please think of corresponding suffixes in your languages and comment below. This exercise will help us learn how to improve technically rich expression of concepts in Indian languages.
This thread is not about etymological roots, or full scale word derivation for complex scientific concepts. It is about suffixes that change the part of speech, a much simpler concept that all speakers should know. In fact, this facility with suffixes is very natural in English.
Read 21 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
25 Jan
These so called literati have zero knowledge of history. The racist movement in Germany was kickstarted by inspiration from Colonial Britain. A key figure was Carl Peters, who campaigned for German imperialism after getting inspired by his time in England.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Pete…
How important was the inspiration from Colonial Britain to the Nazis?

Hitler rehabilitated Carl Peters officially by his personal decree 20 years after his death and failed colonial adventures.

The Nazis made a fricking propaganda movie called “Carl Peters”.
There was no fricking moral difference between Colonial Britain and the Nazi Party. In fact, Colonial Britain was Hitler’s ideal. All his actions were inspired by British Colonialists, including the creation of concentration camps (created by the British in South Africa).
Read 4 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
24 Jan
In traditional Sanskrit scholarship, the works on grammar are a must for understanding word formation and meaning. So essentially, grammar replaces dictionary! In parallel, there will be descriptive word repositories grouped by meaning, similar to Thesauruses.
There were many European philologists who got stumped by the Indian system of grammar replacing lexicon. It is not just for Sanskrit, by the way. They were unable to understand why grammars of Telugu, for example, started off with rules which they thought should be in a lexicon.
Here is C.P. Brown, a British philologist, who wrote a grammar and dictionary for the Telugu language, and thus "civilized" the Telugu race. He is called the "Āndhra Bhāshōddhāraka" (the resurrecter of Telugu, no less).

He opines the following on Sandhi (grammatical liaison). Image
Read 16 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
23 Jan
This is not unusual at all. Even today, we disapprove of chemical warfare. Or biological warfare through the use of engineered viruses etc. It doesn’t mean some states or non-state actors are not trying to build those things.

The question is if *we* should use them.
The use of killer drones and robots, murder of civilians, mass poisoning of food or water, genetic engineering of viruses (fast killing, or slowly weakening the immune system): imagine our enemies are doing all these things.

Would we react in kind? At which point will we do so?
A barbarian civilization will not hesitate to develop all these weapons and use them, whatever gives them victory. An ethically rooted civilization will hesitate, and will not use such weapons until the very last moment, when its very existence is at stake.
Read 4 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
23 Jan
Interesting thought. We cannot discount the role of individual heroism in shaping history. But there are also geopolitical realities. When some important resources are lost, or regions with such resources are turned hostile to India, there is limited room for maneuver.
During the pre-British era, horses were an important resource in shaping the battles. Good breeding areas of horses were lost to India, when the northern regions of Jambūdwīpa were neglected and surrendered to the enemy. So there was a fundamental weakness in Hindu resistance.
Another key factor is naval command and control of the rich trade on Indian Ocean. The Hindu Navy suffered a major drawback when Sindh was lost. Remember, the Arab invasions started first as naval expeditions. Europeans conquered the Arabs to take over Indian Ocean, not Indians.
Read 8 tweets
vakibs Profile picture
11 Jan
In this thread, I will discuss the division of earth into continents, and how the term “Jambūdwīpa” जम्बूद्वीप, perhaps attested the most number of times in world literature as a continent, lost out to the bastard time “South Asia”.

India must reclaim the term “Jambūdwīpa”.
The word “Jambūdwīpa” is attested not just in India, but in the whole Asian literature. This is how Asian civilizations like India, China, Japan etc. have seen the world, as a sacred geography centered on the Mēru mountain (Sumēru). These ideas spread through Buddhism.
The division of the geography is remarkably similar across a *vast* trove of Hindu and Buddhist literature. What’s more: this geography is attested repeatedly by direct physical observation of travelers on the Buddhist pilgrimage circuit, most notably Xuan Zhang (Hiuen Tsang).
Read 27 tweets

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