#GemsOfASI #14
Theft, loss, and inventory failure

1/
When artefacts disappear from protected monuments, the response is usually administrative.
Files are opened, reports are written, and records are updated.
By the time this happens, the loss has already occurred much earlier. 2/
Many antiquities under protection are still incompletely catalogued, irregularly verified, or stored without consistent physical security.
In such cases, legal custody exists on paper, but effective control on the ground is weak or absent.

#GemsofASI #13

1/ Community custodianship removed. Decay accelerated.

For centuries, India's monuments survived not because of departments.

They survived because of communities.

Priests. Caretakers. Villagers. Guilds.
Daily acts of maintenance kept stone alive.

Then we professionalized protection—and removed the protectors. 2/ What did daily custodianship look like?

• Cleaning debris
• Clearing drainage
• Minor repairs before they became major
• Ritual upkeep
• Constant presence

This wasn't "informal."
It was a functioning system.

Colonial archaeology called it a liability.

1/ When did you last hear about a 2000 years old hotel style South Indian site with Roman silver and Chinese coins?

Never.

Because we were taught ancient India was isolated. Insular. Self-contained.

That was a lie.

Here's what they found underground in Karnataka — and why nobody talks about it. 🪙🌏
#GemsOfASI #MNI938 2/ Chandravalli. Moon-shaped valley. Chitradurga district, Karnataka.

The site: Ankalagi Caves.

Inhabited since 1000 BCE.

Layers stack like civilizations:
Megalithic burials → Satavahana coins → Kadamba inscriptions → medieval cave shrines.

No single empire. Just continuous occupation for 3,000 years.

#GemsOfASI #12
Ritual bans, policing faith, and administrative overreach.

1/
Across India, ritual bans at protected monuments are often justified as “conservation measures”.
Their effects, however, go far beyond conservation. 2/
Rituals in temples are not ornamental additions.
They are structured practices embedded into architecture, time cycles, and spatial design.

Banning them alters how a site functions — not just how it is used.

1/ THREAD — Before 1700 CE, European law didn't prohibit child marriage. It regulated it.

Minimum ages codified in canon law. Contracts binding in royal courts. Elite daughters became diplomatic currency.

This thread documents legal practices from primary sources. It doesn't comment on any modern religion or community.

Ages. Alliances. Archives.

Bookmark 🧵👇 2/
Carolingian Europe.

Bertha of Laon is believed to have married Pepin the Short around 744 CE. Historical sources suggest she may have been around 13–14 years old at the time. The marriage aimed to consolidate the Carolingian claim.

Source: Einhard, Royal Frankish Annals.

Alliance first. Childhood considered differently in historical context.

#GemsOfASI #11

1/ Lving worship, conservation law, and manufactured conflict.

Across India, living worship and heritage protection are repeatedly presented as being in conflict.

This conflict is often treated as inevitable.
It is not. 2/
Indian temples were historically designed for continuous use.

Architecture anticipated:
• daily rituals
• water flow
• oil lamps
• human movement

Use was not an accident.
It was part of structural logic.

Your great-great-grandfather didn't have a surname.

He had a gotra. A kula. A title earned or inherited. A village name. A trade.

Then the British census arrived. 1871–1881.

Suddenly, administration needed fixed surnames. Standardized. Permanent. Inheritable only through patrilineal descent.

Surname took birth in addition to "son of / daughter of / wife of"

🧵 1/ Before colonization:

Rama Dasharathi. Krishna Vasudev. Arjuna Pandav.

Your identity was relational. Fluid. Context-dependent.

Father's name. Gotra for ritual. Kula for lineage. Village for geography. Occupation when needed.

No bureaucracy required you to pick ONE and freeze it forever.

1/ Every December, lights appear worldwide.

Diwali: diyas blaze during Kartik's darkest new moon (late Oct/early Nov).
Hanukkah: 8 candles in December.
Christmas: trees glow on Dec 25.
Yule, Dongzhi, Saturnalia... all cluster around winter solstice.

Why? 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬. 🕯️ 2/ Rome, 217 BCE: Saturnalia begins Dec 17.

For one week, social order inverts. Slaves dine first. Masters serve. Courts close, gambling's allowed. Gifts exchanged: candles, wax figurines, pottery.

It celebrated Saturn's mythical "Golden Age"—a world without hierarchy.

Then normal life resumed.

🧵 THREAD: Sambhar Lake didn’t become salty by accident.
It is the chemical footprint of the Aravallis. 🧂⛰️

Erase the hills, and the lake doesn’t shrink.
It dies.

#SaveAravalli


@narendramodi @PMOIndia @mygovindia @TVMohandasPai @CPCB_OFFICIAL @PIB_India @moefcc 1/
Sambhar Lake sits at the NE edge of the Aravalli Range.
This is not coincidence.
It is a tectonic basin formed along ancient Aravalli fault lines.

No Aravallis → no Sambhar.
Simple geology. Ignored policy.

1/
#GemsofASI #2 : British ASI manuals still rule India.
Not symbolically. Institutionally.

India became independent in 1947.
Its archaeology did not.

The Archaeological Survey of India still operates on conservation doctrines framed between 𝟏𝟗𝟎𝟒–𝟏𝟗𝟑𝟖, designed for colonial governance—not for a living civilisation.

#Decolonisation 2/
The 𝐀𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐮𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐜𝐭, 𝟏𝟗𝟎𝟒 wasn’t written to protect Indian culture.
It was written to **control it**.

Its goals were explicit:
• Centralise authority
• Isolate monuments from locals
• Treat ritual use as damage
• Convert living sites into silent ruins

This logic never left ASI.

1/9
Ever hear of the Santhal Hul? Two years BEFORE the 1857 "Sepoy Mutiny" that history books love to call India's "first war of independence," the Santhal tribes rose up in 1855 against British exploitation. This was pure grassroots fury – bows and arrows vs. an empire. Let's dive in. 🏹 2/9
Background: The British "invited" Santhals to clear forests in the Rajmahal Hills (Damin-i-Koh, now Jharkhand/Bihar/WB) for farming and revenue. Sounded good – until zamindars, moneylenders (mahajans), and corrupt officials turned it into a nightmare. Debt traps, land grabs, exorbitant interest, forced labor. Santhals called outsiders "dikus" – exploiters.

#GemsOfASI #1

ASI was founded in 1861, not to protect India’s past—but to manage it.

The Archaeological Survey of India was created by the British Empire, staffed by military engineers, and embedded inside colonial administration. The name "Survey" itself says it all.

This matters. 2/
ASI’s first Director General, Alexander Cunningham, was a Royal Engineers officer.

His training was not in living cultures.
It was in surveying, mapping, classification, and control.

Archaeology was an imperial tool.

🧵🏰 What kind of fort gets called "minor" at 2,700 feet with multi-tiered defences visible for miles?

The kind that didn't fit colonial narratives. Rayadurgam Fort, Anantapur — massive, sophisticated, erased.

We're still using their textbooks. The stones outlasted empires. The lie outlasted the stones.

#GemsofASI MNI#20

1/15 🛕 Built by 𝐉𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐚 𝐍𝐚𝐲𝐚𝐤𝐚 (1520s–30s), this was a Vijayanagara frontier fort controlling movement between AP & Karnataka. Colonial historians later downgraded it as "minor". Minor? A 2,700-ft citadel controlling two regions. But the empire narrative couldn't accommodate decentralised power. So it became "minor".

2/15

1/ They taught us the British ended Sati. Saved us from our barbarism. 🕊️

Then why did Sati cases spike from 1 in 8 years to 5000 per year under British rule?

Why did cases DROP under Mughal emperors?

Let's talk about the history they never taught you. 🧵 2/ From 1900 BCE to 1900 CE—2,500 years—historians found fewer than 500 verified Sati incidents.

That's one every 8 years. Rare. Tragic. But rare.

Between 1813-1829, just 16 years under British rule, they documented THOUSANDS.

What changed?

1️⃣ The Taj Mahal was built using measurements from 3300 BCE.

Same unit. Same system. 5000 years apart.

Your history textbooks never mentioned this. Why? 🧵 @narendramodi @PMOIndia @mygovindia @sanjeevsanyal @IndicMeenakshi 2️⃣ The Harappan civilization used the angula—a finger-width of exactly 1.763 cm.

That same unit designed the Taj Mahal in 1648 CE.

5000 years. Zero breaks. Uninterrupted architectural DNA. 🏛️

🧵 The Bhagavata Purana tells a wild story about Ajamila—a Brahmin who spent 88 years sinning, then accidentally hacked moksha at his deathbed.

Yes, accidentally.

Let me explain. 🪷 1/ Ajamila started pure. Born into a respectable Brahmin family, mastered the Vedas, lived virtuously with his devoted wife.

Textbook dharma. Perfect resume.

Then one day in the forest, he saw something that broke him. 👀

🧵 Delhi chokes every winter. Politicians blame farmers. Farmers blame weather. Weather experts blame geography.

Nobody blames the real culprit: traffic mismanagement.

Here's the math they don't want you to see:

₹60,000 Cr lost annually. 37 deaths daily. 16 cigarettes worth of air per day.

The fix? ₹13,900 Cr. Payback? 11 months.

Every number below is sourced from IIT Kanpur, WHO, EPCA, CSE. Every solution has worked elsewhere. Every excuse has expired.

@BJP4India controls both centre and state. @gupta_rekha has 4 years left.

Let's see if data trumps inertia 👇 Bookmark and RT. 1) The damage — Quantified

- AQI 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝟒𝟓𝟎–𝟓𝟓𝟎 during winter months (safar data)
- WHO: every 10 µg/m³ rise in pm2.5 increases mortality by 6–8%
- Delhi averages 𝟏𝟒𝟎–𝟏𝟖𝟎 µ𝐠/𝐦³ 𝐩𝐦𝟐.𝟓 — ~10× the safe limit
- A𝐧𝐧𝐮𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐛𝐮𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐧: ₹𝟔𝟎,𝟎𝟎𝟎–₹𝟔𝟓,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐜𝐫 (moefcc + teri)
- P𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲: 13,752 deaths/year (gbd dataset)
- Exposure equivalent: 𝟏𝟔–𝟏𝟖 𝐜𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐬/𝐝𝐚𝐲

Sources of pm2.5 (IIT kanpur source apportionment):

- Vehicles: 𝟒𝟏%
- Road dust: 𝟐𝟏.𝟓%
- Industry: 18%
- Construction: 8%
- Waste burning: 6%
- Stubble burning: 𝟓.𝟓%
- Firecrackers: <1%

Here's the problem:

Everyone cites these percentages. No one asks 𝐰𝐡𝐲 vehicles contribute 41%. No one asks 𝐰𝐡𝐲 road dust is 21.5%. No one asks 𝐰𝐡𝐲 construction spikes PM by 8%.

The real question isn't WHAT pollutes.

It's WHY Delhi's vehicles pollute 3–4× more than vehicles in Mumbai, Bangalore, or Singapore.

WHY does road dust account for 21.5% here but <5% in Tokyo?

WHY does construction create such massive spikes?

The answer: 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐥𝐮𝐫𝐞.

This thread dissects the failure points—and presents engineered fixes with ROI under 12 months.

1/9
Welcome to Jalore Fort, Rajasthan: the “Golden Fort” that literally glows at sunset yet remains invisible to 99.9 % of Indian tourists. Built to laugh at invaders, now dying of Instagram indifference. Classic. 🏜️✨
#SonarKila #GemsofASI
State protected monument number S-RJ-223,224 @UNESCO @narendramodi @PMOIndia @gssjodhpur @ASIGoI @MinOfCultureGoI 2/9
10th-century Paramaras: “Let’s park a fortress on a lone volcanic plug no army can climb.”
Result: Never fully conquered. Alauddin tried in 1311, lost 40,000 men, still had to bribe the gatekeeper. Peak medieval flex.

1️⃣ 🧵 While everyone obsesses over Hampi, let me tell you about Rayadurgam Fort.

16th century. 2,727 feet elevation. Anantapur district.

A fortress that survived Vijayanagara's collapse, Muslim invasions, Nayaka power plays, and Tipu Sultan's expansion now may not survive few more decades thanks to bureaucracy 😑

Yet most Indians have never heard of it. Here's why that's a problem. 🏰

#GemsofASI MNI#20 #Archaeology @AndraPradeshCM @asicircle 2️⃣ Built by Junga Nayaka under Vijayanagara rule, but the site's earlier story is messier.

Local Balija chiefs—the Rayadurgam Palegars—held this hill. Called "turbulent" by imperial records. The emperor sent officers to drive them out.

Once conquered? Renamed to "Bhupatirayakonda" (King's Hill).

Erasing rivals through nomenclature. Colonial Tale as old as time. #VijayanagaEmpire #IndianHistory #ForgottenForts

1️⃣ These brick ruins are what remains of Karnasubarna—ancient capital of King Sasanka's Gauda Kingdom (circa 600-625 CE). Once a thriving Buddhist center with the grand Rakta Mrittika Mahavihar, as documented by Hiuen Tsang himself. 🏛️

Now? Barely anyone knows it existed.

ASI protected monument number 3692. Can you see the protection? #GemsofASI 2️⃣ Hiuen Tsang described Rakta Mrittika Mahavihar as having 'red brick walls' with over 1,000 monks studying here in the 7th century. A major Buddhist learning center in Eastern India, predating Nalanda's peak fame.

Yet most history books skip straight to Nalanda.

No signboards explaining the mahavihar's significance. No interpretive panels. Nothing.

THREAD: How Bengaluru Buried 3,000 Years Under Asphalt 🧵

1/ Take a moment. Picture Chikkajala—a megalithic burial site predating empires we revere. Unearthed by Captain Branfil in colonial times, packed with Iron Age cists (500-1000 BCE) and striking black-and-red pottery. Priceless for science. Until we paved it over. What a legacy, eh? 🏗️🪦🏛️

#GemsofASI #Archaeology 2/ This wasn't just dirt. A 3,000-year-old cemetery fused with a fortified temple, etched stepwell boasting fish, turtles, scorpions. Hoysala pillars, Vijayanagara scripts, a bicentennial Hanuman shrine, and a peepal tree clinging to granite like ancient defiance. But highways wait for no history. 🛣️🕳️🗿