The Significance of Ancient Indian History

It tells us how, when, and where people developed the earliest cultures in India.
It tell us how they began undertaking agriculture and stock raising which made life secure and settled.
It shows how the ancient Indians discovered and utilized natural resources, and how they created the means for their livelihood.
We get an idea of how the ancient inhabitants made arrangements for food, shelter, and transport, and learn how they took to farming, spinning, weaving, metalworking, and the like, how they cleared forests, founded villages, cities, and eventually large kingdoms.

Unity in Diversity:-

Pre-Aryans, the Indo-Aryans, the Greeks, the Scythians, the Hunas, the Turks, and others made India their home.

Scholars equate Aryan elements with the Vedic and Puranic culture of the north, and they equate pre-Aryan elements with the Dravidian and Tamil culture of the south.

The Vedic texts ascribed to 1500-500 BC contain many Munda, Dravidian, and other non-Sanskritic terms.

The earliest Tamil texts called the Sangam literature, which is roughly used for the period 300 BC-AD 600, contain many Pali and Sanskrit terms signifying ideas and institutions that developed in the Gangetic plains.

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The people of eastern region inhabited by the pre-Aryan tribals spoke the Munda or Kolarian languages. Munda pockets in Chhotanagpur plateau, the remnants of Munda culture in the Indo Aryan culture are fairly strong.

The Indo-Aryan languages also contain many Dravidian terms. The dominant cultural community called the Aryans named Aryavarta.

Aryavarta denoted northern and central India and extended from the eastern to the western sea coasts. India was better known by another name, Bharatavarsha, which referred to the land of the Bharatas. The term Bharati or an inhabitant of India occurs in post-Gupta texts.

Iranian inscriptions are important for the origin of the term Hindu. The term Hindu occurs in the inscriptions of fifth–sixth centuries BC. It is derived from the Sanskrit term Sindhu. Linguistically becomes h in Iranian. The Iranian inscriptions first mention Hindu as a district on the Indus. the term Hindu means a territorial unit.

People universally praised kings who made attempts to establish their authority from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin and from the valley of the Brahmaputra in the east to the land beyond the Indus in the west. They were called Chakravartis.

This form of political unity was attained at least twice in ancient times. In the third century BC Ashoka extended his empire over the whole of India barring the extreme south. His inscriptions are scattered across a major part of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and even in Afghanistan. Again, in the fourth century AD, Samudragupta carried his victorious arms from the Ganga to the borders of the Tamil land.

In the seventh century, the Chalukya king, Pulakeshin, actively defeated Harshavardhana, who held the title of the lord of the whole of north India.

The word Hind or Hindu is derived from the Sanskrit term Sindhu, and as a result, the country came to be known as ‘India,’ which bears a close resemblance to the Greek term for it.

India came to be called ‘Hind’ in the Persian and Arabic languages. In post-Kushan times, the Iranian rulers conquered the Sindh area and named it Hindustan.

In the third century BC Prakrit served as the lingua franca across the major part of India. Ashoka’s inscriptions were inscribed in the Prakrit language mainly in Brahmi script.

The Relevance Of The Past To The Present

There is no doubt that Indians of old made remarkable progress in a variety of fields, but these advances alone cannot enable us to compete with the achievements of modern science and technology. One cannot ignore the fact that ancient Indian society was marked by gross social injustice.

For India to develop rapidly, its society must eradicate such vestiges of the past. The caste system and sectarianism hinder the democratic integration and development of India.

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The Significance of Ancient Indian History, The Significance of Ancient Indian History, The Significance of Ancient Indian History