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What kind of TU rights, Democracy, Elections and many other things prevailing in other countries are there in China, the beloved country of 85 % LIC pensioners as they seem to claim when they were unable to launch a passive resistance to restore TU rights under ID Act 1948 which was snatched under LIC Act 1981. There pastime is starting with to abuse great KMLA for every adjournment many in number by Misra bench at SC where they are not a litigant but become one at DHC after decades expecting a quick judgment of present SC bench with arrears of pension upgradation with retrospective dates. Other pastimes being support to beef-eating, opposing economic reforms by which they got upto double the real wages while in service, condemning PVN Rao who gifted pension to all PSUs and formal working class, support to corrupt UPA regimes to prevent BJP to take power at Centre even at the cost of depriving pension updation for a decade and many other things, the latest being tirade against SIR and its author CEC
who should be sent to TIHAR. Their only achievement is to collaborate Assistants recruited were forced to retire at the entry grade/A+30 which never happened any office of GOI/PSBs/PSUs. They continue to imagine that they are as mighty as the ruling parties of China/ Russia/ other 14 states of erstwhile Soviet Union for 3/7 decades with spurious results of win 99.9% in elections with the threat of Nuclear arms may be like with present North Korea. Karma punished all.
https://theprint.in/opinion/rajput-patronage-krishna-mughal-india-popular-god/3038623/ Krishna is an ancient god, but his present-day superstardom is recent. It was the result of an entanglement between Rajput kings, Bengali ecstatics, and Mughal poets and emperors. Anirudh Kanisetti 10 September, 2026 Hindus across the country celebrated Janmashtami last week, marking the birth of the god Krishna, with processions, song, and celebratory human pyramids. As a cowherd, wise teacher, and beloved trickster, Krishna is often assumed to have always been central to Hinduism, adored since time immemorial.
A donkey at Galta
Let’s consider a legend from Galta, a Vaishnava shrine near present-day Jaipur. In the 16th century, the region was ruled by Prithviraj Singh of Amber, patron of a shape-shifting yogi named Taranath and his unruly acolytes. One day, a wandering Vaishnava pilgrim, Paihari Krishandas, came by and asked the yogi to share his campfire. An enraged Taranath turned himself into a tiger and sprang at Krishandas, who said, “What a jackass!” Taranath was instantly turned into a donkey, and his terrified followers scattered. King Prithviraj, according to the legend, immediately changed gurus. Krishandas’ Ramanandi line, revering the divine Rama and Sita, took over the shrine at Galta.
Historian William Pinch, in Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (2006), reads this legend as a memory of a political and religious shift in the 1500s. Yogis such as Taranath were formidable but unreliable. As a result, royal patronage steadily moved into large religious institutions and networks of pilgrimage. The power that had saved Krishandas was not his own, but that of a deity standing beside him: one who could be worshipped in a state-administered temple embedded in larger pilgrimage networks.
Around the same time in Bengal, a Brahmin named Vishvambhara Mishra took the ascetic name Krishna Chaitanya, and led communities in ecstatic devotion to Krishna. Worshipped with singing, dancing, and weeping in the street, Chaitanya’s Krishna was not the charioteer of the Bhagavad Gita but the cowherd of Vrindavan, with his consort Radha. Chaitanya sent his closest followers, the brothers Rupa and Sanatana Goswami, west to Braj with instructions to recover its lost sacred sites: the groves and ponds where Krishna’s childhood was said to have unfolded. In 1534, Rupa is said to have found an image of Govinda-deva on a mound at the centre of Vrindavan. He raised a modest shrine over it the following year, claiming to have restored an ancient temple mentioned in the Puranas.
Eight years earlier, Mughal conqueror Babur had won the First Battle of Panipat. Vows and strategy
Forty years later, Chaitanya’s ecstatic worship and Amber’s state-administered pilgrimage centres became irrevocably intertwined. Chaitanya’s Vaishnavism, called “Gaudiya” for its origins in Bengal (Gaur), had rapidly spread across the eastern Gangetic Plains and Odisha, with a network of monasteries and pilgrim facilities patronised by local rulers and devotees. In 1571, Man Singh, descendant of Prithviraj Singh and soon–to–be the Mughal emperor Akbar’s most formidable general, visited the small shrine of Govinda-deva in Vrindavan.
According to historian R Nath in ‘Śrī Govindadeva’s Itinerary from Vṛndāvana to Jayapura, c. 1534–1727’ (1996), Man Singh vowed to build Govinda-deva a worthy home if he prevailed over Mewar. In June 1576, at Haldighati, he led a Mughal army against Rana Pratap of Mewar, who was wounded and escaped. Man Singh, seeking to fulfil his vow, started building.
His colossal temple to Govind Dev Ji was possibly the largest temple North India had seen in centuries: a sandstone structure whose five spires were once visible for miles across the Braj plain. Its cavernous interior was vaulted with Mughal-esque arches. Architectural historian George Michell suggests that it was likely built by the same craftsmen employed at nearby Fatehpur Sikri.
In fact, Akbar had been endowing Braj’s Vaishnava temples since 1565, and he backed Man Singh’s Govind Dev Ji as well. Muslim writers across North India were also writing devotional poetry to Krishna around this time—a subject studied at length by Professor Francesca Orsini. Akbar may have had a strategic reason for his patronage. Raja Man Singh would govern Bihar, Bengal, and Odisha on his behalf from 1588. These were the heartlands of Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Endowing its holiest shrine in the Mughal territorial core was an intelligent outreach; it bound distant subjects through pilgrimage into the imperial network.
This model of Vaishnava patronage travelled fast. At Orchha, the Bundel chief Madhukar Shah devoted himself to Krishna and Rama. His enormous Chaturbhuj Temple at Orchha, the tallest in North India, appears to have been modelled on Man Singh’s Govind Dev Ji. God moves into the palace
In the 1630s, Shah Jahan handed management of the Govind Dev Ji temple directly to the house of Amber, though the arrangement did not last. Forty years later, amid political turbulence with his vassals, emperor Aurangzeb ordered the Keshav Rai Temple in nearby Mathura to be demolished. According to historian Munis Faruqui, this was because of its custodians’ support for Jat rebels. In contrast, Aurangzeb had actually renewed Govind Dev Ji’s land grants on several occasions in 1661, 1671, 1695, and 1707. Though the sequence of events is debated, the temple was eventually damaged in regional upheavals. The temple custodians had already swung into action. Govind Dev Ji’s idol left Vrindavan and moved west in stages, arriving at last in Amber in the early 1700s, where the ruler, Sawai Jai Singh II, was constructing a new capital: Jaipur. The Rajput king also built Govind Dev Ji a garden retreat, moved him into Jaipur when the city was completed, and finally installed him inside the palace compound itself. (Historian Sam Dalrymple shares photos and an overview of the shrine’s history here.)
In 1740, Jai Singh II ordered every title-holder at his court to pay toward the god’s upkeep, effectively declaring him the state deity. His shrine was designed to resemble an imperial Diwan-i-Aam, writes Dalrymple, rather than the “towering shikharas (spires)” that had once crowned his temple in Vrindavan.
Krishna and the State, however, were somewhat uncomfortable bedfellows. Kiyokazu Okita, in Hindu Theology in Early Modern South Asia (2014), writes that Jai Singh II made several interventions to bring his territories in line with orthodox Hinduism. He performed Vedic sacrifices, including the Asvamedha horse sacrifice. He forced the Mughal court to abolish jizya and other pilgrim taxes. On the other hand, he directly intervened in his subjects’ devotional lives, stopping the Ramanandi practice of meditating on the intimate life of Sita and Rama. This was the same group that the king’s ancestor, Prithviraj Singh, installed at Galta near Jaipur.
Jai Singh II recognised only four legitimate lineages for Vaishnava devotion. One Rup Lal of the Radhavallabhas refused to affiliate with anybody, and was driven out of Vrindavan with his family. The king was also determined to prove that Radha and Krishna were married. (Strictly speaking, according to the Gaudiyas, Radha was married to another cowherd, but since she was an emanation of Krishna’s energy, their union was metaphysically sanctioned.) In 1719, Jai Singh II convened a conference at Jaipur to settle the matter, and sent an envoy to argue the case in Bengal. However, even a king had no authority over whom god was permitted to love. The Bengalis heard Jai Singh’s envoy out and rejected his arguments. Govind Dev Ji stayed in the palace, but Radha, theologically, stayed married to somebody else.
https://theprint.in/opinion/indian-hinduising-southeast-asia-converted-region-to-islam/3032392/ The advent of Islam in India, and its spread in Southeast Asia, are much bemoaned as end of the “Indosphere”, supposedly breaking these ancient networks. But the opposite is true. Anirudh Kanisetti 03 September, 2026 In India’s long history with Southeast Asia, there’s one half that we’re very comfortable with: the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism. From Rabindranath Tagore to Narendra Modi, Indian writers, diplomats and politicians have waxed romantic about the ancient religious and commercial ties between the subcontinent and the landmasses of the Eastern Indian Ocean. The advent of Islam in India, and its rapid spread in Southeast Asia, are much bemoaned as the end of the “Indosphere”, supposedly breaking these ancient networks. But, if anything, the opposite is true. Indians were just as influential in spreading Islam in Southeast Asia as we ever were in spreading Hinduism. And Islam spread along the same networks that Hinduism once had, deepening and widening the oceanic web of ideas and influences. he fakir from the Coromandel
One of the oldest surviving Malay texts, the 14th-century Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, minces no words about where Islam arrived from. Receiving divine portents, the legendary Sultan Muhammad of Ma’bar in the Coromandel—supposedly a descendant of Caliph Abu-Bakr—renounces his throne. He puts on a fakir’s clothes and sails to Samudra (Pasai) on Sumatra’s northern tip, on a ship coming from Mecca. There he anoints a chief named Merah Silu as Sultan Malik al-Salih. The ship returns to Mecca laden with gifts, while the fakir remains, in the chronicle’s words, to firmly “establish the religion of Islam”.
Indians, referred to as “Kling”, appear again and again in this Hikayat, as they do in many other Malay Muslim chronicles. A Kling trader arrives and locates the gold that makes the infant Pasai Sultanate rich. A Kling yogi comes to display his magic and loses to the sultan’s sanctity, converting on the spot and granting the Sultan the title of “Perumudal Perumal” (Perumal is the name by which the god Vishnu is known in the Tamil country).
Historian Anthony Reid, in his paper “The Indian Dimension of Aceh and Sumatra History,” suggests that this story was invented to circumvent the sultan’s South Indian origins.
All this is to say that just because Indian Ocean ports transitioned from Sanskrit to Arabic, it didn’t mean that Indians had any less of a key position. In 1393, the Qazi (specialised maritime magistrate or judge) of the port of Calicut (present-day Kozhikode) wrote a letter to the sultan of Yemen. Historian Elizabeth Lambourn studied the letter in her “Khuṭba and Muslim Networks in the Indian Ocean”.
The qazi’s letter mentions that envoys from Bengal, Hormuz, and Samudra-Pasai had spent vast sums trying to have their rulers’ names recited in Calicut’s Friday sermon—only to be turned down. Why? Such a recitation, in a port home to a cosmopolitan Muslim diaspora, would have signified the Sultan’s pre-eminence among other rulers, carrying the news to all ports linked to Calicut.
This is an echo of the “religious diplomacy” practised by earlier Malay kings. In 1006, the kings of Kedah had similarly established a Buddhist monastery at Chola-ruled Nagapattinam, a gesture of their Buddhist piety in a key Indian port. Centuries later, in a world where Islam and Arabic had established themselves, a South Indian port remained a crucial hinge.
Khambhat’s other arm
When we imagine Gujarati merchants today, we typically think of Jains or of Hindu Banias. As I wrote in an earlier column, Bania firms were eminent in the Persian Gulf. About a third of the houses in the Persian port of Bandar Abbas were Indian, and the Persian authorities prohibited public cow slaughter on their behalf. But Gujarat’s Khambhat, as historian Ruby Maloni puts it, stretched out two arms — one toward Aden, the other toward Malacca. Banias ran the western one, but Gujarati Muslims dominated the eastern.
Before the Portuguese seized Malacca in 1511, the six largest cloth ships arriving there each year were Gujarati. The Portuguese targeted these Gujarati Muslims, importing European attitudes that saw so-called “Moors” with suspicion. These merchants then moved to a new, militant port: Aceh.
The English merchant James Lancaster counted sixteen to eighteen Indian vessels in Banda Aceh harbour in 1602, about half of them Gujarati Muslim ships trading Indian cloth for Sumatran pepper. A few generations later, the buccaneer William Dampier found that most resident merchants and goldsmiths in the city were Indian, and that no foreign trader could handle Aceh’s many competing currencies without a Gujarati agent to keep him from being cheated.
Gujarati Muslim scholars travelled the same route as the merchants with their cloth. In the early 1580s, a Gujarati teacher of Hadrami Arab descent, Muhammad Jilani, arrived at Aceh to teach logic and rhetoric. As Azyumardi Azra writes in The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia, he found that his potential students wanted Sufi mysticism instead. Jilani sailed to Mecca forthwith, learned the subject, and came back to teach what the market wanted. The demand was Southeast Asian; the Indian simply adjusted his stock.
To be clear, what Jilani and his nephew—Nur al-Din al-Raniri—brought was not the cosy, ‘syncretic’ Sufism we romanticise in India. Nuruddin al-Raniri, born at Ranir on the Gujarat coast, was appointed Shaykh al-Islam—the city’s highest Islamic authority—at Aceh in May 1637. He spent seven years hunting a rival school to near-extinction, branding them as heretics, burning their books, and having those who refused to recant killed.
At the same time, al-Raniri was also responsible for outstanding early Malay works, such as the Bustan al-Salatin, a world history. Sufism came to Southeast Asia as often in the hands of Indian inquisitors as of accommodators. The end of an ancient relationship
Aceh’s intimate relationship with India continued over the centuries. Tamil Muslim merchants gradually became dominant there, supporting sultans by importing mercenaries from the subcontinent. Fugitives from the failed 1857 revolt received shelter and refuge there. But ultimately, European colonial power ended this exchange that had outlasted empires and witnessed the rise and fall of religions and languages. The Dutch declared war on Aceh in 1873 and blockaded it, ending the most lucrative exchanges with the Coromandel Coast. Harsher regulations in the 1890s finished the smaller traffic. Tragically, though, India and Indonesia’s independence from the Europeans changed nothing. Neither Jawaharlal Nehru’s India nor Sukarno’s Indonesia wanted open borders.
In the 20th century, Indonesian scholars sought ‘purer’ Arab and Persian antecedents for Islam in the archipelago. Meanwhile, Indian intellectuals obsessed over ancient “Indianisation”, renouncing our presence in the Indian Ocean’s recent Muslim history and claiming Hindu and Buddhist heritage alone — often on much weaker evidence.
But hard evidence dams the tide of nationalist ink. On the Isthmus of Kra, the strip of land separating the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Siam, archaeologists have found carnelian beads dating to the fourth century BCE, Indian materials manipulated with Indian techniques, perhaps from as far away as Khambat. Art historians have also traced white marble epitaphs from Khambat to graves at Gresik and Pasai in the 15th century CE — 18 centuries later, still exporting hard-stone craft eastward. Can 1,800 years of exchanges be forgotten with lines drawn in the ocean?
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