>Pajeets need to learn how much of our current reality is shaped by colonial era. Even having same caste surnames, same version of hinduism all across india, same version of epics like ramayana all go back to colonial era.
James Lochtefeld examined the microfilmed records of the Haridwar bahi registers held by the Genealogical Society of Utah and could not find a record dated older than the 1770s, which is in contrast to the popular narrative, that the pandas have been serving clientele at Haridwar and recording their genealogies for thousands of years.[24]
As per Lochtefeld, records dating earlier than 1800 were extremely rare, with the records becoming more consistent from 1800 onwards, which he attributes to the British control of upper India bringing regional stability.[24] Lochtefeld discovered that the oldest records for pilgrims from particular regions of India at Haridwar were for pilgrims from Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, and Rajasthan, as the inhabitants of those areas have had a longer and stronger connection to Haridwar, due to the northwest trade route, and inhabitants of Punjab and Rajasthan have been going to Haridwar for funeral rites for a long time. [24]
Records for pilgrims from Eastern India to Haridwar (such as Bihar and Bengal) only begin appearing in the 1840s.[24] Lochtefeld attributes this to the fact that Gaya instead had long been a place of funerary pilgrimage for people of these regions and Haridwar was difficult to travel to for them, especially prior to the railways.[24] Pilgrimage was originally confined to elite social groups, thus the earliest records at Haridwar cover pilgrims who were Brahmins and land-owners (zamindars).[24] Brahmins were motivated by religious-concerns, such as having their rituals attested whilst the visits by land-owners and royalty were recorded by pandas to enforce future patronage, which was a strong motivating factor on behalf of the pandas to record the details.[24]
Other castes and classes later began going on religious pilgrimages, such as to Haridwar, in order to emulate the upper castes and classes in their aspirations for upward social mobility.[24] Thus, Lochtefeld claims the panda-jajman dynamic in Haridwar only began in the late 18th century.[24]
Further evidence cited by Lochtefeld is that the sanyasis were the original inhabitants of Haridwar, rather than the pandas.[24] The lineages of the pandas of Haridwar mostly trace to nearby villages, but some are quite distant, which means the pandas were likely motivated to settle in Haridwar and leave their original places of habitation.[24] Lochtefeld claims that the motivation for this was the development of a bustling north-west India trade in the late 1700s that motivated Brahmins in the general region to migrate and settle in Haridwar to take advantage of it, becoming the pandas of Haridwar.[24]
Christopher A. Bayly found that the earliest, extant pilgrim record from the Varanasi pilgrimage trade was a copper-plate inscription from 1658 and the earliest extant bahi ledger book was from 1665.[24] It would be unlikely that Haridwar's pilgrimage trade would date earlier than Varanasi's, thus agreeing with Lochtefeld's assertion that the beginning of the genealogical record tradition of Haridwar dates to the late-18th century.[24]
>pajeets are too uneducated on history. They lack critical thinking They believe stupid lores, kang stories. But don't worry i will educate them with truthpills.
Here's another truthpill. Mahabharat wasn't even a uniform text. There were several regional variations. Gita press and TV serials popularised just one of them.
The BORI Critical Edition of the Mahabharata is the most authentic and scientifically compiled version of the epic. Spanning 18 parvans and consultaing 1,259 ancient manuscripts over nearly 50 years, scholars at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute removed centuries of regional additions and interpolations to recover the oldest core text.Key
Features of the Critical EditionManuscript Analysis: Extracted using historical and linguistic analysis rather than folklore to establish the most consistent verses.
Reduced Volume: The text is just under 75,000 verses, compared to up to 100,000 verses found in unedited versions.Accessibility: The complete English translation by Bibek Debroy is widely considered the definitive accessible version of the Critical Edition.Official Hub: The original BORI Mahabharata Department in Pune oversees this ongoing research and offers courses on the 18 Parvans.
