Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: > Er, yes. I didn't say it was. But so what if it wasn't? The fact remains > that pilgrimages could not be depended upon to be "free", either in the > monetary sense or in terms of security and easy passage.
But the point is that you cannot call a people hostile based on this. The very definition of hostile is subjective, IMO and depends on your perspective. >> I don't think the Shaivism or Vaishnavism has anything to do with >> taking care of guests. > And I don't see how "taking care of guests" has anything to do with what > I wrote. People from out of town visiting you... guests.... you get the drift. >> As far as my limited knowledge goes, kings used to deliberately invite >> people who had a different viewpoint to foster cultural growth and it >> was a matter of pride for them to do it. > > No doubt some kings at some times did this, and others didn't. I don't > see how this is relevant. Or are you claiming that every ruler across The point was to rebut your argument that Shaivite kings cared two hoots for Vaishnavites and vice versa. > There are instances of people being prevented from travelling to their > place of pilgrimage because some ruler of a kingdom on their route was > hostile or indifferent. These conditions were always changing. Care to give some examples... > I don't know it. Ask Google about "Romila Thapar Somanatha book". It has > relevant evidence in spades. My bad, I should have googled it. > There was certainly a Gandhara kingdom. Kandahar may have derived its > name from it, or from Alexander's name. I don't think anyone knows for > sure. There's no evidence of a beautiful princess or blind king being > involved in the mix, though. Well, nobody knows about it because we did not document it. Software programmers should learn from this... documentation is extremely important. > > (And wasn't the Mahabharata supposed to have taken place eight hundred > thousand years ago, or something?) > People are still trying to find out how long ago it happened. I certainly believe it was not a figment of someone's imagination. Some facts might have been slightly exaggerated, but no fiction, this. > And you accept this as historical fact? Really? Absolutely. > "Making this believable", you say? I wonder why it needs any "making". Because a whole lot of us do not believe our own past. > Good point. Maybe they'll discover something to corroborate this theory > someday, so it should be safe to accept it as fact in the meantime. Well, how many of us try to follow what these researches are doing? But then, we follow every story of how things evolved in other cultures. Bah!
