Bhadohi district
Bhadohi district is a district of Uttar Pradesh state in northern India. The city of Gyanpur is the district headquarters. According to the epic Mahābhārata, the Pandavas escaped from Lakshyagrah through a tunnel and took shelter here at a place called Semradhnath, it is said that Mata Sita, wife of lord Rama, lived here in the ashram of Maharshi Balmiki when she was abandoned by Lord Rama. Here and Kush were born and Mata Sita immersed herself in the lap of goddess Earth; the region is linked with Sant Ravidas, after whom the district had been given the name Sant Ravidas Nagar. Bhadohi gets its name from Bhar Raj of the region which had Bhadohi as its capital, whose traces can be found in the names of ruined mounds and old tanks named after the Bhar rulers, a tributary of Kannauj kingdom, which in the early medieval period was included in the Kingdom of Jaunpur. During the reign of Mughal Emperor Akbar, Bhadohi was made a dastur and included in the sarkar of Allahabad. By the fifteenth century the Bhar were overpowered by Monas Rajputs with Sagar Rai as the first head of the clan, his grandson, Jodh Rai received it as a zamindari sanad from Mughal Emperor Shah-e-Jahan.
However around 1750 AD due to non-payment of land revenue arrears, Raja Pratap Singh of Pratapgarh, in lieu of his paying the arrears gave the entire pargana to Balwant Singh of Benaras, subsequently he received it directly under a sanad from Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh under British influence in 1770 AD. In 1911, Bhadohi came under first Maharaja of the newly created princely state of Benares ruled by Maharaja Prabhu Narayan Singh and it remained with Benaras till 1947. Bhadohi was created on 30 June 1994 as the 65th district of the State, it was part of Varanasi district prior to its creation. The Mayawati government changed this district's name from Bhadohi to Sant Ravidas Nagar; the Akhilesh Yadav government resolved on 6 December 2014 to change the name back to Bhadohi. This district is situated in the plains of the Ganges River, which forms the southwestern border of the district. Ganges and Morva are the main rivers; the district is surrounded by Jaunpur district to the north, Varanasi district to the east, Mirzapur district to the south, Allahabad district to the west.
The district has an area of 1055.99 km². Rampur is a famous ghat in Bhadohi, there are some famous temples in Bhadohi: Sita Samahit Sthal, Semradhnath Bhole Shankar Mandir, Baba Harihar Nath, Baba Doodhnath, Chakwa Mahaveer, Shiv Mandir, Ghopaila Devi Mandir, Shani Dham, Tilanga Shivjatpur and Bhadrakaali temples, Baba Gangeshwarnath Dham situated in Itahara Uparwar Village; this district is divided into three tehsils, Aurai Tehsil and Gyanpur, six blocks, Suriyawan, Deegh and Aurai. There are 1075 populated and 149 non-populated villages along with 79 nyay-panchayat and 489 gram panchayats in the district; the district has nine police stations. According to the 2011 census Sant Ravidas Nagar district had a population of 1,554,203 equal to the nation of Gabon or the US state of Hawaii; this gives it a ranking of 320th in India. The district has a population density of 1,531 inhabitants per square kilometre, its population growth rate over the decade 2001-2011 was 14.81%. Bhadohi has a sex ratio of 950 females for every 1000 males, a literacy rate of 89.14%.
Carpet weaving in Bhadohi-Mirzapur region dates back to the 16th century, during the reign of Mughal Emperor, Akbar and is believed to have established when centuries ago, some Iranian master weavers stopped at Madhosingh village, near Khamaria, in Bhadohi while travelling in India, subsequently set up looms here. The present day Bhadohi district is biggest carpet manufacturing centres in India, most known for its hand-knotted carpet. While the Mirzapur-Bhadohi region has the largest number of weavers involved in handmade carpet weaving cluster, engaging around 3.2 million people in the industry, Bhadohi alone employs 2.2 million rural artisans in its 100 percent export-oriented industry. Bhadohi based organisations account for about 75% of the Rs 44 billion of total carpet exports from India, The annual turnover of carpet exports from Bhadohi was Rs 25 billion in 2010. In 2010, the carpets of the region received the Geographical Indication tag, which means carpets manufactured in nine districts of the region, Mirzapur, Ghazipur, Kaushambi, Allahabad and Chandauli would be tagged with'handmade carpet of Bhadohi'.
Most of the production is aimed at foreign countries. Well-known carpet types from Bhadohi include cotton Dhurries, Chhapra Mir carpets, Persian, Indo Gabbeh but Nepalese carpets and more recent shaggy type carpets, they are manufactured in various qualities. Bhadohi received a major boost in November 2018 as the government has extended the'export excellence' tag to it. Under the'Towns of Export Excellence' tag, carpet makers of the city will get financial assistance from the central government to procure modern machines, improve export infrastructure, organise fairs and exhibitions in different parts of the world to attract global buyers. Bhadohi will be the 37th town in India to get this status; the tag would help put the carpet city on the world map. Official website YouTube: Sita Samahit Sthal, notable temple
Nastaʿlīq
Nastaʿlīq is one of the main calligraphic hands used in writing the Persian alphabet, traditionally the predominant style in Persian calligraphy. It was developed in Iran in the 15th centuries, it is sometimes used to write Arabic-language text, but its use has always been more popular in the Persian and Urdu sphere of influence. Nastaʿlīq remains widely used in Iran and Afghanistan and other countries for written poetry and as a form of art. A less elaborate version of Nastaʿlīq serves as the preferred style for writing in Kashmiri and Urdu, it is used alongside Naskh for Pashto. In Persian it is used for poetry only. Nastaʿlīq was used for writing Ottoman Turkish, where it was known as tâlik. Nastaʿlīq is the core script of the post-Sassanid Persian writing tradition, is important in the areas under its cultural influence; the languages of Iran, Afghanistan and the Turkic Uyghur language of the Chinese province of Xinjiang, rely on Nastaʿlīq. Under the name taʿliq, it was beloved by Ottoman calligraphers who developed the Diwani and Ruqah styles from it.
Nastaʿlīq is amongst the most fluid calligraphy styles for the Arabic script. It has short verticals with no serifs, long horizontal strokes, it is written using a piece of trimmed reed with a tip of 5–10 mm, called qalam, carbon ink, named “siyahi”. The nib of a qalam can be split in the middle to facilitate ink absorption. Two important forms of Nastaʿlīq panels are Siyah mashq. A Chalipa panel consists of four diagonal hemistiches of poetry signifying a moral, ethical or poetic concept. Siyah Mashq panels, communicate via composition and form, rather than content. In Siyah Mashq, repeating a few letters or words inks the whole panel; the content is thus of less significance and not accessible. After the Islamic conquest of Persia, the Iranian Persian people adopted the Perso-Arabic script, the art of Persian calligraphy flourished in Iran as territories of the former Persian empire. Mir Ali Tabrizi developed Nastaʿlīq by combining two existing scripts of Nasḫ and Taʿlīq. Hence, it was called Nasḫ-Taʿlīq.
Another theory holds that the name Nastaʿlīq means "that which abrogated Taʿlīq". Nastaʿlīq thrived, many prominent calligraphers contributed to its splendor and beauty, it is believed. The current practice of Nastaʿlīq is, however based on Mirza Reza Kalhor's technique. Kalhor modified and adapted Nastaʿlīq to be used with printing machines, which in turn helped wide dissemination of his transcripts, he devised methods for teaching Nastaʿlīq and specified clear proportional rules for it, which many could follow. The Mughal Empire used Persian as the court language during their rule over South Asia. During this time, Nastaʿlīq came into widespread use in South Asia; the influence continues to this day. In Pakistan everything in Urdu is written in the script, constituting the greatest part of Nastaʿlīq usage in the world; the situation of Nastaʿlīq in Bangladesh used to be the same as in Pakistan until 1971, when Urdu ceased to remain an official language. Today, only a few people use this form of writing in Bangladesh.
Nastaʿlīq is a descendant of Taʿlīq. Shekasteh Nastaʿlīq style is a development of Nastaʿlīq. Mir Ali Tabrizi Mir Emad Mirza Buzurg-i-Nuri Mishkín-Qalam Mirza Mohammad Reza KalhorAnd others, including Mirza Jafar Tabrizi, Abdul Rashid Deilami, Sultan Ali Mashadi, Mir Ali Heravi, Emad Ul-Kottab, Mirza Gholam Reza Esfehani, Emadol Kotab, Yaghoot Mostasami, Darvish Abdol Majid Taleghani, and among contemporary artists: Hassan Mirkhani, Hossein Mirkhani, Keikhosro Khoroush, Abbas Akhavein and Qolam-Hossein Amirkhani, Ali Akbar Kaveh, Kaboli. Islamic calligraphy was used to adorn Islamic religious texts the Qur'an, as pictorial ornaments were prohibited in sacred publications and spaces of Islam. Therefore, a sense of sacredness was always implicit in calligraphy. A Nastaʿlīq disciple was supposed to qualify himself spiritually for being a calligrapher, besides learning how to prepare qalam, paper and, more master Nastaʿlīq. For instance see Adab al-Mashq, a manual of penmanship attributed to Mir Emad.
Nastaʿlīq Typography first started with attempts to develop a metallic type for the script, but all such efforts failed. Fort William College developed a Nastaʿlīq Type, not close enough to Nastaʿlīq and hence was never used other than by the college library to publish its own books; the State of Hyderabad Dakan attempted to develop a Nastaʿlīq Typewriter but this attempt failed miserably and the file was closed with the phrase “Preparation of Nastaʿlīq on commercial basis is impossible”. In order to develop such a metal type, thousands of pieces would be required. Modern Nastaʿlīq typography began with the invention of Noori Nastaleeq, first created as a digital font in 1981 through the collaboration of Mirza Ahmad Jamil TI and Monotype Imaging (formerly Monotype Corp & Monot
Urdu
Urdu —or, more Modern Standard Urdu—is a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language. It is the official national lingua franca of Pakistan. In India, it is one of the 22 official languages recognized in the Constitution of India, having official status in the six states of Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, as well as the national capital territory of Delhi, it is a registered regional language of Nepal. Apart from specialized vocabulary, spoken Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi, another recognized register of Hindustani; the Urdu variant of Hindustani received recognition and patronage under British rule when the British replaced the local official languages with English and Hindustani written in Nastaʿlīq script, as the official language in North and Northwestern India. Religious and political factors pushed for a distinction between Urdu and Hindi in India, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy. According to Nationalencyklopedin's 2010 estimates, Urdu is the 21st most spoken first language in the world, with 66 million speakers.
According to Ethnologue's 2017 estimates, along with standard Hindi and the languages of the Hindi belt, is the 3rd most spoken language in the world, with 329.1 million native speakers, 697.4 million total speakers. Urdu, like Hindi, is a form of Hindustani, it evolved from the medieval Apabhraṃśa register of the preceding Shauraseni language, a Middle Indo-Aryan language, the ancestor of other modern Indo-Aryan languages. Around 75% of Urdu words have their etymological roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit, 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit; because Persian-speaking sultans ruled the Indian subcontinent for a number of years, Urdu was influenced by Persian and to a lesser extent, which have contributed to about 25% of Urdu's vocabulary. Although the word Urdu is derived from the Turkic word ordu or orda, from which English horde is derived, Turkic borrowings in Urdu are minimal and Urdu is not genetically related to the Turkic languages. Urdu words originating from Chagatai and Arabic were borrowed through Persian and hence are Persianized versions of the original words.
For instance, the Arabic ta' marbuta changes to te. Contrary to popular belief, Urdu did not borrow from the Turkish language, but from Chagatai, a Turkic language from Central Asia. Urdu and Turkish borrowed from Arabic and Persian, hence the similarity in pronunciation of many Urdu and Turkish words. Arabic influence in the region began with the late first-millennium Muslim conquests of the Indian subcontinent; the Persian language was introduced into the subcontinent a few centuries by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties including that of Mahmud of Ghazni. The Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate established Persian as its official language, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which extended over most of northern South Asia from the 16th to 18th centuries and cemented Persian influence on the developing Hindustani; the name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century Urdu was known as Hindi.
The language was known by various other names such as Hindavi and Dehlavi. Hindustani in Persian script was used by Muslims and Hindus, but was current chiefly in Muslim-influenced society; the communal nature of the language lasted until it replaced Persian as the official language in 1837 and was made co-official, along with English. Hindustani was promoted in British India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian; this triggered a Hindu backlash in northwestern India, which argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script. This literary standard called "Hindi" replaced Urdu as the official language of Bihar in 1881, establishing a sectarian divide of "Urdu" for Muslims and "Hindi" for Hindus, a divide, formalized with the division of India and Pakistan after independence. There have been attempts to "purify" Urdu and Hindi, by purging Urdu of Sanskrit words, Hindi of Persian loanwords, new vocabulary draws from Persian and Arabic for Urdu and from Sanskrit for Hindi.
English has exerted a heavy influence on both as a co-official language. There are over 100 million native speakers of Urdu in India and Pakistan together: there were 52 million and 80.5 million Urdu speakers in India as per the 2001 and 2011 censuses respectively. However, a knowledge of Urdu allows one to speak with far more people than that, because Hindustani, of which Urdu is one variety, is the third most spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English; because of the difficulty in distinguishing between Urdu and Hindi speakers in India and Pakistan, as well as estimating the number of people for whom Urdu is a second language, the estimated number of speakers is uncertain and controversial. Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localized wherever it is spoken, including in Pakistan. Urdu in Pakistan has undergone changes and has incorporated and borrowed many words from region
Demographics of India
India is the second most populated country in the world with nearly a fifth of the world's population. According to the 2017 revision of the World Population Prospects, the population stood at 1,324,171,354. During 1975–2010 the population doubled to 1.2 billion. The Indian population reached the billion mark in 1998. India is projected to be the world's most populous country by 2024, surpassing the population of China, it is expected to become the first political entity in history to be home to more than 1.5 billion people by 2030, its population is set to reach 1.7 billion by 2050. Its population growth rate is 1.13%, ranking 112th in the world in 2017. India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35, it is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan. India has more than two thousand ethnic groups, every major religion is represented, as are four major families of languages as well as two language isolates (the Nihali language spoken in parts of Maharashtra and the Burushaski language spoken in parts of Jammu and Kashmir.
Further complexity is lent by the great variation that occurs across this population on social parameters such as income and education. Only the continent of Africa exceeds the linguistic and cultural diversity of the nation of India; the sex ratio is 944 females for 1000 males This ratio has been showing an upwards trend for the last two decades after a continuous decline in the last century. The following table lists estimates for the population of India from prehistory up until 1820, it includes estimates and growth rates according to five different economic historians, along with interpolated estimates and overall aggregate averages derived from their estimates. The population grew from the South Asian Stone Age in 10,000 BC to the Maurya Empire in 200 BC at a increasing growth rate, before population growth slowed down in the classical era up to 500 AD, became stagnant during the early medieval era era up to 1000 AD; the population growth rate increased in the late medieval era from 1000 to 1500.
India's population growth rate under the Mughal Empire was higher than during any previous period in Indian history. Under the Mughal Empire, India experienced an unprecedented economic and demographic upsurge, due to Mughal agrarian reforms that intensified agricultural production, proto-industrialization that established India as the most important centre of manufacturing in international trade, a high degree of urbanisation for its time. Under the reign of Akbar the Great in 1600, the Mughal Empire's urban population was up to 17 million people, larger than the urban population in Europe. By 1700, Mughal India had an urban population of 23 million people, larger than British India's urban population of 22.3 million in 1871. Nizamuddin Ahmad reported that, under Akbar's reign, Mughal India had 120 large cities and 3,200 townships. A number of cities in India had a population between a quarter-million and half-million people, with larger cities including Agra with up to 800,000 people and Dhaka with over 1 million people.
Mughal India had a large number of villages, with 455,698 villages by the time of Aurangzeb. In the early 18th century, the average life expectancy in Mughal India was 35 years. In comparison, the average life expectancy for several European nations in the 18th century were 34 years in early modern England, up to 30 years in France, about 25 years in Prussia; the total fertility rate is the number of children born per woman. It is based on good data for the entire years. Sources: Our World In Data and Gapminder Foundation. Life expectancy from 1881 to 1950 The population of India under the British Raj according to censuses: Studies of India's population since 1881 have focused on such topics as total population and death rates, growth rates, geographic distribution, the rural and urban divide, cities of a million, the three cities with populations over eight million: Delhi, Greater Mumbai, Kolkata. Mortality rates fell in the period 1920–45 due to biological immunisation. Other factors included rising incomes, better living conditions, improved nutrition, a safer and cleaner environment, better official health policies and medical care.
India supports over 18 % of the world's population. At the 2001 census 72.2% of the population lived in about 638,000 villages and the remaining 27.8% lived in more than 5,100 towns and over 380 urban agglomerations. India's population exceeded that of the entire continent of Africa by 200 million people in 2010. However, because Africa's population growth is nearly double that of India, it is expected to surpass both China and India by 2025; the table below summarises India's demographics according to religion at the 2011 census in per cent. The data is "unadjusted". Characteristic
Ghats in Varanasi
Ghats in Varanasi are riverfront steps leading to the banks of the River Ganges. The city has 88 ghats. Most of the ghats are bathing and puja ceremony ghats, while two ghats are used as cremation sites. Most Varanasi ghats were rebuilt after 1700 AD; the patrons of current ghats are Marathas, Holkars and Peshwes. Many ghats are associated with legends or mythologies while many ghats are owned. Morning boat ride on the Ganges across the ghats is a popular visitors attraction; the word ghat is explained by numerous Dravidian etymons such as Kannada gatta Tamil kattu and Telugu katta and gattu. Ghat, a term used in the Indian subcontinent, depdending on the context could either refer to a range of stepped-hill such as Eastern Ghats and Western Ghats. Roads passing through ghats are called Ghat Roads; the ghats as named and counted by the city of Varanasi with supplementing links, listed in ascending order according to their location: Part 1: from Assi Ghat to Prayag Ghat According to the puranic sources, there are five key ghats on the riverfront, important because of their association with a defining feature of the holy city of Kashi: Assi Ghat, Dashashwamedh Ghat, Manikarnika Ghat, Panchganga Ghat and Adi Keshav Ghat..
This ghat that used to lie at the confluence of the Ganges with the dry river Asi marks the traditional southern boundary of the city. Asisangameshwar Temple at the ghat finds mention in the Kashi Khand of Skandmahapuran; this ghat is popular because it is one of the few ghats, linked with the city through a wide street. It is the major ghat, closest to BHU. Assi ghat name is given. PM MODI launched water ATM on 17th sep,2015 on occasion of PM bithday. Dashashwamedh Ghat is located close to Vishwanath Temple, is the most spectacular ghat. Two Hindu mythologies are associated with it: According to one, Lord Brahma created it to welcome Lord Shiva. According to another, Lord Brahma sacrificed ten horses, during Dasa-Ashwamedha yajna performed here. A group of priests daily perform in the evening at this ghat "Agni Pooja" wherein a dedication is made to Lord Shiva, River Ganges, Surya and the whole universe. Two legends are associated with Manikarnika Ghat. According to one, it is believed to be the place where Lord Vishnu dug a pit with his Chakra and filled it with his perspiration while performing various penances.
While Lord Shiva was watching Lord Vishnu at that time, the latter's earring fell into the pit. According to the second legend, in order to keep Lord Shiva from moving around with his devotees, his consort Goddess Parvati hid her earrings, asked him to find them, saying that they had been lost on the banks of the Ganges. Goddess Parvati's idea behind the fib was that Lord Shiva would stay around, searching forever for the lost earrings. In this legend, whenever a body gets cremated at the Manikarnika Ghat, Lord Shiva asks the soul whether it has seen the earrings. According to ancient texts, the owner of Manikarnika Ghat bought King Harishchandra as a slave and made him work on the Manikarnika at Harishchandra Ghat. Hindu cremations customarily take place here, though a majority of dead bodies are taken for cremation to the Manikarnik Ghat. According to other sources that Manikarnik Ghat is named after Jhansi ki Rani Laxmibhai. Scindia Ghat known as Shinde Ghat borders Manikarnika to the north, with its Shiva temple lying submerged in the river as a result of excessive weight of the ghat’s construction about 150 years ago.
Above the ghat, several of Kashi’s most influential shrines are located within the tight maze of alleys of Siddha Kshetra. According to tradition, the Hindu God of Fire was born here. Hindu devotees propitiate at the Lord of all heroes, for a son. Mana-Mandir Ghat: Maharaja Jai Singh II of Jaipur built this Ghat in 1770, as well as the Jantar Mantar equipped with ornate window casings along with those at Delhi, Jaipur and Mathura. There is a fine stone balcony in the northern part of the ghat. Devotees pay homage here to the lingam of the Lord of the Moon. Lalita Ghat: The late King of Nepal built this Ghat in the northern region of Varanasi, it is the site of the Ganges Keshav Temple, a wooden temple built in typical Kathmandu style,The temple has an image of Pashupateshwar, a manifestation of Lord Shiva. Local festivals including musical parties and games take place at the beautiful Assi Ghat, at the end of the continuous line of ghats, it is a favorite site of photographers. It is here at the Assi Ghat that Swami Pranabananda, the founder of Bharat Sevasharam Sangh,attained'Siddhi' in his'Tapasya' for Lord Shiva, under the auspices of Guru Gambhirananda of Gorakhpur.
The Jain Ghat or Bachraj Ghat is a Jain Ghat and has three Jain Temples located on the banks of the River. It is believed. Bachraj Ghat has three Jain temples near the river's banks and one them is a ancient temple of Tirthankara Suparswanath; the Maan-Sarowar Ghat was built by Man Singh of Amber. The Darbhanga Ghat was built by the Maharaja of Darbhanga Tulsidas wrote Rāmacaritamānasa at Tulsi Ghat; the Chet Singh Ghat, with a magnificent fort-like palace, is named after Chait Singh. The first raja of Benares was Balwant Singh, his illegitimat
Hindus
Hindus are persons who regard themselves as culturally, ethnically, or religiously adhering to aspects of Hinduism. The term has been used as a geographical and religious identifier for people indigenous to the Indian subcontinent; the historical meaning of the term Hindu has evolved with time. Starting with the Persian and Greek references to the land of the Indus in the 1st millennium BCE through the texts of the medieval era, the term Hindu implied a geographic, ethnic or cultural identifier for people living in the Indian subcontinent around or beyond the Sindhu river. By the 16th century, the term began to refer to residents of the subcontinent who were not Turkic or Muslims; the historical development of Hindu self-identity within the local South Asian population, in a religious or cultural sense, is unclear. Competing theories state that Hindu identity developed in the British colonial era, or that it developed post-8th century CE after the Islamic invasion and medieval Hindu-Muslim wars.
A sense of Hindu identity and the term Hindu appears in some texts dated between the 13th and 18th century in Sanskrit and regional languages. The 14th- and 18th-century Indian poets such as Vidyapati and Eknath used the phrase Hindu dharma and contrasted it with Turaka dharma; the Christian friar Sebastiao Manrique used the term'Hindu' in religious context in 1649. In the 18th century, the European merchants and colonists began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus, in contrast to Mohamedans for Mughals and Arabs following Islam. By the mid-19th century, colonial orientalist texts further distinguished Hindus from Buddhists and Jains, but the colonial laws continued to consider all of them to be within the scope of the term Hindu until about mid-20th century. Scholars state that the custom of distinguishing between Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs is a modern phenomenon. Hindoo is an archaic spelling variant. At more than 1.03 billion, Hindus are the world's third largest group after Muslims.
The vast majority of Hindus 966 million, live in India, according to India's 2011 census. After India, the next 9 countries with the largest Hindu populations are, in decreasing order: Nepal, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, United States, United Kingdom and Myanmar; these together accounted for 99% of the world's Hindu population, the remaining nations of the world together had about 6 million Hindus in 2010. The word Hindu is derived from the Indo-Aryan and Sanskrit word Sindhu, which means "a large body of water", covering "river, ocean", it was used as the name of the Indus river and referred to its tributaries. The actual term'hindu' first occurs, states Gavin Flood, as "a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus", more in the 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I; the Punjab region, called Sapta Sindhu in the Vedas, is called Hapta Hindu in Zend Avesta. The 6th-century BCE inscription of Darius I mentions the province of Hidush, referring to northwestern India; the people of India were referred to as Hinduvān and hindavī was used as the adjective for Indian in the 8th century text Chachnama.
The term'Hindu' in these ancient records is an ethno-geographical term and did not refer to a religion. The Arabic equivalent Al-Hind referred to the country of India. Among the earliest known records of'Hindu' with connotations of religion may be in the 7th-century CE Chinese text Record of the Western Regions by the Buddhist scholar Xuanzang. Xuanzang uses the transliterated term In-tu whose "connotation overflows in the religious" according to Arvind Sharma. While Xuanzang suggested that the term refers to the country named after the moon, another Buddhist scholar I-tsing contradicted the conclusion saying that In-tu was not a common name for the country. Al-Biruni's 11th-century text Tarikh Al-Hind, the texts of the Delhi Sultanate period use the term'Hindu', where it includes all non-Islamic people such as Buddhists, retains the ambiguity of being "a region or a religion". The'Hindu' community occurs as the amorphous'Other' of the Muslim community in the court chronicles, according to Romila Thapar.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes that'Hindu' retained its geographical reference initially:'Indian','indigenous, local', virtually'native'. The Indian groups themselves started using the term, differentiating themselves and their "traditional ways" from those of the invaders; the text Prithviraj Raso, by Chanda Baradai, about the 1192 CE defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan at the hands of Muhammad Ghori, is full of references to "Hindus" and "Turks", at one stage, says "both the religions have drawn their curved swords. In Islamic literature,'Abd al-Malik Isami's Persian work, Futuhu's-salatin, composed in the Deccan in 1350, uses the word'hindi' to mean Indian in the ethno-geographical sense and the word'hindu' to mean'Hindu' in the sense of a follower of the Hindu religion"; the poet Vidyapati's poem Kirtilata contrasts the cultures of Hindus and Turks in a city and concludes "The Hindus and the Turks live close together. One of the earliest uses of word'Hindu' in religious context in a European language, was the publication in 1649 by Sebastiao Manrique.
Other prominent mentions of'Hindu' include the epigraphical inscriptions from Andhra Pradesh kingdoms who battled military expansion of Muslim dynasties in the 14th century, where the word'Hindu' implies a religious identity in contrast to'Turks' or Islam
Munshi Ghat
Munshi Ghat is one of the Ghats of Varanasi, in India. It is located at 25° 18.335’ North and 83° 00.566’ East, is 0.052ha. The palatial building by Clarks Hotel Group. Built in the year 1812 along with part of the palatial building, the Munshi Ghat is named after Sridhara Narayana Munshi, a finance minister in the estate of Nagpur. In 1915 the Brahmin king Kameshwar Singh Gautam Bahadur of Darbhanga purchased this ghat and extended it; the extension became known as Darbhanga Ghat. The palatial building of Darbhanga Ghat is made of sandstone from Chunar, with beautiful porches and Greek pillars; the strong steps for the roof were built in 1930. This area has been importance in the Puranic context, but for its grandeur and architectural style this palace is important. In 1994 the Darbhanga palace was purchased by the Clarks Hotel Group, who named it as Brijrama Palace, planned to transform it into five star hotel, they have demolished half of the structure from the back. It would be a lovely setting for the hotel with a view to attract a high class rich tourists from the west, however by the growth of essential infrastructural facilities the whole environment will face the problem of pollution, socio-psychological depression and harder common life.
It has been alleged that the Clarks Hotel Group is no way interested to preserve and maintain the heritage, aesthetic sense and to support the wellbeing of the local community. Due to the acts of an activist organisation which with the support of local people and judiciary presently stopped the demolishing and conversion process into hotel
Varanasi district
