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Argumentative Indian - by Amartya Sen | Derek Sivers

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When taking a view of Indian civilization, don’t forget the period preceding the Muslim conquest. Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth century. India was not a ‘Hindu country’ even before the arrival of Islam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium. The Chinese in the first millennium CE standardly referred to India as ‘the Buddhist kingdom’. The roots of scepticism in India go back a long way, and it would be hard to understand the history of Indian culture if scepticism were to be jettisoned. There’s a long tradition of accepted heterodoxy in India. See how much heterodoxy there has been in Indian thoughts and beliefs from very early days. Not only did Buddhists, Jains, agnostics and atheists compete with each other and with adherents of what we now call Hinduism (a much later term) in the India of the first millennium BCE, but also the dominant religion in India was Buddhism for nearly a thousand years. Bhagavad Gītā presents a tussle bet

When taking a view of Indian civilization, don’t forget the period preceding the Muslim conquest. Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth century. India was not a ‘Hindu country’ even before the arrival of Islam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium. The Chinese in the first millennium CE standardly referred to India as ‘the Buddhist kingdom’. The roots of scepticism in India go back a long way, and it would be hard to understand the history of Indian culture if scepticism were to be jettisoned. There’s a long tradition of accepted heterodoxy in Indi

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