Here is a list of 10 must read books on Indian history. Includes books by Nehru, Amartya Sen, Ramachandra Guha and many more authorsIAS History Books. We have compiled for you a list of IAS books for Indian History. These are the best reference books for handling the History portion in the IAS exam. GYANBOOK/15957302270.jpg' alt='Books Of Ancient Indian History' title='Books Of Ancient Indian History' />Ancient Marijuana History The Weed Street Journal. The earliest recorded use of cannabis dates back 1. Taiwan off the coast of mainland China. The Chinese would use the cannabis hemp plant to create shoes and clothes. Many ancient Chinese manuscripts are filled with passages urging people to plant the cannabis hemp plant. Since food was essential rice and millet were the main crops of priority. Secondary crops were vegetable gardens and orchards, followed by textile plants namely hemp. It was discovered that the hemp plant was differentiated between male hsi and female chu. Through this differentiation the Chinese recognized that male plants produced a superior fiber compared to female plants. Female plants on the other hand produced superior seeds. The legendary emperor Shen Nung lived around the 2. BC, and is credited with experimenting with Chinas plant life in order to find curative medicines. The cannabis plant was primarily used for rheumatism, gout, malaria, and various other diseases. As hemp and marijuana became more integrated into Chinese culture the use of this plant spread to India where we begin to see the development of one of the biggest marijuana oriented cultures in the world. A collection of four holy books called the Vedas told the tales of wars, battles, conquests, and the eventual settlement into the land of the Indus. These books also mention that the God Siva brought marijuana from the Himalayas for their use and enjoyment. The Vedas mention that Siva became angry over a family argument and stormed off into the fields by himself where the cool shade of a tall marijuana plant brought him comforting refuge from the rays of the hot sun. Interested about the plant that sheltered him from the sun, he decided to eat the leaves of the plant and thus became the Lord of Bhang. Bhang is not necessarily referring to the marijuana plant itself, but as liquid refreshment made with its leaves, which gives a similar effect to the marijuana used in modern day America. Two other marijuana based concoctions are Ganja and Charas. Ganja is prepared using flowers and upper leaves of the marijuana plant and is more potent than Bhang. Charas, the most potent of the three concoctions, is created from flowers of the marijuana plant at the peak of their bloom. Books Of Ancient Indian History' title='Books Of Ancient Indian History' />Charas contains a relatively large amount of resin and is similar in strength to hashish in potency. Bhang in India has been and is still used the same way alcohol is used in todays western world. Bhang is used in India at social and religious gatherings namely weddings. It is said to keep away evil spirits that hover over the bride and groom and is also a symbol of hospitality. Bhang is also used as a drink warriors would drink before they would go into battle, the same way Western warriors would take a swig of whisky before going to battle. A 1. 5th century Indian document refers to Bhang as light hearted, joyful, and inspirational spiritually to the mind and body. Indias holy men ritually use Bhang in order to facilitate communication with their deities. According to a legend, Siddhartha Gautama lived on a daily ration of one marijuana seed and nothing else during his six years of asceticism. In addition Persia, Greece, as well as parts of France and Germany became permanent settlements of the Arians, who notoriously integrated the marijuana plant into Indian culture. It is only natural that marijuana use would spread throughout these regions through trade, wars, and other forms of communication. The Persian prophet Zoroaster around the 7th century BC wrote the Zend Avesta, the Persian counterpart to the Vedas. Professor Mirceau Eliade, a renowned historian of religions, suggests that Zoroaster was a user of Bhang to bridge the metaphysical gap between heaven and earth. In one of the few surviving books of Zend Avesta, Bhanga is referred to as Zoroasters good narcotic. As marijuana spread through the region it undoubtedly spread to Greece. While the ancient Greeks were unaware of the mind altering affects of the cannabis plant, they still recognized the durability and strength of its fiber. From the beginning of the 6th century BC Greek merchants had a lucrative business transporting cannabis fiber to the ports along the Aegean Sea. As the Greeks became more experienced cannabis producers in different geographical regions, they undoubtedly realized the additional uses of cannabis, namely a remedy for a back ache during the 4th century BC. During the 3rd century AD there is an unmistakable reference to cannabis. Roman Emperor Aurelian imposed a tax on Egyptian cannabis, however there are still very little hemp fibers in Egypt due to the climate. The Greek historian Herodotus mentions that the Scythians would ritually eat cannabis seeds between 5. BC and 1. 00 BC. As knowledge of the marijuana plants euphoric properties became more widespread, its recreational use began spreading through the Middle East. In the Middle East cannabis is most popularly smoked as Hashish, a compressed brick of resin created by THC trichomes that the cannabis plant creates. The Hebrew term bosm means aromatic and sweet smelling is found in connection with the word qeneh which put together creates the word qeneh bosm. The relation between the term qeneh bosm and cannabis was discovered by Semitic etymologist Sula Benet. The Jewish Talmud mentions the euphoric properties of cannabis in Abel 1. As the cannabis plant became more and more popular throughout Middle Eastern culture its uses were brought to the attention of the Europeans. Marco Polo gives a second hand report about Hasan ibn al Sabbah, who between 1. AD would recruit followers to commit assassinations. Legends developed about their supposed use of hashish. Hasan ibn al Sabbah would give his followers copious amounts of hashish to smoke and bring them to beautiful gardens and sanctuaries and were given a glimpse of paradise. He would then promise them this paradise if they fought for him with undying loyalty. In the 1. 3th century Arab traders brought cannabis to the Mozambique coast of Africa. Then in 1. 37. 8 Ottoman Emir Soudoun Scheikhouni issued one of the first edicts against the eating of hashish. The Greatest Ancient Picture Gallery by William Dalrymple. Massimo BorchiAtlantide PhototravelCorbis. A statue of the Buddha in one of the Ajanta caves, India. In the winter of 1. Major Robert Gill, a young British military draftsman, set off from Madras into the independent princely state of Hyderabad to record a major new archaeological discovery. Some years earlier, in 1. British hunting party in the jungles of the Western Ghats had followed a tiger into a remote river valley and stumbled onto what was soon recognized as one of the great wonders of India the painted caves of Ajanta. On the walls of a line of thirty one caves dug into an amphitheater of solid rock lay the most beautiful and ancient paintings in Buddhist art, the oldest of which dated from the second century BCan otherwise lost golden age of Indian painting. In time it became clear that Ajanta contained probably the greatest picture gallery to survive from the ancient world, and along with the frescoes of Pompeii, the fabulous murals of Livias Garden House outside Rome, and the encaustic wax portraits of the Egyptian Fayyum, Ajantas walls represented perhaps the most comprehensive depiction of civilized life to survive from antiquity. The Ajanta murals told the Jataka stories of the lives of the Buddha in images of supreme elegance and grace. Unlike the flatter art of much later Indian miniature painting, here the artists used perspective and foreshortening to produce paintings of courtly life, ascetic renunciation, hunts, battles, and erotic dalliance that rank as some of the greatest masterpieces of art produced by mankind in any century. Most famous, perhaps, are the two astonishing images of the compassionate Bodhisattvas Avalokitesvara and Vajrapani, beings of otherworldly beauty, swaying on the threshold of enlightenment, caught in what the great historian of Indian art Stella Kramrisch described, wonderfully, as a gale of stillness. Even today, the colors of these murals glow with a brilliant intensity topaz dark, lizard green, lotus blue. When they were first published in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1. John Smith, the leader of the initial hunting party that had rediscovered the caves, had carved his name across the body of a Boddhisattva, and it did not take long for word to spread that here were unprotected treasures ripe for the attention of Victorian hunters, tourists, and assorted other graffiti artists. Nine years later, Dr. James Bird, in the course of preparing a report for the Asiatic Society, notwithstanding protestations about defacing monumentscontrived to peel off four painted figures from the zodiac or shield, one of the finest of the paintings at the site. Before long a self appointed Indian caretaker had set up shop in the caves and, for a small consideration, presented tourists with souvenir fragments of fresco. This was a relatively benign intervention by the standards of the time in the same decade, forty newly discovered masterpieces of Gupta sculpture had been taken from the archaeological site marking the place of the Buddhas First Sermon at the Deer Park in Sarnath in northern India and thrown into the Barna river under the bridge to check the cutting away of the bed between the arches. Many of the bricks of the great Sarnath stupa built by the Emperor Ashoka were also carted away to build a new suburb of Varanasi in the mid nineteenth century. Luckily, shortly after Birds visit, the painted caves of Ajanta came to the attention of James Fergusson, the pioneering archaeologist, art historian, and early scholar of Indian Buddhism. It was Fergusson who first realized the real importance of the Ajanta paintings and the danger they were in. After making a detailed study of the site and giving the caves the numbers they still possess today I numbered them like houses in a street, he sent for the painter Major Robert Gill to make copies of the paintings before anyone else attempted to prise them off the walls or decorate them with records of their visit. Twenty two years later, in 1. Indian Uprising of 1. British had murdered hundreds of thousands of suspected rebels, the East India Company had been removed from power, and instead Queen Victoria had been proclaimed empress of a now fully colonized Indiabut Major Gill was still in his beloved caves, hard at work. When he finally sent his painstakingly detailed oil paintings to London for exhibition in 1. Crystal Palace, they were almost immediately destroyed in the fire that engulfed the exhibition center. Tragically, the paintings had not even been photographed. Gill knew what he had to do with astonishing sangfroid, he packed his bags and returned to the site to begin work again. He died there, still absorbed by his copying, in 1. Gills place was taken by John Griffiths of the Bombay School of Art, who arrived in 1. Ajanta has always had this effect on people. Not only are the murals of unrivaled beauty, depth, and complexity, the site itelf is extraordinary a steep horseshoe shaped sickle of cliffs cut by the Wagora River, located in the wild mountain country of the western Deccan. But when Griffiths pictures were sent to London, many of these too were destroyed when a wing of the Victoria Albert Museum went up in flames. Then, in 1. 91. 6, the Japanese artist Kempo Arai arrived in India to teach Rabindranth Tagore calligraphy. Like Gill and Griffiths before him, he too spent many years tracing the murals through thin Japanese paperthe traditional Japanese method of making copies of artworks. Intel Tv Wizard Download Windows 7. Download Driver Hp Pavilion Dv2000 For Win7. On completion, Arai sent his work back to Japan, where they were stored at Tokyo Imperial University before they were destroyed by fire during the Taisho earthquake. In our own time, the caves have lost none of this ability both to enrapture and entrap those artists and scholars who fall in love with them, and a whole sequence of modern academics have spent their entire careers studying the cavesDieter Schlingloff,2 Monika Zin, Naomichi Yaguchi, and perhaps most notably and prolifically, Walter Spink of the University of Michigan. I first saw the caves when I was eighteen, on a backpacking trip to India exactly thirty years ago, in the summer of 1. Staying the night in the modest tourist department rest house at Fardapur, a short walk from the caves, I happened to bump into Walter Spink. He had already lived in the rest house for as long as anyone could remember, and even then was recognized as a wonderfully enthusiastic and eccentric Ajanta obsessive. It was thirty years since he had published his first essay on Ajanta, in 1. I met him he sat up under the stars regaling my companion and me with stories about the caves and his theories of how they were built. Three decades later, Spink, now in his mid eighties, is still resident in Fardapur for part of the year. In addition to bending the ear of any receptive passing traveler, he has just finished the seventh and final volume of his lifeworkAjanta History and Developmentwhile the handsomely bound and beautifully illustrated Volume Six is just off the presses. Spinks long, lonely decades of work on Ajanta are one of the most remarkable examples of art historical focus and dogged scholarly obsession in the field, and Spink is widely respected for both his charm and tenacity.