Book review : Learned Men and Women of Ancient India

Learned Men and Women in Ancient India
by Sreelata Menon
Genre:Nonfiction

This is an interesting and informative book for children. Though by no means complete, it is a book of and about learned men and women in ancient India as the title says. What is interesting about the book is that each chapter is about one learned man or woman and starts with quotes/shlokas from the works of the men and women covered in the chapter or from rig veda and then goes to into their life and later their contributions to philosophy, aviation, surgery, mathematics, astronomy and other fields.

The learned men include Kanad to Thiruvaluvar while the women include Maitreyi to Gargi. I kind of missed Avvaiyar and other women poets whose contribution as usual is missing though their works are there in some of the oldest literature is recorded in Purananooru and Bhakti literature. That is my only complaint but in a multilingual country like India it is hard to cover so many women and men who composed and contributed to  ancient literatire like Puranooru, Agananooru, Periya Puranam, Tolkapiyam, Shakuntala, Silapathikaram, etc. Maybe the author should plan to write a sequel to this book

The writing is crisp and easy to follow. Some like Charaka, Lopamudra, Bhaskarcharya II were new to me. I didn't know there were two Bhaskaras who had contributed to mathematics and thought there was just one.  

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The Rigveda Code - book review

The Rigveda Code
by Rashmi Chendvankar
Genre: Historical Fiction

 Rikshavi is a talented young girl. An intuitive archer, she is the princess of the ancient and powerful kingdom of Vrij. She grows to be a strategist while she gives up being a princess. What has this got to do with the Rigveda Code and what is it anyway?  Chendvankar manages to keep the reader interested with twists and turns and finally ending it with a surprise which the reader never expects.  

Her writing style is crisp and clear. The pace is unexpected and one wonders why even now, we are unable to follow the system so clearly laid out in the first republic - the Licchavi Republic which according to the ASI dates back to the 6th century BC in Bihar.

It is also a political commentary on issues we face today - justice for the common people and the inequality of power among states-now - the increased centralization of power as states are fast losing their individuality and continuous erosion of powers of states. While India was conceived as a country based on "unity in diversity" and decentralization of power much like the ancient Lichavvi Republic but we are heading towards "One country, one culture."much like the kingdoms that preceded it.  But what has this got to do with the Rigveda Code? Read the book to find out. 

 

You can buy it here