The Indosphere — an encyclopedia of Indian civilization
By traditionAll traditions →
- HinduThe Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva and Śākta currents, their deities, texts and philosophies.892 entries
- VedicThe Saṃhitās, Brāhmaṇas and Upaniṣads, the śrauta rites and the gods of the hymns.95 entries
- BuddhistThe Buddha, the saṅgha, the schools, and the spread of the Dharma across Asia.164 entries
- JainThe tīrthaṅkaras, the Digambara and Śvetāmbara traditions, ahiṃsā and anekāntavāda.109 entries
- SikhThe ten Gurus, the Guru Granth Sāhib, the Khālsā and the Panth.45 entries
- IslamicIslam in the subcontinent — the Sultanates, the Mughals, and the Sufi orders.73 entries
- HeterodoxThe Ājīvikas, Cārvāka materialism and the other śramaṇa currents outside the Vedas.12 entries
- Folk & RegionalVillage and mountain deities, clan cults and the local traditions beneath the great ones.115 entries
- Other FaithsZoroastrian, Jewish, Christian and Bahá’í communities of the subcontinent.19 entries
- Political & SecularStates, wars, economies and institutions — the history that is not a history of belief.413 entries
By periodAll periods →
From the entriesA–Z →
Recently revisedA–Z →
- RāmāyaṇaThe Rāmāyaṇa is the Sanskrit epic attributed to Vālmīki, in seven books, telling how Rāma of Ayodhyā is exiled for fourteen years, loses his wife Sītā to the rākṣasa king Rāvaṇa, and wins her back by war.
- TibetTibet is a high-plateau region of Inner Asia, home to the seventh-to-ninth-century Tibetan Empire and to Tibetan Buddhist civilization, ruled after 1642 by the Dalai Lamas' Ganden Phodrang government and administered since the 1950s by China as the Tibet Autonomous Region.
- Timur's invasion of IndiaTimur's invasion of India was a campaign by the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur, known as Tamerlane, against the Delhi Sultanate in 1398, culminating in the sack of Delhi and the mass killing of its population.
- Tipu SultanTipu Sultan was the ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore from 1782 to 1799, known both for his prolonged military resistance to British expansion in southern India and, in a historically contested record, for episodes of forced conversion and temple destruction in frontier regions of his kingdom.
- UjjainUjjain is a city on the Shipra River in Madhya Pradesh, continuously inhabited since at least the sixth century BCE, that has served in turn as the capital of the Avanti Mahajanapada, a Gupta-era center of astronomy, and one of Hinduism's seven sacred Sapta Puri cities.
- UpanishadsThe Upanishads are a body of Sanskrit philosophical texts, composed over several centuries from roughly the eighth century BCE, that form the concluding portion of the Vedic corpus and the scriptural foundation of Vedanta philosophy.
- Vallabhbhai PatelVallabhbhai Patel was an Indian independence leader and, as the country's first Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister from 1947, the principal architect of the integration of over five hundred princely states into the Indian Union.
- VālmīkiVālmīki is the sage to whom the Rāmāyaṇa is attributed, called the ādi-kavi or first poet, and who appears inside his own poem as the hermit who shelters the banished Sītā and raises her sons.
Reference worksAll →
- The Hindu PantheonEvery deity of the tradition, Vedic to folk, each with an entry.
- Kingdoms of IndiaDynasties, empires, republics, sultanates and princely states.
- The MahābhārataAn atlas of the poem — books, figures, kingdoms, the war.
- The RāmāyaṇaAn atlas of the first poem — the exile, the search, the island.