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MY NEWAR MY NEPAL : A Symbiotic Study in Retrospective
Author
Raraabha Vashishtha
Specifications
  • ISBN 13 : 9788187393740
  • year : 2022
  • language : English
  • binding : Hardbound
Description
The present work is basically an anthropological study of the Newars who are the denizens and promoters of the ancient land what we know today as Nepal. Parvata and Parvate, which is a toponym and ethnonym as well as a speech respectively, is postulated by the author to be the precursor and collaterals of all ancient South Asians who were pushed to the Himalayan hillsides by the incursive Vedic Aaryas and were thus marginalized. The coteries of the Vedic Aaryas, of whom some had waited upon, and serves as priest-attendants of the pristine virgins in the past did develop animosities against the celestial Ladies during their peregrination that had begun in the wake of Out of Africa movement following the cessation of glaciations after the last Glacial Age around 10, 000 BCE. The banished or displaced lots who retreated much later to the sub-Himalayan foothills are cognizable as Naagas who were the amphibian peoples and were known variously in ancient South Asia and they coalesced later into one or another stocks of Kiratas and Newars –who juxtapose into one and the same entity-- as the author theorizes as per available sources including the Vedas, the epics, and other Hindu religious texts in addition to some published works including the native chronicles. Newars are a linguistic club, and not as an ethnic group, he assets, whose members hailed from varied ethnos that were clamoured basically by the itinerants and fugitives who dwelled on Kali-hrada, the lake habitat of Kali-Naagas, which the author identifies with the mystic, and now vanished, Ilaavritta –as the Kaaliya-Naagas were subdued and banished by Shri Krishna-- and other entities. He dismisses Sankhadhara Saakhvaa as the sole promoter of Nepal Samvata. The author opines that mythical Ilaa and her troupes upon arriving in hordes from Sahara which dried up and turned into the desert in fifth millennium BCE or so, repaired to secluded valleys of the sub-Himalayas and founded a realm, named also Ilaavarsha, that stretched in the form of crescent from the Brahmaputra River in the east to the Sindhu or Indus in the west. The stoic Kiratas who seem to have been the minions of the moon goddesses and waited on the celestial Ladies to satisfy theirs all whims however turned abusive to the goddesses and incurred the natural wraths of the latter that consequently disintegrated Ilaavritta which nonetheless resurrected later as Kiratadesha, the realm of Kiratas. The Kathmandu Valley, which has of late been the synonym of Nepal, was the urheimat of the proto-Newari speakers whose speech developed into, and subsequently spread, the author is convinced, as the Tibetan language, in the dim past. The thesis also points out the fraternity of ancient Kiratas alias Newas with the Biblical Nephilim and the ancient Mesopotamians. The Proto-Newari speakers who eventually groomed the heterogeneous society that was characteristically militant yet civil and urbane stand eroded today and yields to communal exclusiveness that is basically narrow and xenophobic which must, the author urges, be shredded. Ramendra Raj Sharma Bhattarai Vashishtha alias Raraabha Vashishtha, who holds the PhD degree in Ancient History, Culture, and Archaeology from the Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal, retired on superannuation in 1991 from the services of Nepal Government after serving the country and the government for more than 30 years. Dr Vashishtha lives with his wife in the USA now.