Revision as of 15:22, 13 July 2013

About Indpaedia

Formal launch of this site: late 2013 or early 2014

This is an amateur,hobby archive of clippings from newspapers and magazines.Each clipping waits to be converted into an encyclopaedia article, alone or in combination with other clippings on the same subject.

The formal launch of this site will take place only once we have at least 6,000 articles.

At present we are adding two or three new articles everyday, and adding fresh details to one or two existing articles every week. At this very slow pace the formal launch is unlikely before late 2013 or early 2014.

The contents, the archive

Parvez Dewan had, since 1987, been collecting materials for a Britannica-style physical encyclopaedia for India. Every weekday he would add five or six newspaper clippings to already bulging file folders, arranged in the alphabetical order according to the subject; on weekends the number would be five times as many.

By 2006, most of the clippings were electronic files (instead of paper clippings) put into MS Word directories (instead of paper folders.

The collaboration

On the 8th November 2008 Neelotpal Mishra and Parvez met in Beijing on the first evening of their Oxford and Cambridge Society of India (OCSI) trip to China.

By then Wikipedia had totally re-written the rules of how encyclopaedias were compiled, published and read.

Over vegetarian noodles at a nondescript restaurant near the City Wall of Beijing, Neelotpal (Department of Computer Science, Oxford: 2008) very kindly offered to help Parvez out by creating a Wikipedia-style online platform for his archive. Parvez (Wolfson College, Cambridge: 1987) was only too glad to accept.

Work on the software officially started on March 8, 2010. The ‘requirements gathering phase’ lasted till April 17, 2010.

The website http://www.indpaedia.com was registered on April 24, 2010.

The software team

Since April 1, 2010 many people tried to get actively involved in the creation of indpaedia.com. However, most had to leave due to a paucity of time.

Ms. Ekta Singh on 12 September 2010 created the installation guidelines for Media Wiki, the frame work that we finally adapted for Indpaedia.

On Nov 21, 2011 Dr. Ravi Prakash helped Neelotpal and Parvez by identifying a group of dedicated students who have since been working very hard to make this bring this project to fruition.

The first basic, functional prototype of this online archive is ready and is in the testing phase. The fully functional website is being developed by the students by taking out time from their busy and demanding academic schedule. (Parvez: ‘Listen, boys, don’t neglect your studies.’)

The students involved in the project under the able guidance of Mr. Vishwa Ranjan are:

We would like to express our sincerest gratitude to Prof. Ravi Prakash, Vice Chancellor, Jaypee University of Information Technology for his unstinted support to the project and the continuous motivation to his students to complete such a complex project.

Prof. Prakash’s web page can be viewed at http://www.juit.ac.in/University/vc.php

Our debt to Wikipedia and MediaWiki

Above all, we are grateful to Wikipedia for helping us save forests by creating the paperless model, and to MediaWiki for their open source software package on which indpaedia.com has been built.

Indpaedia is not in competition with Wikipedia

We are not in competition with Wikipedia. Our focus is quite different.

Wikipedia caters to the world. Therefore, it has to explain basic concepts in science, mathematics, psychology, literature, indeed, all disciplines.

Only a few of these concepts were developed in South Asia. Therefore, most of them will not get written about by the readers of Indpaedia.

On the other hand, the taxation laws of Pakistan, the judgements of India’s superior courts, the literary cult favourites of Bangladesh, the smallest monasteries of Bhutan and Nepal, the smallest towns of Myanmar, the tax evaders of India and Sri Lanka, the cave paintings of Afghanistan, and the minority languages of the Maldives—Indpaedia will endeavour to record details about them all, through its editors and readers.

Why pAedia?

Because South Asia follows British English, the original. Switching to US English will involve an expense of billions of rupees and takas, in the form of re-writing school textbooks and re-educating every school teacher.

Let us not confuse schoolchildren about which spellings to use. Let us stick to the spellings approved by our school boards, which are all in British English.

Actually, the correct spelling would have been ‘pædia’—i.e. Indpædia. However, it is inconvenient for most readers to type the letter æ, hence ‘paedia’ is the compromise.

Why South Asia?

This is an Indian encyclopædia/ archive meant for all of South Asia.

Why did we not restrict it to just India?

Simply because that is not possible.

Till 1947 the three biggest South Asian countries were one country. The histories of all three are, in turn, also linked with Afghanistan. Some of the best articles on the history of pre-1947 India and the literature and culture of post-partition India , which we are in the process of uploading on Indpaedia, have been taken from Dawn.

The histories of Sri Lanka and India, too, are intertwined. Bangladesh and West Bengal; and Pakistan and the Indian Punjab share the same language. Bhutan and Ladakh share the same sect within Buddhism. Maldives and Lakshadweep boast of the same people, the same ocean. Myanmar has strong links with India’s north-east.

At present we are keeping religion out of this pædia. However, South Asia is also bound together by religion. The majority religion of the people of Pakistan and Bangladesh is the religion of India’s second biggest community; the Chishtiya order is mainly South Asian; Ajmer Sharief is the undisputed capital of all Chishtiya Muslims; and the Hanafi school has most of its adherents in South Asia.

The majority communities of India and Nepal share the same religion. Maldives and Lakshadweep even have sub-sects in common. And Sri Lanka and Myanmar have unbreakable bonds with India that are rooted in Bodh Gaya.

South Asians, thus, are one people living in nine sovereign nation states—just as West Europeans are one people living in many nation states, and the Latin Americans are one people residing in different countries.

No country’s views are superior to those of the others

Therefore, though this pædia is based in India, it will endeavour to cater to all of South Asia. Readers from all South Asian countries (indeed, from anywhere in the world) will (after Indpaedia’s formal launch in 2013 or ’14) be free to post articles on Indpaedia. The points of view of all nine South Asian countries are equally valid (as long as the language used is civil) and no single country’s views are superior.

However, there are two non-negotiables: i) The map of India used on Indpaedia will be the map officially approved by the Government of India; and ii) Nothing shall be posted on Indpaedia that gives offence to the citizens of any other South Asian country, or the members of other religious, ethnic, linguistic or caste groups.

For that reason we are keeping religion and politics out of Indpaedia. We will be posting British Raj-era articles on castes and communities. Some of their views are politically incorrect by today’s standards. Let us read them as historical accounts even if we do not agree with them.

Why the name Indus?

Indus—-the ancient civilisation as well as the river of the same name—-is perhaps the highest common factor of South Asia.

Between 3300 B.C. and 1300 B.C. an urban civilisation developed on both sides of River Indus. It is now known as the Indus Valley Civilisation. Its best known sites are in Mo[h]enjo Daro, Harappa and Mehrgrah (in present day Pakistan) and Lothal (in Gujarat, India). The civilisation covered all of Pakistan, most of Afghanistan, the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat, and Iranian Balochistan. The Indus script has been found in Oman and Turkmenistan as well.

Asko Parpola (born 1941), an Indologist, Sindhologist, and professor emeritus at the University of Helsinki, and Iravatham Mahadevan (born 1930), an Indian civil servant and scholar, have argued that the script inscribed on Indus seals indicates that the Indus Valley people spoke a Dravidian language. The jury is still out on their contention but if it is true it broadens the footprint of this Civilisation to cover all of South India, northeastern Sri Lanka, and parts of Nepal and Bangladesh, where Dravidian languages are spoken. Incidentally, Brahui, which is spoken in Balochistan, has a Dravidian base and origin.

Dhivehi (the language of the Maldives and parts of Indian Lakshadweep) and Sinhala (the majority language of Sri Lanka) are—like many languages of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan—Indo-Aryan languages.

River Indus originates in Tibet, passes through Ladakh (India) and flows down the entire length of Pakistan. The people of Bhutan, like their Buddhist brethren in the Indian Himalayas, follow a culture which, too, originated in Tibet. The river has tributaries in Afghanistan as well.

Indus—the civilisation, the river and the group of languages that bears its name—is without doubt the highest common factor of South Asia.

Why the special emphasis on North-Eastern India?

Because scholarship on and information about this culturally rich region has been neglected.

There will be a similar emphasis on the minority regions of every South Asian country.

Why are we not giving a contact address or email ID?

Because we do not have the staff to handle mail. For all practical purposes this is a one-man archive.

Volunteers are more than welcome, but we cannot pay.

Our Facebook page is Indpaedia.com. You can post messages there (on the Timeline/ wall or send a message) but it might not always be possible for us to respond to them.