History
Time
is always referred as Kaala Chakra in India. In Ancient India the time
was divided in Four yugas. The calendar which most Indians follows goes
in accordance to this. There by, measuring the dates of Vedas came in
later days.
With
its oldest core dating back to as early as 1500 BC, the Rigvedic
Sanskrit is one of the oldest attestations of any Indo-Iranian language,
and one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language
family, the family which includes English and most European languages.
Sanskrit has had a profound impact on the languages and literature of
India. Hindi, India's most spoken language, is a "Sanskritized register"
of the Khariboli dialect. In addition, all modern Indo-Aryan languages,
Munda languages and Dravidian languages, have borrowed many words
either directly from Sanskrit (tatsama words), or indirectly via middle
Indo-Aryan languages (tadbhava words). Words originating in Sanskrit are
estimated to constitute roughly fifty percent of the vocabulary of
modern Indo-Aryan languages, and the literary forms of (Dravidian)
Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. Part of the Eastern Indo-Aryan languages,
the Bengali language arose from the eastern Middle Indic languages and
its roots are traced to the 5th century BC Ardhamagadhi language.
Tamil,
one of India's major classical languages, descends from Proto-Dravidian
languages which was spoken around the third millennium BC in peninsular
India. Tamil literature has existed for over two thousand years. and
the earliest epigraphic records found date from around the third century
BC. Another major Dravidian language, Kannada is attested
epigraphically from the mid-1st millennium AD, and literary Old Kannada
flourished in the 9th to 10th century Rashtrakuta Dynasty. Pre-old
Kannada (or Purava HaleGannada) was the language of Banavasi in the
early Common Era, the Satavahana and Kadamba periods and hence has a
history of over 2000 years. The Ashoka rock edict found at Brahmagiri
(dated to 230 BC) has been suggested to contain a word in identifiable
Kannada.
According
to 2001 India census, Hindi is the most spoken language in India,
followed by Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil. In contemporary Indian
literature, there are two major literary awards; these are the Sahitya
Akademi Fellowship and the Jnanpith Award. Seven Jnanpith awards each
have been awarded in Kannada, six in Hindi, five in Bengali, four in
Malayalam, three each in Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu and Oriya and two each
in Telugu and Tamil,.
The Rāmāyaṇa
and the Mahābhārata are the oldest preserved and well-known epics of
India. Versions have been adopted as the epics of Southeast Asian
countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. The Ramayana consists
of 24,000 verses in seven books (kāṇḍas)
and 500 cantos (sargas), and tells the story of Rama (an incarnation or
Avatar of the Hindu preserver-god Vishnu), whose wife Sita is abducted
by the demon king of Lanka, Ravana. This epic played a pivotal role in
establishing the role of dhárma as a principal ideal guiding force for
Hindu way of life. The earliest parts of the Mahabharata text date to
400 BC and is estimated to have reached its final form by the early
Gupta period (ca. 4th c. AD). Other regional variations of these, as
well as unrelated epics include the Tamil Ramavataram, Kannada Pampa
Bharata, Hindi Ramacharitamanasa, and Malayalam Adhyathmaramayanam. In
addition to these two great Indian epics, there are five major epics in
the classical Tamil language — Silappatikaram, Manimekalai,
Civaka-cintamani, Valayapathi and flangdoodleing
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