The case of the missing stones A bestselling polemic says Panini, Chanakya and Kalidasa never existed. The evidence says otherwise Few things are as satisfying to a historian as an inscription. Carved in stone, dated by a king’s reign and impossible to quietly edit, it is the nearest the ancient past comes to a signed confession. A Hindi-language book that has found an eager readership, Bhram Ka Pulinda (“A Bundle of Delusions”), by Rajiv Patel, takes this respect for epigraphy and pushes it to an extreme. If a figure is not on a rock, he argues, he was not real. The test is applied with gusto. No Mauryan edict mentions Chanakya, the wily minister said to have made Chandragupta emperor. No stone records the grammarian Panini, the sage Patanjali or the poet Kalidasa. The surviving manuscripts of their works are on paper, and paper reached India via China and the Arabs. Mr Patel concludes that these men were “implanted” into the Buddhist-era past by a later priestly class, using...
1. Introduction: Hook the Reader on Historical Misconceptions How often do modern religious assumptions and fabricated traditions distort our understanding of the ancient past? Across popular culture, mythological legends and retroactively invented dogmas routinely eclipse empirical archaeological, stratigraphical, and inscriptional evidence. This gap between manufactured popular narrative and verifiable material remains has allowed pseudo-historical claims to masquerade as established fact for centuries. To systematically dismantle these entrenched illusions, author Rajiv Patel, alongside co-author Sanjay Kumar Singh, written Bhram Ka Pulinda (A Bundle of Delusions), published by Samyak Prakashan. The text delivers an incisive, evidence-based critique that interrogates long-held historical myths using the rigorous methodology of epigraphy, archaeology, and historical linguistics. By subjecting readable stone edicts, coins, urban physical strata, and script evolution to ...