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Penguin Books Ltd - Sen Gupta Subhadra

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84 pages

English

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Was king Ashoka fond of chewing paan? Mulligatawny was a soup, but what was pish-pash? Did they design jewellery in Harappa? Who played pachisi, chaupar and lam turki? Find the answers to all these weird, impossible question in this fascinating book about how people lived in the past. Go time travelling through the alleys of history and take a tour through the various ages from Harappa to the Mauryan, Mughal to the British. Through short snapshots and wacky trivia, this book gives you a glimpse into the vibrant culture of India, as you learn about the life and times of kings, queens, viceroys and even ordinary children! Spend a day with Urpi as she tries selling pottery in exchange for a few beads at Mohen-jo-daro; step back into King Ashoka s kingdom where Madhura prepares to be a warrior; watch Adil harbour hopes of becoming a khansama in British India.

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184756784
Langue	English

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SUBHADRA SEN GUPTA
Let s Go Time Travelling
Life in India Through the Ages
Illustrated by Tapas Guha

PUFFIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
INTRODUCTION What is This Book All About?
One: EARLY INDIA
The Harappan Civilization (2600 BCE-1500 BCE)
The Indo-Aryans (1500 BCE-500 BCE)
Two: ANCIENT INDIA
The Mauryas and Guptas (300 BCE-500 CE)
The Pallavas and Cholas (600 CE-1100 CE)
Three: MEDIEVAL INDIA
The Delhi Sultanate (1200 CE-1500 CE)
The Mughals (1550 CE-1850 CE)
Four: BRITISH INDIA
The People of British India (1800 CE-1940 CE)
The Rulers of British India (1800 CE-1940 CE)
MORE HISTORY HUNGAMA
Copyright Page
PUFFIN BOOKS
LET S GO TIME TRAVELLING

Subhadra Sen Gupta has written over twenty-five books for children, including mysteries, historical adventures, ghost stories and comic books. Right now she is waiting for someone to build a time machine so that she can travel to the past and join Emperor Akbar for lunch.
She loves to travel, flirt with cats, chat with auto-rickshaw drivers and sit and watch people.
Read Other Books in Puffin by Subhadra Sen Gupta
A Flag, A Song and a Pinch of Salt: Freedom Fighters of India
Saffron, White and Green: The Amazing Story of India s Independence
Puffin Lives: Ashoka, the Great and Compassionate King
Puffin Lives: Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation
The Secret Diary of the World s Worst Cook
What is This Book All About?
This book is about history true, but you can be sure of one thing. It is not about kings, battles and dates. And you won t have to take a test on it. It talks of all the colourful and human things that are interesting about history.
It is about how people lived in the past. So you ll discover what they ate for lunch in Harappa (crocodile curry) and whether women in Mauryan India put on make-up (yes, they did). Did children go to school (some did), did their gurus give them homework (of course not!). Everything from houses, fashion, food, sports, board games, theatre, elephants and palanquins; all the weird, freaky stuff that you never find in textbooks finds mention here. So I m hoping you ll have fun.
So okay, I read a lot of fat books and dug out all the information, but this book wouldn t have happened without three very important people. There is of course my friend Tapas Guha, who went crazy drawing all the funny cartoons, and also my two fabulous editors, Sudeshna Shome Ghosh and Sohini Mitra, who made some really clever suggestions. The idea of having a story in the beginning of each chapter is their brainwave. Finally if you have any questions, ideas of what you want me to write next or even rude comments, mail me at subhadrasg@gmail.com .
One: EARLY INDIA
The Harappan Civilization The Indo-Aryans
The Harappan Civilization (2600 BCE -1500 BCE )

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF URPI
Urpi and her older brother, Kira, accompanied their father to the market. There they laid out the earthen bowls and pans that he had made on his potter s wheel. Nearby, a woman sat with a pile of fresh vegetables; the fisherman had laid out rows of fish that he had caught in the river that morning; and a farmer had parked his bullock cart in the corner, piled high with baskets of grain.
The workers from the granary were carrying baskets to the warehouse at the top of the Citadel where the grain was stored. So whenever their mother needed wheat or barley, she would go to the granary to buy some. Just then a woman came to buy two bowls and paid for them with a bunch of bananas. That made Kira smile as he loved bananas. Urpi wished someone would pay for the pottery with a few beads, for the new necklace that she was stringing together.

Urpi watched an important man walk past-it was the High Priest from the Citadel temple, wearing his flowered dress, a diadem around his forehead and a stone seal hung around his chest. They both stood up and bowed to him, but he was too busy to notice the two children standing behind their stall of pottery.
The High Priest goes past every day and we always bow, but he never smiles at us, said Kira, puzzled.
Why should he-we are just the children of a potter. If our father had been a rich trader sending ships to the west he would smile at us, Urpi said shortly.
Then we should ask Father to become a trader and send our pottery to the city of Ur. That would please the High Priest, won t it?
Hah! Urpi swung her pigtails. I can make him smile any day I want. Just watch me.
You do that and I will get you more beads.
How? Like magic? asked Urpi disdainfully.
I am growing carrots at the back of the house. I ll exchange a basket of them for beads.
Done! High Priest here I come! declared Urpi.
The children knew that in the afternoon the High Priest headed home for lunch. As he came down the steps of the temple, Urpi ran up to him carrying a pretty pottery bowl and bowing said, A gift for Your Honour.
Oh! the High Priest stopped in surprise. What a beautiful bowl and it is a gift for me?
I admire you, sir. You are such a great and powerful priest.
As the High Priest took the bowl from Urpi he gave a wide, toothy smile, Thank you my child! and still smiling, walked away.
Urpi skipped back to their stall in triumph, See! Everyone likes a free gift, even our gloomy High Priest!
True! And flattery makes everyone smile, sighed Kira. I ll start picking the carrots.

Urpi and Kira lived at Mohenjo-daro, and what is amazing is that we know quite a lot about how they lived, even though it was nearly five thousand years ago.
It all began with huge piles of muddy brown bricks and broken walls that could be seen in the desert lands of Sind and Western Punjab in today s Pakistan. They looked really old. No one knew who had built their houses with these bricks, when they had done it and why they had gone away. The villagers living near one of these mysterious brick piles called it Mohenjo-daro, because in Sindhi it means, the mound of the dead .
Until the 1920s no one knew that these were the remains of India s first cities and that those bricks, crumbling away in the sun, were over four thousand years old! They were still so strong that the villagers used them to build their own huts, and two British engineers happily helped themselves to a whole pile to lay the tracks for a railway line!
STOP THE FILCHING!
Then the archaeologists arrived in their khaki shorts and sola hats and yelled, Stop! These bricks here are very important to India s history. No more filching! And so the sites at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were saved. Phew! Or we would have never known about the amazing cities of the Harappan Civilization.

In the beginning the cities were called the Indus Valley Civilization, as many of the ruins are around the River Indus, but now we refer to them as the Harappan Civilization, after the first city that was discovered.
The cities and villages of the Harappan Civilization grew along the banks of one of the mighty rivers of the Indian subcontinent-the Indus or Sindhu, and its many tributaries like the Sutlej, Ravi and Ghagghar. India is named after the Indus, and here people built cities around 2600 BCE. Try to get your head around this number- 4,600 years ago!
Cities, the first in the world, were also coming up at this time along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Iraq that we call the Mesopotamian or Sumerian Civilization, and along the River Nile in Egypt. This proved that India was among the oldest civilizations of the world!
The archaeologists John Marshall, Mortimer Wheeler and two young Indians, R.D. Banerji and D.R. Sahni, dug away under the burning desert sun and found much more than just bricks at Harappa. They unearthed pottery, bits of cloth, toys, jewellery, sculpture and some odd, small, square stone seals with pictures carved on them. On top of every seal is a line of script that we still can t read. From these dusty and broken finds they began to create a picture of how people lived in these cities.
In the following decades, over a thousand Harappan sites have been found, stretching from Sind to Jammu, Gujarat, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Mohenjo-daro, Harappa and Chanhu-daro are in Pakistan. Among the sites in India are Kalibangan (Rajasthan), Rupar (Punjab), Lothal and Dholavira (Gujarat).
COPYCAT CITIES
If you lived in Delhi and were dropped in the middle of Hyderabad, would you think they were the same? No way! Does the Marine Drive of Mumbai look the same as the Marina Beach of Chennai? Of course not! But if you lived in the Indus Valley you could get confused because all the cities looked pretty much the same .
Honestly, I m not making this up! All the cities were made using bricks that were exactly the same size. The streets were laid out in straight lines at right angles in an identical grid and the houses had the same design. You had two main streets, one running from north to south and another from east to west, and they were as wide as our three-lane highways.
Narrower lanes branched off from the main streets with houses on both sides. At one end of the city was a fort-like structure built on a higher ground that archaeologists call the Citadel. It had larger buildings that could have been granaries or the homes of the rulers. At points along the lanes there were wells and shady trees, and the traffic on the main roads was of people, bullock and camel carts.
BATH TIME FOLKS!
All the houses had rooms around a square courtyard and sometimes a second floor with a wooden balcony. They all looked quite the same. The houses had no windows opening into the lane, so you walked along a lot of blank walls. There were steps leading to the flat roof where people must have slept during summers like we do even today. And they were very serious about taking baths! Every house had a bathroom, and Mohenjo-daro had what seems to be a giant swimming pool called the Great Bath.
What is amazing is that so long ago they had planned a superb drainage system. All