Great Epic Research Articles

Sense of Humour in Muna Madan

Muna Madan exploits humor, an elemental device in Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s narrative, in a series of instances, ranging from Madan’s departure to his return journey after his business trip to Lhasa. In this article, there is a short description of black bile (melancholy), as one of the four types of 'humors', present in the great epic poem 'Muna Madan' by the great poet Devkota. This sense of 'humor' is realized throughout the poem. For the research study, secondary resources were consulted. Books and journals were studied for the purpose. The data were collected and analyzed for exploration of the humor in this short epic. Finding suggests that Madan and Devkota, in his real life, had a similar experience of melancholy as the sense of humor.

The Archetype of Revolt in John Milton's Paradise Lost

John Milton (1608-1674) was one of the main advocates of the reform policy initiated by Oliver Cromwell in England. The texts written by him during the conflict between the Parliament and the King determined the new Republic to offer him high-ranking positions. In the last part of his life, however, after Charles II restoration, Milton fell into the disgrace of the new king. It is the period of time when he wrote the great epic poem Paradise Lost, published in a first edition in 1667 and consisting in ten books. The present paper aims to capture the way Milton developed a theory on the right to rebellion in his poem Paradise Lost. Using the instruments of a psychoanalytic approach, we want to capture the archetype of the revolt, revealing the deep meaning of the concrete history in which it is projected. For Milton, rebellion is justified. This idea was later confirmed by John Locke as the right to rebellion in The Second Treaty on Governance. For Milton, revolt is an archetype, but for Locke it becomes a true philosophical concept. Milton's main hero, the fallen angel Lucifer, becomes an archetypal symbol for the spirit of revolt. However, the text was meant to provide its creator with rehabilitation in front of the Crown, who finally recognized his genius. Using psychoanalysis, we identified subtle links between Milton's life and his work. We can even consider that Milton's life and his work intertwine; they are one and the same thing.

Critical Reading of the Character: Vishwamitra in Amish Tripathi’s 'Sita: Warrior of Mithila'

The great Epic of Ramayana has once again proved to have an ambitious space for numerous perspectives and understandings. Likewise this article relishes looking into the eyes of the chief of Malayaputra, Maharishi Vishwamitra, perhaps the mastermind behind the plot. His ideas on land, society, caste system, equality, and redemption agitate the characters and the readers. This article advances to critically understand Vishwamitra and his unorthodox schemes and importance in creating characters for his future prospectus. Although it is unclear on his obvious destination this article manages to discern Maharishi Vishwamitra’s purpose basing on “Sita: Warrior of Mithila” by Amish Tripathi.

City Profile: Bodhgaya, India

Notebook city profile Bodhgaya, India by Kalpna Singh-Chitnis PHOTO:KALPNA SINGH-CHITNIS HOW FORTUNATE IT IS to be born in a small town in the eastern state of Bihar, India, I learned only when I once went to seek the blessings of a highly spiritual Tibetan Buddhist monk, Khamtrul Rinpoche, in my hometown, Bodhgaya. The Rinpoche held my hand and said, “You are already blessed to be born in a place where the Buddha got enlightenment.” Then he wrote a prayer for me in the Tibetan language in a book, Meaningful to Behold, which was translated into English by one of his disciples and read: “A prayer, that you quickly attain the state of enlightenment, through never being separated from the holy Dharma from lifetime to lifetime.” Yes, Bodhgaya is the land of the Buddha , Dharma, and Nirvana. It is a part of the Gaya district located on the bank of Falgu, known as Niranjana River during the Buddha’s time. Gaya, named after the great demon Gayasur, literally means “gone” and also echoes the essence of the Heart Sutra: Gate, Gate, Paragate, Paasamgate, Bodhi, Svaha (meaning, “O Bodhi, gone, gone, gone to the other shore, landed at the other shore, Svaha”). Gaya has attracted spiritual energies for centuries. It is known as the land of Vishnu, Jain Tirthankaras, and Sufi saint Hazrat Ata Hussain Fani. All major religions have flourished here. We find references to Gaya in the Rigveda, Varaha Purana, and in the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is also mentioned in the travel accounts of Faxian and Xuanzang, who came to Magadha, an important destination of the Silk Routes. Bodhgaya, once a laid-back town, has now morphed into a modern suburban city welcoming millions of tourists every year. One can fly to Bodhgaya from all major Indian cities or get there by bus or train. All Buddhist countries have their temples and monasteries there. A first-time visitor to Bodhgaya may get a feel of being in an East Asian country, but within a few miles’ radius, one can also see how the city has preserved its centuries-old history and its own unique presence. But Bodhgaya is not only about going to the temples, seeing the museum, shopping at the local Tibetan markets, and enjoying Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan food. You do not want to miss out on hiking the Brahmayoni Hill, where the Buddha gave the famous Fire Sermon to a thousand bhikkhus , and the Barabar Caves, the ancient dwellings of Buddhist monks (featured as fictional Marabar Caves in A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster). You might also like to walk on the bank of Falgu River, which has endured the Curse of Sita and flows undercurrent; visit Root Institute, Magadh University; and, most important, enter the Mahabodhi Temple, originally built by the emperor Ashoka in the third century bce. There, you can find some quiet time to sit and meditate under the Bodhi tree, where the Buddha attained nirvana and proclaimed in his verses: Through the round of many births I roamed / without reward, / without rest, / seeking the house-builder. / Painful is birth / again and again. / House-builder, you’re seen! / You will not build a house again. / All your rafters broken, / the ridge pole destroyed, / gone to the Unformed, the mind / has come to the end of craving. Visiting Bodhgaya is like coming home, as it reminds you to return to yourself. Author note: Heart Sutra’s translation from the Sacred Texts. The Buddha’s verses from the Dhammapada, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. The Fire Sermon is mentioned in The Waste Land (III), by T. S. Eliot. Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is the author of Bare Soul and three collections of verse in Hindi. Her work is widely published and translated into many languages. WORLDLIT.ORG 5 ...

Hausner, Gábor Zrínyi-album (review)

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 782 Hausner, Gábor (ed.). Zrínyi-album. Zrínyi Kiadó – Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum, Budapest, 2016. 381 pp. Appendices. Index. Ft7500. In 2014 to mark the 350th anniversary of Count Miklós (Nicholas) Zrínyi’s death Zrínyi publishers of Budapest commissioned this bilingual, copiously illustrated album. It is an impressive and weighty tome in which the Hungarian text runs parallel with the English translation (by Bernadette Szabadkai) and is the result of cooperation between several Hungarian historians and literary historians each contributing individual chapters. The life and work of Count Miklós Zrínyi (1620–64) is inseparable from his great-grandfather of the same name, Miklós Zrínyi of Sziget (1509–66) who made his name in the Turkish Wars with the protracted defence of the Southern Hungarian fortress of Szigetvár (in its Anglicized form ‘Sigeth’) where, just days before the surrender of the fortress Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent also died. This commander’s seventeenth-century descendant was likewise a warrior but also a poet and the author of essays on warfare and military organization. The present collection covers all Count Miklós Zrínyi’s activities thanks to the leading experts on the life and afterlife of this notable poet-commander. Both Miklós Zrínyi and his brother Péter were already acknowledged as talented military commanders in their lifetime. For various reasons the former became a much-admired hero of Protestant Europe and France, hailed by over twenty English publications in the years 1663–65, all devoted to the Turkish Wars, at the same time highlighting Miklós Zrínyi’s role in the events. There was even a whole book on this Hungarian/Croat military commander in English entitled The Conduct and Character of Count Nicholas Serini, Protestant Generalissimo of the Auxiliaries of Hungary (Samuel Speed, London, 1664), a biographical compilation from German and Dutch sources. As for its reports of battles and campaigns this book is on the whole reliable, though it does contain (the deliberate or occasional) error. Zrínyi was a Roman Catholic, though a very tolerant one, believing that in a battle with the Turk the religious allegiance of Christian soldiers should not be questioned. The Zrínyi-album reproduces the title-page of The Conduct and Character on page 60, but the author of this chapter, the late Ágnes R. Várkonyi, still asks ‘who is the mysterious [figure] behind the monogram O.C.?’ This O.C. is the author of the book’s foreword, most likely its editor. The present reviewer actually offered a solution in his essay (in Hungarian) on English sources of the Turkish Wars (Korunk, 2015/6) claiming that ‘O.C.’ is in fact a monogram of ‘Ortelius Continuatus’ (Continuation of Ortelius), ‘Ortelius’ being an earlier popular chronicle of Europe’s struggle against the Ottoman Empire. As for Miklós Zrínyi’s great epic poem, Szigeti veszedelem, written between 1645 and 1648, Sándor Bene offers interesting information on the title: it could REVIEWS 783 be literally rendered as ‘peril’ of the castle of Sziget rather than the history of its siege, but the contents of the poem justify its translation as ‘siege’. This is indeed the title of the epic’s first English translation by László Kőrössy published by the Catholic University of America Press in 2011. As for the sources of this impressive epic poem, we learn from Zrínyi-album that although in his own foreword the author speaks of his adherence to Homer and Virgil, his principal modelwasOvid‘whosenamedoesnotevengetmentioned’(p.217). Zrínyimust have also found Marino closer to his taste than Tasso, though this ‘marinism’ informs more the Hungarian poet’s lyrical poems, quoted and rather clumsily translated by the translator of the rest of the album (pp. 233–39). Finally, the chapter on ‘Fame and Memory’ (pp. 282–379) could have been shorter. While some parts of it are helpful in the interpretation of Miklós Zrínyi’s survival in national and international memory, the last twenty pages could have been cut — for example, what the Habsburg Archduke Joseph thought about...

La configuración del héroe épico griego arcaico a través de Homero y Hesíodo

La emergencia del culto heroico cuenta aspectos relevantes de la antigua organización social griega. Los griegos concibieron a sus héroes legendarios como grandes hombres de un pasado mítico y glorioso, pero también como entidades sobrehumanas capaces de ofrecer protección al que les rindiese honores por medio de sacrificios y ofrendas. Las grandes figuras de la poesía homérica, Agamenón, Aquiles, Odiseo, probablemente comenzaron su andadura épica como reyes, guerreros y nobles micénicos de la tradición oral de la Época Oscura. Posteriormente, fueron transfigurados en semidioses. Así, parece factible que Homero y Hesíodo hubieran concebido el pasado distante como una era en la que el mundo estaba habitado por una raza semi divina. La arqueología parece mostrar que la percepción de ese pasado emergió poco antes de la composición de los grandes poemas épicos, hacia mediado el siglo viii a.e.c., en una época de relevantes cambios sociales. El culto de los héroes míticos, por el que las familias renombradas legitimaban su prestigio al asociarse con ancestros heroicos, fue dejando paso al deseo de las comunidades de beneficiarse de la protección de héroes. En pleno clasicismo, seguirían siendo prototipos heroicos cuasi divinos, influyentes en la organización política doméstica.

The Numinosity of Ethiopian Christianity

Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity is an ideal laboratory in which to study the theories of C. G. Jung. We can see living examples of Jung's conceptual framework concerning human psychology and healing. In fact, it is a perfect Jungian world with mystery, exotic religious texts, mandalas, alchemy, shamanism, an ancient history, and a pathway to Europe in the Middle Ages.The Ethiopian Christian system is metaphysical as well as Christological. The transcendent reality of both living this religion and creating it in the material world ultimately draws upon a celestial archetype in the symbolism of the center, which is found in in every church and in the spiritual–mythological writings of the Ethiopian people. The whole concept of the uniqueness of Ethiopian Christianity originates in the people's belief that they are the New Israel, the beloved of God, as told in their great literary epic, The Glory of Kings. In a mix of religion, myth, and archetype, the writings teach that their kings and queens descend from Solomon and Sheba, whose son, Menelik, stole the Ark of the Covenant and brought it to Ethiopia. The God of Israel thereby transferred His place of abode from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. The divine power now flowed to the rulers of Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

Women at the Margins


 
 
 This paper looks at Vālmīki’s use and placement of his female characters as significant markers of religious identity. It argues that Vālmīki conceptualizes and creates specific types of female figures and carefully locates the episodes in which they appear to mark specific narrative transitions and real or imagined anxiety-inducing threats to the author’s idealized world. Moreover, Vālmīki provides his audience with potential resolutions to those threats. Thus, in addition to such major figures as Sītā, Kausalyā, and Kaikeyī, characters such as Anasūyā, Śabarī, Svayaṃprabhā, and even the non-human characters Surasā and Nikumbhilā are demonstrated to have a specific and integrated function within the narrative and are argued to form part of a larger, gendered narrative frame in which the epic action occurs. Each of these characters, I contend, represents a particular level of the feminine intruding into the culture’s religious practices in an ever-increasing destabilization of the poet’s idealized vedic world or as the means for its reemergence as a stronger, more stable, and less corruptible one. Vālmīki’s creation and use of these intriguing figures provide further testament both to the author’s genius and the underlying unity of structure of his great epic.
 
 

Myth and Cloth from India: The Kalamkari Collection in the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich

Important centers of devotional Kalamkari art are found in the southeast of India. The large, hand-painted temple cloths, often including extensive inscriptions, portray stories from the Puranas or the great epics Mahabharata and Ramayana in many successive images. These are organized in rows that run horizontally around a large centerpiece, which depicts a key scene. Kalamkari temple hangings mark a sacred space and offer a condensed presence of the divine, yet they also have a narrative function. Following clear aesthetic and stylistic conventions, they edify, illustrate, and serve as mnemonic devices. The article discusses the multifaceted collection of Kalamkari temple cloths from Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh owned by the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich.

Eternalising Cultural Memory Through Cultural Parallels in Literary Narratives

Cultural memory represents the collective perceptions and creations of the distant past. Such collective memories are best documented and secured in Literature. What matters is not the real facts but rather the consensus of conventions shared by both the cultural history and the literary creator. However, literary narratives do not always give a compilation of such memories under a single wrap. It is on this distinctive point that Jakkana stands out in eternalising cultural memory. BasavarajNaikar’s novella, Jakkanna is the retelling of the life and history of the AmarsilpiJakkannacharya, the famed architect of the Hoysala dynasty. The plot is replete with events that have been happening from the ancient times. Parallels of such incidents that have endured to the modern times can be drawn from the two great epics and other ancient Indian philosophy and literatures. This article aims at highlighting such aspects of our lives that seems to have been greatly influenced by the past. It also looks at such events that have endured eras.

New Light on Devabodha, the Earliest Extant Commentator on Mahābhārata

Abstract The name of Devabodha is well-known to specialists of Mahābhārata textual traditions: author of the Jñānadīpikā or “Lamp of Knowledge”, the earliest extant commentary on the Great Epic, he has been duly referred to by the critical editors of this text along with his successors such as Vimalabodha, Arjunamiśra and Nīlakaṇṭha. Yet Devabodha remains an almost complete mystery regarding the period or the place he lived in, or even the conditions that urged him to compose a commentary. Since he commented on a version of the Mahābhārata belonging to the Northern recension and was quoted by Vimalabodha between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he has been approximately assigned to eleventh-century Northern India or Kashmir, but till now no positive evidence has been brought forth to validate this opinion. The purpose of the present paper is to shed some light on this important author by proving that, contrary to a prejudice rehearsed in every history of Indian literature, he is one and the same person with a medieval poet and dramatist called Devabodha or sometimes Devabodhi. Then follows a critical and synthetic account on what we can know about Devabodha’s life and career from all the available sources.

The roots of Hinduism: the early Aryans and the Indus civilization

Preface Introduction 1. Defining 'Hindu' and 'Hinduism' 2. The early Aryans 3. Indo-European linguistics 4. The Indus civilization 5. The Indus religion and the Indus script Part I: The Early Aryans 6. Proto-Indo-European homelands 7. Early Indo-Iranians on the Eurasian steppes 8. The BMAC of Central Asia and the Mitanni of Syria 9. The Rigvedic Indo-Aryans and the D?sas 10. The Asvins and Mitra-Varuna 11. The Asvins as funerary gods 12. The Atharvaveda and the Vratyas 13. The Kuru kingdom and the great epics Part II: The Indus Civilization 14. The language of the Indus civilization 15. Fertility cults in folk religion 16. Astronomy, time-reckoning and cosmology 17. Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha 18. Royal symbols from West Asia 19. The Goddess and the buffalo 20. Early Iranians and 'left-hand' Tantrism 21. Religion in the Indus script Conclusion 22. The prehistory of Indo-Aryan speech and Aryan contributions to Hinduism 23. Harappan religion in relation to West Asia and later South Asia 24. Retrospect and prospect Bibliographical notes References Index

Drinking habits in ancient India.

Consumption of one or other form of intoxicating substances has been present throughout the history of the world. This article traces such use in the Indian subcontinent, both in North and South India. References to the use of intoxicants are to be found in the Vedas, the Great Epics, and the ancient Tamil literature.

Monsters and monstrosity in Augustan poetry

Roman poets of the Augustan period reinvented monsters from Greek myth, such as Harpies, Furies, and the warring Centaurs and Giants. These monsters represented the attractions and dangers of novelty in various contexts, ranging from social values to artistic innovation. Rome's two great epics of the early principate, Vergil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, are both filled with mythical monsters. Like the culture that produced them, these poets were fascinated by unfamiliar forms despite their potential to disturb and disrupt. This book takes a fresh approach to the canonical works of Vergil, Ovid, and their contemporaries, contributing to a very recent turn toward marvels, monsters, and deformity in classical studies. The volume proposes that monstrosity was acutely topical during the birth of the principate, having featured in aesthetic debates of the Hellenistic age, while also serving as an established, if controversial, means for public figures to amaze the population and display their power. Monsters provided a fantastical means to explore attitudes toward human nature, especially in its relationship with sex. They also symbolized deformations of poetic form. Such gestures were doomed to replay the defeat of hypermasculine monsters yet, paradoxically, they legitimized poetic innovation. Monsters and Monstrosity in Augustan Poetry is the first full-length study of monsters in Augustan poetry, and the first metapoetic readingof monstrosity in classical antiquity. Intended primarily for scholars and students of classical Latin literature, it will also speak to interdisciplinary monster studies. It does not require knowledge of Latin or ancient Greek and quotations are translated.

The early 8thcentury A.D. zoomorphic iconography of the wall decorations in Qasr al-Amra, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

ABSTRACT Located near to the village of Azraq, in eastern Jordan, the archaeological site of Qasr al-Amra was built in the early Umayyad period, for the caliph Al-Walid I. It is especially famous for the wall paintings that have survived on the interior ceilings and walls, showing, among other subjects, hunting scenes and several zoomorphic figures. Many of these portray the ancient local fauna, including a snake (probably Walterinnesia aegyptia Lataste, 1887), several birds (herons, flamingos, cranes, peacocks and partridges), carnivores (Ursus arctos Linnaeus, 1758, Felis silvestris Schreber, 1777 and Vormela peregusna Guldenstadt, 1770), and ungulates (Syrian onagers and Persian gazelles). It is very likely that some of these illustrations were influenced by tales contained in the great Iranian epic poem Shâh Nâmeh, or “The Book of Kings”, and in other traditional Sassanid and Muslim texts.

Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808–1810, by Barbara H. Stein & Stanley J. Stein

Crisis in an Atlantic Empire: Spain and New Spain, 1808-1810, by Barbara H. Stein & Stanley J. Stein. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. viii, 795 pp. $89.95 US (cloth). For over a half-century, the duo of Barbara and Stanley Stein has been labouring on a massive history of the evolution of the Spanish empire, especially the complex interdependence between Spain and Mexico. This book is the last installment, the fourth volume of what must surely count as one of the great epics of the making of the modem world by Bourbons, their backers, and the swelling ranks of rivals and critics. This particular volume is a study of the feverish years between Napoleon's invasion of Spain to the outbreak of the plebeian revolt in Mexico led by the provincial priest, Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. After a century of struggles to reform and adapt to the internal and external pressures of an earlier globalization, the old empire finally entered the phase of its collapse. Recent scholarship of the Spanish empire has turned increasingly to the study of Atlantic cultural and religious exchanges. The earlier structuralist explanations of the Iberian empires--that emphasized the durable power of the alliance between monopoly merchants and ancien regime ministers --went by the wayside to be replaced by a different portrait of power. Drained of class interests, the new historiography accents the cultural dimensions of authority. At first blush, this book appears to be a throwback. The underlying theme of the book--indeed the series--is that an empire ruled by a patrimonial monarch and backed by merchant-rentiers who thrived off protection of their privileges, forced sales to Indians, and a gamut of coerced labour could not possibly be serious about Enlightened reform. There was something intrinsically reactive, not to say reactionary, about the Spanish ancien regime. Why it did not collapse was because of the wealth extracted from the Americas, especially Mexico. In fact, the Steins present a subtle account of a trans-Atlantic elite adapting to pressures and incentives, but only up to the limits of their self-interests and convictions. The strong impression one gets in this book is of an imperial ruling class--with some remarkable detail about the interlaced connections between private and public pursuits--with a powerful, pragmatic, elan. This class knew that at the bottom of the social pyramid lay landless peasants of Andalusia, growing Cuban slave populations, and 5 million mestizos, mulattoes, and ethnic Indians exploited by dominant whites, criollo and pensinsular(p. 174). In this context, reform was a dangerous game and this book pulls the veil back on the memoranda and calculus of elites grappling with just how much they had to concede before letting events get out of control. Indeed, it provides a richly detailed account of behind the scenes debates about policymaking, one that demolishes misguided depictions of the Spanish regime as absolutist or blind to the threats that closed like a noose around it. But it was not up to monarchs and ministers to dictate the whens and whys of imperial adaptation. While there was much internal dispute over whether to give in to the neutral trade demands of some colonial ports, or whether to adjust the averia tax administered by merchant guilds on behalf of the crown, it was ultimately the pressure from Paris that forced the hand of rulers. …

The fall of the Ottomans: the Great War in the Middle East

Sunday Times Top Ten Best-seller. The final destruction of the Ottoman Empire - one of the great epics of the First World War, from best-selling historian Eugene Rogan. For some four centuries the Ottoman Empire had been one of the most powerful states in Europe as well as ruler of the Middle East. By 1914 it had been drastically weakened and circled by numerous predators waiting to finish it off. Following the Ottoman decision to join the First World War on the side of the Central Powers the British, French and Russians hatched a plan to finish the Ottomans off: an ambitious and unprecedented invasion of Gallipoli...Eugene Rogan's remarkable book recreates one of the most important but poorly understood fronts of the First World War. Despite fighting back with great skill and ferocity against the Allied onslaught and humiliating the British both at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia (Iraq), the Ottomans were ultimately defeated, clearing the way for the making, for better or worse, of a new Middle East which has endured to the present.

A Sociological Perspective on Suicide in Rural China: A Case Study of G Village in Gansu Province between 1956 and 2009

This essay, taking G village in the northwest minority regions of China as an example, analyzes the quotas quo, types, characteristics, major causes, effects and the trend of suicide cases from sociological perspectives. Based on the data collected from 1956 to 2009, it is hoped to articulate various reasons of suicide that happened in the rural villages of China. And, more importantly, via these suicide cases, a great epic of social change in rural areas of China can be depicted to represent the experience of modernization in minority regions of China. It is found that suicide is significantly related with social characteristics (such as the degree of social liberal, economic model, power structure).The means, causes, quantity and characteristic of suicide vary at different historical stages.

Comic Gags and the Mahabharata War

Taking the view that the Mahabharata is a narrative universe rather than just a text, this article explores a new comics experiment that creatively inserts a story within that universe. Using a modified manga style of comics storytelling Shohei Emura and Vidyun Sabhaney provide an alternate telling to the Great Mahabharata War using the canonical tropes and technical devices such as panel size, page layout, word–image relationship and so on that are made possible by the comics style of storytelling. A focus on genre and structural form enables an entry into the sensibility of the great epic, its problematisation of conventional codes in a way that is true to the comics genre of slapstick humour and critical inquiry.

Genetic Affinity of the Bhil, Kol and Gond Mentioned in Epic Ramayana.

Kol, Bhil and Gond are some of the ancient tribal populations known from the Ramayana, one of the Great epics of India. Though there have been studies about their affinity based on classical and haploid genetic markers, the molecular insights of their relationship with other tribal and caste populations of extant India is expected to give more clarity about the the question of continuity vs. discontinuity. In this study, we scanned >97,000 of single nucleotide polymorphisms among three major ancient tribes mentioned in Ramayana, namely Bhil, Kol and Gond. The results obtained were then compared at inter and intra population levels with neighboring and other world populations. Using various statistical methods, our analysis suggested that the genetic architecture of these tribes (Kol and Gond) was largely similar to their surrounding tribal and caste populations, while Bhil showed closer affinity with Dravidian and Austroasiatic (Munda) speaking tribes. The haplotype based analysis revealed a massive amount of genome sharing among Bhil, Kol, Gond and with other ethnic groups of South Asian descent. On the basis of genetic component sharing among different populations, we anticipate their primary founding over the indigenous Ancestral South Indian (ASI) component has prevailed in the genepool over the last several thousand years.