Wikipedia
Madra, Mada or Madrak, is the name of an ancient region and its inhabitants, located in the north-west division of the ancient Indian sub-continent. The kingdom or area where these people are believed to have inhabited is thought to have extended from portions of the Hindu Kush (possibly as far as North Eastern Iran) to the present day Punjab and Haryana province of India. Some support for this belief lays within the ancient epic, the Mahabharata that describes the armies of the Madra Kingdom led by King Shalya, marching from ancient Northwest Punjab to what would be known today as Haryana. The Madra are numerously referenced in ancient Sanskrit and Pali literature and some scholarly work references them as being part of the Kshatriya group during the time of the Mahabharata (the Vedic Period). Recent scholarly work references the Madra kingdom existing for at least two thousand years and places its home between the Ravi and Chenab.
Additionally, there are scholars who identify the Medes as a branch of the Madra tribes, while some identify Media (Medes) with Uttaramadra referenced in the Aitareya Brahamana. There are others who recognize the Madra as being of Scythian or Saka in origin and make the connection to Madra people as being one of the progenitors, as a founding clan, of the Jat people in the Indian subcontinent. Recent genetic testing provides tangential support for this scholarship in that it has shown there is evidence of a relationship between Jats, Northern Iranians and NE Europeans; the data, however, leaves other interpretations possible and also provides that predominant nature of the mitochondrial DNA is not dissimilar from other South Asian groups.
A review of earlier genetic studies cast doubt on historical research and argues the opposite "...the southward gene flow that has been imprinted on our minds for centuries was wrong, after all: the flow was out of, not into, India...India acted as an incubator of early genetic differentiation of modern humans moving out of Africa." Given India's considerable genetic diversity and the evolution of genetic research it provides for the possibility of different origins of ancient peoples that doesn't fall into "crude racial nineteenth century fallacies of Aryan invaders and Dravidian autochthons...[G]enetics is joining other disciplines in helping to clean the cobwebs of colonial historiography".
Madra is the debut album of Miranda Sex Garden. It stands apart from their later works in that it is entirely a cappella and the songs are all English madrigals. The entire album was recorded over the course of two days in March 1991.
The Madra were an ancient people who lived in northwest Panjab in ancient India.
Madra may also refer to:
- Madrak as one of a number of founding clans of people who make up part of the Jat gotra in India.
- Madra Kingdom as described in the text of the Mahabharata.
- Uttaramadra is a northern branch of the Madra Kingdom.
- Madri, a princess of the Madra Kingdom, who was to become a wife of King Pandu.
- Madra Mountains, a mountain range in the Aegean range of Turkey.
- Madra, the debut album of the band Miranda Sex Garden
- Old Irish reference of love and appreciation for a fox or dog, originally stated as madrad or madradh, but whose spelling and speech of, has mutated and shortened over time. Can also refer to wolf, depending on modifier, for example madra allta. See Wiktionary for further elucidation.