On Broken Buddhas

Among the many disturbing videos that turned up on twitter last week, there was one from North West Pakistan.

At first glance it looks a benign video of rural development - on what seems like the the outskirts of a village, a few villagers are laying a pathway through the hills. In their effort to remove some obstruction on the ground, a man is seen smashing a sledge hammer on an oblong piece of stone. The camera then pans closer to show us that this is not ordinary stone that his being smashed. It was a 1700 year old statue of the Buddha. You recoil with shock, memories of the Taliban destroying the Bamiyan Buddhas with tanks and artillery comes to mind.

The place where this happened in called Takht-e-Bahi. When I looked this up on the web, interesting details emerged - this place is about 15km from the town of Mardan in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and is famous for the ruins of an "exceptionally well preserved" Buddhist Monastery. Exceptional perhaps because hardly any archeological site older than a 1000 years has survived in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Conjectural restoration of the Monastery

However, I was in for a surprise and my shallow assumptions were soon busted. The Buddhist monastery here was built in the 1st century CE and thrived through the centuries under the Kushans and the Parthians, but it is under the Huns - especially Toramana and his son, Mihirakula - that this area witnessed genocides and wholesale destruction of Bushiest monasteries. In other words, the Takht-e-Bahi monastery was destroyed long before Mohammad was born and Islam as a religion was even conceived!

So who were the Huns? Why did the father-and-son duo of Toramana (493-518 CE) and Mihirakula (515-540 CE) get so upset with the Buddhists? According to a version recorded by the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim-monk Xuangzang (Hsuan Tsang):

"...initially Mihirakula was interested in learning about Buddhism, and asked the monks to send him a teacher; the monks insulted him by recommending a servant of his own householder for the purpose. This incident is said to have turned Mihirakula virulently anti-Buddhist. Xuangzang states that he destroyed 1,600 monasteries in Gandhara and had 9,000 men killed or sold into slavery on the banks of the Indus."

Further, according to the historian DN Jha (1998) -

"The Huna king Toramana had Vaishnavite association but was converted to Jainism and this tyrant son Mihirakula, ruling from Shakala (modern Sialkot), was a devout Shaiva who founded the temple of Mihireshvara. He persecuted the Buddhists as was later sone by Shashanka, a fanatic ruler of Bengal"

It is almost a relief to be reminded that destruction of temples was not the monopoly of Islamic fanatics, zealots and conquerers.

At the same time it is ironic that the descendents of the people who suffered the most under the waves of conquests, today consider themselves so far removed from their own roots that they consider it an honor to destroy, in the name of religion, the very things that they ought to proudly display, in their own museums!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jH0AnRXCzI
* The past is a different country (FT 2014)- https://www.thefridaytimes.com/the-past-is-a-different-country/
* http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Ancient-statue-of-Buddha-destroyed-as-un-Islamic-50623.html
* Jha DN (1998): Against Communalising History, Social Scientist, Vol 26 (on JSTOR) - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3517941?read-now=1&seq=5#page_scan_tab_contents

* A Neelakantan (2018) - https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/why-d-n-jhas-claim-that-ancient-hindus-were-given-to-violence-is-far-from-the-truth
* Pinterest - Takht-e-Bahi Gandhara sculptures -https://www.pinterest.com/sophialiu0808/takht-e-bhai-gandhara/

A Teeny Army of Teachers

Today evening I found myself in Varadero, Cuba. 

Ever since the Covid-19 lockdowns started, I had picked up the habit of walking up and down the terrace after sunset, listening to music, podcasts or, sometimes, just checking the never-ending backlog of messages on social media. Today's special was a podcast -  a remarkable Duolingo episode titled "Una maestra en botas" (A teacher in army boots).

This Spanish-English bilingual podcast was a first-person account of a 73-year-old Afro-Cuban lady named Norma Guillard. Born and brought up in one of the poorest provinces of Cuba she was about 14 when Fidel Castro  took over the country and brought in the revolution. One of his top priorities was to raise the level of education in Cuba

1961 was declared the "Year of Education", and paradoxically, a full school-year was cancelled! Approximately 300,000 school-going teenagers like Norma were asked to volunteer one year for teaching a family in the countryside not only how to read, but also to teach them how to prevent common diseases like TB and Leprosy. In return the government gave them scholarships to pursue higher education.

So an army of teenagers, armed with textbooks, notepads and pencils, went through a brief training course and then out into remote rural areas, to spread education. Not everything, of course, went off as planned: Norma's first host-family was racist - they did not want a black teacher; the second one kept her away because they suspected her of having contracted leprosy.  In the midst of of this came the US "Bay of Pigs" invasion. She was finally able to settle down and teach a family of six how to read.

One of the thoughtful elements of Castro's plan was the rule that the eldest member of each household had to be taught first, so that they could read, understand and sign official papers. Later, this was dovetailed into the national land re-distribution campaign.

Given the background it is hardly surprising that during the current pandemic, Cuba won international praise for sending no less than 28,000 doctors to 59 countries to to help them fight Covid-19!

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* Duolingo - Episode 51 - "Una maestra en botas" - https://podcast.duolingo.com/episode-51-una-maestra-en-botas-a-teacher-in-army-boots
* Cuban Literacy Campaign - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Literacy_Campaign
* The Worlds Most Ambitious Literacy Campaign - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/latin-lessons-what-can-we-learn-from-the-worldrsquos-most-ambitious-literacy-campaign-2124433.html
* 28,000 docs in 59 countries - https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/governance/kerala-and-cuba-how-left-cousins-won-praise-for-covid-19-fight-70834

Swartz and the Free Internet

Until today I had not heard of the name Aaron Swartz. A dive down one twitter rabbit-hole led me to this documentary and I was quite amazed to learn about this child prodigy, this teenager who was one of the founders of Reddit, an architect of Creative Commons, the slayer of draconian legislations that restricted internet freedom, and conscientious young man who was driven to kill himself by MIT and the Obama administration. 

As if all these were not achievements enough for a lifetime, Swartz also gets the credit to enabling the discovery of a test that leads to the early detection of pancreatic cancer!

A friend who studied at MIT thought there was nothing new or shocking about MITs role in making a scapegoat out of Swartz. "It is difficult to admire MIT if you're a thinking person", he said, "Most of the research there is centred on war weapons and the best way to kill". So it may not be surprising that the Obama government wanted to make an example of a man whose principal crime was to get past the JSTOR paywall and download years of public-funded research papers.

Until last year I would have thought such a move went against the very grain of USAs self-proclaimed   position as a 'land of the free'. The aggressive rise of China, the Covid-19 pandemic, Galwan, and the nine-dash-line leads me to a more hardline position against authoritarian regimes who are trying to turn this freedom into some kind of liability.

If internet freedom and free access of research from US universities only leads to a one-way flow of information and technology, it may not be a bad idea to temper the zeal of youngsters, who, for all their deep knowledge, are unable to see the big picture of global geo-politics.