Kyauktada Katha

George Orwell's book, "Burmese Days" is centred on a fictional town called Kyauktada 'in Upper Burma'. It is the story of an English timber merchant named John Flory set in the 1920s. Kyauktada is actually a district in Yangon so it seems Orwell drew his inspiration for this story from his stay at a small town called Katha ('story' in many Indian languages), on the banks of the Irrawaddy.

The book brings to life the life and times of the British colonial enterprise in the 1920s, seen through the eyes of a merchant named John Flory. He lives in a small, insular community of Britishers who are already nostalgic about the violence used to bring the natives to heel. In the words of the local administrator, "In my young days, when a butler was disrespectful, one sent him along to the jail with a chit saying 'Please give the bearer fifteen lashes'. Ah well, Eheu fugaces!"

Flory is a misfit at the  British-only club, an oddball in the sense that he is not as disdainful of the locals. An Indian doctor, Veeraswami  - 'very slimly' according to his compatriots - is a good friend with whom him enjoys long conversations. It is in these conversations that Orwell frames his views on  the Empire. Here the roles are reversed, it is Veeraswami is a a loyal subject of the empire, an admirer of all things British, while Flory is the skeptic who thinks he is living a lie -

"But my friend, what lie are you living?' 

"Why, of course, the lie that we're here to uplift or poor black brothers instead of to rob them.. Look at our schools - factories for cheap clerks. We've never taught a single useful manual trade to the Indians..."

This anti-Empire line of thought is expanded through the Veeraswami-Flory conversations:

"What was at the centre of his thoughts now, and what poisoned everything, was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived. For his brain to develop - you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are absolutely committed to the wrong way of life - he has grasped the truth about the English and the Empire. The Empire is a despotism - benevolent no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object..."

"The real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the army. Given the Army, the officials and business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets."

"With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship. Affection, even love - yes, English men do often love Indians - native officers, forest rangers, hinters, clerks, servants. Sepoys will weep like children when their colonel retires. Even intimacy is allowable, at the right moments. but alliance, partisanship, never! Even to know the rights and wrongs of a 'native' quarrel is a loss of prestige."

No wonder Orwell was wary of a backlash if the book were to be published first in Britain. He wisely decided to publish this book in USA instead.

I loved the flowing prose in "Burmese Days", and the way he brings out his characters - especially the Burmese ones. One particularly obnoxious one is Ko Po Kyin, "the crocodile" and his wife, Ma Kin Kin...dressed in a guangbaung of pale pink silk, an ingyi of starched muslin and, and a paso of Mandalay silk. Another interesting character is is Ma Hla May, Flory's mistress who aspired to be a bo-kadaw - a white man's wife - but is discarded as soon as Elizabeth, a young lady turns up at Kyauktada. The crocodile uses her to undermine Flory and destroy his rival, Veeraswami. 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned', especially if she turn up at the most unexpected places screaming Pike-san pay-like! Pike-san pay-like ('Give me the money') !

This is only my second Orwell book after Animal Farm many years ago. It is William Dalrymple's podcast on that led me to Burmese Days, so if you don't have the time read books do listen to this particular series on the remarkable life and times of George Orwell.

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LINKS and FURTHER READING

* Orwell and Dalrymple on English Class (2022) - https://quillette.com/2022/05/02/orwell-dalrymple-on-english-class/

* Empire Podcast - Episode 302 - https://youtu.be/s_vrCr3XW8o?si=92s71EOZ5hjpqvh6

Dynamics of the North East

At first glance Sanjoy Hazarika's book may seem rather dated. It gives a snapshot of the North Eastern states up to the early 1990s. 

Much of the turmoil described in the book has died down - insurgencies that roiled the North East for decades after independence has given way to a superlative push for development -  the new longest river bridge in India, 10,000km of new highways, railway links pushing further eastwards,  and ten new airports, a new impetus to the agriculture sector...all this has done much to integrate the region with the rest of the country. And yet, thanks to the recent troubles in Bangladesh, and the breakdown of trust and goodwill bodes ill for the seven sisters. 

This history of the seven sisters is a lot more complex than I expected. It also goes way beyond the unequal Treaty of Yandabo (1826) through which the British grabbed large swathes of Burma into British India.  The vast Brahmaputra valley has seen multiple invasions from the east of whom, perhaps the Ahoms lasted the longest.  Originally from the Shan region bordering Burma and China, the Ahoms conquered the area in the 13th century, adopted Hinduism, married into local communities and ruled for the next 600 years.  Even during this period it seems the tribes inhabiting the hills raided the plains but the rules were sanguine about pursuing them into the hills - 'can an elephant enter the hole of a rat?'

In terms of language and culture, a certain pecking order was imposed on this region. Soon after the British conquest of Assam, Bengali became the language of the courts and remained the official language till 1873. The Assamese in turn tried to impose their language on the hill states much to their resentment.

Partition of British India, tensions between India and Pakistan and  the creation of Bangladesh cut off the North East from its natural trading partners. The most accessible port at Chittagong went to Bangladesh even though it was located in Chakma region dominated by christian tribes. On top of this, power politics in North India forced the NE to subordinate it natural resources to states like Bihar. Petroleum extracted from Assam was sent in pipes all the way to Barauni refinery for processing!

Hazarika's book is a valuable record of the missed opportunities in the North East. It also provides a perspective on how the ongoing transformation of the seven sisters.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

- PIB Press Note on the North East 

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Dholavira

An endless white expanse of saltpans, blue skies, and Dholavira.

If you are a history buff nothing quite prepares you for the ancient Harappan site of Dholavira. Perhaps you recall hearing about the place in school classrooms, or visits to museum galleries or books. Bits and pieces in our collective memory about the ancient civilisation that covered an area larger than known sites in Mesopotamia, Egypt, or China; cities with carefully designed streets, water supply and drainage systems, and of a script that is yet to be deciphered. And yet the scale of it all does not quite sink in until you see the place for yourself.

Kutch, the district in Gujarat where Dholavira is located, happens to the largest in India - 45, 674 sqkm! There are about a dozen Indian states that are smaller than this one district, including Kerala and Haryana.  Most of Kutch district barren scrubland or saltpans dotted with solar and wind farms. 

We reached the site after a long drive from Bhuj, with stopover at Hodka village, and a drive along the so-called "Road through Heaven" - a 50km road that cuts straight through an area that was once covered by the sea.

The open sea is today about 300km away from Dholavira. All available evidence suggests that maritime trade was the mainstay of this city with its seals and jewellery being found in the Nile Valley, Egypt.

Unlike most Harappan cities excavated so far, Dholavira is the only one which is built from stone. Most of this stone was quarried out of areas that became the large tanks for storing water. Canals, sluices and wells ensured that water was available throughout the city with special arrangements for those staying in the 'upper city', an area where the elites resided.

There is a nice ASI museum at the site but not much information seems to be available on the web, except for some websites aimed at attracting tourists to the luxury tent-cities that are built every year. YouTube does have some good talks on the Harappan sites in general but IO am yet to come across anything that does justice to the the oldest known port city in ancient India.

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REFERENCES and LINKS

YT - Michel Danino on Harappan Civilisation - https://youtu.be/_s5EDxuL0Vs

Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dholavira

https://www.evokedholavira.com/blog/dholavira-a-harappan-city-with-intricate-architecture-and-rich-history/

The Balkh Connection - Resurrection of Persian

A carpet from Balkh adorns our living room. It is a constant reminder old assignments with the UN in Afghanistan, of traveling long dusty roads lined with the relics of various wars, of bustling markets and lovely lilt of Dari language.

Dari is a variant of Persian widely spoken in the country. I had always imagined that the Persian influence on Afghanistan dated back to the reign of kings ranging from Cyrus to Nadir Shah. Today, while communing back home on the metro listening to an episode of the Empire podcast, I realised the extent of my naivety.

There was a time when the Persians ruled most of the territory that extends from today's Punjab to Turkey and North Africa. The mighty Achaemenid kings - Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes - ruled from Persepolis (559 - 330 BC), until the empire was destroyed by Alexander. Then came the Seleucids (312 - 62 BC) who were contemporaries of Chandragupta  of the Maurya empire in India; the Parthians (247 - 224 BC) and the  Sasanians (224 - 651 CE).

Then came a time when the conquerors got conquered. The endless wars between two great empires, the Romans and the Persians, exhausted both and enabled a new kid on the block, the Arabs driven by the zeal of a brand new religion, to colonise  Persia. Over the next 200 years, Arabic took over as the official language, Persian language, culture and religion got subsumed. Amazingly some of the most prominent Vezirs appointed by the Arabs were the Barmakids, a clan of hereditary Buddhist priests ("Pramukh") from the Nawbahar monastry in Balkh who had converted to Islam!  

One of the few holdouts was Khorasan, an area which is mostly the provinces o Herat and present-day Afghanistan. 

It is under the patronage of the Saffarid kings of Khorasan that Persian language survived. The poet, Ferdowsi started writing the epic Shahname under their patronage. However, by the time he finished his magnum opus, the Saffarids had been defeated by the Ghaznavids, and the new king Mohammad of Ghazni was too busy plundering India and did not think much of Persian poetry. 

It is Persia that owes much to Afghanistan - not the other day around!

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BUT-SHIKAN  बुत-शिकनبت شکن

This word, meaning "iconoclast", is an honorific adopted by many Islamic rulers in India. Sikandar Shah Miri, a ruler of Kashmir was called Sikandar Butshikan for the zeal with which he destroyed many monasteries and temples.

So the question is - does 'but' refer to icons of the Buddha?

A friend who loves Urdu poetry insists that the word comes from Persian. So did the ancient Iranians also take delight in destroying temples? Turns out that they did - hundreds of years before Persia was overrun by conquering armies from Arabia under the banner of Islam, it was Zoroastrian rulers who destroyed buddhist monasteries and temples in the Khorasan region!

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REFERENCES & LINKS

• Empire Podcast - https://twitter.com/EmpirePodUK/status/1747563631653396807 
• Buddhism in Iran - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_in_Iran
• https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/content/did-you-know-city-balkh-ancient-capital-bactria-and-centre-buddhism-and-zoroastrianism
• https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/buddhism-i
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Buddhists
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikandar_Shah_Miri 

Ajanta Valley - Chaityas and Viharas

If there is any place that completely defies expectations it must be Ajanta.

We grow up reading about this place in our school textbooks, it figures in superlative terms when people discuss art and architecture, and it is even the name adopted by a popular brand of wall-clocks...and yet we know so little about the people who built this amazing complex of excavated temples - Chaitya's and Viharas - over a span of eight centuries, from 200 BCE to 600 CE!

Our journey started last month with a de-hypenation. Rarely is this site mentioned by itself - it is always paired as Ajanta-Ellora. So I had always thought that this was some kind of twin-site like Hyderabad-Secundrabad or Kochi-Ernakulam. It is only when I started looking up the logistics of our week-long visit to Aurangabad that I discovered the length of this particular hyphen - 103 km!

This is not a place for folks in a hurry. There are indeed tourists who fly into Aurangabad (the nearest airport) and do a day trip covering Ajanta, Ellora and even the fort at Devgiri (Daulatabad) but these trips can only be shallow and superficial. All the more so if you land up at Ajanta without a good guide.

Also, there are no good hotels close to Ajanta so like most tourists, we had to stay at Aurangabad and start out early morning for a two-hour road journey to the site. We were however very fortunate to get an excellent driver (Madhukar Kohli), who in his own quiet, gentle way, gave us the option of going to the regular entry point directly, or to approach it from the 'view-point' (an 15 km extra). He also suggested we take a guide from Balapur, the point where the road diverges to the view-point.

This guide was a youngster, a 12th-pass-aspiring-licensed-guide. He led us to this sweeping panorama - 

Looking down from the undulating plains is the famous horseshoe-shaped valley created by the Waghora river. This was the view seen by an East India Company soldier who came here on a hunt in 1819, and saw a tiger disappear into a cave in the thick forest below. The cliff-turned out to be a vast complex of excavated Buddhist shrines and monasteries that had been forgotten since the time it was abandoned some time in 700 CE.

The stone is mostly hard volcanic basalt and layered like a cake. At one end of the valley, the river cuts through these layers in a cascade of seven waterfalls, and curves away further down the plateau. It is here that generations of Buddhist monks chipped away at the rocks, generation after generation, a space where they could congregate and meditate. The acoustics of the temple halls is quite amazing.

It is one thing to cut through solid stone to create and build a quiet place for prayers, and quite another to embellish it with sculptures and intricate paintings! 

According to our guide the oldest caves - 9, 10, 12 and 13 - have paintings that use only five vegetable colours. The later ones have the additional distinct blue hue of lapiz lazuli which presumably was brought in from distance places in Central Asia. This may also explain why some caves have depictions of people who are distinctly mongoloid, as well as brown-bearded and trousered Persians.

The intensity of activity you see in the paintings leaves you with so many questions - what was the purpose of recreating a world in such exquisite detail by monks who came here to renounce all attachments? How did the monks sustain themselves? As in the case of Sanchi, which is at a safe distance from the ancient city of Vidisha, which is the nearest city where the monks went to beg of alms? Were they completely dependent on the generosity of kings or did they grow their own food?

There is nothing on the site that offers more information. As is the case in most sites under the control of the ASI, here too you have a bunch of shabby shops selling kitsch and cool drinks, the vendors go about trying to sell mediocre guidebooks and informal guides do their bit to make a muddle of site that certainly deserves the attention drawn by sites like the Humanyun's tomb in New Delhi.

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REFERENCES & NOTES

- The Satavahanas - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satavahana_dynasty

- Jataka Tales - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jataka_tales

- Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajanta_Caves 

Revisiting the Epics

I thought I knew a thing or two about Indian epics and classics.  Over the past months, two books and a podcast have undermined this notion, and reminded me that my knowledge is, at best, narrow and woefully shallow.

The two books were - S Jaishankar's "The India Way" and Roberto Calasso's "Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India" (Translated by Tim Parks), and the podcast series, "The Vatapi Curry Point" by Krish Ashok and Anirudh Kanisetti.

Jaishankar's book is mainly about the evolving global stance of the Indian state - the way it views itself, and the rest of the world. Much of the book reads like a guide for career diplomats, but still, what is of interest in this context is Chapter 3, titled "Krishna's Choice". In this he lays out observations on India as a civilisational entity trying to fit itself into a narrower idea of a nation state, a concept born from the Peace of Westphalia - 'an international society of sovereign state entities possessing the monopoly of force within their mutually recognised territories'.

He begins with a quote (or admonition!) from Goethe -  "A nation that doesn't honour its past has no future", and discusses the importance of dissimulation in statecraft. While most of us may be familiar with Kautilya's 'Sama, Dana, Danda, Bheda' (alliance, compensation, force and trickery), as ways of approaching political challenges, the role of specific characters in the Mahabharata was something I did not know.

Take for instance, the role of Susarma. He was the chief of the Trigarta warriors from a kingdom around present day Punjab:

"Traditional allies of the Kurus, they conceived a special enmity towards Arjuna, who defeated them while preparing the ground for Yudhistira's coronation ceremony....their single-minded hostility proved very dear to the Pandavas. Constantly pouring oil into the Kaurava fire, they collaborated in the effort to smoke the Pandavas from the Virata kingdom during their period of exile...their challenge to Arjuna of a fight to the death diverted him away from the main battle, leading to the capture of his brother Yudhistira alive by the Kauravas...The moral here is of the danger of smaller adversaries whose single-mindedness goes to the extent of destroying themselves to inflict damage."

Obviously the reference here is to Pakistan and the state's attitude towards India. Jaishankar presents other examples as well:  Shalya, the maternal uncle of Pandavas, who is tricked by a false flag operation into committing to the Kaurava side; Krishna's brother Balarama, is genuinely neutral as he has taught warfare to both sides and opts out of the conflict by taking a long pilgrimage during the war; and Rukmi of Vidharba, another notable warrior who stays out of the war, by overestimating his own value to both sides and ends up accepted by neither.

Calasso's "Ka", on the other hand, examines the epics from a different dimension. While in Jaishankar's book we can connect to geographical locations that match places in India today, Calasso reminds us that the stars and constellations in their supra-human forms played an active role in the human drama, in this part of the world:

Daksha - "he who is skillful" - emerges from the thumb of the creator, Prajapati / Brahma's right hand. Over time, he becomes a king and weds Prasuti, and the couple have a whole bandwagon of daughters. 27 of these daughters marry Soma, the moon god, who places them in the heavens as dancing troop of 27 Nakshatras/stars. The most headstrong of his daughters is Sati who insists of marrying Shiva, the most reclusive and fiery-tempered of all gods; the one who traps the whole Milky Way (Akashaganga) in his tresses and brings it down to earth as the river Ganga!

The last one, a podcast, is delightfully irreverent. It is a freewheeling discussion on history, food, and science between two authors and social-media-stars, Krish Ashok and Anirudh Kanisetti on Instagram. It pokes fun at the prevailing dogmas, ridicules folks set on creating communal divisions while also asking interesting questions. 

Here is one: What is the similarity between Arjuna and Maradonna?

This question zapped me out for a while. How can there be anything in common between a hero of the epic Mahabharata and a modern football icon? Turns out that just like the tenuous but intriguing linkages brought out in the BBC series Connections 2 & 3,  the connection here too lies in something unexpected -  the metal Silver.

According to Krish Ashok, the Sanskrit name Arjuna is based on the Indo-European word for silver - "Argentum".  Arjuna - Argentum - Argentina - Maradonna!

There is certainly a lot more to the epics than meets the eye :)

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REFERENCES & LINKS

- Jaishankar, S (2021): The India Way

- Calasso, Roberto (): Ka - Stories of the Mind and Gods of India

- Vatapi Curry - Insta - https://www.instagram.com/_masalalab/?hl=en

Vatapi Ganapati

 

"Vatapi Ganapati" is a much loved composition in Carnatic Music, one of the two branches of classical music in India. Composed by the great poet-composer Mutthuswami Dixitar (1775-1885), it is a hymn praising a specific idol of Ganapati,  worshipped in a small shrine in Tiruchenkattankudi Utrapatishwaraswamy Temple, in Thiruvarur district in the Tamil Nadu state of India.

The name of this place may seem long and complicated to those who are unfamiliar with South Indian languages, but so is the distance covered by this Ganapati. Vatapi (present day Badami), is a place located about 1000 km away from this coastal town. According to the g-maps, it would take a brisk walker about 190 hours or a week to cover this distance. 

How did a temple idol get its name from a place so far away? 

Anirudh Kanisetti's answers this question (and many others) through his fascinating new book titled, "Lords of the Deccan". For the vast majority of us who had been brought up on passing references in our history books to this part of this country, Kanisetti's book is a revelation, an eye-opener to the array of kingdoms that had ruled this vast area in central India from 500 to 1200 CE. 

Is is the story of the powerful dynasties that ruled this part of the country before the Islamic invasions - the Chalukyas, Pallavas, Rashtrskutas, and the Cholas. It is also a rather sad commentary on the shortage of written records that tells us about the life and times of those who built some of the massive temples of South India. Among these is the Kailashnatha temple at Ellora that was 'built' top-down by cutting through solid rock on a cliffside, after carefully chipping away more than 200,000 tonnes of granite stone!

Coming back to the story of Vatapi Ganapathi, it turns out that this idol was actually war booty that was brought here more than 1300 years earlier by the Pallava kings of Kanchipuram.  Tiruchenkattankudi was the birthplace of Paranjothi, the commander-in-chief of the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I (reign: 630–668 CE). 

Contrary to the Hindutva tropes about Hindu temples getting destroyed by exclusively by Muslim invaders, it is interesting to know that ever since temple building became a popular symbol of power projection after 500 CE, it was fairly common for Hindu kings to loot and destroy the temples of their rivals. 

Some other nuggets are even more surprising, such as the extent to which foreigners, especially West Asians, were welcomed by the kingdoms of ancient India. Muslim Persians and Arabs, as well as Zoroashtrians, Jews and Christians of diverse ethnicities, had not only settled in large numbers in the port cities but also rose to high positions in the civil and military hierarchies:

One fascinating example is a Persian Muslim known to us a Madhumati, son of Sahiyarahara (a Sanskritised version of Muhammad, son of Shahryar). In the tenth century, Madhumati was appointed the Rashtrakuta governor of the entire region of Sanjan, including much of northern Konkan.

Long before "Globalisation" became a buzzword, the Rashtrakutas, Pallavas and Cholas were already convinced of the strategic, political and economic benefits of encouraging meritocracies that were multi-ethnic, multilingual and cosmopolitan!

Thucydides in Ukraine

 

It seems nobody actually thought the cornered bear would attack, but last week, it did.

Perhaps it was assumed that all the snarling and swiping was nothing more than political and military posturing, that the 200,000 troops amassed by Russia along Ukraine's borders would just complete their 'exercises' and go home...but nothing of that sort happened. Instead, what we have now is a full blown war - an invasion that has already turned a million people into refugees, thousands have been killed, buildings blown to bits, and countries struggling to prevent a nuclear war.

These developments have also been a revelation, and an unravelling of myths, at many levels. 

First of all there is this myth about "rules based global order". When a big country invades a smaller, weaker country, the only rule that works is the Thucydides dictum - "The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must". When USA invades other countries - Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan - it is packaged as a noble venture, to promote democracy, to usher in a free market economy,  as a saviour to the uncivilised, and so on. Turns out that this is a game other bullies can play as well.

Then there is this myth of "free speech". The Western media seems to have convinced itself that they alone know the difference between propaganda and news. BBC, CNN, and DW can barely hide their glee when news channels from other other side of the fence are banned or expelled. 

'Experts' from the western media hold forth on why blonde fair-skinned European deserve to be treated more humanely than the hapless people fleeing wars - initiated by their own governments -  in Africa and Asia. The levels of hypocrisy and racism has been just breathtaking!

It was also amazing to learn that over 20,000 students were trapped in the war-zone. While the government has managed to evacuate most of them, a few hundred still remain trapped in the war-zone. It seems a vast majority of them were studying medicine, revealing shortcomings in our own education system which seems to be better equipped at churning out engineers.

Then there is geography. Until last week I was aware of only a few cities - Kiev from Odgen Nash's famous poem - "The Muddlehead" from Petushkee, Odessa from Alister Maclain's files and novels, and, of course Chernobyl. The humanitarian crisis currently unfolding has made us aware of places far away, on the frozen steppes of Eurasia - Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Mariupol, Kheson...

As the father of political realism, Thycydides may have been right about the fact that relations between countries are dictated by just two factors - fear and self-interest. It seems not much has changed since 450 BCE.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/27/western-media-coverage-ukraine-russia-invasion-criticism

* https://www.wionews.com/world/ukraines-refugee-crisis-exposes-western-medias-hypocrisy-457831 

* Perhaps the clearest articulation of India's position - DBV Varma - "The Putin Pushback"

Nutmeg & Mace

 

On the banks of Manimala river in Tiruvalla, Kerala, there is a place called Thottabhagom. Perhaps the area gets it name (~ 'garden areas') from its exceptionally fertile soil, enriched by the occasional flooding of the river. 

One of the common trees on these fertile river banks is the Jathi-ka Maram, better known as the Nutmeg tree (Myristica fragrans), the source of two important spices - Mace, and, of course, Nutmeg. During the summer months, hundreds of fruits can be found strewn under the tree, often hidden under tufts of grass and dried leaves. The ones that are found get carefully laid out on straw mats, its fleshy portions are cut away revealing a seed that looks like a piece of art, with its deep red pericarp delicately covering a large oval seed like a lace glove. 

As children we did not think much of this tree because there were others that offered instant gratification - mangos, guavas,  rose-apples, tamarind and mangosteens. It is only much later that we learnt just how much these spice seeds meant to people in far away places, of how thousands had been killed, and sold into slavery so that a few europeans could enjoy trade monopolies, and enrich their own cities.

The greed for nutmeg and mace brought the Dutch to the Banda Islands south the Malaccas in the 14th century. Here they first tried to get exclusive deals from the local traders, and when that failed, they decided to solve the problem with their won version of the "final solution" - by exterminating the entire population of these two islands. Then for about a century they ensured that all the nutmeg trees were uprooted and destroyed on the nearby islands. This ensured that they could enjoy profits of over 400 percent of the investments for each voyage.

This story, and its wider ecological and economic impact has been brought out in the latest book written by Amitav Ghosh - "The Nutmeg's Curse - Parables for a Planet in Crisis". As with Ghosh's earlier books this too weaves a narrative based on extensive research of the origins of global trade in these spices, the depredations of the colonial period, of how it shaped capitalism as we know it today which sees the earth as a resource to be exploited at will.

The fruit itself becomes a metaphor for the larger picture - 

...Taking the nutmeg out of its fruit is like unearthing a tiny planet...Like  a planet, the nutmeg is encased within a series of expanding spheres. There is, first of all, the fruit's matt-brown skin, a kind of exosphere. Then there is the pale, perfumed flesh, growing denser towards the core, like a planet's outer atmosphere. And when all the flesh is stripped away, you have in your hand a ball wrapped in what could be a stratosphere of fiery, crimson clouds..."

One question that this books leaves unanswered is on the Dutch monopoly. For a tree that grew widely in South India, with records in the Sanskrit texts going back at least to the 6th century, how could the Dutch establish a monopoly in the first place?  

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* https://penguin.co.in/book/the-nutmegs-curse/

* https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/food/the-wonders-of-nutmeg-fruit/article19369859.ece

* WebMD - https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-788/nutmeg-and-mace

Orion and Friends

It's 5:30AM and there is a nip in the air. You look out from the balcony and your gaze moves up from the empty roads, the streetlights, over the tree-tops, to one single bright star in the sky.

Which one is it? you wonder..

As your eyes get accustomed to the darkness, other less bright stars peek out through the haze, and a familiar pattern emerges - the three stars that make the belt, two for the dagger, another two pairs each for the shoulders and limbs... and Orion the Hunter emerges in all its glory. Then again on either side of the hunter two more bright stars - Aldebaran and Sirius marking the positions staked by the constellations Taurus and Canis Major.

We are now the Navaratri festival season, a period of nine nights when the moon transforms from a thin sliver barely visible in evening sky, to a bright autumn full-moon marking, not only two of the most important festivals in India, Dussehra and Diwali, but also the onset of winter.

I often wonder - why are our night skies filled with stellar patterns that carry mostly Latin names, with a few Arabic ones thrown in for variety? What did the ancients in India, South America or Australia make of these patterns in the night sky?

As Raj Vedam explains so well in his videos, ancient astronomers in India looked at the skies in a very different way, with oral traditions that record and mark the changing positions of the moon, planets and stars with almost obsessive detail. So much so that with modern software simulations it is possible to triangulate the time-period of certain historical events that could only have happened thousands of years ago. 

The Ecliptic, or the path taken by the sun to traverse the sky, is one of the key reference points. They observed that - "The moon appears on the eastern horizon at a different time every day, offset by about 48 minutes, agains a different backdrop of stars." Also, it was noticed that it takes 28 days for the moon to return to the same backdrop of stars. From this emerged a system based on Nakshatras and Raashis.

Nakshatra refers to the principal or brightest star in each segment of the night sky, formed by dividing the ecliptic into 27 segments of 13.33 degrees (13.3 * 27 = 360). As a mnemonic to remember the right sequence these stars were woven into mythology to represent 27 wives of the moon.

Similarly the 12 lunar months were made by dividing the sky into 12 segments of 30 degrees each (12 * 30 = 360), represented by the constellation in which the full moon made its appearance. These were called the Raashis.

So when the full moon appeared in Chittira Nakshatra (Spica in Virgo Constellation) it could immediately be understood that in that month, the sunrise took place 180 degrees opposite in Ashvini Nakshatra (Sheratan or Beta Arietis in the Aries constellation).

What about old familiar friend Orion and his companions? For some reason it seems ancient astronomers in India were not too keen on conjuring up figures from the stellar patterns. They highlighted only three stars in the Orion and Taurus constellations:

• Nakshatra no. 4 -   Rohini (Aldebaran in Taurus constellation)
• Nakshatra no. 5 - Makaram (Mintaka or Delta Orionis in Orion constellation)
• Nakshatra no. 6 - Thiruvathira (Betelgeuse in Orion constellation)

One big surprise is that in the subsequent 13.3 degree segment they completely ignored the brightest star in the sky, Sirius and instead selected Pollux (Gemini constellation) as Nakshatra no. 7. To put this in perspective, Pollux  or Beta Geminorium is an orange giant with a magnitude (brightness) of 1.1 while Sirius (Greek for 'scorching' and also called Alpha Canis Majoris) has a magnitude of - 1.5 which is about 2.5 times brighter!

Maybe there is something more to this that I am missing, but ignoring the brightest star in the sky! - you can't be Sirius! 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Orion Constellation - ultimate guide - https://www.planetguide.net/orion-constellation/

*  https://www.astrosoftware.com/SiriusNakshatra.htm

* Inca Astronomy - https://www.peruforless.com/blog/inca-astronomy/

Across the Waters

 The Suez was in the news last month. A single, massive ship passing through the canal got blown by the winds and ended up getting wedged across the canal, blocking traffic for a week. During this period it effectively blocked the passage of about 400 ships and prevented an estimated USD 9.6 billion worth of trade!

How did we end up getting so completely dependent on the Suez and Panama canals? What is it that drives us to make bigger and bigger ships that need wider, deeper shipping docks and canals that cut across continents? The simple and obvious answer is global trade, and the economy of scales that drive it. If simple answers do not satisfy you, the book you need to read is David Abulafia's "The Boundless Sea".

This book is a serious piece of work - over 800 pages of which nearly half is references and citations! And yet, it is eminently readable, especially in the e-book format where the act of picking up a book of this size does not remind you of visits to the gym :)

The book covers a wide canvas. Starting from the oldest records of those who ventured out to explore the seas and oceans, all the way to the obsessive search for trading opportunities and power-play between countries that marks our relations with the not-so-boundless seas today.

I particularly enjoyed reading the sections on Polynesian navigators and explorers, trade during the Harappan period; the spread of Buddhism by sea; the Cholas, and the spread of Omanis deep into southern coasts of Africa. Towards the end, details of the arrival of the Europeans on the scene, and their depredations in Africa, the Americas and Asia makes for depressing reading. 

At the end one has to admit that if it were not for the bloody competition between the European powers that completely transformed the world through slave-trading and migrations, the world would have been a completely different place. 

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* 2021 Suez Obstruction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Suez_Canal_obstruction

* 

Spin and Wobble vs. Space and Time

 Today is the winter equinox - one of the few festivals days linked to the solar calendar India. In the north - especially in Punjab the day is celebrated as Lohri, a harvest festival, while in the south and east it is Makara Shankranti.  

In the zodiac, Makara (crocodile), coincides with Capricon (sea-goat), and so this day marks the farthest movement of the sun on horizon, the longest night and shortest day of the year. From here on, as the sun moves further into Makara/Capricon, the days get longer, and winter is giving way to spring.

Indian astronomy is something I always wanted to understand better. No festival or ceremony - birth, marriage, death - is complete without a precise reference to the Hindu almanac which seemed like a complicated triangulation of the position of the stars, constellations, the sun and the moon. This is also the reason why most of us celebrate two birthdays every year - the constant solar calendar date, and the luni-solar date which changes each year.

It is only recently that I came across a video that explains some of these things clearly - a lecture by Prof. Raj Vedam titled, "Indian Civilization - The Untold Story". It is a long lecture (1:37 hrs) but what fascinated me is the explanation on astro-archeology. In this the author uses references to the luni-solar dates in the ancient epics and poems to determine when these works were composed.

First a bit of background. What is the Indian astronomical model? 

The main elements of the traditional astronomy are the Nakshatras and Rashis. The night sky was divided into 13&1/3 segments (Nakshatra s) and each was named after the brightest stars in that section. The 27 Nakshatras  covers the space around earth (27 * 13 1/3 = 360 degrees).

Next this was combined with the location of the full moon. So the sky was also divided into 30 degree segments called the Rashi -(30*12 = 360).

Now consider Kalidasa's epic poem, "Meghadoota" (The Cloud Messenger) which is said to have been composed in the 4th or 5th century CE. The story refers to a time when "the rainy season (Varsha Ritu) began in Ashada Masa". This means that at this time, the full moon was above Ashadha nakshatra (~Sagittarius constellation), and from here it follows that that the sun, 360 deg opposite, was in Punarvasu nakshatra (castor-pullox of Gemini).

At present the rainy starts when the sun is in MrigaShirsha nakshatra (Orion constellation). There is only one logical way to explain this discrepancy - precession of equinox.

What exactly is precession? It is the wobble of a spinning top. As the earth spins on its axis (once every 24 hours), it also wobbles slowly, making the axis turn a full circle in 25,771 years. Thanks to this wobble our view of the stars also changes as time goes by. Today Polaris is the pole-star (Dhruva today); in 3000 BC it was Thuban, and in 14000 AD it will be Vega (Abhijit).

So, coming back to Kalidasa's poem, it is precession that explains a two nakshatra difference between the observation of the start of the rainy season. Precession of equinox happens at the rate of 960 years per nakshatra. Hence the event being described by Kalidasa happened 1920 years ago (960 * 2), around ~100 CE about 400 years before the commonly accepted date of the composition!

This makes you wonder about conventional wisdom, most of which is based on the observations of Western scholars. Which are the other dates waiting to be revised in our textbooks? 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* "Indian Civilization - The Untold Story" by Prof. Raj Vedam - https://youtu.be/RGyjvyXEKdc

* List of Nakshatras - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nakshatras

Slavery - Not So Long Ago

 I got my first introduction to the concept of Slavery a few decades ago,  from Alex Haley's book, "Roots". 

This book not only left a lasting impression about this dehumanised life of Kunta Kinte, but also a notion that slavery was something that was the white man created to obtain cheap labour for his plantations in the New World - a rather naive view in which slaves were snatched from Africa, packed like sardines into ships, and sold to sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas.

I did come across other references to slavery in the distant past. The history of Islamic invasions across the Indus River, the enslavement of 'infidels' in their thousands by the Ghaznivid and Ghorid sultanates, as a result of which an entire mountain range got the name Hindu-kush, or 'killer of Hindus', because a large number of Indian slaves had perished while being driven across the central Afghan mountains, to the slave supermarkets of Central Asia. 

That was, of course, the distant past. The most recent news of slavery came from the Middle East with reports of what ISIS or Al Qaida had been doing to the Yazidis and other ethic minorities in Iraq and Syria. Except for this aberration of sorts, my rather simplistic view has been overturned by the book - "Slavery in South Asia" by Richard Eaton and Indrani Chatterjee.

This book is a compilation of essays focusing on different parts of India across the ages.  It now turns out that far from being a rarity, slavery has always been an integral part of empire building in India. 

If the ISIS enslavement of Yazidi women is shocking, you should read about what the Cholas did with captured women for centuries. They developed military slavery to such an institution that captured women were systematically organised into "Velam s", to serve as breeding machines for future soldiers. A practice that has been meticulously recorded in temple inscriptions both by the victors and the vanquished - especially the Pandas and Chalukyas.

Another surprise was the extent to which foreign slaves were brought into India. Mongol invasions (starting 1222 CE) had destroyed the social and economic fabric of the area around the Caspian Sea, and children were being traded for a pittance. So Central Asian raiders to India had entire battalions made of such slaves, and trusted them more than their own sons. Some of these slave-boys went on to become Sultans themselves, starting with Qutub-al-Din Aybak, Iltutmish and Balban, all of whom were slaves of Turkish origin.

Religious sanction, of course, provided just the impetus for a practice that would surely have been hard to accept morally. The Koran was - and is - quite unambiguous - 

"When ye encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads, until ye have made a great slaughter among them; and bind them in bonds; ad wither give them a free discussion afterwards, or extract a ransom; until the war shall have laid down its arms. -- Sura 47:4-5 in The Koran

"Tarikh-i-Firuzshahi" gives the standard value of a 'working girl' as fixed between 5 and 12 tankas, a singing girl between 20-40 tankas...a handsome slave-boy between 20-30 tankas, a working man between 10-15 while "ill-favoured" boys were priced at 7-8 tankas.

Alauddin Khilji had a slave general with a name that combined his price-tag - Malik Kafur Hazar Dinari. He had been captured during a raid into Gujarat and went on to become an army commander who not only stopped the Mongol invasions in the early 1300s but also plundered the kingdoms of deep south - the Kakatiyas, Hoysalas and Pandyas.

Each time there was a successful raid into India, so many people were enslaved and taken away that prices nosedived, and the slave markets collapsed. Ibn Battuta was quite pleased at the bargain rates for which he got slave boys and girls in Delhi; All the Mughals traded Indian slaves for horses from Uzbekistan; Nadir Shah took so many slaves and wealth back to Persia that he did have to tax his countrymen for a few years.

Then we have the amazing Ethiopian slaves, purchased from African kings and Arabs in exchange for Indian textiles. These "Habshis" and "Sidis" formed military backbone of the Deccan Sultanates. So much so that one of them - Malik Ambar - became the de facto king of Ahmednagar and employed among his many Maratha commanders, the father of a boy who was to become Chattrapati Shivaji!

Did the practice of slavery end after the British took over India? Not quite. A British monarch himself requisitioned for "two pairs of slave dwarfs" from India for his entertainment. In the North East of India the practice of slavery continued to the basis for recruiting soldiers into the British Indian Army. 

During the 1800s, more than four rounds of severe famines had ensured that thousands of men, women and children were forced to become slaves under the "Chawmman" system wherein they owed their chiefs for payments for board, or price of food. So when the British wanted cannon-fodder for the trench-wars in Europe, these men were readily signed up by their village chiefs. 

It was only after the First World War that the 1919 Convention of Saint Germain-en-Laye affirmed international desire to secure complete suppression of slavery. This was lated taken affirmed by the League of Nations and then, the United Nations.

This book is a sobering reminder that the dreadful past is a lot more recent that we imagine.

Alwar and Sariska

This was a New Year trip to remember.

Our road trip to Alwar and the Sariska Tiger Reserve was just meant to be a break - from the dreariness of Covid Lockdowns and the usual overcast gloominess of peak-winter in Delhi. The expectations were rather low - we had not spotted a tiger during our trip to Ranthambore, so in our calculus, Sariska, with less than half the number, did not stand much of a chance. I had not heard much about sightseeing in Alwar, and the hotel too did not seem remarkable.

As a fallback option, I had armed myself with a nice fat book to cope with the anticipated ennui - "Slavery and South Asian History", a compilation of essays by Indrani Chatterji and Richard M. Eaton.

Four days later I am looking back with wonder and amazement over the fact that Alwar does not attract even a fraction of the tourist traffic that throngs the so -called Golden Triangle of Delhi-Jaipur-Agra.

It is a lovely getaway. Alwar is a plain little town that hides its treasures very well, and Sariska Tiger Reserve has the feel of a Jurassic Park biding its time, waiting for the world to wake up to its potential.

We started out road trip on 30 Dec., 2020, half expecting the roads to be blocked by agitating farmers. The journey was smooth - except for the switchover from National Highway 8 to the State Highway. The junction at Bhiwadi is a pot-holed mess and for a few dozen kilometres the SH has a nasty collection of unmarked speed-breakers. Once you get past these, the driving is smooth as can be.

Hotel Alwar Bagh Aamod is about midway between Alwar and Sariska. It covers a large area alongside the Aravali hills, with lawns, orchards and gardens. The rooms are so-so. Many of the facilities it promises on its website are not available (space observatory, table-tennis), while some of the 'sports facilities' are downright pathetic - especially indoor games like snookers, darts and carroms. The hotel blames this on cutbacks linked to the the C19 lockdowns. However, it does have a bunch of really helpful and proactive staff. The obstacle course is particularly good, and is staffed by an able Lucky-ji. They also offer a decent buffet spread for breakfast and dinner as a part of the package.

The drive from Aamod to Sariska is quite interesting. The gentle Aravali hills seem to grow higher and broader, you drive past an unmarked fort surrounded by jagged rock formations, past the buffer area of the park until you reach the main entrance which seems to sit at the centre of a massive U-shaped valley. 

I was surprised to learn that this park covers 881 sq.km which is more than double the size of the Ranthambore reserve. It has lovely scrub forests and valleys filled with dhok trees, plenty of deer (Sambhar, spotted and Neelgai) and birds. We hired a jeep and drove around route-2 for more than two hours, enjoying the pin-drop silence broken only by occasional animal calls, and the low rumble of the vehicle. One obvious flaw of this park is that it allows private vehicles owned by local villagers, unfettered access right through the park. No wonder the tiger population here fails to grow here -- the domestic cows and buffaloes that roam around in the park are clearly not bothered by the tigers. 

The park has a ticket counter but it is better to make online bookings at Sariska Tiger Reserve site. It is better to choose the open jeeps over the noisy canters at about INR 800 pax.

The park does gives you a sense of how this area would have looked for thousands of years. Alwar district located along one of the old trade routes to the Arabian Sea, so it is not surprising that it has a long history. During the Vedic era and the Mahabharata wars (~4000 BCE?), this area was ruled by the Matsyas. An Ashoka edict in nearby Viratnagar (Bairat) dates back to 300 BCE but  the structures that stand today are the palaces, tanks and forts built by the local Rajput clans.

Alwar's medieval palace now functions as a dreary government secretariat but three things here a strong impression -- Musi Rani ki Chattri (a mausoleum), the terraced water-tank, and the government museum. At the mausoleum a board tells you that it was built in the memory of Raja Bhaktavar Singh and his wife, Musi, who committed "sati" on his funeral pyre. 

The truth is a bit more complicated. According to the book on Slavery, Musi was actually war booty - a slave girl snatched from the Meo tribe defeated by the Rajputs. 

The museum here is a bolt out of the blue - neat, well organised with excellent displays of paintings, artefacts and weapons. Some of the collections here surpass the National Museum in New Delhi!

It would be wonderful to see the rest of the Alwar palace, and the water-tank restored to its former glory. 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

- Sariska Tiger Reserve - http://www.tourism.rajasthan.gov.in/content/rajasthan-tourism/en/tourist-destinations/sariska-tiger-reserve.html

- Dhok Trees - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/dhok-the-purple-heart-warrior-of-the-aravallis/article28295083.ece

- Rajasthan Tourism - http://rtdc.tourism.rajasthan.gov.in/

- Alwar Bagh Aamodh Hotel, Sariska - https://www.aamod.in/sariska/ -- note - photos and details here are completely out of date. 

Tsuneno's World

 

Let us be upfront about two things about this book: first, its a fine piece of work, and second, it might look like a tome but its not - nearly half the book is notes, bibliography, references and the index!

Amy Stanley's "Stranger in the Shogun's City" is a labour of love spanning nearly two decades. It is the real life story of an ordinary girl named Tsuneno, daughter of a temple priest, who gets married at 12, lives through four divorces and many journeys through Japan before landing up as an impoverished migrant worker in the capital city of Edo, now Tokyo.

The book reconstructs her life from a vast collection of letters that Tsuneno sent to her brothers back home. Letters that were preserved at Risenji, a temple in Ishigami village for nearly 200 years before finding its way to the archives section of a library in Niigata Prefecture. 

Tsuneno's lifetime (1801-1853) covers one of the biggest inflection points in East Asian history - the colonial powers, the Dutch, England, France, and Americans are carving out their colonies in Asia, and the Japanese Shogunate is waking from its slumber to see the aftermath of gunboat 'diplomacy', the Opium Wars and the humiliation heaped on China. It is also a time of terrible deprivations - especially the Tempo Famine (1833-37), a period when -

 "...it was hard to say how many died of hunger and how many died of epidemic diseases - typhus and dysentery - the ravaged the weakened population...in the northeast, half the peasants in one domain had died of some of the survivors had resorted to cannibalism. Even reliable accounts described people reduced to eating grass and straw sandals, roadways strewn with emaciated corpses, and gravediggers too weak an exhausted to continue their work".

The book brings to life many familiar places in Tokyo - Chiyoda, Kanda, Tsukiji, Ginza - areas that are now teeming with skyscrapers, clean roads and manicured gardens. It is good to be reminded of the millions of hapless migrants like Tsuneno who did their bit to raise a grand city from dirt and squalor.

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* Stanley, Amy (2020): STRANGER IN THE SHOGUN'S CITY - A Japanese Woman and Her World, Scribner 2020

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/