Shunya's Notes

“Indian Civilization is an Idea But Also an Enigma”: Karan Thapar interviews Namit Arora

I was honored and delighted to receive an invitation from Karan Thapar himself, one of the sharpest and most incisive and intellectually astute interviewers in India today. He wanted to discuss the web series Indians on his show. But I’m also media-shy, and right after saying yes, I grew anxious about the interview. Well, I think it turned out alright. :) Thapar asked about 15 questions and masterfully summarized at several places what I’d said in long-winded ways, illustrating once again the basis for his high reputation and numerous awards. See for yourself! 

Exploring India's Past: From Al-Beruni to Marco Polo and Ibn-Battuta

I was recently invited to participate in a forum called The Black Hole, an "educational and intellectual space" in Islamabad whose goal is to further science, art, and culture in Pakistan. It is run by Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist, author, and secularist known for his vocal and courageous advocacy of scientific temper and progressive values, and who I've long admired. He invites authors and thinkers to present and interact with his live audience.

I was delighted by the invitation and overcame my enormous media-shyness to join this event. The session, held on 24 March, began with an introduction by Pervez Hoodbhoy, followed by a screening of Episode 7 of Indians (Alberuni and Marco Polo in India) and a Q&A interaction in Urdu/Hindi/English that lasted over an hour.

What Can I Do About Climate Change?

This is the last article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Aravali Biodiversity Park in Gurgaon, Haryana, was a quarry site that’s been rewilded with native species and opened for use as a public park. It’s a remarkable example of how a group of ordinary citizens came together to protect biodiversity and wild heritage for public benefit. Photo: Vijay Dhasmana via Ecological Restoration Alliance

In this series of articles, I aimed to provide some context around our environmental predicament, including climate change. I discussed its multilayered complexities, how we got here, and where hope for the future of humankind may be found. In this final article, I’ll consider the next hardest question I’m frequently asked: What can I do about climate change?

It’s a pressing question. The role of the individual within larger systemic changes is difficult to map, but clearly most vital. For though we are in so many ways enmeshed and often powerless, still the totality of our enmeshed, individual actions is what makes our world. Nor can our answers today, arrived at within our current social and material frameworks, be complete; they can only be steps, taking us into a future of inevitable discontinuities: unexpected, abrupt, and snowballing social and material changes stretching through our lifetimes and for generations beyond. We already live in a climatically different world than the one that shaped human evolution and all of human history—the world to which we are best adapted—and more extreme changes are inevitable. For both the Earth-system and its subordinate human system have a momentum that carries us along and is difficult to turn.

So rather than imagine that any individual can do something to slow down climate change and other ecocide, it seems most useful to first orient ourselves toward a broadly conceived vision of a more equitable and less consumerist world. We might then try to align our actions with helping to create that world in place of this one, piece by piece, even as conditions change significantly along the way—new problems, new possibilities opening before us, new conflicts and catastrophes, new understandings that change our older ones.

The one lesson I feel sure about is that any helpful response cannot entail promoting the further expansion of the human enterprise. It will not be found in the direction of using more energy and creating additional layers of technological or social complexity devised to maintain the course of our present civilization. Rather we must look toward disentangling ourselves from them, thread by thread. Any genuinely hopeful response can only be found in embracing greater simplification. In our civilization. In our lifestyles. It must lead toward a reduction of the overall human ecological footprint in the most equitable manner. And the most effective and equitable long-term responses will ultimately be the highly localized ones: locally conceived and built to answer local needs and issues, endeavours that deliver both their benefits and attendant costs to the same community.

Is There Hope?

This is the eleventh article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

‘The Eye of the Storm’. Credit: OrganikArts

In the face of climate change, people often ask me if I have any hope for the future. For it seems a bleak prospect to contemplate the fundamental unsustainability of industrial civilization, as I’ve done throughout this series. It is, after all, the only way most of us know how to live. But without a shared context for what futures we understand to be possible or desirable, I find hope a slippery topic. It matters very much what we hope for.

Many of us simply ‘hope’ our world will carry on as it has been, while governments and corporations control global warming with technical fixes. But this attachment to a desired outcome without evidence that it’s possible is blind faith, not hope. Indeed much of what gets called hope today actually includes beliefs held contrary to evidence. These are fantasies or delusions, wishful thinking or willful ignorance. All such false hopes are dangerous. They lull us into inaction. They guide us down wrong paths.

But real hope is essential for human thriving. And real hope is built upon the possible. It’s arrived at by facing hard truths, understanding what the challenges truly are, and contemplating the difficult tradeoffs. It isn’t passive; it arises through engagement.

As I’ve shown in this series, to significantly slow the rate of anthropogenic climate change and its underlying cause of ecological overshoot requires us to radically staunch emissions from combustible fossils while also broadly promoting global ecological integrity, including rebuilding fluidly equitable human societies within the dynamic web of life. This unavoidably entails commensurately radical and rapid changes to our global economy and sociopolitical systems. But whether and how these might occur or be achieved remain open questions. Nor are the answers limited to matters of global cooperation through officialdom. Revolutionary reforms centered on our relationships with the Earth and each other will not be technocratically mandated from the top down. Given all this, it seems clear that hope must find purchase not in fantasies of continuing the present patterns of civilization, but in departures from the world we’ve known.

Fossil Fuels and Modern Myths

This is the tenth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

As heterodox economist Steve Keen likes to point out: Technology without energy is a sculpture. A city without energy is a museum. And labour without energy is a corpse.

That’s a vivid summation of the fact that there is no economy without work, and there is no work without the flow of energy. But we do not create energy. We can only take existing energy and change its form, converting heat energy into motion or motion into electricity, for instance. And as energy flows through the processes of doing work, converting from one form to another, some of it is lost at every step, irreversibly depleted as waste heat that can’t be recovered to perform work, including to support life. These rules governing energy flows of course also apply to the human economy.

Yet our presently dominant mythological universe—which guides policy today no less than the ancient Sumerian belief system guided theirs—doesn’t accept these kinds of empirical constraints. It teaches instead that different forms of energy and materials are perfectly substitutable and able to sustain energy use and economic growth without limits. Its stories dismiss the diminishment of the living world and dismemberment of its essential geochemical cycles as though they’re neutral to the flows of energy and materials that comprise the global economy. It even posits that technology can substantially ‘decouple’ economic growth from consumption and its associated pollution.

Our modern stories substitute money for energy and materials, and then reify money as a thing in itself. Disregarding physics and ecology, they foreground the finances that represent the flows of capital in the world. But the finances aren’t real, in that they don’t account for the true biophysical cycles and interrelationships constraining the larger system which provides all that capital. Finances float above the world, when reality is enmeshed within the world; they constitute merely a selectively descriptive artifice, an opaque bubble of reasoning that ultimately obstructs our view of what’s actually happening in the larger, biophysical world of which we’re an inseparable part.

This modern story-verse lets us imagine that we can get more out of a system than what goes into it. We call this magic profit. But it is a trick of accounting. For gains at the center of our finite system are actually losses from its peripheries; whatever we take as profit is ultimately felt as a loss to someone or something else. In the present world, that loss usually cuts most deeply into the non-human biosphere as well as the most vulnerable members of global society. Of course, our mythology simply labels losses to the biosphere or the exploitable classes as externalities: things that don’t concern us. Yet they do concern us, for by over-extracting from them, we’re destroying the body within which we live.

Our Insatiable Quest for Fire

This is the ninth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Everyone alive today has known only a world of rapidly increasing global material wealth: More goods are more available to more people than ever before. More people are eating more food. More new things are being continuously invented. More people have access to more technology-mediated healthcare, cars, computers and phones. More roads are built, buildings raised, clothes worn, toys and gadgets and appliances used. More people are traveling farther and more often. And the global Gross Domestic Product—possibly the most revered metric in all of human history—has been going up and up and up.

Graphs of consumption or production of various commodities and goods—like sand or cement, steel or cars, houses or furniture, and a host of other things—as well as the size of the human population, emissions of industrial waste, or other metrics reflecting our use of energy and materials, nearly all indicate a strikingly similar growth pattern across time: around the 1950s, all these things began to accelerate. Geologists, anthropologists, and others call this astonishing trend the Great Acceleration. But the Industrial Revolution began two hundred years prior to this. So what was happening in the middle of the 20th Century to fuel such a rush in the consumption of energy and materials, the associated pollution of air, water, and soil, and a dramatic acceleration in the extinction of species and loss of biodiversity?

Indians | Ep 10: The Faiths of Varanasi | A Brief History of a Civilization

Varanasi, or Banaras, is among the world's oldest living cities. Its archaeological finds go back to the 9th century BCE. Emerging in history as Kashi, Varanasi became an early centre of learning. The Buddha preached his first sermon here, which effectively launched Buddhism. The city has an impressive history of religious pluralism and still hosts Brahminical Hinduism, various major and minor faiths and sects of old India, shrines to sundry matas and folk gods, and many flavours of Islam: Shia, Sunni, Sufi, Ahmadiyya. Located on the left bank of the Ganga, it’s the city of Shiva, of seekers and pilgrims, Pirs and Aghoris, death and instant moksha. Muslims form 30% of its people and most of its weaving industry; their Hindu ancestors made Varanasi famous for textiles even in ancient times.

Foreigners like Xuanzang, Alberuni and Bernier left accounts of Varanasi. How do scholars today view religious conversions and temple desecrations in the city under Muslim rulers? In these centuries, popular religion—including Bhakti and Sufism—thrived in Varanasi with locals like Tulsidas, Kabir and Ravidas. It was Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, composed in the 1570s during Akbar’s rule, that turbo-charged Rama’s career as a god in north India. The city then also became a major centre of Indo-Persian culture, co-created by Hindus and Muslims at both elite and commoner levels. I'll close with a few words on its present.

(Bibliography & Transcript)

The Agricultural Revolution: An Alternate Telling

This is the eighth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Much as men were likely the primary hunters in foraging societies across the ages, so women were the primary ‘gatherers’ and plant specialists, providing the bulk of the food and medicine. By 21,000 BCE, those of the Levant knew well the produce of their coastal woodlands and neighboring steppelands, which stretched eastward for hundreds of kilometers. At least two common steppe grasses, wheat and barley (jau), produced tasty, nutritionally-dense seeds. Using long, thin, flint blades, they gathered these grasses by the armload. In their small encampments, they threshed out short mounds of seeds and ground these with stones.

Alongside more than a hundred varieties of other plants they gathered nearby, plus meat from hunting, this grain provided an astonishing, almost effortless surplus from their cold, arid landscape. Even with the world in the grip of extreme glaciation, it was enough for their small bands to remain stationary for most of the year—the first multi-seasonal camps we know of, anywhere in the world. But eventually the nomads moved on, leaving behind their heavy mortars to be found and reused in future years, if the grasses grew well.

Of Mice and Men, Energy and Cancer

This is the seventh article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

It takes energy to get food—whether you’re chasing it in a hunt, climbing for it in the trees, digging it out of the ground, or farming it and trucking it across the country. Most animals, of course, lack trucks or other vehicles, so whatever food they eat they must gather on foot (or fin or wing). But for an animal in balance with its healthy home environment, it will be enough. Our human ancestors also acquired enough energy and materials from gathering and hunting to reliably reproduce at a slow and steady rate, make their tools and artworks, dance and sing and play and participate in other essentials of community life.

But sometimes the landscape provides an unexpected stockpile of food, so that one need expend hardly any additional energy to gain lots more of it. When human societies—or any other living systems—gain access to such a source, they may experience this as a sudden expansion in the carrying capacity of their environment; that is, suddenly the same amount of effort returns enough energy and materials to make and support a lot more of them. We might call this a ‘cheap’ supply of energy and materials that stimulates growth.

Notice that in living systems the consumption of energy and materials are linked: if a system is able to use (consume) any new source of energy, it will do so in conjunction with an increased usage of materials, whether that material is the food itself or other materials—like firewood or coal or iron—that are acquired by expending that energy. Imagine, for instance, beavers living along a river encaged as a zoo exhibit. If zookeepers leave them extra food and let them do as they please, they will become more beavers, who will then cut down more trees—as beavers are wont to do—and then build larger dams or more dams, increasing the overall size and complexity of their beaver world along their river. It is the combination of energy and materials that a living system uses to grow in size, number, or complexity.

Indians | Ep 9: The Mughals and Bernier | A Brief History of a Civilization

The Mughal Empire was founded in 1526 by Babur, who was part of a long line of people—since at least the Indo-Aryans—to have entered and settled in the subcontinent. It grew to become the largest, most opulent empire yet in India. As with most long-lasting, multi-ethnic, and multilingual empires, most Mughal rulers too espoused pragmatic ideals, especially Akbar and Jahangir. Co-opting elites from diverse groups of Hindus into their administration, they presided over a brilliant fusion of Indo-Persian culture and syncretic creations in art, architecture, literature, music, dance, painting, cuisine, dress, crafts, and more.

In 1658, a French doctor, François Bernier, came to Delhi as a physician to Dara Shikoh, and wrote about the bloody war of royal succession and the first decade of Aurangzeb’s rule. Bernier’s insightful account describes Mughal courtly culture in Delhi, the economic condition of Indians, their science and intellectual life, and Hindu cultural and religious customs. Scholars routinely critique the Mughal Empire’s record on many fronts, but the Mughals have lately also attracted much cultural vilification, especially from Hindu nationalists. They allege that the Mughals persecuted and forcibly converted Hindus to Islam on a large scale, and indiscriminately desecrated tens of thousands of temples. Is that true? I’ll explore the evidence behind such allegations—and a lot more—in this episode.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

Modern Myths of Prehistory

This is the sixth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Anatomically modern humans—people like us—have been living on this planet for some 300 thousand years. Most of that time—over 98% of our time on Earth—all societies were nomadic, subsisting entirely on foraged, wild foods. There were no permanent buildings or roads. Every person lived in a wild landscape. That is, they didn’t live in a world primarily shaped and controlled by human desires, but rather one where humans were only one among many forces—some equal to or more powerful than themselves—all co-creating their environment.

Popular narratives that imagine those early lifeways tend to presume that our ancestors lived such materially simple lives because they were primitive brutes, simply incapable of building anything more ‘advanced’ or ‘civilized.’ Prehistoric, non-state peoples—often derided as ‘cave men’—are cast as mentally dim, miserable and hungry, impulsive and cruel in their treatment of each other. Or as Thomas Hobbes imagined it, their lives were ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ We expect they understood little and did nothing worthwhile. Since their time, we tell ourselves, humans have followed a preordained path of progress from lower to higher states of understanding and living. We’re led to presume our modern lives are so much richer and full of leisure or pleasure than theirs could possibly have been. And this leads us to presume that those beyond the reach of modernity even today are in want of our ‘civilization’ and programs for their ‘development.’

But such narratives mythologize both the past and the present in the service of rationalizing the status quo, including the present distributions of global power, wealth, and exploitation. These attitudes are the same prejudices once called White Man’s Burden, though we’ve adopted them as our own; we may now say Industrialized Man’s Burden, instead. The truth is, our ancestral cave-dwellers—and the few peoples who live beyond the reach of state power today—simply lived differently and with different expectations than we do. Yet they lived in a state of healthfulness and ease at least as satisfying to them as our own is to us—very likely more so. In modern times, we know that whenever any non-state society has been made to give up their ways of life in exchange for ‘civilization’ (not to be conflated with individual goods, which they might take and use on their own terms), they have always resisted the imposition with as much force as they could muster; this does not signal desire.

In fact, for most of our human experience, we could neither imagine nor desire any other way to live than to be forever on the move, sleeping in temporary encampments, no other food to eat than what commonly surrounded us. We had no other way to spend our time, other than traveling, adventuring, telling stories, looking after the children, fashioning tools and self-adornments, playing games, singing and dancing, discussing and arguing and sometimes fighting. We continually discovered, tested out, and prepared new foods and medicines, studied the lifecycles of the landscapes and animals and the shapes in the stars. We explored and learned about our world. We searched for meaning.

The Human Animal in the Circle of Life

This is the fifth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Basic ecology teaches us that there is no life without the flow of energy. Most of life’s energy is sourced from the sun: Sunshine falls upon the land and water, at a finite daily rate, where it’s absorbed either kinetically—as heat, driving winds and ocean currents and evaporation—or chemically, by plants whose photosynthetic powers can trap it within the chemical bonds of carbohydrates, a form of fuel that can later be burned as needed by most living cells, for growth, health, and reproduction.

Almost every living thing on the planet takes its energy from this sun-fed system, either tapping into it closer to the source, like the plants who first capture it, then the deer who eat the plants, or further from the source, like the big cats who eat the deer, or the fungi and microbes who eat all of these after they’ve lived and died. Humans eat all of these things too. After we die, we’re also eaten by the fungi and microbes; the materials that make up our bodies are returned into the soil and the air, and eventually reabsorbed by the plants. Energy and materials flow through this circle of life—really, multiple interconnected circles, or a web of life—with each species occupying its place, or niche, within the flow.

Indians | Ep 8: The Vijayanagar Empire | A Brief History of a Civilization

The Vijayanagar Empire (1336–1565) once ruled much of south India. Foreigners have left vivid accounts of its capital city, aka Vijayanagar—its grand temples, palaces, royal baths, audience halls, Islamic quarter, bazaars, military might, and cosmopolitanism. Considered the birthplace of Carnatic music, Vijayanagar also evolved syncretic forms of architecture, governance, and courtly attire. Folk tales abound of its famous king, Krishnadevaraya, and his minister, Tenali Raman, who had a clever solution to every problem. The city’s remains now lie near Hampi village, in a beautiful rocky landscape by the Tungabhadra River.

How did Vijayanagar acquire all the wealth that impressed foreign travellers? Their eyewitness accounts—and contemporary scholars—reveal much about its economy, social customs, big festivals, and the cloistered lives of its elite women. I’ll describe what’s known about its trade, taxation, governance, policing, crime and punishment. I’ll also look at Vijayanagar’s religious landscape and courtly norms, its eager embrace of Persianate culture, and its war machine and shifting military alliances in which religion mattered little. And finally, the causes of the empire’s massive defeat at the battle of Talikota. Hindu nationalists today fondly imagine Vijayanagar as a self-conscious bastion of Hinduism bravely resisting the ‘onslaught of Islam’. Is that true? As we’ll see, history is messy, and it often confounds sectarian readings of the past.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

Becoming Human: Shaped by Ice

This is the fourth article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Morteratsch Glacier, Switzerland. Photo: Daniel Schwen/CC BY-SA 2.5

Our planet has experienced great temperature fluctuations throughout its past. Even in the Pleistocene ice age, beginning about 2.5 million years ago and continuing until the present, average global temperatures have repeatedly cycled between extremes of five or six degrees. When the temperatures swung downward, glaciers engulfed large parts of Eurasia, North America, and Greenland, burying the midlatitudes, which we consider temperate today, under mountains of ice. We call those frigid periods glaciations. The air was cold and dry; subtropical deserts expanded or shifted their locale.

But when the temperatures cycled upward again, the glacial periods were broken by spells of great warmth, called interglacials. The air grew warmer and moister; deserts like the Sahara might even bloom with grasses. Forests expanded, and animals moved to higher latitudes across the continents or into higher elevations on the mountainsides. Interglacial temperatures were more like what we consider historically ‘normal.’ Yet the glaciers always came lurching back, devouring mountains and plains and rivers with their tongues of ice, continually remaking the landscape.

 In fact, for the past million years, glacial conditions have dominated the planet with each episode typically lasting around 90,000 years, while the interglacials each lasted less than 15,000 years. And all of recorded human history has occurred only during our present interglacial episode, called the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago, continuing until modern times. If humans had not so radically changed the climate, our present interglacial would also have come to an end with temperatures sliding back toward the next glacial phase, in keeping with the longstanding patterns of the Pleistocene.

This cycling of the climate through cooler-dryer and warmer-wetter millennia, the expanding and shrinking of glaciers, rising and falling of sea levels, was the world into which early humans evolved. Yet we shouldn’t presume our ancestors were miserable brutes mutely suffering these conditions; it makes no more sense to imagine they hated the ice age than to imagine that polar bears hate the Arctic today or that whales hate the sea.

The ice age shaped what we are. And in it we thrived.

Becoming Human: Forged by Fire

This is the third article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Wildfire in Bandipur National Park, 2019. Photo: NaveenNkadalaveni/CC BY-SA 4.0

Fire looms large in the ancient myths of many peoples around the world. Interestingly, most of these old stories share a common motif, in which fire was withheld from humankind—either by gods or by some other being—until humans finally acquired it only through an act of theft, violence, or other ignoble means.

In a tale from ancient Greece, the god Prometheus steals fire from his fellow gods to share it with humans; for this transgression, the other gods condemn him to endure an eternity of torture. The Polynesian demigod, Maui the trickster, ventures to the end of the world to retrieve fire from his grandmother Pele, the god of fire, by taking her burning fingernails one by one—only to churlishly extinguish each one; Pele finally grows so angry with him that she sends fire chasing after him into the human world. In one Diné (Navajo) story, the fire god hoards fire for himself, using it only to destroy things, until trickster Coyote steals some and gives it to humans. Among different Australian Aboriginal peoples, the origin of fire is placed with various animals, or sometimes human women, from whom it is forcibly taken through violence or trickery; it’s then distributed among the trees of the land, from where anyone can recover it. The ancient Vedic and Zoroastrian traditions are a bit different, but the fire god—Agni or Atar—is both devourer and protector. As the light of knowledge and acculturation, Agni too once hid from humans, before serving as an intermediary between humans and the gods of the Vedic pantheon.

Such stories from every quarter of the planet engage with the mystery and power of fire in ways that we of industrial civilization do not. They imagine fire as being of divine origin or imbued with some property fundamentally tied to our very humanity, the world we inhabit, or divinity. Without it, our human world is incomplete. Yet an ambivalence too surrounds fire, either through explicit acknowledgement of its dual nature as both benefactor and destroyer or an implicit association of it with an act of transgression or moral corruption. But we need it, the stories tell us; its power to cook food and to keep us warm enables our human existence. Our evolutionary story is, in fact, very deeply bound up with fire. And though no living society can possibly retain a true memory of the origins of a bond forged millions of years ago, it’s remarkable that a mythic awareness of its centrality to human societies, its powers and its dangers, remains alive among peoples who retain their cultural connection with a non-industrialized worldview.

Direct human connection to fire began as global temperatures were dropping into the Pleistocene ice age. Our early hominid ancestors in Africa had left the forest canopies, where they’d enjoyed a diet of raw leaves and fruit, seeds and insects, to explore new ways of life on the expanding open savannas. Their grassland lifestyles favored evolution toward bipedalism, along with dextrous minds and hands able to sharpen rocks into cutting implements. They must have learned they could glean good food from the charred leavings of forest fires. This accidental cooking rendered some foods easier to eat and digest, enabling these hominids to enjoy nutritious foods they might not have eaten before, like the calorifically dense tubers and corms that grew underground. This meant their bodies could receive more nutrition from food while expending less energy in processing and digesting it, because fire effectively did some of that processing and digesting for them.

Indians | Ep 7: Alberuni and Marco Polo in India | A Brief History of a Civilization

In the early second millennium, two famous travellers visited India: Alberuni and Marco Polo, who’ve left behind vivid impressions of social life. Alberuni, a great scientist and scholar of the Persian ‘Golden Age’, was in north India between 1017–30, when Mahmud of Ghazni was raiding temples. Led by his own curiosity, Alberuni spent thirteen years studying Indian thought and society. He learned Sanskrit, studied the works of Brahminism, and sought out learned men to clarify his doubts. In 1030, he published his magnum opus, Alberuni’s India, containing sharp insights into Brahminical religion, scriptures, caste, marital norms, festivals, inheritance, taxes, crime and punishment, etc. He also assessed the quality of the ‘Hindu sciences’. Alberuni’s portrait of India is so perceptive that he deserves to be called the ‘first Indologist’.

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant–adventurer. Returning home from China in 1292, he stopped in south India. He landed in the kingdom of the Pandyas, near modern Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. He spent a few months going around the coast, finally sailing out of Gujarat. Marco Polo was less scholarly and more gullible than Alberuni, but he still astutely recorded many practices of religion and caste, customs and professions, norms of beauty and sexuality. These travellers add colour and depth to our understanding of medieval India, with rich insights into how much has—or hasn’t—changed.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

A Planetary Perspective

This is the second article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

Ancient lava flows, part of the Deccan Traps, visible today in Panna National Park, MP. Photo credit: shunya.net.

We live on a madly unstable planet. For billions of years it has never stopped wobbling and wandering, freezing and thawing, cracking and flowing, blooming, dying, regenerating. Small changes in its chemical composition, geological cycling, orbit, or orientation in space cascade into extreme changes felt on its surface. Despite this—maybe because of it—our planet has also given birth to a complex, interwoven, and forever changing family of living beings, a rarity in the cosmos as far as we know. Understanding this bigger picture of the relationship between the planet itself and human life can help us gain some perspective on our modern predicament. So let’s begin at the beginning.

Earth was born about four and a half billion years ago, alongside several sibling planets, all of them formed from fragments of material left over after the birth of the Sun. It began as a glob of fiery, fluid rock spinning amidst other bits of ice and stone. But over the course of Earth’s first half billion years, its molten surface cooled and solidified; its dry, sulfurous skies became unending showers of acid rain; its empty basins filled with water. In these new oceans simmered a rich elemental brew of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous, iron—to mention but a few star ingredients—absorbing heat-energy from deep-sea hydrothermal vents and joining together into chains of chemicals. These complex molecules then clustered together, generating higher order structures, eventually forming cells that ate and breathed and reproduced—living avatars of dust, born of Earth’s own dynamically interconnected biological, geological, and chemical processes, or biogeochemistry.

While these earliest lifeforms were coming into being, Earth’s surface was still being relentlessly pummeled by meteors, some of them the size of mountains. Great impacts injected new material into our planet, cracking and reshaping its biogeochemistry. In this environment, about 3.5 billion years ago, some of those early cells evolved a new ability to convert light-energy from the sun into chemical fuel through a process, called photosynthesis, that takes carbon-dioxide from the air and emits oxygen as metabolic waste. By two billion years ago, the buildup of oxygen was turning Earth’s skies blue above its oceans of rust-red. Many forms of life in that nascent biosphere were poisoned by this atmospheric oxygen and went extinct.

But life itself was not defeated. The cells that did survive continued to diversify into myriad new forms that could withstand and even make use of this corrosive new gas. Some of these found ways to work together, joining into multicellular lifeforms, mixing genes through sexual reproduction, eventually filling the oceans with early forms of fungi, plants, and animals by around one billion years ago. These creatures grew and died, burrowed and crawled, built residual structures, stirred sediments, altered rocks and seabeds in ways that further changed Earth’s biogeochemistry. This changing geochemistry also affected the structure and motion of Earth’s crust, now sliding and tearing, bumping and churning up the landforms into barren mountains and valleys and volcanic alleys, exposing new, unweathered rock—which further changed biogeochemical systems.

At some point in the midst of this lively flourishing, the changes led to the entire planet freezing over. By around 720 million years ago, floating icebergs and islands of slush were drifting over the tropical seas of a ‘snowball Earth,’ as the planet lay cocooned within vast sheets of ice. In the stagnant, anoxic waters beneath, life barely carried on—but it did carry on. And after the ice truly loosened its grip, about 630 million years ago, the quiescent biosphere once again surged. As the seas turned bluegreen, saturated again with oxygen, undersea life burst forth in a stunningly rapid increase in biodiversity.

Earth’s Changing Climate

A large building is seen being broken and carried away by a flooding river. Photo: X/@BhavreenMK

This is the first article in a 12-part series about the Earth-system, how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it The article appeared here first, in Unraveling Climate Change, a series for The Wire.

If it seems like you’re hearing a lot more stories about heatwaves, fires, and floods than you remember hearing ten years ago, it’s not your imagination. June 2023 alone saw extreme heat break over Bihar and Uttar Pradesh that killed scores of people. Violent floods pummeled parts of north India in July and August, and Sikkim in October, drowning dozens of people, displacing untold numbers, causing landslides, destroying crops, homes, and infrastructure like roads and bridges. Parts of Delhi too were flooded as the Yamuna rose to its highest level in 45 years. And these are only a sample of stories from India.

During 2023, heatwaves killed hundreds in Mexico and the United States alone; heatwaves also struck Europe, China, Laos, and Thailand. Thousands died and hundreds of thousands were displaced by torrential flooding and wildfires in dozens of cities across the United States, Chile, Brazil, Haiti, Spain, China, Japan, South Africa, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Greece, Libya—to name a few. This is to say nothing of the extensive damage to crops from heat, flood, fire, drought, and extreme winds across the world. As has frequently happened in recent years, 2023 was again declared the hottest year ever measured across the globe. But even more than that, 2023 was likely the hottest in at least a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. Yes, the situation is that far beyond what we consider ‘normal.’

As crazy as the weather has been, we are sure to see worse in the years ahead. This is because the frequency, extent, and intensity of such severe weather is increasing due to global warming caused by the accumulation of excess greenhouse gasses (GHGs)—like carbon-dioxide and methane—that trap heat in the atmosphere. These excess GHGs result directly from industrial and other economic activities linked to burning fossil fuels and destroying forests and wetlands. The excess heat they trap is causing the ice to rapidly melt away from the Arctic Ocean and Greenland, exposing dark waters and rock surfaces that directly absorb even more solar radiation; this then drives its own contribution to further warming—and thus further melting—in what’s called an amplifying feedback loop, one of several in the climate system. Over the coming decades, the lists of nations and cities hit by floods will grow longer, the heatwave death tolls more harrowing, the crop losses much higher. This much we already know will happen, as the globe continues to warm.

Indians | Ep 6: Khajuraho and the World of Tantra | A Brief History of a Civilization

Khajuraho was the capital of the Chandelas who built 85 temples between 900–1150 CE. The 25 that survive are now famed for their fine sculpture, including graphic sex on their walls. In the late first millennium, such temples arose across India, at Badami, Mathura, Konark, etc. Who built them and why? What sort of a worldview puts explicit sex next to their gods? How did a dominant religious culture that glorified austerity, renunciation, and asceticism as the path to God, accept such sexual imagery—on temples, no less? And how did Indians of that era turn into today’s woeful prudes easily scandalised by such erotica, no hint of which appears on their modern religious monuments?

Clearly, Indian religious culture then was very different. A key difference was Tantra, whose pre-historic roots go back to non-Aryan folk traditions. Tantra revered the idea of fertility, and saw sexual love as a path to spiritual progress and liberation. Rising from below, Tantra fused with Jainism, Buddhism, the Puranic sects of Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta, and inspired sexual imagery on their monuments. The sex-positive, anti-caste, and goddess-centric folk culture of Tantra was also the soil that sustained the secular hedonism of the elites and the Kamasutra. But then came a huge conservative blowback within Hinduism that decimated Tantra. Discover the lost world of Khajuraho, the influence of Tantrism in early medieval India, and its decline.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

Indians | Ep 5: Nalanda and the Decline of Buddhism | A Brief History of a Civilization

Nalanda was a Buddhist monastery founded in the 5th century during the Gupta period (319–543 CE)—a creative age for literature, art, architecture, maths and science. Nalanda became the greatest centre of Buddhist learning in the world, lasting more than 800 years until the 13th century. It attracted student monks from across Asia, including three from China whose travel accounts contain fascinating insights into the social life of India and academic life at Nalanda in the 5–7th centuries. They describe urban life, laws, medicine, obsessions with purity and pollution, food taboos, untouchability and religious conflicts. They relate the rhythms of daily life at Nalanda, its curriculum, star teachers, academic debates, funding sources and more.

In this episode, I’ll also explore the many causes for the decline of Buddhism in India, starting in the second half of the first millennium. By the time of the Turko-Persian invasions, most Buddhist sites had already been abandoned, destroyed, or converted into Brahminical sites across much of India. Buddhist artifacts and texts were wiped out and Buddhism vanished from India's public memory. By the early colonial period, Indians had even forgotten that a man called the Buddha had existed in their past! Only in the 19th century did Indians rediscover Nalanda and their amazing Buddhist heritage through archaeology, texts that survived in foreign lands, accounts of Chinese and Tibetan monks, and other sources.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

Indians | Ep 4: The Ikshvakus of Andhra Pradesh | A Brief History of a Civilization

Archaeological sites like Keeladi have pushed back the rise of complex societies in south India to at least the 6th century BCE. In the late first millennium BCE, a ‘cultural package’ from Aryavarta began moving south. It would radically reshape the religions, languages, and social norms of south India. It brought religions like Brahminism and Buddhism, new ideas of caste endogamy and patriarchy, and cremation of the dead. A major channel for this northern cultural package was the Satavahana Empire, and a successor state, the Ikshvaku Kingdom. Their elites, from the tribe of Andhras, had earlier become culturally Aryanized.

The Ikshvaku Kingdom thrived from c. 220–320 CE. The sprawling remains of its capital city, Vijayapuri, and its monuments, were discovered only in 1920. This kingdom supported multiple religions, traded with Rome, and built the only amphitheatre found in ancient India. It hosted Nagarjuna, also known as ‘the second Buddha’, and founder of Madhyamaka, or the influential Middle Path school of Mahayana Buddhism. Curiously, Vijayapuri’s elite religiosity had a gendered bias—its kings mostly patronized Brahminism and sold themselves as descendants of Rama, while its queens and other wealthy women mostly patronized Buddhism and actively shaped its evolution. In this episode, I’ll also examine the changing religious landscape of India and the strategies used by Brahminism and Buddhism to win new patrons and followers.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

Indians | Ep 3: The Mauryans and Megasthenes | A Brief History of a Civilization

In 327 BCE, the Greek warrior Alexander of Macedon invaded the Punjab. He was forced to turn back after his army suffered heavy losses in fighting Porus. Soon after, the Greek-ruled Seleucid Empire arose west of the Punjab, and the Mauryan Empire to its east, with its capital in Pataliputra. This produced a freer flow of ideas between India and Greece, as in science, art, and philosophy—and a fascinating account of India by Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Mauryan court. Megasthenes described the huge city of Pataliputra, its wooden homes, walls, and watchtowers; its bureaucracy, taxation and laws; its giant army; urban lifestyles, elite fashions and social norms. He noticed the emergence of endogamy and early castes in the Aryanized groups around him, and he saw Brahminism as more patriarchal than Buddhism.

Two generations later came Ashoka who presided over an expanding agricultural state, often at the expense of the forest peoples. Still, his public embrace of non-violence in midlife was significant and likely unique among the world’s emperors. He converted to Buddhism and sent missions to spread it far and wide. His public edicts can be seen as the earliest expressions of Indian secularism, in which the state attempts to fairly patronize all major religions. From the Mauryan period, we get monumental stone art and stunning sculpture, such as of Sanchi and Bharhut stupas, some with clear continuities with pre-Aryan forms and aesthetics.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

Indians | Ep 2: The Aryans and the Vedic Age | A Brief History of a Civilization

After the decline of the Harappan Civilization, waves of Aryan migrants arrived from Central Asia between 2000–1500 BCE. A nomadic-pastoralist people of lighter skin, the Aryans were culturally different from the Subcontinent’s settled farmers and forest tribes of darker skin. They brought along an early Sanskrit, proto-Vedas, Vedic gods, a priestly class fond of fire rituals and oral chants, new social and gender hierarchies, the horse and the chariot. Mixing with the locals forged a lighter-skinned elite that spoke Indo-European languages, or Prakrits. In the centuries ahead, larger political units led by tribal chiefs emerged in north India. War among Aryanized tribes like the Bharatas and Purus became common. From this substrate and its social conflicts came the early stories of the Mahabharata, c. 1000 BCE. Indo-Aryan culture and languages became dominant in Aryavarta, whose cultural and material qualities I'll explore in this episode.

More than a thousand years after the Harappans, the next cities arose in the Gangetic Plain in mid-first millennium BCE. New states with money economies even flirted with democratic ideas. New hybrid cultures arose from the mixing of Indo-Aryans, post-Harappans, and ethnic groups whose ancestors had come to India much earlier. They forged new trades, lifestyles, and a thriving marketplace of spiritual and religious ideas. This prolific age—of the early Upanishads, the Buddha, Mahavira, Carvaka, Panini—would profoundly shape later Indians.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire)

Indians | Ep 1: The Harappans | A Brief History of a Civilization

The ruins of the Harappan (aka Indus Valley) Civilization were unearthed a mere hundred years ago. And what a discovery it was! It greatly expanded India's civilizational past. The Harappans built the first cities in the Indian Subcontinent and a material culture that included advanced urban design, city-wide sanitation, and the first indoor toilets in the world. In this episode, I'll explore its mature period, 2600–1900 BCE, at sites across western India and Pakistan. I'll compare it with other Bronze Age civilizations, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and consider what distinguishes the Harappans from others—such as a much flatter social class hierarchy, and no clear evidence of temples, priests, big statues, palaces, weapons of war, or standing armies.

I'll look at Harappan lifestyles and the stories that emerge from surviving artifacts: pottery, seals, figurines, toys, jewellery, sartorial fashions, social organization, dietary norms. I’ll discuss their metallurgy, tools, textiles, ships, trade, and burial customs. Their monumental work was the city itself, a marvel of engineering. In the excavated city of Dholavira in Gujarat, I’ll wander its streets and homes laid out on a grid-like plan. I'll look at their achievements in water harvesting, storage, and drainage systems, as well as what may be the first stadium anywhere in the world! I'll consider the languages the Harappans likely spoke, their undeciphered script, theories about their demise, and how their legacy still shapes us today.

(Bibliography & Transcript;  On The Wire) 

The Overshoot Story

[This article first appeared in the Caravan magazine, June 1, 2023.]

India’s approach to global warming cannot mirror the West

THE GODAVARI RIVER wends its lazy way between the Papikondalu Hills of the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh. Bright jungle spills down the steep hillsides, reflected in the broad, slow bends of the magnificent river. On the December day I visited, a pall of pollution damped the view. The flanks of the hills were dotted with small villages, but nearly all of them were ghost towns—empty, voided spaces where not a child played, not a dog snoozed, not a cow grazed. These were the remains of a few of the over two hundred and fifty villages that will be flooded¹ when the Polavaram dam is finished, not far downriver, creating a vast reservoir that will drown this spectacular landscape.

At the site of the Polavaram project, where the dam is currently under construction, dozens of gargantuan steel cylinders towered above the dusty road, awaiting their placement in what will become one of Asia’s largest hydroelectric dams. Dams are not only disastrous for the people who must leave their villages but are environmentally calamitous as well, destroying wetlands, inundating ecosystems, disrupting the natural flows of silt and nutrients and the migrations of riverine creatures. They affect the livelihoods of people living downriver, too, as conditions for fishing and farming change around them. For towns and farms above the dam, the reservoir may provide a source of water more reliable than the changing monsoons. Yet, having directly displaced around a hundred thousand families² from relatively poor and marginalised rural communities, the power generated by the dam will primarily serve a different set of people: those who can most afford to pay for it. Much of what we call “development” across the globe has followed this modus operandi for centuries, dismantling the systems of the non-human world in service to “economic growth,” while doling out the costs and benefits unevenly among people.

This hints at the shape of things to come.