Category: Books & Authors
-
The Wonder That Was India
Condensed versions of this review have appeared in The Pioneer, July 2006, Culture Wars, August 2006, and Desi Journal, Sep 2006.
An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
by Pankaj Mishra. Picador, 422 pp., INR 2751.
-
A Prologue To The Promised Land
Who Are the Jews of India? by Nathan Katz
Of all the Jewish communities in the Diaspora, the Indian Jews were among the oldest and perhaps the most interesting. They adjusted without assimilating within the larger culture and were not persecuted in any way by the majority Hindu community. Nathan Katz’s book, “Who Are the Jews of India?” is an in-depth account of the history of Indian Jews. For those who are interested in learning about this once tiny (now fast disappearing) but influential community, Katz’s book will be a rich source of information. Attractive black and white photographs accompany the text.Within a year of each other, India gained independence from Britain and Israel was established as a Jewish state. After these two events, the majority of Indian Jews left for Israel, UK, Australia and other places. Despite the presence of some prominent Jews on the Indian cultural scene of my youth (poet Nissim Ezekiel, actors David Abraham and Nadira, cartoonist Abu Abraham) and a Jewish distant cousin in my family, I never paid much attention to the history and heritage of Indian Jews until much later. Actually, not until I became acquainted with Jews in America.
-
Wise Man Socrates
Socrates, like Jesus and the Buddha, never committed his ideas to writing.* Our main sources on him are Plato, his student, and Xenophon, the historian. The picture that emerges from their accounts make him perhaps the greatest man of Classical Greece. This is by no means an original insight, but one that I was able to convince myself of many years ago.Socrates is justly famous for declaring that the unexamined life is not worth living, and for his dialectic method of inquiry, the Socratic Method. With Socrates, the central problem of (Western) philosophy shifted from cosmology to the formulation of a rule of life through understanding, to a practical use of reason. He upheld self-knowledge and the supremacy of the intellect, insisting that one must work hard to discover the right and wrong. As the Apology relates, Socrates advocated the tending of one’s soul, to make it as good as possible – and not to ruin one’s life by putting care of the body and possessions before care for the soul.**
Socrates was no retiring ascetic but an urbane intellectual of aristocratic lineage, a man of the world, famed for his practical wisdom, modesty, self-control, generosity, alertness, and integrity. “There was no complacent self-righteousness of the Pharisee nor the angry bitterness of the satirist in his attitude toward the follies or even the crimes of his fellowmen. It was his deep and lifelong conviction that the improvement not only of himself but also of his countrymen was a task laid upon him by his God, not to be executed with a scowling face and an upbraiding voice. He frequented the society of promising young men, and talked freely to politicians, poets, and artisans about their various callings, their notions of right and wrong, the matters of familiar interest to them.”**
-
The Man Who Would Be King
“To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force,…. is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe.” : Josiah Harlan, 1799-1871 – First American in Afghanistan “The Man Who Would Be King” by British writer and journalist (The Times, London) Ben Mcintyre is a historical non- fiction which reads like a work of fiction. Mcintyre’ book is the biography of the first American believed to have entered Afghanistan, where he fought wars, retraced Alexander’s footsteps in Central and South Asia and even became a “king”, under circumstances both amazing and amusing. It is widely believed that Rudyard Kipling’s famous eponymous short story (made into a film by John Huston, starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine) was based on the life of this early American adventurer.
The Man Who Would Be King is the improbable life story of American Josiah Harlan, a young Quaker from Chester County, Pennsylvania. In 1822, Harlan, an earnest young man of twenty two, robust in health and florid in his imagination, set out to seek a new life with nothing more at his disposal than a love of adventure, history (especially the exploits of Alexander the Great of Macedonia) and botany. His journey began in Philadelphia and landed him in Calcutta, India, by way of China in 1824. In India he enlisted as an assistant surgeon in the army of the East India Company (the precursor to the British Raj) although the only medical knowledge Harlan possessed came from a medical manual he read during his ocean crossing. After being injured during battle in Burma, Harlan obtained his discharge from the Company’s army and traveled to northwest India and Afghanistan, seeking to realize his fondest dream – to follow in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.
Category: Books & Authors -
The Tragedy of the Congo
Cross-posted from Neutral Observer .
The history of European colonialism is replete with examples of extreme cruelty. The decimation of the American Indians in South America and the United States is but one example. What was done to the natives of Africa is no less barbarous. The British, the French and the Germans were all guilty of slaughtering native populations. Among the less well-known examples is what the Belgians and their King did to the people who lived in the Congo river basin.
Adam Hochschild wrote a book in 1999 describing the rape of the Congo. King Leopold’s Ghost is his attempt to document the atrocities of Belgian rule over the Congo, starting from about 1875 to 1908. Among other things, the book is a remarkable account of the chicanery of Belgium’s monarch. However, its most disturbing aspects are the stark descriptions of the inhuman brutality of European rule. It is also startling in its revelation of the magnitude of the inhumanity – Hochschild estimates that nearly 10 million people died due to unnatural causes during the period ranging from the 1880s to about 1920. The Congo basically underwent a holocaust in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.
-
Identity: Donning Our Many Hats
In The Name Of Identity (Violence And The Need To Belong), a slim but ambitious book by author Amin Maalouf, may create a bit of a dilemma for a librarian attempting to categorize it. Bits of history, anthropology, religion, philosophy and politics are interwoven in Maalouf’s long essay about “identity.” His informed and open minded treatise is not hard to understand, appreciate and to agree with. What may be much more difficult is to expect to see his vision translated into reality in a world currently racked and riven by clashing “identities.” “A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous. “Identity” is one of those false friends. … It has been the fundamental question of philosophy from Socrates’ “know thyself!” through countless masters down to Freud,” begins Maalouf. Although he modestly claims to lack the ability to redefine “identity,” that is precisely what he does in this book. And he does it rather splendidly. He points out that among our many selves are those that are products of our birth and early upbringing – race, gender, ethnicity, language and religion. Other identities we acquire of our own choosing – our philosophy, politics and choice of job and home. Our identity is not just the label with which we get tagged by others but also what we ourselves want to assert or “identify” with. Moreover, identity is fluid, often determined by the time and place we are in and what our life experiences have been. Our allegiances may be the result of ambition, pride, expediency, anger, humiliation and even the desperation for survival. As I pointed out in my post on “home,” identity too is not fixed at birth but made and remade through a journey lasting a lifetime.
Maalouf, a French-Lebanese author born in Lebanon and living in France, begins with his own case. Maalouf is an Arab Christian and as such shares his ethnic / linguistic identity with several million Arabs, most of whom don’t share his religious faith. His religious identity is shared by a couple of billion Christians, the majority of whom do not speak his language. In either of the two above cases, he is a member of a large global community. But as an Arab and a Christian, he belongs to a tiny minority group anywhere in the world. Which of these groups must he pledge allegiance to? Also, where is his real home? Lebanon, where he was born or France, where he chooses to live? Do any or all of these “identities” define Maalouf fully as a human being? What about his politics, his gender, his sexual preference? Or whether he is a doctor, writer, florist or a soldier? Or even by what his tastes in food and music are or which soccer team he roots for? By the time we cover the entire intricate woven tapestry of a person’s identity, he or she may have more in common with a total stranger than can be first imagined by taking into account only the most visible or obvious facets of identity. “Six Degrees of Separation” in the current global milieu is more than a parlor game or catchy cliché.
Category: Books & Authors -
A Rare Wodehouse
In an otherwise unrelated article by Christopher Hitchens, the erstwhile brave contrarian and now a pathetic neocon prevaricator, I came across this statement:
George Galloway Is Gruesome, Not Gorgeous
By Christopher HitchensMy old friend and frequent critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft once tried to define a moment of perfect contentment and came up with the idea of opening a vintage wine while settling down to read an undiscovered work by P.G. Wodehouse. ………..
Category: Books & Authors -
Five Chinese Classics
Have you read, or heard of, the great classical Chinese novels written between 14th and 18th centuries? Still part of folk culture, they’re known to most Chinese. I learned of them and their contexts while reading The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence. Here are five of them:
Journey to the West: “China’s most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure” … published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty, when “essayists, philosophers, nature poets, landscape painters, religious theorists, historians, and medical scholars all produced a profusion of significant works, many of which are now regarded as classics of the civilization.” The novel’s hero, “a mischievous monkey with human traits … accompanies the monk-hero on his action-filled travels to India in search of Buddhist scripture.” * It’s “a first-rate adventure story, a dispenser of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory in which … pilgrims journeying toward India stands for the individual journeying toward enlightenment.” Indeed there aren’t many books in which “go west, young man” would be a call to go to India. 🙂Golden Lotus: Published anonymously in early 17th century, this is a “socially elaborate and sexually explicit tale, the central character (who draws his income both from commerce and his official connections) is analyzed through his relationships with his five consorts, each of whom speaks for a different facet of human nature.” It can be read as “allegory, as a moral fable of the way greed and selfishness destroy those with the richest opportunities for happiness; yet it also has a deeply realistic side, and illuminates the tensions and cruelties within elite Chinese family life as few other works have ever done.” *
-
Arundhati Roy on Her Money
From an interview in Tehelka, “the people’s paper” of India (Nov ’05):
Arundhati Roy: As for money, I have tried to take it lightly. Really, I have tried to give it away, but even that is a very difficult thing to do. Money is like nuclear waste. What you do with it, where you dump it, what problems it creates, what it changes, these are incredibly complicated things. And eventually, it can all blow up in your face. I’d have been happier with Less. Yeh Dil Maange Less. Less money, less fame, less pressure, more badmashi. I hate the f***ing responsibility that is sometimes forced on me. I spent my early years making decisions that would allow me to evade responsibility; and now…Tehelka: You gave your Booker money to the NBA. Your Sydney prize money to aborigine groups. Another award money you gave to 50 organisations who are doing exemplary work … You gave away your money … Very few people do that …
Category: Books & Authors -
Buggering Khushwant
Few Indian writers can match the irreverence, acerbic wit, and bawdy humor of Khushwant Singh. Here is his latest piece at 92. He is not well-known outside India but there is much more to the man than this light-hearted piece conveys. He has secured his place as a major Indian novelist, journalist, and historian of the Sikh experience. Read this article, for instance, to see another side of him. A compelling, if less upbeat, viewpoint on his legacy has been put forward by Amardeep Singh.I crave the forgiveness of my readers for writing on a subject which is taboo in genteel circles. I also apologise in advance for using words which some people may find distasteful. I wouldn’t be doing so if the end of my tale of woe was not so comic.
It all started during my recent summer vacation in Kasauli. I woke up one night with a queasy feeling in my stomach. Half asleep, I tottered to the loo to rid myself of my sleep-breaker. When I got up from the lavatory seat to flush out the contents, I was shocked to see I had passed a lot of blood with my stool. “Shit!” I said to myself, suddenly wide awake. The rest of the night was wasted in contemplation of the end. I had had a reasonable innings, close to scoring a century, so no regrets on that score. Was I creating a self-image of heroism in the face of death? That vanished on the following day as more blood flowed out of my belly.
-
Rereading Naipaul
An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul
India: A Wounded Civilization by VS Naipaul
I first read Naipaul in the mid-90s: India: A Million Mutinies, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World. They resonated with me well enough. But in the ensuing years, living in California and W. Europe, I read far more about Naipaul than by him (an excerpt from Beyond Belief; his essays in the NY Review of Books). Somehow, over time, my view of Naipaul began to sour.
-
The Namesake
Mira Nair’s movie packs in far more universal appeal than Jhumpa Lahiri’s book. Rather than the movie’s fidelity to the book, my main basis of comparison was: on the whole, does it tell a deeper, richer story? I thought yes; it improved on a mostly drab and plodding book, altering it in positive ways. For instance: the movie reduced the book’s all-pervading, melancholy sense of loss and exile of the middle-class Indian economic migrant (which I couldn’t relate to and found rather annoying); it had richer vignettes of India as seen through visiting NRI/ABCD eyes; its manner of revealing the significance of “Gogol” was more effective; near the end, it made the middle-aged Ashima come into her own as a woman/singer; and so on.
-
Democracy in Athens
(Below is an excerpt from a chapter on the Greeks from my review of Herodotus’ Histories. Any resemblance between classical Athens (5th cent. BCE) and a modern nation-state is not purely coincidental.)
The liberal-popular and the conservative-aristocratic emerged as the two dominant factions in Athenian democracy … The spirit of the agon (competition), fame, glory, honor and the desire to surpass all others were values enshrined even in the Homeric poems, particularly the Iliad. “It was widely accepted as ‘natural’, that the members of the community were unequal in resources, skills and style of life.” -
Omar Khayyam of Persia
In his lifetime, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) achieved great fame as a master of philosophy, jurisprudence, history, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics. The Great Seljuq Empire owed the reform of its calendar to him. The result was the Jalali era (named after Jalal-ud-din, one of the kings)—’a computation of time,’ wrote Gibbon, ‘which surpasses the Julian, and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian [calendar].’ He measured the length of the year as 365.24219858156 days, a number improved to 365.242196 days only in the 19th century and the current measure is 365.242190 days.
He not only discovered a general method of extracting roots of an arbitrary high degree, but his Algebra contains the first complete treatment of the solution of cubic equations which he did by means of conic sections. He was also part of the Islamic tradition of investigating Euclid and his parallel postulate. Arguing that ratios should be regarded as ‘ideal numbers,’ he conceived a much broader system of numbers than used since Greek antiquity, that of the positive real numbers. In many such areas, he furthered the remarkable work of al-Beruni. Commissioned to build an observatory in the city of Esfahan, he led a team of astronomers to do so.
-
Al-Beruni’s India
The first significant intrusion of Islam into India was led by Mahmud of Ghazni who, quite justifiably, lives in Indian history as a cruel and bloodthirsty fanatic, destroyer of temples, and plunderer of their wealth, but in his own dominion he was known as a patron of the arts, literature, and science (not unlike Genghis Khan who is a great and beloved hero in Mongolia today, gracing its currency, plazas, airports, etc.). He assembled in his court and the university he established at Ghazni (in modern Afghanistan) the greatest scholars and writers of the age.
One such scholar was al-Beruni (973-1048; another was Firdausi), “commissioned” by Mahmud of Ghazni to produce his monumental commentary on Indian philosophy and culture – Kitab fi tahqiq ma li’l-hind. “In his search for pure knowledge he is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds in Islamic history.”* Romila Thapar calls him “perhaps the finest intellect of central Asia … His observations on Indian conditions, systems of knowledge, social norms, religion … are probably the most incisive made by any visitor to India.” -
On Personal Responsibility
(This is a follow on to my earlier post on our dignity and rights.)
The modern age has overseen a great expansion of our rights. Global disparities remain but there is no dearth of people who believe that rights are a good thing (at least for the social group they identify with most, be it based on race, nation, class, culture). Countless rights commissions and tribunals, as well as some NGOs and the media, strive to preserve or enhance them, often on behalf of strangers across the world and often with remarkably heartening results. Clearly, talk of rights is now chic but what about obligations and personal responsibility? What good is the former without the latter? People can demand rights from their government, but who gets to demand personal responsibility from the people? What happens when our exercise of rights and freedom get increasingly divorced from personal responsibility?
-
Our Moral Compass
The gazillions of regular readers of Shunya’s Notes may find interesting a recent exchange of views between me and Ruchira Paul on Accidental Blogger. It began with my comment to a post by Ruchira on a book called Moral Minds by Marc D. Hauser, and then moved on to somewhat tangential discussions on the roots of morality, and secular and religious ethics.
