Category: History
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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.
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Kissing Without Consent or A Picture May Not Tell The Whole Story
Last week at the other blog, I reported the story of Glenn McDuffie, the Houston man who was recently identified as the sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square in the celebrated 1945 Life magazine photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt. The picture seen and recognized by millions, is an historical moment captured by a photographer’s lens, marking the end of World War II.
Upon being identified, McDuffie, who had served in the US Navy during WWII, described what the day was like when he went into Times Square with a couple of his buddies and later bussed the nurse in celebration.
On Aug. 14, 1945, he was in Times Square when the word came.
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Little Boy of Hiroshima
“Little Boy was the codename of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945″ by the US Air Force, the first atomic bomb ever used as a weapon. Three days later, the Fat Man atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Both cities and 200,000 people were instantly destroyed, and this video shows how. The US is the only country that has used nuclear weapons in war or against civilian populations.
Source: BBC’s Hiroshima (2005) | Was it Necessary? One, Two, Three, Four, Five
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John Frum
Some time ago, Ruchira brought to my attention an article about a village on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, where the people believe Prince Philip of England is a god. Though it might sound preposterous to many of us, it’s actually not a joke. As the article explains, Prince Philip is a foreigner who traveled across the sea from his native land to marry a powerful woman and, as it happens, the people of Yaohnanen village on Tanna know that a pale-skinned spirit from their own island once made just such a journey. Somewhere in the past decades, Prince Philip came to be regarded by these villagers to be that selfsame island spirit.And why not? This religious tradition dates back some decades to the time when Vanuatu was a colony of European powers. Conflating their own mythic histories with the current news they would have heard during those colonial times was not an unreasonable thing for the islanders to do, especially given that the goings on in faraway England and the lives lead by British royals might seem every bit as mythical and magical to them as their stories of spirits might to us. What’s more, by recognizing this powerful man as being one of their own kin (albeit of a spiritual nature), they associate themselves directly with power and can appeal for benevolence.
At least on one level, this is the aim of religious mythology: to associate ordinary people with mystical power. One sees in the emergent and localized religions of Vanuatu the unvarnished essence of how religion works, how it arises, what function it serves in society and in individuals, how it binds groups in common understanding, and also how it impedes understanding between people of different beliefs.
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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.
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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.”**
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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.
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The Burning Ghats of Varanasi
(For a significantly modified and expanded version of this post, please click here.)
Varanasi (Benares, Banaras, Kashi), on the left bank of the Ganga (Ganges), is one of the seven sacred cities of the Hindus. Among “the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world, its early history is that of the first Aryan settlement in the middle Ganga valley. By late 2nd millennium BCE, Varanasi was a seat of Aryan religion and philosophy and a commercial and industrial centre famous for its muslin and silk fabrics, perfumes, ivory works, and sculpture.”
It was the capital of the kingdom of Kashi during the Buddha’s time (6th century BCE), who, after achieving enlightenment, gave his first sermon at nearby Sarnath (it is said that he purposely avoided this hotbed of Brahmanism). The Chinese traveler Hiuen Tsiang visited Varanasi in c. 635 CE and saw it as a centre of art, education, and religion. The city, he wrote, extended for about 5 km along the western bank of the Ganga. -
Anandpur Sahib
Anandpur Sahib is a holy city in Punjab. Its historical significance to the Sikhs is second only to Amritsar. Hundreds of Sikhs once embraced martyrdom here. Sikh history is deeply marked by their struggle for survival in a volatile land, especially during the peak of Mughal persecution under Aurangzeb, which radicalized the Sikhs (many paintings in the museum at the Golden Temple in Amritsar record the horrifying persecution stories retold across the land). The mystical faith of Guru Nanak transformed into the fiercely spartan and nationalistic faith of Guru Gobind Singh, who also committed the Sikhs to the five Ks. In early 19th century, Maharaja Ranjit Singh further militarized the Sikh nation, creating the first modern army in the subcontinent. Reversing the dominant historical trend, he went west to conquer new lands (which later fell in the British lap).
Takhat Kesgarh Sahib—one of five Takhats, or seats of authority, in Sikhism—is the centerpiece of Anandpur Sahib. It stands upon a hill and is visible for miles. The Khalsa was revealed here by their tenth and last guru, Guru Gobind Singh, who selected the five beloved ones and administered baptism of Khanda (Khande di Pahul), instituting the Khalsa panth on Baisakhi, 30 Mar 1699. A special congregation was held that was attended by thousands. Kesgarh Sahib Fort was built here in 1699, replaced long since by the Gurdwara (a room in its inner sanctum holds twelve important military relics of Guru Gobind Singh). The Sikhs celebrated the 300th anniversary of the day in 1999 with thousands of religious gatherings all over the world. Two Gurus and families of four Gurus lived in Anandpur Sahib for many years. -
Respecting the Holocaust
The UN General Assembly recently adopted by consensus a resolution condemning the denial of the Holocaust. This US sponsored resolution “urges all member states ‘unreservedly to reject any denial of the Holocaust as a historical event, either in full or in part, or any activities to this end’ … ‘ignoring the historical fact of these terrible events increases the risk they will be repeated.’”
It can be argued that this UN resolution has a laudable symbolic value, especially in light of the recent Iranian conference that questioned the Holocaust. But this comes at the back of news from France, where a “French court handed a leading far-right French politician a three-month suspended jail sentence and fined him 5,000 euros… for questioning the Holocaust”, also ordering him to pay 55,000 euros in damages to the plaintiffs. It also appears that “Germany is using its six-month European Union presidency to push for EU-wide criminalization of Holocaust denial.”
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Ghost Town in the Levant
(See an updated entry on Quneitra, including a video.)
Quneitra was once a bustling town in the Golan Heights and southwestern Syria’s administrative capital with a population of 37,000. The word ‘Quneitra’ derives from Qantara, or ‘bridge’, between Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. Known for its abundant water resources, it has been continuously inhabited since the Stone Age. Over the millennia, many peoples, including Arameans, Assyrians, Caldeans, Persians, Greeks, and Arabs have occupied it. 
In 1967, during the six-day war, Israel captured Quneitra. It then became a site of many battles but, except for a brief interlude, remained in Israeli hands until 1974, when a UN-brokered agreement led to an Israeli pullback. Before withdrawing, however, Quneitra was evacuated and systematically destroyed by the Israeli army (based on eyewitness accounts; UN General Assembly resolution 3240 in 1974 condemned Israel’s role in its destruction. Israel disputes this account). Many prominent Western reporters, agreeing with the UN and Syrian version of events, saw this as nothing short of an act of wanton brutality — a whole town methodically ransacked, dynamited, and bulldozed.
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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.” -
The Enlightened Romantic
The Enlightenment began admirably by liberating men from despotic rulers, slavery, and serfdom, reducing superstition, the abject hold of religion, and creating the framework of human rights—its legacy is evident in present day social struggles. Inspired in part by the newly acquired scientific method, it also suggested that history can have a design, that it can converge to a universal civilization where men would come to acquire the same values, only error and prejudice block the path to the perfect society. It transformed human thought and action by nurturing the ideas of linear progress and ‘perfectibility’ of man. People can live by reason alone, once they give up superstition and fanaticism; mathematics and natural science will ultimately yield solutions to the moral, social, political and economic problems of humankind; scientific and ‘objective’ principles can steer history towards compatible, rational ends. Such ideas, in inflamed forms, influenced communism and numerous other excesses of secular faith. An immoderate love of social ideals, particularly in the name of progress or reason, often breeds its own tyrannies. 
Romanticism rebelled against the ideological optimism of the Enlightenment: none can live by reason alone; people are also shaped by their roots, homeland, ties of blood and marriage, experiences, temperament and tradition—and other submerged suprarational forces integral to humans—which inform their various, at times, incommensurate ends. The logic of science does not extend to human behavior. “Values are not discovered, they are created; not found, but made by an act of imaginative, creative will, as works of art, as policies, plans, patterns of life are created.” Diversity calls for celebration – there is merit in the age-old corporate solidarities and cultural mores by which human society holds together. It championed plurality of values, cultural history, and rejected the evaluation of civilizations by a single yardstick. This was a blow to the central Western belief thus far—religious or secular—that true human values are universal, immutable, timeless, that a perfect society was, in principle, realizable. Alas, in preaching tolerance for the diversity of values and aspirations, Romanticism, at times, swung towards extreme forms of relativism, nationalism, chauvinism, and irrationalism. We are the children of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, shift back and forth between them. Mine-fields lie at the extremes of each; we would do well to tread the middle ground, to survey the fault lines. In his celebrated works, Dostoevsky rationally interrogated the Reason of the Enlightenment, much as Foucault did later: “What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects … limits … dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers? … this question … is both central and extremely difficult to resolve. In addition, if it is extremely dangerous to say that Reason is the enemy that should be eliminated, it is just as dangerous to say that any critical questioning of this rationality risks sending us into irrationality.” Only the exercise of reason, for instance, reveals the dangers in schemes that aim to rationalize society (or our conduct). Here are some worthy quotes:
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The Dilwara Temples
Many Indians claim that the Dilwara Jain temples of Mt. Abu are a more magnificient achievement than the Taj Mahal – both were stunningly ambitious, state-sponsored, multi-year, monumental, marble-work projects – but the claim is an imponderable to me. One difference, however, springs to mind: while thousands of art lovers and devotees also worked for a generation on each of the two Dilwara temples, the Taj, proof of an emperor’s inability to rationally accept his lover’s death, was built largely by hired men. I can understand a man’s desire for a memorial to his lover; I also believe that a modest memorial need not be any less meaningful, but no, size clearly mattered to Shah Jehan. He had to divert enormous resources of state to fund his absurd private infatuation. While I think the Taj is rather sublime – I am awed by its beauty each time I visit – the so-called “romance of its inspiration” bugs me. For the untold thousands who labored on it, Shah Jehan didn’t even have the magnanimity to dedicate the Taj to, say, “all the lovers of Hindustan,” or something similarly inclusive. The poet Sahir Ludhianvi, speaking for the masses, famously said of the Taj: “Ik shahanshah ney daulat ka sahaara ley kar / Ham ghareebon kee mohabbat ka uraaya hai mazaaq” (An emperor relying so on his wealth / Has ridiculed the loves of the poor like us). On the other hand, the Dilwara temples, built half a millennium before the Taj, seem to me expressions of a fairly democratic religiosity.
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On History and Historians
‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born,’ Cicero declared, ‘is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’ A good historian begins with the hard facts on public events and fragments of cultural life. But it takes more than what can be taught to become a great historian. He must also possess sensitivity, imagination, depth of perception, distance, and that uncanny ability to synthesize vast bits of knowledge, the kind found in great novelists. He must attempt to enter the society he studies, to see the world as its members saw it, and understand, to the extent possible, what it was like to live in it. He must examine the psychology, morals, aspirations, and assumptions of ordinary people.
The conception of man as an actor, a purposive being, moved by his own conscious aims as well as causal laws, capable of unpredictable flights of thought and imagination, and of his culture as created by his effort to achieve self-knowledge and control of his environment in the face of material and psychic forces which he may use but cannot evade—this conception lies at the heart of all truly historical study.
[—Isaiah Berlin]Category: History -
The Carvakas
It comes as a surprise to many that in ancient “spiritual” India, atheistic materialism was a major force to reckon with. Predating even the Buddhists, the Carvaka is one of the earliest materialistic schools of Indian philosophy, named after one Carvaka, a great teacher of the school. Its other name, Lokayata, variously meant “the views of the common people,” “the system which has its base in the common, profane world,” “the art of sophistry,” and also “the philosophy that denies that there is any world other than this one.” The founder of this school was probably Brhaspati.
The Carvakas sought to establish their materialism on an epistemological basis and their thought resembles that of British empiricist and skeptic David Hume, as well as of logical positivists. The Carvakas believed sense perception alone as a means of valid knowledge. The validity of inferential knowledge was challenged on the ground that all inference requires a universal major premise (such as “All that possesses smoke possesses fire”) whereas there is no way to reach certainty about such a premise. The supposed “invariable connection” may be vitiated by some unknown “condition,” and there is no means of knowing that such a vitiating condition does not exist. Since inference is not a means of valid knowledge, all supersensible things like “destiny,” “soul,” or “afterlife,” do not exist. To say that such entities exist is regarded as absurd, for no unverifiable assertion of existence is meaningful.
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A Mousetrap for Metaphysics
About six years ago, after an obsessive, multi-year engagement with history and philosophy, I struggled with the following question: Is it possible to reduce the vast range of humankind’s metaphysical responses down to a few distilled outlooks that have shaped (and continue to shape) human culture? An elementary classification has been in vogue at least since Herodotus: the East and the West, but it is clearly untenable in light of the internal diversity of both the East and the West. Is there a better classification, I wondered, that is at once simple, non-geographic, and more comprehensive?
I was well aware of the danger of oversimplification. Even accomplished scholars are prone to finding seemingly profound but ultimately specious patterns in human affairs. Still, in the summer of 2000, amid the stacks of Stanford’s Green library, I devised a classification that has withstood my own scrutiny over time (it can surely be fine tuned). All of our metaphysical knowledge, I concluded then, is arrived at via one of these three distinct approaches: Orthodox, Suprarational, Rational.
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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.
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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.” -
Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka
In Aug 2005, I visited a remarkable site in Madhya Pradesh, India: the prehistoric rock shelters and paintings at Bhimbetka, discovered in 1957-58 by Dr. Vishnu S. Wakankar. Of the nearly 750 rock shelters, 500 or so are adorned with paintings; about 15 are open to the public, though few come due to their relative remoteness and lack of public transportation. The site, 45 km from Bhopal, is at the foothills of the Vindhya mountains and is surrounded by forests of teak and sal that had grown lush green in the monsoon season.Bhimbetka remained a center of human activity from the lower Paleolithic times—the oldest paintings are believed to be 12,000 years old (a disputed estimate); the more recent ones date from the first millennium BCE. One can plainly see that the same surface was often used by different peoples at different times.
