Indian History Carnival – 48: Gibb, Taj Mahal, Air India, New Delhi, Coins

This is the 4 year anniversary edition of the Indian History Carnival. So let me take this opportunity to thank my contributors who e-mail me various links. This has become important as various other things, like work, has been keeping me terribly busy leaving less time for reading and blogging. So Sandeep V, Feanor and others – Thanks for making my life easy.

  1. Shubo Bose has an excellent blog which looks at the coins of India with lots of pictures.
  2. The Taj Mahal diamond owned by Elizabeth Taylor is going to be auctioned. That rock has an interesting history.
  3. Though the gem is associated with one of the most famous marriages of this century- the one of Burton and Taylor, its provenance goes back to one of the greatest love stories in history. The Mughal Emperor Shah Jahangir gave it to his son Shah Jahan who in turn gifted it to his favorite wife Mumtaz-i-Mahal and later built the Taj Mahal in her honor.

  4. Matthew Gibb (1849-1920), great-grandfather of the Bee Gees, was a military man and he served in India. Fëanor writes
  5. He was one among the many BOR – British Other Ranks – soldiers from these isles who served in India, along with the much larger native forces. They bivouacked in Cantonments waiting to be called out on campaign. When he joined, India was the largest and most important of British colonies. The Army acted as a vast Imperial police force, maintaining law and order and British interests in the region. Gibb was one of sixty thousand white soldiers living and working along with Indian army men in garrison towns across the subcontinent.

  6. New Delhi is 100 years old and the NYTimes blog has the story of its birth.
  7. Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens, the two architects appointed to design much of the city, seemed to be curious choices for such a venture. Baker worked in South Africa, where he had become a disciple of the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. Lutyens, who previously had mostly designed English country houses, was known for his occasional prejudiced outbursts against India. In a letter to his wife, for example, Lutyens described Indian architecture as “essentially the building style of children.” Even the Taj Mahal, he complained, was “small but very costly beer.” Both men reveled in their assignment to create a monument to imperialism.

  8. Bhaskara has a detailed history of Air India from its humble origins in 1932. This is only the first part in a three part series.
  9. During World War 2; the growth in new routes slowed for Tata Airlines. But because the War was relatively docile in India; demand on existing routes continued to grow. They upgraded their fleet constantly; eventually jumping up to a fleet of 3 Stinson Model As, as well as multiple 14 seat Douglas DC-2s. This new lift helped Tata spread its wings to Bangalore, Nagpur, Calcutta, and even Baghdad, Iraq by June of 1945 (nearing the end of the war).

If you find interesting blog posts on Indian history, please send it to varnam.blog @gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up around Jan 15th.

Briefly Noted: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

Sati. Check. Inter-caste love affair. Check. A clownish Hindu who thinks a Black shipmate is an avatar of Lord Krishna. Check. Amitav Ghosh’s book, which is set in during the period when opium was cultivated in India and exported to China, has all the typical Booker Prize ingredients (The book was a finalist). 
In Operation Red Lotus, Parag Tope writes that the East India Company was a state sanctioned monopoly for drug trafficking  during this period; the manufacture of the drug was controlled by the company either directly or indirectly. In 1837, following the First Opium War, the trade ran into some hiccups causing the British traders to come up with a new strategy. During that time the following conversation happens between them:

This elicited an instantaneous response from Mr. Burnham, who placed his wineglass forcefully on the table. `Evidently you have mistaken my meaning, Raja Neel Rattan,’ he said ‘The war, when it comes, will not be for opium. It will be for a principle: for freedom – for the freedom of trade and for the freedom of the Chinese people. Free Trade is a right conferred on Man by God, and More so perhaps, since in its absence many millions of natives would be denied the lasting advantages of British influence.’

As the war was being planned,Benjamin Burnham, the owner of Ibis, a slave carrying ship from United States had no other option, but to divert to transport coolies to Mauritius. It is into this ship that an assortment of characters step in. They include the recently widowed Deeti and her Ox cart driving husband, Zachary Reidm a freed slave , Neel Rattan Halder, a Raja whose land was seized and turned into a convict by the British, Paulette Lambert, a French orphan and an assortment of characters.
A large porition of the book is plain narrative where the characters and their back story are established. Very soon it lapses into a Films Division style documentary on life during that period. But that period is described meticulously and the amount of research that has gone into the habits, costumes and food is really impressive. I recently started reading Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth and found much more vivid historical detail in Ghosh’s work. The book drags in the middle and there is a rush of action towards the end.

Multiple Universes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDHOLAACYv0
Episode 4 of the PBS show Fabric of the Cosmos is truly mind bending. In this episode Brian Greene talks about multiple universes and how the math proves that many universes could theoretically exist. The evidence for this comes from the fact that the universe is expanding and the math of string theory. The possibility that there could be another copy of me in another universe with a blog which has more than ten readers is very disturbing.
You can watch all the four episodes of Fabric of Cosmos online.

Abraham Eraly's Facile Spring

Abraham Eraly has a new book on the Gupta period which is considered a Golden Age in Indian history. There are two reviews of The First Spring.  The first review by Bibek Debroy has Eraly’s theory on why this period was considered as the Golden Age.

First, Buddhist (and Jain) ethics emphasised equity and access and human enterprise. “Fatalism” had not set in. Second, agriculture went through a transformation. There was monetisation, capital formation and trade, with increase in literacy. Third, guilds provided skills and their standardisation, and testing and certification of goods and services. They also regulated prices and working conditions of labourers. Fourth, kings had contractual obligations, not a divine right to rule. More importantly, s/he possessed executive duties of ensuring domestic and external security, with almost no legislative powers and limited dispute resolution powers. “One of the most laudable aspects of the political developments of the classical age was the robust growth of village self-government in many parts of India.” To use today’s jargon, we had better governance and decentralisation, with optimal provision of public goods and services. Fifth, there was urbanisation, not a retreat into a rural Arcadia. Sixth, cross-fertilisation led to innovation and experimentation. Seventh, rigidities of caste had not set in. Individually and in isolation, each of these propositions is plausible and known. Taken together, they represent a coherent story of why civilisations rise (and fall). The reversal into dark ages is explained by a reversal of each of these trends. Though not an Eraly estimate, there are rear-casts that between 500 BC and 500 AD, India had a per capita income of about $150. That made it one of the richest regions of the world.[Lessons From The Golden Age (H/T Yashwant)]

Eraly is a believer of the Aryan Invasion Theory and has romantic notions of Buddhism. His analysis of Vedas is based on translations by Wendy Doniger and so his observations have to be taken with quintals of salt. Nayanjot Lahiri’s review bursts Eraly’s balloon.

Eraly’s new book brings more than a millennium within the ambit of ‘Classical India’. This makes the scope of The First Spring highly ambitious, including in it India’s sprawling landscape, polity and society, economy and everyday life, philosophy and literature, even arts and religion, across 1,300 years and more.
Unfortunately, this is compromised by unsubstantiated generalisations, by an ignorance of archaeology and the kind of information it has yielded on many of the issues examined here, and by a complete disregard for some segments of the India it claims to describe.
Anyone with a working knowledge of ancient India would be appalled, for instance, by the book’s characterisation of classical Indian civilisation as essentially Buddhist. Is this a reaction to what Eraly supposes to be a “common misconception that it was a Hindu civilisation”? He should know that such labels are no longer used to characterise Indian history and, certainly, the millennium he examines was neither Buddhist nor Hindu but one marked by multiple religious traditions. Mathura is one example where there were Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu practices besides the worship of fertility deities. Nagarjunakonda is another instance of religious heterogeneity, with over 30 Buddhist establishments, 19 Hindu temples and some medieval Jain places of worship.
Eraly ignores the evidence of archaeology, goes for unproven generalisations, and doesn’t include the Northeast in his narrative.
Similarly, if Eraly had cared to look at the details of ordinary living that have emerged from excavations in the Gangetic plains, he’d find it difficult to believe that the Aryans “changed farming techniques” and introduced iron there. Rice began to be cultivated in the Gangetic alluvium in the 7th millennium BC and communities with broad-based farming patterns were flourishing there from the early 2nd millennium BC onwards. If the area did not have to wait for the putative Aryans for the consolidation of its agricultural base, neither did it require them for producing metallic iron, which was used there from the middle of the 2nd millennium BC itself.
Eraly’s description of cities also ignores archaeology, including the splendid ruins of urban Taxila, the most extensively excavated urban landscape of ancient India. Even when he describes Ujjain, he does not say anything about the town plan and building tradition that various seasons of digging has revealed.
These, though, are just the small things that Eraly so often forgets to mention. The most serious lacuna is that a big chunk of India, from Assam to Nagaland, is missing from the narrative. You wouldn’t know from the book that the epigraphs of the kings of Assam, for instance, have been extensively used to reconstruct the agricultural practices and the settlement pattern of the Brahmaputra valley or that there are Gupta type architectural remains near Tezpur. Nor would you learn about Tripura, not even about the presence of Buddhism there, otherwise so central to this book, as the relics of the Buddhist stupa at Shyam Sunder Tilla so dramatically reveal.
This is a book which aspires to have a reach. Alas, that aspirational reach exceeds its author’s intellectual grasp.[Facile Spring (H/T Yashwant)]

Indian History Carnival – 47: Sabha, Mughal Miniatures, Calicut, Linnaeus Tripe, Project "Sesame"

  1. Sriram explains how the Sabha culture originated in Chennai
  2. Chennai was uniquely positioned for the birth of such a concept. When Chennai or Madras first came into existence in 1639, the performing arts were dependent exclusively on the patronage of the rulers, landholders and noblemen. They held private soirees to which their intimate friends were invited or on occasion sponsored public performances in temples or open spaces where the ordinary folk could attend. Temple festivals and weddings in the houses of the rich were occasions when people could attend these performances without invitation.

  3. Fëanor has some photographs of the Mughal miniatures he saw at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin
  4. Based on the 17th century notes by Roger Hawkes, Maddy gives us a glimpse of life in Calicut during that period.
  5. 7. We see that the textile traders in Calicut were mainly from West Godavari regions.
    8. We see that the Shabander or governor had responsibility for repayment of goods sold. Dubious practices of him needing to be bribed can be seen as a lack of law and order, and more consistent with activities today. We also see that he had authority to decide who got control of the goods cleared through customs.

  6. One of the earliest photographers in India was Felice Beato. But before Beato, there was Linnaeus Tripe who took photographs of South India and Burma. India Ink has more with some of the photographs.
  7. The part of Mr. Tripe’s career that he is most well-known for can be broken into three parts: The first was in December 1854 when, on leave again, he went to photograph the temples at Halebid and Belur in Mysore. One of Sotheby’s portfolios contains 56 prints from this trip, including 26 unique prints and three previously unknown photographs. One of the newly discovered images is of a Hoysala-era Ganesha statue at the temple in Halebid.

  8. Apparently, the plan to move the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi was a secret, writes India Realtime blog
  9. Those who did know about it referred to the plan by the codename “Sesame.” The queen wasn’t told about it till the party arrived in India, according to architectural historian Robert Grant Irving. The viceroys of the provinces concerned weren’t told a thing till the night of Dec. 11.
    The ceremonial laying of the foundation stone of the new capital, which took place on Dec. 15, isn’t mentioned anywhere in the detailed official program of the week’s events, which had been released earlier. Two days after the Durbar, 500 invitations were hurriedly distributed for the stone-laying, wrote Mr. Irving.

Thanks: Sandeep V & Fëanor
If you find interesting blog posts on Indian history, please send it to varnam.blog @gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on Dec 15th.

Population Growth in History

As the world population is hitting 7 Billion this month, The New Yorker takes a look at the population count at various periods in our history.

Around ten thousand years ago, there were maybe five million people on earth. By the time of the First Dynasty in Egypt, the number was up to about fifteen million, and by the time of the birth of Christ it had climbed to somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred million. Global population finally reached a billion around 1800, just a couple of years after Thomas Malthus published his famous essay warning that human numbers would always be held in check by war, pestilence, or “inevitable famine.” In a distinctly un-Malthusian fashion, population then took off. It hit two billion in the nineteen-twenties, and was three billion by 1960. In 1968, when Paul Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb,” predicting the imminent deaths of hundreds of millions of people from starvation, it stood at around three and a half billion; since then, it has been growing at the rate of a billion people every twelve or thirteen years.[Billions and Billions]

India’s population was somewhere between 350 and 400 million at the time of independence and this growth chart shows how fast we reached here.

Briefly Noted: The Triple Agent

Last month, a Taliban member came with a message from the Quetta shura to meet Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former Afghan president who was leading the peace council. The Taliban member — Mullah Esmatullah — had bought two audio messages from the shura and one of them was for Mr. Rabbani. The messenger was treated with respect and bought into Rabbani’s room where he exploded, taking a few lives with him.
In 2009, in Khost, Afghanistan, a similar event happened. A Jordanian agent who had provided spectacular reports on Al-Qaeda members was invited to Camp Chapman for a debriefing. To show that he was trusted, CIA officials in Khost who had never met him decided to let him inside without a search. As soon as he saw the line of CIA officers and their Blackwater guards he started chanting something and only his Jordanian handler knew what was going to happen.
According to a NY Times report

The attack at the C.I.A. base dealt a devastating blow to the spy agency’s operations against militants in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, eliminating an elite team using an informant with strong jihadi credentials. The attack further delayed hope of penetrating Al Qaeda’s upper ranks, and also seemed potent evidence of militants’ ability to strike back against their American pursuers.[Attacker in Afghanistan Was a Double Agent]

The Triple Agent: The al-Qaeda Mole who infiltrated the CIA by Joby Warrick tells the story of what happened in Khost by following the lives of the bomber Humam al-Balawi, his Jordanian handler Sharif Ali bin Zeid, the station chief Jennifer Matthews, the analyst Elizabeth Hanson and even their guards. It starts with the arrest of al-Balwai who was a doctor who moonlighted as an online Islamic warrior. He was arrested by Jordianian Intelligence, but then bin Zeid decided to make him a double agent. He was to infiltrate al-Qaeda in Pakistan and report back. The doctor who had never been to Pakistan before vanished into the tribal regions and very soon started giving inside information like they had never seen before. No one in Jordan or Langley realized that it was a setup. The al-Qaeda folks turned out to be smarter than the ones who flew the drones.
The book compiles decisions made the various actors and how they all added up to a disastrous end. Excited by the possibility that they could get al-Zawahiri, the CIA let their guard down. The blame is finally attributed to the station chief Jennifer Matthews who made the decision to let the bomber in without a search. The book is less than 300 pages, but reads a Frederick Forsyth novel.

In Pragati: Book Review – Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road

(This review appeared in Oct 2011 edition of Pragati)

In the 19th century, Britain went on a world wide bloodthirsty rampage: they were involved in the Crimean War (1853 – 1856), Anglo-Indian war of 1857, Second Opium War (1856 – 1860) and the Anglo-Sudan War (1870s) and a photographer named Felice Beato was present to capture all of them on film. Like Ibn Batuta who roamed around Dar al-Islam documenting the customs and traditions of various countries, Beato visited the countries occupied by the British and captured the war, landscapes and local life using the newly invented medium.
Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road by Anne Lacoste and Fred Ritchin features a selection of photographs he took in India, China, Burma, Korea and Japan covering significant events in the history of those countries. For people back in Britain, Beato’s photographs gave an early realistic depiction of the cultures they had conquered. His photographs about India during the Anglo-Indian war are important now not just because of their historical significance, but also because they reveal a lot about the colonial attitudes of that period.
Felice Beato was an Italian who had settled in Constantinople as an apprentice to Scottish photographer James Robertson. In 1858, he left Constantinople for Calcutta and spent the next two years photographing the final phases of the Anglo-Indian war of 1857. Beato did not introduce photography to India; British officials were already using for more than a decade and there were photographic societies in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.
By the time Beato reached Calcutta, the war of 1857, which was planned by leaders like Nana Saheb, Tatya Tope, and Baija Bai Shinde, had shocked the English and they had retaliated using extreme brutality. Citing the murder of women and children at Cawnpore (Kanpur) by Indian soldiers, they discarded their usual pretence to civilized behavior and embarked on a death march to clear the villages which supported the army. At the start of 1858, Delhi and Kanpur were in English hands; Awadh was cut off from Central India and Lucknow’s fate was uncertain. Kalpi was the headquarters of the freedom fighters and Tatya Tope and Rani Laxmibai were still holding out.
Beato went to Cawnpore, Delhi and Lucknow and documented the damage caused by the war. Photographers of that period had severe technological limitations: the equipment was heavy and the photographer also had to carry glass plates and chemicals. Since lengthy exposures were required and the negatives had to be developed within minutes, the photographer could not be in the middle of the battle; he could capture the scene before the battle or after it was done.

(via Wikipedia)

He reached Lucknow a few weeks after the city was captured by British forces under Sir Colin Campbell and one of the gruesome photographs he took in Sikandar Bagh shows a partially destroyed building with skeletons scattered all around with a few locals passively watching them. The skeletons were of the 1,800 Sepoys bayoneted by the British troops and left to the dogs and vultures in November 1857. There is controversy regarding this photograph: Sir Colin Campbell probably not wanting to suggest that the corpses were left to rot in the open wrote that Beato dug up the bones and laid them out for dramatic effect, but a reporter from The Times who visited Sikandar Bagh around the same period remembered many skeletons still lying around. Even if it was staged, there was nothing unusual about it. His contemporaries who were covering other wars too did it for dramatic effect.
Another photograph from the same period shows the hanging of two sepoys: In the picture two people are hanging by their necks watched by a group of turbaned soldiers. The caption claims that the soldiers were from the 31st Native Infantry who were being hanged in Lucknow. Even that is not without controversy. First, the 31st Native Infantry did not participate in the war and second, they were based in Sagar. So it is possible that there is a mistake in documentation or that they simply were villagers hanged by the English as part of their campaign of brutality.
Beato, the lucid strategist, was on the side of the British and showed no compassion for the conquered or the dead. He was quite different from the British soldier named Clive Branson who served in India in 1942. Madhusree Mukherjee’s Churchil’s Secret War mentions Branson who roamed around the countryside visiting villages and socializing with the locals since his unit was not doing anything important. As he traveled, he felt ashamed of his country and the fact that he was one among them. Beato never felt that way. He earned his living by selling photographs like the hangings to soldiers and onlookers as souvenirs as well as by taking flattering portraits of Army officers. He ingratiated himself with British officials and his enthusiastic documentation of their triumphs got him a into prominent locations like Lucknow as soon as it was retaken. He also was an ‘embedded’ war photographer in the Second Opium War and captured the war in all its horror. Each catastrophe thus cemented his reputation.
Another area in which he specialized was architecture. Thus when he went around India, he took pictures of the Taj, Benares, the Golden Temple and various palaces. He also specialized in taking panoramic shots. Currently you can use the stitching feature of photoshop software to generate panoramas from a series of photographs, but during Beato’s time you had to take a series of overlapping photos carefully, develop the negatives quickly to maintain the uniform tone and join the pictures manually. His panoramas in India include those of Delhi, Lucknow, Qutub Minar and the entrance to the Juma Masjid which were around five to seven feet in length.
Beato was not caught up in political correctness and photographed British brutality for commercial benefits. He took photos of drawings of beheadings in Japan and photographs of dead bodies in China; in China one of the military surgeons noted Beato walking with excitement among the dead, photographing them before they were removed. Due to Beato’s photographs, the blurry words of historians become indelible images.
In their commentary on the photographs, the authors write that the hanging photograph brings up questions like “How did the British officers decide to hang the Indian soldiers? Did they hold any trial? What were the responses of the men to their impending execution?”. They don’t offer answers, but the answers can be found in Parag Tope’s Operation Red Lotus which presents a dramatically different version of the war of 1857 based on never before translated letters and eye witness accounts. He argues that the official policy of Britain to suppress the insurrection was to target thousands of civilians including women and children and this policy was one of the reasons why India lost the war. Sepoys of mutinous regiments who could not give a good account of themselves were hanged. From Beato’s images we know that even some from non-mutinous regiments may also have been hanged.
Two important photographs taken by Beato are not there in the book. One shows the Lal Bagh, the place in which General James Neill was shot and the other, the Residency where Sir Henry Lawrence was killed. These photographs don’t depict cadavers or skeletons, but form an important point in the narrative of the war of 1857 where two war criminals met justice. As you flip through the book, you see the conquered locals of India, China and Korea among demolished buildings and their conquerors in flamboyant settings. This contrast explains the story of the East better than many thousand words.

Gregory L. Possehl is no more

In Pragati: An Outdated Syllabus

Following World War II, Western anthropologists realized that race cannot be scientifically defined, based on cranial size or nasal index. According to Prof. Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, who has studied the Harappan skeletal remains extensively, “Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any of the theories concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity.” According to Prof. Gregory Possehl, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Pennyslvania, “Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been totally discredited as a useful concept in human biology.” Thus there is nothing to distinguish the invaders from the natives; in short, there is no Aryan or Dravidian race.

The Indus Colony in Mesopotamia – Part 2

Few years back, Gregory L. Possehl, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, was reading Leo Oppenheim’s Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, when he discovered a reference to a personal seal of a Meluhhan translator — Shu-ilishu — who lived in Mesopotamia. Possehl tracked down a photograph of the seal as well as got a fresh impression from the original seal (pic). The seal was dated from Late Akkadian (2200 – 2113 B.C.E) to Ur III (2113–2004 B.C.E)

I referred to his work in few other posts as well: A 4000 year old Leper’s Tale, Ancient India. He passed away last week.

Indian History Carnival – 46: Master Painters of India, Dastangoi, Gaspar de Gama, Harikatha

  1. “ ‘Wonder of the Age’: Master Painters of India, 1100-1900” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art showcases 800 years of Indian art. NYTimes has a review of this exhibition and Alain Truong has some samples.
  2. Mahmood Farooqui writes about Dastangoi, a lost and old art form of storytelling.
  3. The word Dastangoi refers to the art of storytelling, it is a compound of two Persian words Dastan and goi which means to tell a Dastan. Dastans were epics, often oral in nature, which were recited or read aloud and in essence were like medieval romances everywhere. Telling tales of adventure, magic and warfare, Dastans mapped new worlds and horizons, encountered the unseen and protected the hero through many travails and lovers as he moved on his quest. The hero’s adventures could sometimes parallel the mystic quest, at other times the story narrated a purely profane tale.

  4. Maddy has the fascinating tale of Gaspar de Gama, a Polish Jew who ended up as a slave in India, worked for the king of Bijapur as a Muslim, met King Manuel as a Christian and became one of the first Europeans to set foot in Brazil.
  5. Whether by intent or not, Gaspar was the person who provided Gama with large doses of misinformation, he explained that most of India was ruled by Christian kings (see CHF blog on this subject) including the Vijayanagar kingdom. He was later to become the person who arranged the meeting of Cabral with the King of Cochin and thus become the primary reason for the later problems of Malabar after the Portuguese were welcomed at Cochin. But let us see how this interesting meeting came about. I would assume that he was thus the reason for the Gama to fall somewhat out of favor with King Manual some years after he got back.

  6. Sriram has a brief introduction to Harikatha, a form of story telling which evolved in the 18th century
  7. The Maratha kingdom of Thanjavur was where it came up as a result of several important influences. The art of Katha Kalakshepam or passing of time by listening to stories was already a powerful presence in the area, but it existed more as a form of religious discourse where learned scholars would take up a topic and embellishing it with some shlokas, speak on the subject for a few hours. Based on the type of subject matter, such discourses looked to different works for material. Thus if the subject matter was the Periya Puranam, the Kanda Puranam or Kamba Ramayanam, it was called prasangam and had quotes from the Tiruvachakam, the Tevaram and similar Tamil works. If the subject matter was from the Puranas, there were quotes from the Bhagavatam, the Maha Bharatham and the Ramayanam.

Thanks: Sandeep V & Fëanor
If you find interesting blog posts on Indian history, please send it to varnam.blog @gmail or as a tweet to @varnam_blog. The next carnival will be up on Nov 15th.