Nehru: The Vacillating Socialist

When Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister of India, it was expected that India would have a socialist government. This was not a false expectation because over the past two decades he had shown his inclination through the speeches he gave, the literature he read and the friends he kept. In 1929, two years after this three day visit to Moscow, Jawaharlal Nehru told Congress workers that India has to be a socialist nation to end poverty and inequality. During that period, socialism was not in the official party line, but he called himself a socialist. Mahatma Gandhi understood his passion and once explained that Nehru wanted socialism by any means, even without non-violence.
But once he took office, this passion for socialism disappeared and reappeared only seven years before his death. As a man who always got things done his way, he could have got the country to adopt this idea as well, but he stayed away from it even when opportunity presented. One such occasion was during the refugee crisis following partition, but even then he did not voice anything about socialism or a classless society. In 1948 a private member of the Constituent Assembly introduced legislation demanding a socialist economic pattern, nationalization of key industries, and collective farming. Nehru dismissed this demand as “vague” and wondered how any government could accept such a resolution.
What was going on? Why did the self-professed socialist backpedal when he got an opportunity to implement his ideas? In some cases, it was seen that he even opposed making socialism official. Did he realize that socialism went against millennia old Indian polity and hence stayed away from it or was it pure politics which caused him to press pause and then resume when the situation demanded?
Party Politics
One reason for Nehru going slow on socialism maybe due to the fact that the party machinery was controlled by Sardar Patel, who was known as a capitalists’ man. A socialism versus capitalism fight during that period would not have done any good for the party. Then Patel died in 1950 and Nehru was able to get Patel’s nominees out of the leadership paving way for absolute control. He could have inflicted any “ism” on the country, but even while the first Five-Year-Plan was being developed, there was no reference to socialism in the documents.
A turning point came after the first general elections. The Congress won an overwhelming majority both to the Parliament and in the State legislatures, but the Socialists and the Kisan Mazdoor Party polled in double digits as well. This was a cause of concern to Nehru and he tried to get Socialists to his side by negotiating with Jayaprakash Narayan. Once again the demands of Jayaprakash Narayan — redistribution of land, nationalization of banks and insurance, state ownership of selected industries — sounded like Nehru’s dream, but he walked away from it stating that the time was not right. The Socialists were not surprised because it was on Nehru’s advice that the group was formed within the Congress and once it was formed, Nehru refused to join it. Also, when Gandhi wanted a socialist leader to be the President of Congress in 1947, Nehru joined forces with Patel and opposed it. What was more strange was this: the Constitution and Economic Programme Committee of the party, under Nehru’s chairmanship recommended a socialist economic programme, but as Prime Minister he rejected the report.
He provided various explanations for this behavior; in one speech he said that he was not interested in any “ism” and was focused on achieving a casteless and classless society. In another speech he said he aimed for a society not guided by greed, but one in which there is distribution of economic power. What people wanted, he argued, was food, clothing and shelter and they were not concerned about the social and economic policies.
The Socialist Vision
In 1954 Nehru visited China and North Vietnam and saw how both countries were using a new social system to build their nations. He saw the response of the hungry masses to socialism and thought that it would be a trump card against both Socialists and Communists. On his return, without consulting the Cabinet or Planning Commission or Congress Working Committee, he started touting socialism. In speech after speech, he talked about the utopia that socialism would bring and this policy was adopted in the next annual session of the Congress party without much difficulty. This was a brilliant move for it seeded confusion among the socialists and leftists and brought everyone else into Nehru’s big tent.
Once socialism and the goals of casteless and classless society were proclaimed, candidates for the next election were selected based on caste, class and religion. In places where feudal loyalties played an important part, feudal candidates were selected. In some places black-marketers or drunkards were selected and Nehru justified it saying that the selection was due to the pressure from the ‘rightist’ elements.
After all this, he started behaving erratically; the Second Five Year plan was released later and it had no trace of socialism in it. After spending energy explaining socialism and socialist pattern was few years earlier, he started backpedaling once again. He refused to define what he wanted and vaguely mentioned equality and removal of disparities. He asked party workers to go around the country explaining the party agenda and when some of them asked details on his vision of socialism, he simply refused. All this did not prevent the party from adopting a resolution which demanded the creation of a socialistic society in the Nagpur session in 1959. At this point no one seemed to care what it meant and no one wanted to know.
At the end, the socialist agenda of Nehru was vague. It could only be explained using the words “Neti, Neti” for it was not about nationalization or doctrine or confiscation of private property. For a man who was passionate about the idea, it later became an empty slogan which could be used for political needs. By being vague about it, he could bring it up when needed and discard it once the juice was extracted. Fed up with this drama Subash Bose bluntly asked how a person as individualist as Nehru could be a socialist. Finally thanks to Nehru’s vague socialism, many congressmen who were paupers before 1947 became millionaires.
Reference

Adapted from Rao, Amiya Rao, B. G. Six thousand days : Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister, Sterling Publishers, 1974.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

Writers of historical fiction tend to use few standard structural patterns. The most common one is when all the events happen in the same time frame as in Wilbur Smith’s Warlock or Jason Goodwin’s The Snake Stone or Javier Sierra’s The Secret Supper. Another popular structure is when people in the present time frame are chasing a treasure or reacting to events that happened centuries ago. In such styles, two timelines alternate with clues set up in one narrative affecting the events like in the novels of Daniel Silva or Clive Cussler. More adventurous writers handle three timelines like in the Bible of Clay by Julia Navarro. Then once in awhile you read books, where the writer juggles much more than three timelines effortlessly, weaving a tale or presenting an idea that is captivating, like in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
An Instance of the Fingerpost plays with the structure in a different way: the tale of a 17th century murder at Oxford is narrated by four people who were present and each of those narrators are unreliable and have their own agenda. The story is set during the period following the events of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies . Charles II was keeping the throne warm and the sugarcane plantations of Barbados were generating wealth. Oxford was a town filled with scientists, philosophers and priests and it is to this town that the first narrator — a Venetian named Marco da Cola — who is in England to tend to his father’s business affairs, arrives.
There he mingles with intellectuals like Robert Boyle, John Locke, Thomas Ken and Richard Lower and mingles in the local taverns and their homes. He is also a gentle soul, helping the poor Sarah Blundy whose mother has been injured and no one would help. He claims to have invented blood transfusion and uses it to help Sarah Blundy’s mother. Then one day, a fellow at the college is found murdered, with traces of arsenic in whiskey. Sarah Blundy, who was seen around is accused and hanged.
The second narrative is written by Jack Prestcott, the son of a Royalist traitor. He is on a mission to clear his father’s name and runs around to find evidence for it. He believes his father was framed by someone powerful, while everyone else believes otherwise. The father’s treason was created using secret messages which were encrypted using some books as the key and he wants to find the messages and the key. Prestcott was in jail and had escaped in the night of the murder by trying up Dr. John Wallis who had come to visit him. Dr. John Wallis, who had worked as a crypographer for both Oliver Cromwell and the King is the narrator of the third part. He has been tasked by the minister with keeping the country safe, irrespective of the ruler and everywhere he looks, he sees conspiracies. He could have helped Jack, if he found the books that were used as the key for encryption. The final piece comes from Anthony Wood, an antiquarian, who is acquainted with all the characters and has an entirely different perspective on the events as well as the actors.
The 700 page book quite successfully recreates the 17th century Oxford with all the issues of that era such as the conflicts of the class system, the battle between the King’s men and Cromwell’s acolytes and the fights between philosophers and scientists. The book is not for those who want something quick to read like Daniel Silva; the story is quite complex and deals with a varied number of issues. Each sentence is well crafted and there is depth to the conversation between the characters with details of medicine, curing ailments, surgery, various philosophical and religious schools, questions of loyalty to men and God.
A main worry of 17th century Europe and 21st century Delaware was witches. You see witches being burned few centuries earlier when Christopher Columbus was on his way to Hispaniola; you see similar theme in 17th century Germany. Oxford, the seat of learning for England, was no different and you see Sarah Blundy being accused of the same because she could heal. This was also a period when Papists were feared as well as ridiculed and since Marco da Cola was one, this issue plays out well.
As each narrator tells his story, the previous narrator’s story is either refuted or altered or something that was downplayed, gets noticed. Thus Marco da Cola, who looked like a curious tourist in the first story, gets a completely new coat of paint in the last one. Sarah Blundy, who looked like a poor girl in Cola’s narrative is found to be a bigger player in the events that happen. As the story moves forward, there are surprises culminating with a climax that could not be anticipated, but was seeded all along. The murder of a seemingly irrelevant person was part of a conspiracy which affected the future of England and that makes it a satisfying read.

Marxists, Missionaries and an Anthropologist

Marxist theory pervades all domains: There were some Malayali film critics who saw every movie using the class struggle lens; most of Indian history was written by Marxist historians. It seems American anthropology too is influenced by Marxist theories and when Napoleon A. Chagnon refuted it with empirical evidence, Catholic missionaries joined forces with the Marxists to discredit him.

A repeated theme in his book is the clash between his empirical findings and the ideology of his fellow anthropologists. The general bias in anthropological theory draws heavily from Marxism, Dr. Chagnon writes. His colleagues insisted that the Yanomamö were fighting over material possessions, whereas Dr. Chagnon believed the fights were about something much more basic — access to nubile young women.
In his view, evolution and sociobiology, not Marxist theory, held the best promise of understanding human societies. In this light, he writes, it made perfect sense that the struggle among the Yanomamö, and probably among all human societies at such a stage in their history, was for reproductive advantage.
During his years of working among the Yanomamö, Dr. Chagnon fell into cross purposes with the Salesians, the Catholic missionary group that was the major Western influence in the Yanomamö region. Instead of traveling by canoe and foot to the remote Yanomamö villages, the Salesians preferred to induce the Yanomami to settle near their mission sites, even though it exposed them to Western diseases to which they had little or no immunity, Dr. Chagnon writes. He also objected to the Salesians’ offering the Yanomamö guns, which tribe members used to kill one another as well as for hunting.
The Salesians and Dr. Chagnon’s academic enemies saw the chance to join forces against him when the writer Patrick Tierney published a book, “Darkness in El Dorado” (2000), accusing Dr. Chagnon and the well-known medical geneticist James V. Neel of having deliberately caused a measles epidemic among the Yanomamö in 1968.[An Anthropologist’s War Stories]

Aviyal

(As part of Centre Right India’s 3rd anniversary, this entry was featured as part of their week long culinary blogging festival. Someone complained that the picture at CRI looked like fruit salad. So here are better pictures)

In May, 1498, when Vasco da Gama’s fleet arrived in Calicut, it was the epicenter of the global spice trade; it was a place for spice production as well as distribution. These spices that came down from the Western Ghats included ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon, but the most valuable was pepper. Pepper, whose growth and harvest was tied to the monsoons, was to Kerala, what oil is to Saudi Arabia. The spices of Kerala did not owe their worldwide popularity to the Portuguese; an obscure Sanskrit name for pepper was yavanesta, which meant, “The passion of the Greeks” and before them came the Romans. From 1000 – 1500 CE, the Indian Ocean spice network was buzzing with Arabs, Tunisians, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Maghribi and Karimi traders and their agents.

While these spices are now used in various Indian cuisines, what makes the Kerala cuisine unique is the delicious base of coconut either as fresh ground, sliced, grated or as coconut milk. Even though spices are abundant in the region, it is the taste of coconut that will overwhelm you in most Kerala dishes. Besides this, the dishes are cooked in coconut oil which adds a distinct taste (We also apply copious amounts of coconut oil on our hair to reflect the tropical sun).

One of the typical dishes is called Aviyal which essentially is a medley of various vegetables. Colloquially, the word is used in conversation to mean things are messed up. It was quite hard to find the history of this dish and we are simply left with two legends of which one dates to the era of Mahabharata. Apparently, when Bhima was serving as the chef of King Virata, there were some unexpected guests. Improvising quickly, he chopped all the available vegetables, added some coconut and voila, the problem was solved. There is another version which mentions that the dish was invented in the kitchens of the Travancore Royal Family when the chef was faced with a similar situation.

I am not a chef and so this recipe is adapted from household records and few books. One of the nice things is that it allows for improvisation; almost any vegetable is acceptable. Also, it is light on spices and relies on coconut to give the taste.

Ingredients:

5 oz yam
5 oz winter melon
2 raw green plantains
2 drumsticks
1 carrot
4-5 beans
1 potato (small)
salt to taste
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
1/4 cup coconut oil
few curry leaves
4-5 green chillies
1/2 cup yogurt
1/2 coconut – grated
1 teaspoon cumin seeds

Steps:

Wash and peel all the vegetables. Chop them lengthwise
Put them in a heavy bottom kadai with the yam, plantains and winter melon at the bottom and others at the top. Add turmeric and salt. Also add water and cover to cook.
The vegetables should not be overcooked so that they become mushy.
Make a paste of grated coconut, cumin and green chillies with just enough water.
Add this paste to the cooked vegetables along with the yogurt. Make sure that no vegetable is spared of the paste.
Finally add coconut oil and few curry leaves.
You are done. This can be eaten as a side dish along with rice.

How the British invented “Whiteness” and “Blackness”

A 19th century lithograph by Theodore Bray showing a sugarcane plantation

While Charles I was arrested and executed in 1649 CE in England, another revolution was happening in the far away English colony of Barbados. This was the ‘sugar revolution’ and the prosperity it brought would have far reaching consequence for both Britain in the way how different groups of people were viewed.
After the failure of crops like tobacco, cotton, indigo and ginger, the colonists were under pressure from their financiers to deliver. That’s when they decided to try sugar, a crop which had arrived on the island three decades earlier. The problem was that sugar farming was labor intensive, much more than tobacco. Also, it required expertise to prepare the right soil, protect the shoots from disease and to decide the right moment for cutting. All this did not deter the colonists; they experimented, eventually got the right recipe and that made them immensely rich
That’s when the demographics of the island started changing and that change had both to do with the new found prosperity as well as the politics back in England. The backdrop of Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpostwas happening with English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I. Since their fortunes did not look good, the Royalists escaped to the island to evade persecution and to keep their head attached to their body. There were some black slaves, but not quite a lot and so the workforce was predominantly white. But as the ‘white gold’ business boomed, more slaves were required.
From around 6000 slaves in 1643, the number rose to 20,000 by 1655. Also, as the black population was increasing, the white population was decreasing because many of them were leaving the island looking for better opportunities in other countries where the land was cheaper. The black slavery also increased due to economics: an indentured slave cost 10 pounds for about 5 -7 years of work while the blacks cost double the money, but remained as slaves for life. By this time, the slave trading network was well established and it was not expensive to ship them from Africa. In an era, where the goal was to make money by any means possible, slavery did not cause any moral qualms for those who touted their superior religion all the time.
Soon, the number of black slaves outnumbered the the indentured whites and the white settlers started getting paranoid due to the thinning of the Christian people. As the first slave society of the British Americas, they had figure out a way to manage these slaves as well as maintain their superiority. The British had to invent a political structure on which they would be at the top. One of the first laws they passed was the 1661 Act titled “For the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes.” This law declared blacks to be “heathenish, brutish and dangerous people” and since no law existed to govern slaves, new ones had to be invented for “public safety.”
Public safety of course meant the safety of the white settlers; the laws were written by slaveholders and it was upheld by a country which gained financially from the sugar business. The laws were then enforced by the local militia and soldiers. Similar laws were passed by the French and Spaniards and compared to them, the one created by the British was the most cruel. As time went on, more provisions were added which put restrictions on the movement of slaves and prevented them from learning a trade like carpentry.
Following a revolt by black slaves and Irish servants, another law was passed in 1688 which required every slave owner to search slave cabins for drums or horns which could be used to assemble people. If a slave had to leave the plantation, he had to get written permission from the owner. An absconding slave, if found, was whipped and four years later, another law was added which prescribed the death penalty.

In the British legal system, slaves were property and could be bought, sold, or leased; they were never considered as people. Compared to that white indentured people served a limited term and their rights were restored after that. The white indentured people were given better food, clothing and legal protection with provision for trial by jury. A white indentured servant who killed a slave was asked to pay a fine just like other whites. Soon white felons, Irish and Scots were all treated as “white” people while the blacks became another group. Blacks who came from different parts of Africa and identified themselves based on their birthplace were all collapsed into one single bucket. Their individual identity was subsumed under a different label and the world became simply black and white. By this separation, the white settlers prevented a collaboration between the black slaves and the indentured servants and thus avoided a joint rebellion, but that in turn changed the way people viewed each other on the island.
Reference:

Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire by Andrea Stuart

Indian History Carnival–63: Ramayana, Shiva Linga, Koya Pakki, Mughal Map, Gowramma

Ramayana Fresco, Wat Phra Kaew, Bangkok (via Wikipedia)

Daljit Nagra is writing a version of Ramayana drawing based on all available English versions. In this post, he writes about a particular version he came across

One of the most striking written versions I came across in my research is the one commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar, which has survived since the 17th century. An illustrated manuscript in seven books, Jagat Singh’s Ramayana was commissioned in 1649 and has been separated for over 150 years: five of the books have been in the British Library since 1844 and the other two books have been in Mumbai and Udaipur. Now the British Library has digitised their holdings and all that remains of the work is to be reunited online.
The Jagat Singh Ramayana is not only packed full of remarkable paintings – images that help us visualise an ancient imagination from the viewpoint of 17th-century Indians – it is also dazzlingly multicultural. Commissioned by a Sikh, this Sanskrit text owes a debt to a Hindu storyteller, and was illustrated by a Muslim. Most of the manuscript has also spent a large part of its life in the west. The internet is the rightful home for such a great text. The Ramayana is one of the greatest stories ever written, visualised or heard. As such it should be available to the world.
Since Shiva Rathri was just over, it is a good time to look into the iconography of the Shivalingam at Gudimallam

For starters it is the most controversial of subjects in Hindu Iconography and being very much the amateur i am treading a precarious line here, but then what is so special about this form that has seen its spread across the nook and corner of not only India but deep into South East Asia – in central Vietnam, into Cambodia – and that too as early as the 6th and 7th Centuries ? Cannot believe it… Standing a full 4 feet tall, holding the pride of place among exhibits, the massive stone pillar is an awe inspiring site. On closer scrutiny, it is not any stone pillar but a Shiva linga and this is no Indian Museum – this is at the Museum of Vietnamese History, Hochi Minh city, Vietnam and is a local find. Fu Nan period, 6th C CE.
After bringing us the tale of Joao Da Cruz, Maddy has the fascinating story of Koya Pakki, who played a major role in the relation between Cochin, Calicut and the Portuguese.

So we see that the shaming of Cabral and the murder of Aires Correa by the Arabs of Calicut had disastrous effects, and resulted in Vasco da Gama coming again- we studied the massacre of the Meri. Koya Pakki as we saw, survived the attack at Calicut in 1500, moved farther to Cannanore and came back as a friend of Portugal, sometimes also as an emissary of the Zamorin as is stated in some books. In fact it is also likely that he may have just carried a commission of the Zamorin to Lisbon in 1515, though not travelling as a formal emissary of the Zamorin, if I read the story right. It is also clear that it was Koya Pakki who assisted the Portuguese in moving their sights to Cochin and Cannanore, thus isolating Calicut from later Portuguese trade. Finally we saw his involvement in the last scene of the play, supporting the Portuguese flight from the Calicut fort and earning punishment from the Zamorin. So that was Pakki, yet again a small fry in the big story, but the person who was key to many an act.
The British Library has two 18th century Mughal maps which show the route from Delhi to Khandahar. Mughal India blog writes

It is possible, however, that the British Library maps were based on an earlier model since their details complement rather than duplicate the printed account. They include references to the residence of Maharaja Amar Singh who ruled Patiala from 1748 to 1782, and “the late Burhan al-Mulk”, the first Nawab of Oudh, who died in 1739, besides frequent mention of ruined serais (‘travel-lodges’) which were probably destroyed in the disturbances from the mid to late 18th century. Unlike the memoir, both maps extend the route as far as Kandahar.
The Virtual Victorian has a post about two members of Indian royalty who went to England, got converted and whom Queen Victoria tried to engage in matrimony.

With both of the young Indians having converted to Christianity, and with any offspring they might then produce most likely to be Christians themselves, Victoria saw it as her mission to join the pair in matrimony – hoping that this might be the start of the spreading of the Christian faith throughout the whole of the India. However, there is a saying that man may plan but God unplans, and even the plans of a Queen may fail when it comes to matters of matchmaking. Whether or not Gowramma was attracted to Duleep (she was known to be an atrocious flirt, even making eyes at the Prince of Wales, and then discovered in an affair with one of her guardian’s stable boys) the handsome young prince was not convinced to wed his fellow Indian.

We welcome contributions to the carnival, if they satisfy the following rules

The entry must be a blog post and not a newspaper article
It should have a connection to India
The e-mail should have “Carnival” in the subject line, else it will escape my filter.

Please send your nominations by e-mail to varnam.blog @gmail. The next carnival will be up on April 15th.

10 Years of Blogging

Today I complete a decade of blogging. Here is the first post which started it all. Actually I used to have a blog on Blogger or some such entity before that in the final months of 2002, but can’t find any trace of it. So this is the start date.
When I started blogging, I tried to write about everything and that did not go well. Over the years I narrowed it down to history because that is what I am passionate about. Also that is an area on which bloggers are not spending much attention. There are few areas which I have been writing about: the Indus-Saraswati civilization, the Aryan-Dravidian problem, the arrival of Europeans to India and the Anglo-Indian war of 1857. Also over the past few years, I started reading more World History and have been trying to understand Indian history in the global context. But since this is a one man effort, many important areas of history have been left out.
Also, when I started blogging, there was no Facebook or Twitter and hence life was without much distraction. Besides these, many new tools capable of sharing cat videos will appear over the years, but since I come from the era of Krishidarshan and Buniyaad, I am resistant to change. I think I will be around blogging for the next decade as well.
PS: The Indian History Carnival completed 5 years of its existence few months back.

Missionaries, Businessmen and the Annexation of Hawaii

Ship's landing force at the time of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, January 1893. — Ship’s landing force at the time of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, January 1893.

In the 19th century, the private sector consisting of missionaries and businessmen helped project American power to rest of the world. This pattern, where the NGOs intervened in the affairs of a nation, proved to be quite detrimental to the existence of Hawaii. Their culture was transformed, their economy was tied to United States and due to both, in a century their freedom was lost.

In her book, Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire,Andrea Stuart writes about the motivation for Puritans and non-Puritans to migrate to North America from Europe in the 17th century. While the Puritans settled in New England to escape persecution, for others the Bible served as the recruiter for colonization. Anglican priests like Robert Gray, John Donne and Puritan teachers like Thomas Hooker and John Cotton seeded the dream of building a City on the Hill as well as spreading the word. Captain John Smith, an adventurer, planter and the hero of the Pocahontas story wrote at that time about the need to “seeke to convert those poore Savages to know Christ and humanity”. But this urgency to take Christianity to the savages, which was used by the Spanish conquistadors just a century earlier, was just a smokescreen for advancing their business ventures.
In Hawaii, the same pattern followed two centuries later when Baptists, Congregationalists and Methodists arrived by the boatloads to convert the heathens as well as to counter the Roman Catholics who had already set up shop there. These missionaries established good relations with King Kamehameha and opened up the islands to the Americans. Soon they were followed by American businessmen who were involved in whaling and the cultivation of bananas, pineapples and sugarcane.
As American capital and Christianity started flowing to the islands, the Government started taking notice. During that time, the Democrats were interested in expanding to the South, where slavery existed, while the Whigs were interested in expansion to the West. Secretary of State, William Webster, was interested in developing a special relation with the King because Hawaii would serve as a gateway to the riches of Japan and China. He was also interested in limiting the influence of France and Britain, who were interested in the islands. In 1851, the King and Webster agreed that if Hawaii was threatened by European powers, the King would transfer his power to the United States Government.

William Seward, the Secretary of State under Lincoln, and an expansionist wanted a reciprocal treaty to be passed which would give special preference to Hawaiian goods. With this treaty, Hawaiian fruits and sugar would not be subject to American tariffs and in return Hawaii would be open for American manufactured goods. But then the Southern sugar producers did not want to compete with Hawaii and the treaty was defeated in the Senate. During the time of Ulysses S. Grant in 1875, the treaty was passed. American money flowed into Hawaii resulting in a surge of sugar and pineapple farming. The Americans got Pearl Harbor which they developed as a naval base and coaling station.

A photo of the young crown princess Liliuokalani.(via Wikipedia)

Queen Lili’uokalani’ meanwhile was worried about the influence of American economics and politics on Hawaiian independence. As she started putting some limitations, the US Department of State Minister to the Kingdom of Hawaii, John Stevens plotted a coup to overthrow the Queen. Following a coup, John Stevens recognized the new administration led by Sanford Dole and asked requested President Benjamin Harrison to annex the islands to the nation. But Harrison had only a month left as President and the Senate did not act. The next President, Grover Cleveland (the only President to have served non consecutive terms), was not interested in expansion due to the cost and also because he believed that it would betray the ideals of the American revolution.
But that did not mean that Hawaii got its independence back. Hawaii remained as a territory for almost six decades before they were given a choice to either join the Union or remain as a territory without an option for independence. Finally, a saga which started in the 18th century came to an end in 1959, when it became a state.
Reference

America & World/Revolution, Lecture 21 by Professor Michael Parrish at University of California, San Diego

Writing Historical Fiction (10): Geoff Nunberg

A while back, when I was reading one of those modern retellings of The Ramayana, I saw a sentence which mentioned Rama walking through the Diwan-i-Khas and found that anachronism irritating. The Immortals of Meluha was a collection of such anachronisms. Sometimes we need the Internet to find such oddities, but sometimes it just stands out due to lazy writing and poor editing. On NPR, Geoff Nunberg talks about this issue as well the question of historical characters speaking about modern issues instead of issues of their period.

But I give a pass to anachronisms if they don’t jump out at me. No, Mrs. Patmore probably wouldn’t have said “when push comes to shove,” and Lord Grantham should have waited a couple of decades before telling his chauffeur to “step on it,” but that isn’t what’s problematic about “Downton”‘s vision of the past. Even when the characters are speaking authentic period words, they aren’t using them to express authentic period thoughts.

The earl who frets over his duties as a job creator, the servants grappling with their own homophobia, those are comfortable modern reveries. Drop any of them into a period drawing room comedy by Shaw or Pinero, and they’d be as out of place as a flat-screen TV.

Equality, prejudice, race itself. How can you have mid-19th-century characters use words like those without anachronistically evoking the connotations they have for us? To many of Lincoln’s contemporaries, and even his allies, equality still evoked alarming echoes of the French Revolution. To speak of race equality implied not just that people should all be treated alike, but that the races really were morally and intellectually equivalent.

That was an extreme and dubious proposition to all but a few radical Republicans, like Thaddeus Stevens. Lincoln himself almost certainly didn’t believe it, nor did the prominent scientists of the age. In fact, race equality was the phrase the defenders of slavery used to charge that the Republicans wanted to raise Negroes to the same status as whites and encourage miscegenation, charges that most Republicans indignantly and sincerely denied. It’s discomfiting to read the accounts of those debates in Michael Vorenberg’s “Final Freedom,” the book that Kushner chiefly drew on in depicting them.

It’s hard for us to adapt our understanding of words like equality to a 19th-century moral frame. And it’s to Kushner’s credit that there are some overtones of those attitudes in his screenplay. [Historical Vocab: When We Get It Wrong, Does It Matter?]

Borgia: The Election of Pope Alexander VI in 1492

Italian Peninsula in 1492 (via Wikipedia)

A week or so later, a group of cardinals will enter a secret conclave to elect the next head of the Catholic church. TV cameras will be focused on a chimney in the Vatican and the world will be forced to watch the color of smoke that appears. This time, the election is interesting because of the way Pope Benedict departed from the office and also due to the controversies such as the child sex abuse, mismanagement at the Vatican bank, the leaking of secret church documents. As the cardinals are Googling each other and meeting in private apartments and restaurant backrooms, while scandals and intrigue heat up, people are petitioning for the removal of certain cardinals from the conclave.

In 1492 CE, there was an interesting papal election; this was the time of Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli. It was the year in which Christopher Columbus set off on his voyage to discover Asia and it was during this newly elected pope’s time that Vasco da Gama reached Calicut. The French-German TV series Borgia had two episodes devoted to what exactly happened inside the Sistine Chapel and the fictional depiction showed that the whole process had no sanctity and simply was a medieval version of The House of Cards played in the name of a religion. Deals were made, money was transferred, forged documents were presented and even army was summoned, all while the cardinals were holed up in a chapel after taking an oath not to communicate with the external world.
The person who desperately wanted to become the pope was Roberto Borgia (pronounced Borja), the same person who sent Madonna Damiata to investigate a murder in The Malice of Fortune. Though he was not a favorite, he was sure with that the right amount of cunning he could pull it off. During this period, when the worst insult consisted of accusing one of being a Muslim or Jew, there was no unified Italy, but it was divided into a number of warring city-states, kingdoms and duchies and the election of the pope consisted of finding the balance between those battles. Besides the local politics, the relation between Portugal, Spain and France added more spice in the election.
As Borgia enters the conclave, under an oath not to have any contact with the outside world, he he sure of six votes, but needs fourteen to win. But once the doors are closed, the cardinals start bickering over a new oath the pope elected should take. Since the church is rotten to the core and members could buy positions in the Curia, they want to limit that practice. But some members oppose; they don’t want the Vicar of Christ to take man made oaths, but instead want the oath to be non-binding. Once that is resolved, Borgia approaches the Portuguese cardinal and uses his Spanish origins to bargain. Since they both are the non-Italians in the group, he proposes that they unite.
After the first round of voting, Borgia receives just the six votes he expected. He tries to convince a cardinal who received one vote (his own) to support him, but he calls Borgia a whore. The next day, a letter in which Pope Pius rebuked Borgia for attending an orgy, surfaces. As all attention turns to him, Borgia turns the table on his accuser. The accuser had supported Borgia in his two previous attempts to become pope and on those two occasions, he did not bring up the letter. Hence this had to be a forgery. While it calms the proceedings, it reduces his supporters by one.
The next day another letter surfaces which alleges that the King of France had paid 200,000 ducats to one of the cardinals to buy off the election. It also accuses that the forged letter against Borgia was created using French money. Accusations go back with cries of “liar” and “hypocrite”. A young cardinal, who is on his first conclave, wonders why letters are being smuggled in against all rules. The vote count following all this reduces Borgia’s count to four and it looks as if he is on his way out.
Borgia starts negotiating directly with potential supporters. When he promises money, one of them retorts that his opponent as promised double the amount and if they go back and forth of money, all money in Rome would be insufficient for the counter offers. Then Borgia offers him the position of Vice-Chancellor, a position he currently holds in addition to the coins. By the third day, the cardinals are offered only one whole meal a day and all of them who are used to a lavish lifestyle cannot take it. Borgia uses this opportunity to smuggle in a great meal. He also promises an abbey for one cardinal, a church for another and a harbor for the third. He even promises to banish his nephews and niece (actually his children) so that they do not become competitors to the cardinals. A cardinal from Florence was worried about the power of the Medici and Borgia promises him that if he became pope he would crush that family. In the next round of voting, his count increases to ten.
One of the losing cardinals sends a message to the king of Naples to bring his army to Rome, hoping that force would help clear the indecision. As a battle gets underway outside the, the cardinals decide that they will not suspend the conclave till the pope is chosen. The cardinal who summoned the army apologizes for his mistake and asks his supporters to vote for Borgia’s opponent as he thinks Borgia is not a Catholic, but a Spanish Jew who converted. But by the next vote, Borgia’s tally increases to 12 and his opponent to 13. The one who gets 14 wins and it becomes critical for Borgia to get there by any means for else he will have to flee to Spain.
In the final act, he negotiates directly with his competitor. He claims that he is a Roman and is concerned about reforming the church than about the politics between Milan, Naples and Florence. When that does not work, he offers the office of the Vice Chancellor. As bribery and flattery fails, Borgia takes the final weapon in his arsenal; he produces a document which alleges that the opponent’s family has Muslim blood in it. This accusation, Borgia threatens, is sufficient to put him out of business forever. The opponent succumbs and accepts the position of Vice Chancellor and the deal is closed. The next day when the votes are counted, Borgia gets 14 votes and he yells, “I am the Vicar of Christ!”

The politics of 2013 is definitely not going to involve calling armies or passing silver coins, but the Vatican thinks the leaks of certain reports have been done to influence the election of the pope. In 1492 election, theological views were never discussed, but for the coming election, it is expected that a conservative pope will be elected because Benedict has filled the positions with people who align with his conservatism. This means that the Church’s position on homosexuality and birth control will not change. What is same from 1492 is this: even though the growth of the church has been outside Europe in the past century, the electoral college is Eurocentric. We will not know what exactly happens inside the conclave, but one can follow certain blogs and get a sense of the events.