In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote that some human communities are meant to dominate others. David Hume in the 18th century carried the theory further by suggesting that Blacks are inferior to the Whites. There were others like the French naturalist Georges Cuvier and British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper who produced variations of this racist theory. In Cloud Atlas the movie, Hugo Weaving’s various characters remind the tormented that there is a natural order for things and it cannot be upset and Tom Hanks who plays Henry Goose tells Adam Ewing that the strong always prey on the weak as he tries to kill him.
This exploitation of the weak by the strong runs as a thread across David Mitchell’s epic novel Cloud Atlas. Though the movie is out now, let’s start with the book. Unlike any other book I have read both due to the structure and the topics it handles, the book has six novellas set in different time periods. While The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing is set in the 1850s on a ship sailing the pacific ocean towards San Francisco, Letters from Zedelghem is about Robert Frobisher, who becomes an apprentice to a great musician in Belgium. Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery is about an impending nuclear disaster and is set in the 70s in California and The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is set in the present in London. The futuristic pieces are An Orison of Sonmi~451 set in Seoul in the near future and Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After is set in the post-apocalypse period.
It is not six novellas one after the other, but more like one inside the other. The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing ends abruptly and the second one starts. The second one is left incomplete and the third one starts. As the Russian dolls come out one after the other and it reaches Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After, the stories go backwards till they finish with The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. Though they are set in different periods, they are not disconnected. Thus the journal of Adam Ewing is discovered by Robert Frobisher. Luisa Rey gets hold of Frobisher’s music piece and her own story lands as a novel on Cavendish’s desk. Sonmi~451, the heroine of the Neo Seoul piece watches a movie adaptation of Cavendish’s life and Sonmi~451 herself becomes a goddess for the folks who survive the Fall. But the connection among the characters is beyond this simple technique; the characters are the same people who are born across centuries and the connection is much deeper. Or as Mitchell said, “Literally all of the main characters, except one, are reincarnations of the same soul in different bodies throughout the novel identified by a birthmark.”
Now that’s not it. Each of the pieces is written in the literary style of that period among which the language spoken after the Fall is the most difficult to comprehend. Also, the amount of detail that has gone into each section immerses you into that period. As you get sucked into that story, it abruptly ends and you are transported to another period where you make all the connections with the characters in the previous story. Also the topic dealt with are vast: it goes all the way from slave trade to missionaries converting the natives to corporations feeding fabricants with fabricants to racial and economic issues. Reading the book was a mindblowing experience.
In the movie, the treatment is a bit different. While the book spends lot of time in one episode before moving to the next, the movie cuts from one to another abruptly. It goes back and forth in time connecting events logically and visually. But the most interesting decision the directors made is to cast the same set of people across the stories and thus we get to watch Tom Hanks as the villain in the Adam Ewing story and as a good hearted shepherd in the post-apocalypse world. Some portions of the movie differ from the book (There is no Eva for Frobisher to fall in love with; Sonmi~451 does not realize that her escape was choreographed by the totalitarian administration; the post-apocalypse characters do not leave earth), but the new versions do not irritate a bit.
Since I had read the book, the movie was easy to follow, but I am not sure if it was the same experience for folks who came without prior knowledge. While reading the book, the thought that comes to mind is that this book is not filmable, but they managed to make a good movie out of it.
See Also: “Cloud Atlas” author David Mitchell: Adaptation is Translation, Review: ‘Cloud Atlas’ is the Most Daring & Satisfying Film of the Year, Movie Trailer
Magadha and Mahabharata : Archaeological indications from Rajgir Area
Recently ASI archaeologist B.R. Mani made a presentation titled Magadha and Mahabharata : Archaeological indications from Rajgir Area (via Carlos Aramayo) at the International Seminar on Mahabharata held in New Delhi in April 2012. The presentation slides are colored in such a way that humans cannot read it. Fortunately, there is a transcript which tells us that there is a connection between tradition and archaeology.
This was a place known both in Ramayana and Mahabharata. There are some structures named after Jarasandha, who ruled the place during the time of Mahabharata. Archaeological excavations done by ASI has shown that the place was developed around the second millennium BCE since Painted Grey Ware was found there. PGW is a very fine, smooth and even colored pottery with a think fabric. The people who made these artifacts knew sophisticated firing techniques and how to maintain uniform high temperatures in a kiln.
The slides also talk about archaeology in Ghorakatora and lists the articles found there. It then makes the claim that if Mahabharata happened around 1400 BCE, then there is evidence of cultural development dating to that period. When Mahabharata happened is a different discussion and so the take away is that the history of the Gangetic plains is getting updated with new data.
Philippa Gregory on Historical Novel
I have not read any books by Philippa Gregory as the topics she writes about does not interest me. But still this is an interesting speech as it talks about writing historical fiction and has some good examples (via Historical Novel Society)
Decoding Proto-Elamite
In September 1924, an article titled First Light on a Long-forgotten civilization: New Discoveries of an Unknown Prehistoric Past in India by John Marshall was published in the Illustrated London News. The article contained news about the excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro along with a series of photographs. The magazine asked the readers to help in understanding the script and one of the responses came from an Assyriologist who wrote that the seals looked similar to the ones found at Susa, the capital of Elam. The proto-Elamite tablets were dated to the third millennium BCE and belonged to a civlization located in South-Western Iran.
Now, like the Harappan script, the proto-Elamite script too has not been deciphered, but there have been few articles which suggest that there could be a breakthrough soon. They have new technology which helps them create reliable images.
The reflectance transformation imaging technology system designed by staff in the Archaeological Computing Research Group and Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton comprises a dome with 76 lights and a camera positioned at the top of the dome. The manuscript is placed in the centre of the dome, whereafter 76 photos are taken each with one of the 76 lights individually lit. In post-processing the 76 images are joined so that the researcher can move the light across the surface of the digital image and use the difference between light and shadow to highlight never-before-seen details.[Technology helping to crack oldest undeciphered writing system]
There are some ideas about the script and what they could have represented
Some features of the writing system are already known. The scribes had loaned – or potentially shared – some signs from/with Mesopotamia, such as the numerical signs and their systems and signs for objects like sheep, goats, cereals and some others. Nevertheless, 80-90% of the signs remain undeciphered.
The writing system died out after only a couple centuries. Dr Dahl said: ‘It was used in administration and for agricultural records but it was not used in schools – the lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the writing system may eventually have become useless as an administrative system. Eventually, the system was abandoned after some two hundred years.’
These images are now available for you to look and decode.
Reference:
- The Lost River by Michel Danino
Interesting Books for October
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(Click on the book title for the detailed book review)
- The Friar of Carcassonne: Revolt Against the Inquisition in the Last Days of the Cathars by Stephen O’Shea. This is a 12th century tale about a revolt against the Inquisition which happened in France
- Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim al-Khalili
- In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire by Tom Holland
- Master of the Mountain:Thomas Jefferson And His Slaves by Henry Wiencek
Stephen O’Shea recognizes that he has given himself a tough nut to crack in The Friar of Carcassonne. The book is largely the saga of Franciscan brother Bernard Délicieux, a courageous civic leader who laboured mightily to lift the yoke imposed on the people of southwestern France by the Inquisition in the late 13th and early 14th century. Délicieux is a heroic figure, to be sure, and his tale is well worth telling, but perhaps not at book length. Since his revolt against the Inquisition, which was led by the remorseless Dominicans, mostly consisted of legal squabbles, audiences with the king of France and ceaseless litigation, this book has a jarringly Jesuitical flavour.
Beginning in the 8th century, a series of enlightened caliphs began to commission translations of important texts from Persian and Greek into Arabic, laying the groundwork for a period of unprecedented intellectual activity in the Middle East. Geniuses such as the physicist Ibn al-Haytham and the philosopher Ibn Sina did much to influence Europe’s own Renaissance, seven centuries later.
Although occasionally bogged down in historiographic debate, Jim Al-Khalili’s book is a superb read full of fascinating pen portraits. We learn of the Berber polymath Ibn Firnas, who “at the age of 65 … built a rudimentary hang-glider and launched himself from the steep side of a mountain”. Eat that, Leonardo.
The ostensible subject at the heart of In the Shadow of the Sword is the sudden and totally unexpected rise of the Arab Empire of the Caliphate in the seventh century. Holland charts its emergence out of the two Empires that preceded it: the Byzantine Empire of the eastern Mediterranean and the Sassanian Empire of Persia and Mesopatamia. To disentangle the nature of these two very particular states, Holland looks back over the centuries to identify their different spiritual legacies and political dynamics. But the core of the narrative starts in 480 AD and takes us on a roller–coaster of an adventure, ending with the mutually assured destruction of each others territory by Heraclius and Khusrow, which allows for the sudden emergence of an Arab Empire in around 650 AD.
But by the 1780s, Jefferson’s views on slavery in America had mysteriously shifted. He formulated racial theories asserting, for instance, that African women had mated with apes; Jefferson financed the construction of Monticello by using the slaves he owned — some 600 during his lifetime — as collateral for a loan he took out from a Dutch banking house; and when he engineered the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Jefferson pushed for slavery in that territory. By 1810, Jefferson had his eye fixed firmly on the bottom line, disparaging a relative’s plan to sell his slaves by saying, “It [would] never do to destroy the goose.”
Cooking acorns in 1750 CE
This is a mortar and pestle dating to 1750 CE, used by the Ohlone people. They used this to ground acorns (not this one) into a coarse powder. The powdered acorns, their major plant diet, was soaked in water to remove their natural bitterness. After that they cooked it into a gruel, made cakes and then baked them in an oven
A Harappan Feast
If you are having a proper Indian lunch or dinner, there is good chance that your food will contain ginger or turmeric or lentils. You have rice or millet and maybe even a banana to top it off. If so, the food that we eat today is no different from the ones eaten by our ancestors who lived in the Indus-Saraswati region, 4500 years back. An article in Science explains that due to new tools, researchers can now identify food, based on microscopic left overs. Ginger and turmeric were identified for the first time using these new tools and techniques at Farmana and it is the first time they have been spotted in the Harappan region. Thus, in Western lingo, Harappans ate “curry.”
The interesting find though is the banana, which was first cultivated in Papua New Guinea. It is not clear if banana was cultivated in the Harappan region or if it was obtained via trade with people in the East via the trading hubs of the ancient world. In fact there is a bit of controversy over the banana find and I had written about it here.
In Pragati: Holy War by Nigel Cliff
(This book review was published in the September 2012 issue of Pragati)
Urumi, a Malayalam historical film released last year was set in 1502 CE, the year Vasco da Gama made his second voyage to India. The turning point in that movie is when Gama captures Miri- a ship filled with pilgrims returning from Mecca- off the coast of Kerala and barbarically murders 300 Muslims including women and children over five days. The rest of the movie is about how one of the boys, whose father was killed in that attack, gets his revenge during Gama’s third and final voyage. Though the movie was a work of fiction, filled with historical inaccuracies, it brought to attention an important point: Gama had an agenda much bigger than finding a new trading route.
Nigel Cliff’s book expands on that less mentioned detail. He argues that Gama was serving the apocalyptic agenda of King Manuel who wanted to find the Eastern Christians, destroy the power of Islam, and lead Portugal in conquering Jerusalem. This was essential for the Second Coming and the Last Judgement that was to follow. The voyage to Kerala was just one step in this plan.
15th century values
To understand the primary motivation behind Gama’s dangerous voyage circumnavigating Africa and across the Indian Ocean, we have to understand the state of the world in the 15th century. Portugal was ruled by a religious fanatic whose wedding gift to his wife was the expulsion of the Jews settled in Portugal. Since the year 1500 was approaching, he thought the apocalypse was around the corner and he had to conquer Jerusalem. Since Portugal neither had the wealth nor the power for such a task, the plan was to acquire wealth by entering the lucrative spice trade and gain power by forming an alliance with the Eastern Christians. Once the Islamic power was weakened- by eliminating them from the spice trade- the troops could march to Jerusalem and capture the Holy Land.
The Portuguese knew that India was a rich place from where all the spices came. They also knew that it was the home of Prester John, a supposedly Christian king who had unlimited precious metals and a vast army at his disposal. Once the alliance was formed with the Eastern Christians and their rich and powerful king, the march to Jerusalem would be the next logical step.
To put context into this obsession with capturing Jerusalem, Cliff starts off by examining the relation between Islam and Christianity. As a reaction to the violent expansion of Islam from the 8th century till the 10th, the Pope authorised the Crusades to recapture Jerusalem, which went on for centuries. The Crusades had to be halted following the Mongol invasion and the Black Death that followed, but the feelings behind them never really died out. Those feeling were revived following the fall of Constantinople, Christendom’s glorious city, and something had to be done urgently. For that Vasco da Gama set off to find a new route to India bearing the Crusader’s Cross- the one used by the Knights Templar- as his flag.
Disrupting the spice trade was not the first trick the Portuguese tried. After building a naval fleet, they conducted raiding missions down the coast of Africa, planting crosses wherever they landed. When that failed to yield sufficient revenues, they ventured into slave trade. Since this was a war against the Infidels and the unbelievers, it got the stamp of approval from the Pope who issues various Papal bulls and went so far as to divide the world between Portugal and Spain so that peace is maintained between the colonisers.
Apocalypse Now
After a terrifying voyage, Vasco da Gama’s fleet reached Calicut where he found a large number of Muslim traders. He also observed that the ruler belonged to some other religion. By his worldview- in which he had never encountered Hindus- Gama assumed that naturally the Zamorin had to be Christian. But the Zamorin was unimpressed by Gama and the gifts he bought. Gama kept away from the Muslims to be safe, but eventually was disappointed on two counts. First he assumed that the Eastern Christians would be delighted to see their Western counterparts and the united front would expel the Muslims. Second, he thought that Indians would hand over the spices in exchange for the trinkets they had bought but compared to the richness of Calicut, Gama looked like a beggar. Gama in turn blamed his failure on the Muslims, displayed some basic brutality, and returned back to Portugal where he was received as a hero.
Though Gama did not bring back spices or find Prester John, his voyage sent shock waves across Europe. Manuel wanted to ride on this wave of success and sent another mission under Pedro Cabral with a strong warning for the Muslim traders. Cabral wanted the Zamorin to expel all the Muslims traders or face the wrath of the empire. When their demands were not met, the Portuguese went on a rampage. The destroyed the Arab ships in the port and fired shots at the Zamorin’s palace causing him to flee. A later mission under Joao da Nova escalated the religious war and went back without much progress. Manuel needed a strong willed captain who would force the Indians into submission and for that Vasco da Gama was pressed into service once again and it resulted in the Miri incident.
This time the action was not to be restricted to the Malabar coast. Once force was used to subdue the Indians, the fleet would split into two. One part of the fleet would enforce a blockade of the Arab shipping to the Red Sea area and cripple Egypt’s economy. After Egypt was weakened, the Portuguese would sail up the Red Sea and meet land troops who would have marched across Egypt; together they would conquer Jerusalem. But this plan did not work quite as expected.
Gama once again asked his old nemesis, the Zamorin, to expel the Muslims and yet again the Zamorin refused to comply to the Portuguese pirates. An irate Gama went around hanging Muslims and firing cannons towards the coast. The dead people were mutilated and sent on boats off to the shore as a part of the shock and awe strategy. The Portuguese strength came from their naval superiority and since they did not have sufficient strength to fight the Zamorin’s troops, they left. This voyage was considered a great success compared to the others.
The next captain Francisco Alameda, dispensed with the niceties completely and precipitated such a crisis which resulted in major naval battle in the Arabian Sea. After attacking various African countries and butchering people there, Alameda reached Calicut. Remembering the Passion of Christ and motivated by a rousing speech by a priest, the Portuguese attacked Calicut leaving around 3600 dead. Meanwhile another Portuguese fleet cut off the Egyptian supply chain. Based in Muscat, they terrorised all around and took control over the Western destination ports of the Arab ships. The Egyptians, whose business was seriously affected, sent a fleet to the Indian Ocean which defeated the Portuguese, the first naval defeat for them in the Ocean.
The Colonisers
But the Egyptians were no match for the Portuguese; they scored and easy victory over them as well over the Zamorin and finally a fortress was built in Calicut. It looked as if Jerusalem was within grasp.In fact Manuel sent a fleet towards the Suez, but they came back without attacking Jerusalem. Once Goa became a lucrative market for the Portuguese, they were more interested in settling down and plundering the region by enforcing a pass system. Matters like forced conversions and setting up the Inquisition became more important than capturing Jerusalem.
Though the Malabar coast has been part of a global maritime network since the Roman empire, there was an explosion of trade since 1000 CE due to improved navigational aids, better ship building, better map making and new legal arrangements. Places like Quilon (Kollam), Melaka, Quanzhou, Futsat and Aden became the nerve centers of this network where people and goods moved with ease. According to Manmadhan Ullattil who wrote about the Hubs of the medieval trade (Pragati, June 2009), the arrival of the Portuguese changed the rules of the game as they used force to control trade and establish monopolies.
John Keay in “India: A History” has few lines about the Portuguese and Vasco da Gama; he mentions that when Portugal declared a Viceroy for India, it betrayed the true nature of their ambition. “Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From 1000 CE to the Present” (Third Edition) (Vol. 2) by Robert Tignor et. al which is used to teach world history at Princeton University, describes the Portuguese brutality in the Malabar coast. But both these books fail to make a connection between the Portuguese voyages to India and the Crusades. Cliff makes a valuable contribution by putting the piety and plunder of the spice trader into a global context.
Indian History Carnival – 58: Sir Edward Winter, Indian Spy, Mahatma Gandhi
- Sriram writes about the less known deposition of Governor Foxcroft by Sir Edward Winter in 1665
The moral tenor of the Fort was fairly lax with even the chaplain, Simon Smythe being a hard drinker. He was besides married to Winter’s niece. Together, the two hatched a plot and on the pretext of an argument at the Common Table in the Fort, Winter sought the impeachment of Foxcroft. Nothing came of this immediately beyond Winter storming into Foxcroft’s rooms early one morning. Convinced that a coup was at hand, Foxcroft ordered the arrest of Winter. But within 48 hours, Winter had won over the Captain of the Guard and more importantly, the latter’s wife. He was released and bided his time during which interval, the Captain, Lt. Chuseman, burst into Foxcroft’s rooms and in the ensuing duel, at least one Councillor was killed while Foxcroft, his son and another Councillor were wounded. Foxcroft and three others were arrested and Winter took possession of the Fort. That was in September 1665.
- Maddy has the fascinating tale of an Indian spy in Turkey following the first World War
- Baxter Wood has a review of Prof. Vinay Lal’s UCLA course titled Topics in Contemporary Indian History: The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. This was my opinion after listening to Prof. Lal talk about the dark skinned dasas in another course.
This is one of the strangest cases I have come across and perhaps one that is still not solved. On May 24th 1921, this Indian was hanged to death in Ankara, indicted of spying for the British and of a purported assassination attempt on Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Well, as it was to turn out, that was a turning point, and a reason for a total lack of Turkish support for the Indian independence and Khilafat movement in India. Later as it turned out, when the Ali brothers went to Turkey, they could not even get an audience with Mustafa Kemal, perhaps owing to the aborted plans of Saghir. At that point in history, it became a major event in Turkey and the nationalists made a big fuss of it, due to their own issues with Britain. It was a period when Indians in general were not too popular in Ankara as a large number of Punjabi’s and Gurkha’s were involved in the battles at Gallipoli and part of the Allied powers.
Vinay Lal covers many themes about Gandhi: Women, Religions, the West, the Body and his Mentors. But perhaps the most interesting thematic subject is about fasting. And it is presented in several places throughout the course. Twenty-five years ago Lal wrote a book about fasting. His mother’s critique was that the author of a book about fasting should actually try fasting. So Lal took an oath not to publish until he experienced fasting and, of course, the book has not been, nor will ever be published. You will have to get it here.
Not many entries this time. The next carnival will be up on Nov 15th. Send your nominations as a tweet to @varnam_blog or as a mail to varnam.blog @gmail
5000 year old cows
By 2000 BCE, the the Harappan maritime activity shifted to Gujarat. Around that time the trade between Africa and India intensified. While crops moved from Africa to India, genetic studies have shown that the zebu cattle went from India via Arabia to Africa. These Bos Indicus, who reached Africa, met some Bos taurines and before you knew, sparks were flying, setting the African Savannah on fire. There is also evidence of the migration of zebus from Indus to Near East via Iran in the late third millennium BCE. Some of this zebu movement involved travel by boats along the Arabian coast and points to a trade on a much larger scale. Thus the transportation of a giraffe in 1405 by Zheng He’s fleet from Africa to China does not look that far fetched.[Trading Hubs of the Old World – Part 2]
While we know that Bos Indicus were important components of the Indo-African trade of 2000 BCE, we have new evidence of one of the oldest representations of these cows. These come from an excavation at Gilund, a site about 100 KM north of Udaipur. Gilund was part of the Ahar-Banas culture, and existed during the same period as the Harappans. In fact one of the earliest pieces of burned brick was found at Gilund.
The terracota figurines of the cows have the following characteristics
They are most often of fired terracotta, but there are also a number of unfired clay specimens. Nearly half of the collection is comprised of humped animals, interpreted as humped cattle, or Bos indicus .There is significant stylistic variety within the collection,for example, the way the face, legs and hump are shaped;the range in size; whether or not the artisan added such details as ears under the horns, or incised eyes, nose andmouth, etc. (Figure 3.3). In particular, the humped cattlefigurines share stylistic affinities with those recovered atAhar, Ojiyana and Purani Marmi. Similar humped cattle figurineshave also been reported from Mahidpur in MadhyaPradesh[The Gilund Project:Excavations in Regional Context (via e-mail from Carlos Aramayo)]
Another site, Ojiyana, too revealed such cow figurines and they have modeled udders. These are in fact the oldest representations of cows from that region.