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"

Sriram explains how the Sabha culture originated in Chennai

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.

Fëanor has some photographs of the Mughal miniatures he saw at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin
Based on the 17th century notes by Roger Hawkes, Maddy gives us a glimpse of life in Calicut during that period.

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.

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.

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.

Apparently, the plan to move the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi was a secret, writes India Realtime blog

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.

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

“ ‘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.
Mahmood Farooqui writes about Dastangoi, a lost and old art form of storytelling.

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.

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.

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.

Sriram has a brief introduction to Harikatha, a form of story telling which evolved in the 18th century

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.

Dead Sea Scrolls Online

In my article Secrets of the cellars (Pragati,Aug 2011), I wished if only the Mathilakam records were scanned and put online. That may never happen, but there is a model on how it can be done. Two thousand years after they were written, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were kept safe and accessible only to a a few scholars, went online. NPR has an article with photographs which explains how this was done using a $250K camera developed in California and Google’s help.

The appearance of five of the most important Dead Sea scrolls on the Internet is part of a broader attempt by the custodians of the celebrated manuscripts — who were once criticized for allowing them to be monopolized by small circles of scholars — to make them available to anyone with a computer. The scrolls include the biblical Book of Isaiah, the manuscript known as the Temple Scroll, and three others. Surfers can search high-resolution images of the scrolls for specific passages, zoom in and out, and translate verses into English[2,000-Year-Old Dead Sea Scrolls Go Online]

View and read the DSS here.

Writing Historical Fiction (7): Amitav Ghosh

I have not read a single book by Amitav Ghosh (yet), but that should not prevent me from posting his opinion on writing historical fiction

Q: What sorts of things do you have to do to write successful historical fiction?
A: I don’t think there is any great difference between historical and other kinds of fiction. There are, in fact, very few novels that are not, in some sense, ‘historical’. Most novels are written in the past tense after all, and are based on the conceit that they are narrating events that have already happened. Melville’s Moby Dick was inspired by events that occurred decades before he started the book; the same is true of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But today nobody thinks of these books as ‘historical novels’. What this tells us is that history provides novelists, poets and playwrights with different settings and situations: this does not mean that their themes are necessarily different from those that are explored by writers who choose to write about contemporary settings. In the end, novels are all the same in that they are about characters and their predicaments. Nobody would read a historical novel for the history alone. To be successful a historical novel, like any other, must have compelling characters.[Amitav Ghosh Returns to the Opium Trade in “River of Smoke”]

Indian History Carnival – 45: Baburnamah, Rashtrakutas, Mughal Postal System, Camels, Tipu Sultan

Fëanor quotes André Wink to argue that the rise and fall of the Rashtrakuta kingdom was connected to trade with Persian Gulf

Towards the late 10th century, however, the great ports of Gujarat began to decline. According to Wink, the proximate cause was the steady erosion of the Persian Gulf trade as the Red Sea and Egypt became more important. These countries dealt more with Malabar and Coromandel. The resultant decline in wealth and power of the Rashtrakutas was matched by the growing clout of the Cholas in the south of India, with the predictable result.

This is a post from two years back, but it is interesting as it talks about how the postal system worked during the Mughal Period.

The Dak Chawki system was initially restricted to royal and official use. For urgent letters people had to make their own arrangements at personal cost or await the arrival of the regular messengers and prevail upon them to carry the same. In fact, it was this random practice of the postal employees being subject to inducements by the common public, which compelled Babar to introduce the system of transfer. News was conveyed through an efficient channel of confidential reports, supplied daily, bi-weekly and weekly by different agencies acting independently. This system ruled out erroneous information reaching the ruler, not only because of the inbuilt cross-checks but also by giving the emperor different perspectives to a situation.

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has the illustrated edition of Baburnamah — the autobiography of the Mughal invader — from the 16th century CE. The book was originally written in Turkish and was translated and copied by various of his successors. BibliOdyssey has some of the pictures and Flickr has the complete set.
Airavat has a post on how camels were used in Indian warfare.

An illustrated folio of the Akbarnamah depicting the 16th century Mughal siege of Champaner in Gujarat. The two camels are probably the twin-humped Bactrian breed and are carrying naggada beaters. Such foreign breeds were less resistant to heat and Indian camel breeds from Baluchistan westwards began to be used by Mughal armies primarily for transport. Baloch camel traders are shown as forming the long tail of Aurangzeb’s army that caused so much devastation in the Deccan Wars late in the 17th Century. Jadunath Sarkar wrote in his History of Aurangzib: “The worst oppressors of the peasants, however, were the tail of the army……Particularly the Beluchi camel-owners who hired out their animals to the army, and unattached Afghans searching for employment, plundered and beat the country people most mercilessly.”

There is news that very soon a Malayalam movie, which is a historical about Tipu Sultan and Unniarcha, will start filming. Kamal Haasan has signed on. Maddy had a post on this a while back.

The story thus continues to remain a myth. If Unniarcha was born in 1766 and was taken away by Tipu in 1789, then it is impossible for her to have mothered Aromal, unless he were Tipu’s son. But that is also not possible for according to legends, Unniarcha was very much around Malabar and goading Aromal to take revenge on Chandu. Even then the timelines would not be right for such events would not have occurred in difficult times when the Sultans and their army were encamped in Malabar (those events would have found their way into the ballads). Then again, let us for a moment assume that Unniarcha was a favored queen in the Zenana. This is also not possible for the name was never seen in Wellesley’s or Marriott’s papers. The queens listed and the sons that come up do not indicate any person of Malabar origin

Last month’s Carnival featured a post by Sriram on de Havilland and the Madras Bulwark. He has another post on the Eastern and Western Castlets of de Havilland

Western Castlet appears to have survived for much longer, though its exact location is even more difficult to identify. Considering that most accounts say it was off Mount Road, it is very likely that de Havilland’s property extended from east to west with Eastern Castlet being on Mount Road itself and Western Castlet in the rear. After they were divided it is probable that Western Castlet was accessed by a service lane from Mount Road.

Thanks to Fëanor and Sandeep V for sending the links. 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 Oct 15th.