Writing Historical Fiction (5): Research

Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction for 2010 has gone to Ann Weisgarber for The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. This book does not tell the story of murder or hidden treasure or scheming viziers, but  is about black settlers in the American West. This is not my cup of green tea, but here is a snippet from an interview with Ms. Weisgarber on how she did the research.

Next I had to learn about the issues that shaped Rachel when she was a child and a young woman. This called for history lessons about black culture. I discovered popular music, slaughterhouses in Chicago, and race riots in East St. Louis. I discovered Ida B. Wells-Barnett and admired her greatly. So did Rachel. Absorbing the culture was another step toward my seeing the world through Rachel’s eyes.
Last, I had to learn about the mindset of the time period. I read novels and diaries written before and after the turn of the 20th Century. I discovered Rachel’s story was not unique; most women in the West, including Indians, struggled to feed their children. Many women lived with determined men. Heartache and homesickness were not unique experiences, but shared by many women. Rachel was one woman among many
My background in sociology pushes me think about my characters as people of their times. I believe it’s important to include references to literature, to music, and to popular culture. Characters don’t live in vacuums but are influenced by the news of their day as well as by events in the past. Newspaper headlines impact lives.[An interview with Ann Weisgarber]

The Khambat Story

In 1293 CE, Marco Polo visited a port town called ‘Cambaet’ or Khambat in Gujarat and wrote

In 1468, three decades before Vasco da Gama reached Malabar, a Russian horse-dealer named Afanasy Nikitin too reached there and was impressed with the riches. The Economic Times has an article on this city, which is no longer by the sea.

The prosperity of Khambat also had a significant impact on history. Take for instance the period around 1535 when Bahadur Shah, the Sultan of Gujarat refused to bow to Mughal imperial authority. The Mughals, newcomers to India, were eager to extent their reign across the country after having defeated the Lodi king at Panipat. Faced with an attack by the Mughal emperor Humayun, the Gujarat Sultan was confident of beating the enemy back, his confidence in his military being based on two elements.
However, the Mughal army pressed on, its ranks inflated by men seeking a share of Khambat’s wealth. The port town’s wealth became its own undoing and it burnt for three days in the wake of the Mughal attack. It also gave the Mughals their first view of the sea and of the opportunities it offered.
A generation later, Humayun’s son Akbar set his sights on Gujarat. He was motivated by the twin needs of attaining a sea outlet for his land-locked empire and for subduing the robber/baron nobles who were looting the wealth of the state. If men were drawn to India via Khambat, so were ideas. For Akbar, his first glimpse of the sea at Khambat also brought him into contact with merchants from Portugal, Turkey, Syria and Persia. Akbar wanted to be on friendly terms with the Portuguese who controlled the sea traffic to Mecca by their domination of the Arabian Sea. Over time, interaction with the Portuguese increased to an extent when Christian priests coming as part of a diplomatic mission from Portugal were given permission to preach and even convert people. Later, in 1612, the British adventurer William Hawkins would leave India from Khambat, after four years of dodging Mughal court intrigue and Portuguese hostility, while in Jahangir’s court.[Khambat: Once there was a sea]

Optical Illusions

You must have seen these images, typically used for displaying optical illusions. For example, in the first image, do you see a duck or a rabbit? In the second image, do you see an old woman or young woman? Now National Geographic has reported on one of the oldest such illusions which comes from a Paleolithic cave in France.

In a particularly striking example, a small figurine has been given the details of a bison on one side and those of a mammoth on the other. The Paleolithic artist was clearly playing with the similar contours of the two animals and creating a single object that could be flipped to represent one species or the other.[World’s Oldest Optical Illusion Found? ]

You can see the image here. This prompted Ravages  to sent the following photo, found in temples in Tamil Nadu. Do you see a bull or an elephant?

The Earliest Writers & Writing Systems

A major human breakthrough, besides agriculture, was the ability to represent a language graphically. In ancient societies, where most of the people were illiterate, the writing was done by scribes.

  1. In this video, Sara Brumfield of UCLA demonstrates how scribes wrote on clay tablets in Mesopotamia.
  2. This video from The Oriental Institute, Chicago, talks about these scribes and the rationale behind cuneiform.
  3. Egyptian scribes and their work is described in this video from The Oriental Institute, Chicago

Ancient Cloth Production in Greece and Turkey

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review has a review of Brendan Burke’s From Minos to Midas: Ancient Cloth Production in the Aegean and in Anatolia. Ancient Textiles Series 7. This is interesting because the Minoan culture existed during the Mature Harappan period and we can learn how these states produced and exchanged clothes as well as how they used seals.

Two interesting sections in this chapter caught my attention: his discussions of purple dye and of Minoan seal stones. Burke argues for the appearance of purple dye from murex snails to occur in Minoan Crete before anywhere else in the Mediterranean (34ff). He brings together textual sources, bioarchaeological evidence, artifacts, and archaeological facilities and contexts in his discussion, and extends it to consider the role of textiles in ancient overseas trade between Minoan Crete and other cultures in the eastern Mediterranean.
Burke argues for the administration of textile production in the Old Palace Period, based on seal impressed loom weights and spindle whorls as well as a certain type of prismatic seal. He suggests that a motif found on more than twenty-five different seal stones represents three to five loom weights suspended from a bar at the bottom of a warp-weighted loom (44ff, especially fig. 30).3 Burke concludes that the standardized weights of loom weights and their concentrated numbers indicate a “regulated textile industry administered by the Old Palace at Knossos” (58).[Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.12.67]

Briefly Noted: Centurion (2010)

CenturionThe Roman Ninth Legion is a favorite topic of movie makers and novelists. The movies include the forgettable Aishwarya Rai starrer The Last Legion (2007) and upcoming The Eagle (2011) and the novels include Stephen Bennett’s Last of the Ninth and Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth. The British film Centurion deals with the legion’s adventures against the Picts in 117 C.E.
Why this interest in the Ninth legion? Around 117 C.E, the legion disappeared in Britain like how the army of Cambyses II vanished in the Egyptian desert. There are many explanations for this disappearance: some think they perished in the Bar Kochba Revolt while other suggest it was in the conflict with the Parthians. In this movie, Neil Marshall, provides another explanation.
The movie is the swords and sandals version of The Seven Samurai. When their legion is decimated by the Picts (a visually stunning scene) and the General kidnapped, seven survivors decide to rescue him. They reach the Pict camp, but fail to unlock the General’s chains, thus leaving him to his death. The seven then decide to return back to the Romans who have moved to Hadrian’s Wall, but are chased by the Picts. Some survive, some don’t.
Being a plot driven action movie, it does not have much time for character development like Gladiator. There is action — chases, battles, torture — right from the start as if James Bond time traveled to the second century. Even if you have been saturated with Roman violence, this one takes it up a notch. It is a watchable movie: not a classic and not so bad either.

150 years of ASI

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) is understaffed: they don’t have enough people to protect sites under their care nor enough people for underwater archaeology. They don’t have the power to protect sites like the Megalithic site near Thrissur. But then you got to work with the ASI you got and not the ASI you want. That ASI is completing 150 years and on this occasion, Frontline has a politically correct interview with the Director-General (he refuses to comment on Ayodhya, Sethusamudram).

Let me tell you that the ASI is a highly understaffed organisation. The government is aware of the problem and is making its best efforts to strengthen the ASI by providing additional manpower. Whatever may be the extent of additional manpower, such problems cannot be tackled by government initiatives alone. Unless civil society comes forward to defend our heritage, there is very little hope for our monuments. I am not saying this in order to evade our responsibility. Monuments in remote areas are guarded by one attendant. In many cases, the nationally protected monuments do not have the minimum requirement of attendants. So by the time the communication reaches the authorities, the damage is already done.As I said earlier, the ASI must put in its best efforts to stop these. But civil society and people in the neighbourhood too should take proactive steps on these matters. The ASI or the State governments cannot really make much progress on their own[Custodian of heritage]

Saving Megalithic sites

Recently, a new protected area was declared in the Jordan Valley to protect megalithic structures dating back to 3000 BCE. Similar megalithic structures exist near Thrissur in Kerala, but their situation is not as good.

No one has so far protected and preserved any of the ‘kodakkal’ or umbrella stone of megalithic culture found in different places of Malappuram district. Many of them found in Kilikkallingal in Kavanur panchayat near Areekode have already been destroyed either by treasure hunters or by callous quarrying of the laterite.
“When I started my study, I found over two dozen ‘kodakkals’ at Kilikkallingal alone. But unfortunately, now we can find remains of hardly half-a-dozen megaliths there,” said V.P. Devadas, associate professor of history at NSS College, Manjeri, who heads a UGC-aided study on ‘Megaliths of Kerala.
‘Kodakkal’ is a unique mushroom-shaped megalithic burial monument of Kerala. “Nowhere else in the world is this kind of megalithic burial site found,” he said.[No care for Megalithic burial sites]

The Lost River: Harappans and Vedic People

Michel Danino’s The Lost River (Penguin, March 2010) has been reviewed by V. Rajamani in the well-known scientific journal Current Science (25 December 2010, vol. 99, no. 12, pp. 1842–43)

Part three of the book deals with the important question ‘If Ganges civilization was built upon Harappan legacy, and if so, how much of a legacy?’ By comparing the similarities in architecture, town planning, weights and scales, technology and crafts, the Brahmi script and the religious symbols of Harappan and Gangetic civilizations, the author concluded that: (i) Indianness started with Harappans, (ii) Harappans were Rig Vedic people and (iii) the present Ganges civilization is a new avatar of the Indus– Sarasvati civilization. The discussion to counter the various arguments of several earlier workers to negate the existence of the Sarasvati River in the geographic domain of present-day Ghaggar and its mightiness makes interesting reading for those who believe in the complexities of nature.[Current Science, Dec, 2010]

According to Danino’s book, the Rig Vedic people lived during the Harappan period, but that does not mean that all Harappans were Vedic people. This is what I wrote in my review in the Aug 2010 issue of Pragati.

In the absence of any new Aryan material culture and with genetic studies discrediting an Aryan invasion/migration, Mr Danino argues that there can only be one conclusion: Vedic culture was present in the region in the third millennium BCE. Many Indian archaeologists also argue that Vedic people lived along the banks of Sarasvati while it flowed from the mountain to the sea during the Mature Harappan period. Mr Danino, however, refrains from concluding that the Harappans were Vedic people because such a conclusion can only be made after the Indus script has been deciphered.[The mysterious Sarasvati]