Understanding American Civil War

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln, one of the most obscure candidates, was elected as the sixteenth president of the United States and Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins, a slave owner in Columbia, SC was worried. Very worried. In her diary she wrote.

I have never been opposed to giveing up slavery if we could send them out of our country — I have often wished I had been born in just such a country — with all our religious previleges & liberties with none of them in our midst — if the North had let us alone — the Master & the servant were happy with out advantages — but we had had vile wretches ever making the restless worse than they would have been & from my experience my own negroes are as happy as I am: [A Slaveholder’s Diary]

If you have not educated yourselves about the American Civil War by watching Ken Burns’ excellent series, then you can follow the events of the war by subscribing to the Disunion blog. The latest entry describes the events of Nov 16-22 when Georgians were deciding the course of action.
In other civil war related news, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln movie now has a start date and Daniel Day-Lewis is starring as the President.

The Mystery of the 5th Century Sarnath Buddha

When it comes to Buddhist art, one of the first thing that comes to mind is the Gandharan form which developed when Classical Greece met Buddhism in the Af-Pak region; it was a Big Bang moment in Buddhist art. Less mentioned is a major breakthrough which happened in 5th century Sarnath — the place where Buddha gave his first sermon — when a new style of representing Buddha was created. The origins of this style still remain a mystery.
Compared to other representations of Buddha, the Sarnath Buddha (see pic) is quite different. He is seen wearing a see through dress which covers his torso and has no folds; most other styles show dress with folds. The second point is not quite clear in the photo, but the left knee is a bit bent. Third, his genitals are hidden. Also, the eyes look down and he looks feminine. This unique style spread to rest of the Buddhist world — to China, to Vietnam, to Cambodia.
To put this in perspective, look at Bala Buddha (125 CE), one of the important anthropomorphic representations of Buddha, found in nearby Mathura. The statue is 9ft tall and he is staring right at you. Also his genitals are not hidden; the pose is quite strong and powerful. He wears a underskirt and exposes his torso. This is not surprising since Ananda Coomaraswamy found that the inspiration for the Bala Buddha came from the Hindu iconography for the Yaksha. You can see similar pose for a 5th century Vishnu as well. Now if you go back to the Sarnath Buddha (see pic) you can see that all the manliness has been drained out.
What exactly happened to trigger such a change? Was there a political situation which caused Buddhists to change their representation or was it in response to an ascendant Hinduism? (Note that while this change was happening, the Gupta empire was in political turmoil). Is this a feminine representation to come up with something like the ardhanari concept? Or is this a boyish look to appeal to women or queens who were Buddhists ?
Or is there any other theory?
Notes:

  1. Recently I attended a lecture by Prof. Robert L. Brown of UCLA on this topic. This post comes from the lecture notes.

Briefly Noted: The Buddha (PBS)

For someone interested in Buddha’s life, there are numerous books ranging from the ordinary (Deepak Chopra’s Buddha) to the brilliant (Thich Nhat Hanh’s Old Path White Clouds). When it comes to movies or documentaries, I have seen more on the Dalai Lama (Seven Years in Tibet, Kundun) than the Buddha himself; Siddhartha is summarized quickly in programs like Michael Wood’s The Story of India.
In this new PBS documentary, he gets two full hours — highly insufficient to understand his work in detail, but just sufficient to piqué your interest. The documentary combines video, cartoons, and Buddhist art to narrate Siddhartha’s biography.The miracles and the super natural elements are not left out; you get the traditional story. The documentary also finds some time to briefly discuss meditation and mindfulness and why it is effective. It is combined with commentary by Dalai Lama, Buddhist monks, Prof. Robert Thurman, a bunch of American Buddhists I have never heard of.
The PBS website for the program, as usual, is a treasure trove of information. Checkout the dynamic timeline or the Educational Resources

Indian History Carnival – 35: Konark, Britain, Ayodhya

  1. In his post titled The Sun Temple of Konark Or Girish Sahane Gets it Wrong in Detail, Sandeep explains what really happened to the shrine.
  2. One wonders why the priests had to migrate with their God to Puri if say, the Sun temple at Konaraka had been ruined due to say, natural causes. As Hunter records, and Prabhat Mukherjee quotes, it was because Kalaphad had desecrated the shrine. The fact that the temple servitors as late as 1940 (when Mr. Mukherjee’s book was written) testify to that transported idol speaks volumes. As is well-known, Hindu temples or idols once desecrated are treated as mail or impure or defiled and hence unworthy of worship, a tradition that holds true even today.

  3. Fëanor writes about horse trading — of animals which walk on four legs — in 15th century India.
  4. The price of the horse multiplied crazily once it arrived in India. Ibn Battuta talks some numbers: the best bahri horse was valued at up to 4000 tanka, as compared to the middling tatari, which cost only about 100 tanka. The top-class bahris were not for war – most were kept as luxury items coveted by the rich; only the tataris were destined to be warhorses

  5. Anuraag Sanghi writes about how Indian ship building expertise helped Britain to become a prime military power.
  6. British access to India’s huge ship-building capacity, raw-material sources, technicians, shipwright, gave them a decisive edge – considering that Britain controlled Chittagaon (colonial Chittagong), Surat and Mumbai (colonial Bombay), Chennai (colonial Madras), Northern Sircars (modern Andhra Coast) – all famous Indian ship-building centres. Based on this experience, British further expanded teak sources to include Burma by the middle of 19th century. Just before steel started to take over from teak.

  7. In 1943, during the Second World War, the British War Cabinet under Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a decision which resulted in the death of three million Indians. Soutik Biswas writes on the BBC blog about this incident.
  8. Mr Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships – this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. As imports dropped, prices shot up and hoarders made a killing. Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy – which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy – in coastal Bengal where the colonisers feared the Japanese would land. So authorities removed boats (the lifeline of the region) and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks.

  9. In an article published in The Hindu Magazine, Ramachandra Guha made some allegations against an “obscure Belgian priest” who was involved in the Ayodhya movement. The not-so-obscure Belgian priest decided to return the favor.
  10. Guha’s own school could have made that same distinction, e.g. by saying that “it is a pity that Muslims destroyed Hindu temples, but that is no reason for us now to destroy mosques”, or so. Instead, at a time when their power in academe and the media was absolute and unchallenged by any capable Hindu opposition (as demonstrated in M.M. Joshi’s textbook reforms, a horror show of incompetence), it went to their heads and they thought they could get away with denying history. They did indeed get away with their bluff, and may well continue to do so for some more time. However, the prevalent power equation will not last forever, and one day the “secularist” exercise in history denial will be seen for what it was.’

The next edition of Indian History Carnival will be up on Dec 15th. Send your nominations to varnam dot blog @gmail or to @varnam_blog

100 Year Old Sounds from India

Following the Anglo-Indian war of 1857, the British decided to conduct a linguistic survey of India. To compile the list of languages and dialects, people were asked to read the Parable of the Prodigal Son (with some Indian adaptations) from the Gospel of Luke. You can now listen to those sounds from almost a century back at the Digital South Asia Library (H/T Parag)

From the specimens Grierson identified the grammatical and other peculiarities of the language or dialect. He also provided a brief Introduction for each of the languages, distinguishing its various dialects, noting down the number of speakers, the habitat of the language, its literature, and concluding with a sketch of the grammar . In all 179 languages and 544 dialects in the Indian Empire, excluding some portions (Burma, Hyderabad and Mysore states and the Presidency of Madras) were described in the LSI’s eleven volumes in nineteen parts, published between 1903 and 1928 the Introductory volume was published in 1927, followed the next year by a tabular Comparative Vocabulary. Grierson estimated that the survey covered 224 million out of the total population of nearly 300 million of the Indian empire.[Introduction to LSI]

The "Race" Myth

Race was a convenient taxonomy to classify the different people that Europeans saw when they traveled around the world in the 15 and 16th centuries. Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century Swedish botanist, even assigned various traits: Native Americans (wild), Europeans (gentle, law abiding), Asians (melancholic), Africans (ruled by impulse). Well, you get the drift. 

In the 20th century, as I wrote in Outdated Syllabus, anthropologists abandoned race as a valid biological construct; it is no longer used to explain the differences between various peoples. But we all are not the same, you may say. Just walk around the agora, and  you will be able to distinguish a Malayali from a Punjabi or a Kashmiri from a Naga. Since there is variation among human population and since we can group people by visible biological traits, doesn’t race exist?

No, says Prof. Tara D Carter categorically in Making of the Modern World 1 course (podcast). When we say people are different, we are referring to their — to throw some jargon —phenotypic trait. It just means a quantifiable trait like skin color or hair color or height. These differences occur due to evolution and these traits are preserved since it helps individuals with the traits survive. For example, dark skin is advantageous in warm climates to withstand the ultra-violet radiation. If you are living in a dense forest, it helps to be shorter. Thus this variation is good for us as a species for survival.

These adaptations do not occur randomly, but is dictated by geography. Over a long period, the advantageous traits become common in a population; the differences among us is just an adaptation. To conclude, biologically we all are the same.

Native Civilizations of the Americas

In 1700s India was one of the richest nations in the world, but after two centuries of British rule it became one of the poorest. In the 16th century, when Hernán Cortés went to loot Mexico, he was stunned by the beauty of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Three centuries later Charles Darwin went that way and found “the most miserable wretches on the face of the earth.” Yes, colonialism was indeed a powerful mechanism.

Post-colonial World History eventually became the history of the Western world; India or Mexico were primitive exotic lands which did not deserve to be mentioned. The engineering, farming and scientific skills of the ancient American civilizations are now slowly getting the attention it deserves, writes Colin McEwan.

By taming the steep mountain slopes, the Incas turned a previously unexploited eco-niche between the lower valleys and the high puna grassland into immensely productive agricultural terrain. Their mastery of the pragmatic demands of water management and irrigation technology blended a consummate knowledge of the landscape with an unrivalled aesthetic sensibility. The sweeping grandeur of these terraces at Pisac, Moray and Ollantaytambo still takes the breath away. [The Americas: The old New World]

Movie Review: Agora(2009)

Alexandria — the third largest city in the Roman empire — was not a secular town by any means in the fourth century. Christians, once lion food in the Roman Empire, were allowed to practice in public. Intolerance was on the rise with ever-recurring battles between Jews, followers of Greek traditions, and Christians. The intolerance was facilitated by Roman Emperors who after conversion had discovered a new hobby which provided primal excitement – wiping out idolatry.
Theodosius I, for example, banned non-Christian rituals and his man in Alexandria, Pope Theophilus, facilitated the destruction of Serapeum — a temple dedicated to Hellenistic-Egyptian god Serapis. But in spite of religious fanaticism, Alexandria was the Takshashila of Egypt; students came from Syria, Cyrene and Constantinople to learn philosophy, math, astronomy and astrology. The city had temples and churches and schools for intellectual and cultural nourishment. It was here that Hypatia, the female astronomer/mathematician/philosopher lived, taught, and was murdered. The movie is the biography of this less known Egyptian.
When this visually stunning swords-and-sandals movie starts, Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) is already a well known teacher. She had learned from her father Theon, one of the members of the Museum of Alexandria, where some scrolls from the library of Alexandria were preserved. She also wrote commentaries, edited Ptolemy’s texts, and taught Neoplatonism, a monistic theology with similarities to Indic schools of thought (not mentioned in the movie).
She is seen wondering about the paths of planets; this was a time when Ptolemy’s geocentric model prevailed. The observations did not match Ptolemy’s model and she wondered if there was a simple explanation for the wanderers. She mentions Aristarchus, who had proposed a heliocentric model, but was not quite sure if that was the answer.
While she was worrying about the wanderers in the sky, the minds of some of her students were wandering around hers. This included an aristocrat Orestes, who eventually became the Prefect of Egypt. Hypatia rejected his public advances, devoted herself to science, and stayed a virgin till her death.
On the streets, Christians were mocking and aggressively converting followers of Greek traditions. This leads to the first major conflict between the scholars and Christians. Fed up with the constant mocking, the Christians are attacked by the locals. But the Christians gain an upper hand and lay a siege of the Serapenum. The news reaches the emperor who grants amnesty to the non-Christians, but allows the Christians to ransack the place and burn the scrolls.
The second set of disastrous events start following the death of Bishop Theophilus. He was succeeded by his nephew, Cyril, a self-aggrandizing control freak who continued his uncle’s overzealousness with vigor. Since the “pagans” were take care of, Cyril turned his attention to the Jews. The fact that Jews watched the theater during Sabbath turned to be the peace breaker. The violence between Christians and Jews exploded and the matter was bought to the Prefect, Orestes, who was a once student of Hypatia. But he could do nothing. Jews, who lived in Alexandria since the time of Alexander, were forced to leave.
Though a baptized Christian, Orestes does not approve of Cyril’s attempts to encroach over civil power, but he has to steer through the foggy borderlands between his religion and his friendship with his teacher. As the crisis gathers steam and boils over, Cyril notices Hypatia’s popularity and her friendship with Orestes. Cyril gives a public lecture in which he blames Hypatia for controlling Orestes and calls her a witch — an unpopular profession in 5th century Egypt and 21st century Delaware. He also quotes scripture which mentions the role of women and asks Orestes to accept the word of God; Orestes refuses.
To hurt the Prefect, the Parabalani monks — monks whose primary duty is to take care of the ill and homeless — decide to take action. They kidnap Hypatia, a humanist who thought all people were brothers, to a church and stone her to death. In the movie, one of her slaves, who was in love with her, chokes her before the stoning.
None of her works survived, but we know about her from the letters written by one of her students, who later became a Christian priest. In the movie he is portrayed as the one trying to reconcile Cyril and Orestes.
Though the movie is made on large scale with stunning sets which recreate the Alexandria of the 5th century, the script is loose on facts. In the movie Hypatia is seen as discovering the heliocentric model and elliptical orbit, much ahead of Kepler, but facts don’t support it. A millennia later, Galileo would be imprisoned by the Pope for suggesting a heliocentric model of the universe, but Hypatia was not murdered for her philosophy or science, but due to political reasons.
Alongside Hypatia’s death, the destruction of the traditions and beliefs and Gods of the classical antiquity too was happening. These traditions survived the blood thirsty Roman empire, which did not give a hoot as to which Gods you worshiped so long as the coffers were filled. But against the new nemesis — intolerant mutation of monotheism — traditions which survived centuries had no chance of survival. As Rachel Weisz mentioned in an interview with Charlie Rose, Europe slipped into the Dark Ages.
Additional Reading & Credits

  1. Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar
  2. The New York Times review of Agora
  3. Movie Trailer in HD
  4. Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria (Harvard University Press, 1996)
  5. Image from Wikipedia.

Talk by J M Kenoyer on Harappan Civilization

In May, 2010, Prof. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer — who has been conducting archaeology in India and Pakistan since 1986 — gave a talk on the trade relations between the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia. In the talk (watch video), he presented the latest scholarship regarding the Indus: on origins, on the script and on the cultural exchange between Indus and Mesopotamia. He also used the S-word, a taboo among eminent historians.
A quick summary:

  • The Indus civilization flourished around two rivers — Indus and Sarasvati. Yes, he mentions that Ghaggar-Hakra is that river of antiquity. (Additional Reading: The Lost River by Michel Danino).
  • Potter’s marks were found in pottery of the Ravi phase (from 3300 BCE) which is around the same time writing developed in Mesopotamia and Egypt. This writing evolved into the Indus Script, which he says is a writing system, which codifies multiple languages. It was used for trade, accounting and rituals. He is working with folks from TIFR on some theories about the Indus script.
  • One of the seals display a diety sitting on an elephant and grabbing two tigers. While many have suggested that this represents a scene from Gilgamesh, Prof. Kenoyer suggests that this independently evolved in India.
  • He showed one Mesopotamian seal, dated to between 3300 – 2900 BCE, made from a shell found near Karachi. This falls between the period of the Dhuwelia cotton and time of Sargon of Akkad. (Additional Reading: Trading Hubs of the Old World)
  • Wheeled carts were being developed around the same time they were developed in the steppes.
  • Water Buffalo (both motif and animal) went to Mesopotamia from India. Dr. Asko Parpola also made a similar point. (Additional Reading: The Indus Colony in Mesopotamia)
  • There is similarity between the head dress of women in Harappa and one region of Mesopotamia. Maybe the women went via marriage?
  • Swastika was painted in Indian caves about 10,000 years back and in the Samara culture. Swastikas were also found in the Indus Valley.
  • He could not find evidence of warfare and thinks that warfare was not used a mechanism for integration. No weapons were found. Even in the motifs, the fights are between humans and animals or between humans and supernatural beings; never between humans.
  • Yoga had its origins in Indus Valley.
  • There was intensive trade with Mesopotamia from 2600 BCE. He also mentions Queen Puabi. He also talks about the Meluhhan interpreter and Meluhhan villages. (Additional Reading: The Indus Colony in Mesopotamia).
  • There was a concept of a passport in Central Asian trade. They found seals with the Central Asian motif on one side and the Harappan motif on the other. No such seal exists for Mesopotamian trade.
  • Women who had wide bangles were burried separately. Similar wide bangles, crafted in the Indus, were found in Susa,Iran and he makes the argument that they were powerful nomadic traders.
  • There was a social hierarchy – land owners, elites, ritual specialists — and this was deduced from burial patterns.

 

In Pragati: An Outdated Syllabus

(Photo: Justin Gaurav Murgai)

(a shorter and sweeter version of this article appeared in the Nov 2010 issue of Pragati)
Recently M. Night Shyamalan kicked off a race row with his latest movie The Last Airbender (2010). In the TV series, the characters, Aang, Katara, Sokka are Asian, but in the movie, they were portrayed by white actors; the casting call specifically asked for Caucasian actors. Shyamalan was accused of “whitewashing” and “racebending.” Another movie which attracted similar attention was Walt Disney’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) where actor Jake Gyllenhaal played an Iranian Prince. But in this case, most Iranians were pleased that a fair skinned actor played the role because it accurately represented how “Aryan” Iranians looked before Islam was forcibly imposed.
In Iran, the external Aryan ancestry is a non-issue, but in India it is a matter of angry controversy. The fact that it is a source of controversy in India has been bothering scholars in Western universities. In his course, History of Iran to the Safavid Period, Prof. Richard W. Bulliet, an Iranian specialist at Columbia University ridicules the people who oppose Aryan invasion theory and tells students that Indians believe that proponents of the Aryan Invasion Theory are members of CIA who want to portray India as a wimpish state; he specifically mentions members of BJP as belonging to this group.
In the first lecture he mentions the similarities between Old Iranian and Vedic and their relation to the Indo-European languages. For him, this similarity indicates invasion, and this invasion theory is supported not just by philologists, but also by archaeologists and historians. This Grand Canyon wide gap between scholarly consensus and what is being taught in American universities is not surprising. Last Fall, in a course titled  History of India, at University of California, Los Angeles, Prof. Vinay Lal lectured about rejected 19th century racist concepts like “subdued snub-nosed and dark skinned people known as the Dasas” and how forts and citadels were attacked by the invading Aryans.
These professors are wrong — about the Aryan Invasion Theory, about race, about the people who dispute it and the reason they dispute it. Though nationalism and sometimes Hindu nationalism is blamed, the reason why Indians are suspicious of colonial theories will become obvious as we look at an example where “scientific” European minds applied pseudoscience and divided the Indian population.
First, let us look at the Aryan Invasion Theory. In his book The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (2004), Prof. Edwin Bryant who looks at both sides of the Aryan debate concludes that, “there is general consensus among South Asian archaeologists that, as far as archaeological record is concerned, clear, unambiguous evidence of invading or immigrating Aryans themselves is nowhere to be found either in central Asia or in the Indian subcontinent.” Romila Thapar writes in Early India: From the origins to the AD 1300 (1995), that, “The theory of an Aryan invasion no longer has credence.”
Second, when it is mentioned that only members of the BJP are against the Invasion Theory, it is incorrect. Edwin Bryant is not an Indian; Romila Thapar is an antagonist of Hindu Nationalists. Truth is the casualty when he says that opponents of Aryan Invasion Theory have been ignoring archaeological evidence for Prof. Bryant’s survey shows that it is the lack of archaeological evidence, among other things, which prompted many historians to re-think. Instead of the invasion theory, many scholars now believe in a migration theory.
Finally, Prof. Bulliet says that opponents of the invasion might take refuge in the writings of his colleague Edward Said, the author of the seminal book Orientalism. On this point, he is absolutely right. It was the colonial historian who gave us the concept of race. 19th century Europe was the center of racial studies; scientists measured the volume of the skull for various races and found that the white race was the largest and hence of superior intellect.
From 1891, the British official, Herbert H. Risley defined 2378 castes as belonging to 43 races on the basis of their nasal index. Also, Indo-European, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman linguistic groups were identified as different races with Indo-European speakers or Aryans at the top of the tree. Based on this mythology, the skeletons found in Mohenjo-daro were classified as belonging to various races, mostly non-Aryan.  Coming to the Vedic texts, a racial interpretation was assigned to various passages. The dark skinned and nose-less Dasyu was considered of a different race than the fair and high-nosed Aryan. This racial identification was objected to by Indian scholars like Srinivas Iyengar as early as 1914, but such dissenting voices were not the ones writing history.
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.
A century after Indian scholars raised objections, Western scholars are realizing that the racial interpretation was based on over reading soft evidence; it was a consequence of the 19th century racial insanity that ruled Europe. In 1999, Hans Hock reexamined the supposedly racial Vedic material and found them either to be mistranslated or open to alternative non-racial interpretations. Among multiple interpretations, the racial one was preferred because it favoured colonialism. Still the Professor at UCLA still talks about the snub-nosed Dasyus, even though Indian scholars have interpreted that the Vedic word means one devoid of speech, not nose.
Over the years, historians have accepted that various language groups are just that — language labels — and does not map to racial identity. In the 11th Neelan Thiruchelvam Memorial Lecture given in Colombo on Aug 1, 2010, Prof Romila Thapar made this very clear. According to her the notion of separate Aryan and Dravidian racial identities has no basis in history. According to Prof. Thomas Trautmann, “That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a matter of faith. Is it not time we did away with it?” But even in the last general elections, the Dravidar Kazhagam party leader exhorted his followers to reject “Aryan” candidates.
It is such non-benign theories and their consequences that has caused Indian scholars to view Western theories with suspicion. Prof.  Edwin Bryant writes, “I argue that although there are doubtlessly nationalistic and in some quarters, communal agendas lurking behind some of this scholarship, a principal feature is anti-colonial/imperial.” Thus the issue is not what members of BJP believe or do not believe; the issue is what is the latest scholarly consensus and why is it not being taught to students. Maybe the Prince of Persia can investigate if the CIA is involved.

References:

  1. Michel Danino, The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization and its Bearing on the Aryan Question
  2. Michel Danino, Genetics and the Aryan Debate, Purtattva, Bulletin of the Indian Archaeological Society No. 36 (2005- 06): 146-154.
  3. Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).
  4. History of Iran to the Safavid Period, Columbia University (Podcast, Lecture 1)